Anders Hjorth is a digital marketing strategist, consultant and writer. He was also our guest for the latest Ask Me Anything Session Hosted by Luna Rocha. His Ask Me Anything session was rich with important information regarding Paid Search, Amazon and even AI. Ander’s even goes as far as demonstrating the power of AI. Below you will find a recap of the conversation that took place within our slack workspace. We hope you find it informative and will join us live for the next one.
Q: Can you explain the difference between Amazon PPC and DSP (if there is one)?
A: “Sure thing. Yes there are quite a few differences, actually. But first, you need to look at what Amazon PPC is.
It is composed of 3 different solutions : Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display
Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are very similar to Google Ads
They target keywords, products (ASINs which are product codes) and appear in Amazon SERPs and product detail pages.
Sponsored Display is the third PPC solution over at Amazon but it doesn’t use the same placements nor the same targeting.
So Sponsored display is much closer to Amazon DSP which is targeting audiences.
Amazon DSP also targets placements inside Amazon (I typically only run 25% of inventory outside of the marketplace) and it can perfectly well be used to drive conversions, so it is not only for brand awareness.”
Anders also took the liberty of showcasing the power of AI by utilizing ChatGPT to answer the question asked. Although he mentions he doesn’t entirely agree with the response due to the fact that Amazon DSP isn’t just for brand awareness, the response is a strong one none-the-less.
Q: Do you mind giving our audience a bit of background on Anders and your areas of expertise?
A: Was one of the pioneering PPC’ers
Then jumped on Social
Did some content marketing
Coupled it with programmatic
Oh, did I mention, I worked in Affiliate?
And went into retail media a few years back
Once managed an agency that booked and managed domain names
Q: How does Pmax impact sales on Amazon if you sell there?
A: You can’t run Pmax to drive into Amazon, if that is what you mean?
We have been running Pmax on a Google Ads campaign driving to a Shopify store and in parallel doing Sponsored Ads and DSP to drive sales on the Amazon market place. Pmax only affects the Shopify activity
Q: You created a research report regarding major trends in paid search. Are you willing to speculate on any trends we may see in 2023?
Here are the three trends I predicted for 2018:
1. Privacy and the rise of cookieless
2. Blockchain applications beyond Bitcoin
3. More AI in digital marketing
I could perhaps just rephrase those every year
Paid search prediction for 2023 in one word is definitely “PMax”
But going back to the point number 3 from 2018: more AI in digital marketing, can I suggest you all go and check out the #chatGPT which is a natural language processing tool applied to a machine-trained database of answers.
Q: What do you think the PPC professional life will look like few years down the lane?
A: I really like Frederick Vallaeys vision of this. He explained it in his first book. He saw three roles emerge, I think he calls them the Pilot, the Doctor and the Teacher.
I think the Pilot role is the one that resembles the current role of a PPC albeit with a more strategic stance.
PPC professionals will have a more strategic role and less operational in the future. There will be less copy and paste and more brain juice
Q: What is your thought on similar audience feature phasing out?
A: As far as I understand it is simply a technology change and a name change due to cookies phasing out. I don’t think the concept of lookalike audiences will disappear in Google AT ALL.
Fellow board member Brad Geddes then chimes in with a test he’s been trying out regarding this:
“Something we’ve been testing, but just don’t have enough data yet is to make an ad group with a 1st party audience, turn on ‘audience expansion,’ and then make a negative audience of the same audience. In theory, that’s a similar audience. Most of the people we work with don’t want to expand 1st party to include 3rd party users in the same ad group, they want different ads (bids, and budgets), for each user group – so seeing how this works.”
Q: Are there any strategies/synergies you see with using amazon and Google Ads/Microsoft ads? Perhaps retargeting or something of that nature?
A: That is just a complex field to move in and all my plans and initiatives are typically being bombed away by …. attribution. Amazon is very last-click based, so any traffic you drive into Amazon will likely appear to not perform. It is only when you take a holistic view that you can see the positive impact. Retargeting is not really an option here, the best approach I have found was send Google Ads traffic directly into Amazon product pages and measure total uplift rather than attributed uplift!
If you would like to get your questions answered during the next session be sure to join our slack workspace.
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