Sponsored Ads (Danny McMillan 1 of 2) - a podcast by Michael Veazey

Today we will be talking about sponsored ads with Danny McMillan worked in the music industry for years. From about 2008, he created a website and was responsible for managing that site including running Pay Per Click Traffic. In 2015, Danny started selling on Amazon. In 2016 he launched Seller Sessions, which started as a YouTube channel then became a podcast. It focusses on helping more advanced Amazon sellers.

Richard is Danny’s business partner at Seller Sessions.



PPC /Amazon Adwords

Are Amazon sponsored ads still worth using?

Yes, there definitely is.

Even going back to Danny’s website days, he would always start with PPC (Pay Per Click advertising)

It’s the best way to answer the question - is there demand?



If you get good at PPC, it’s a quick way to do this.

You need to find if keywords are converting keywords,  not just keywords with good search volume.

And you want to find out as fast as possible.



Is it enough to bid high on Amazon ads to get shown?

No, Bidding high is not enough now- you need relevance and also some data showing Amazon that there are sales happening via that keyword on a particular listing.



It’s not category based.

Sometimes sellers run Amazon ads and don’t get impressions (ie nobody sees their ads). Mostly new accounts or or in a new category.

They make a complaint to Amazon etc.  but isn’t the solution.

You need sales history to get impressions.

What ’s the solution?

You need a launch funnel.

Here’s one way Danny does it:

Basically you do giveaways.

  1. FaceBook ads with 90% discount



* landing page

* to Amazon storefront URL and code





You may find that your  widget - for example “blue widget” - may appear for a

e.g. “blue widget left handed”



Even if it doesn’t yet  rank for the main keyword, e.g.,  “blue widget”



If you started making sales on “blue left handed widget”,  you’ll start appearing for blue widget

This will take longer because you also need reviews.



This is based on Danny’s data -yes, it’s based on millions of data points from their clients’ data. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t going to change in future!

So how do you do that?

Put the keyword In backend

Have as a phrase multiple times in the listing (again, this is a backup procedure; Danny does this based on his data).

Always follow the people with access to good amounts of data!

Danny listens to people who have access to a lot of data:

Casey Gauss of Viral Launch, who do 25,000 launches a month;

Brad Moss, who helped build Seller central;

Anthony Lee of Zonblast, who are constantly testing.



Is Amazon ads a tool for launch only? Or is it okay for ongoing sales?

It certainly is for both. But you need to treat it differently.

Using Amazon Ads for Launch

A case study of Danny’s Recent Launch

He focussed on 5 keywords exact match using sponsored ads.

He worked with external traffic (ie off Amazon).



Danny sent traffic from google ads to the Canonical URL (product) - listing with keywords  in



He also sent [Google] traffic to the storefront page URL.

Plus sponsored ads traffic exact match



With this, Danny was converting every 6 clicks (17%) with no reviews



Danny attributes this to the work they did on the listing.

They spent a lot of time and effort on:



* Images

* Right keywords

* Listing

* Enhanced brand content



PPC and sponsored ads are only one facet.

Sponsored Ads for people with larger accounts

With 100s of SKUs - you can’t launch across 100s of listings that aggressively - i.e.,

Further episodes of Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

Further podcasts by Michael Veazey

Website of Michael Veazey