Hero Product Review | 2022 Holiday Ride Along

Updated
June 7, 2023

Intro

In this video we'll review the best-selling product from my personal Amazon account as we head into the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend last year between Black Friday and the end of December it generated $50,000 in royalties, which we're going to be attempting to replicate again this year, we'll take a look at the sales from last year's holiday season. Compare that to this year's recent results, and review the ad campaigns and the campaign structures that I'm currently running for this product.

Welcome back to the channel. My name is Cameron Scot, if you're new here on this channel, we discuss the tools and strategies to help make Amazon advertising easier. Today we're reviewing the best-selling products of all time from my own personal Amazon account.

One that I would consider one of my hero products, which is any product that makes up a significant portion of your revenue is a t-shirt on the Amazon merch on demand platform. This is Amazon's print on demand platform where you upload your own designs to various products such as apparel or phone cases, which are then printed and fulfilled by Amazon on demand. Only once that item is purchased. This means there's no inventory to purchase, carry or go out of stock. Amazon provides all the fulfillment and customer support and then you're paid a royalty for each sale even if you sell on one of Amazon's other platforms or even completely different products. This case study will still be relevant as these advertising strategies can still be used on virtually any product.

Hero Product

My hero product is in what I'll call the dad shirt niche. It competes for some very high traffic, high competition keywords, and usually performs really well around Father's Day in the holiday buying season.

It sells for $19.99 has a royalty of $5.23 with each sale, giving it a 26% profit margin or a 26% break-even ACOS this is his third holiday sale season, and it has thousands of reviews with over a 4-star rating. This is a key factor as it's very hard to rank for some of these really high competition high traffic keywords. If you don't have a lot of reviews already last year between Black Friday and December 31.

This product sold 10,000 units for $200,000 in revenue, generating $50,000 in royalties. Looking at a BSR chart, this product peaked at the end of the holiday sales period on December 18th. Right before the shipping times went past Christmas and ended up with under a 1000 BSR and the clothing, shoes and jewelry category turning over to ads. during that timeframe. I spent 18,200 hours across all of this product’s campaigns, ending up with a 98 cent CPC and a 22.6% ACOS.

Since Amazon limits you to only the last 90 days of campaign data inside their native ad console, I'm using Merch Jar here to look at last year's campaign data Merch Jar stores all of your Amazon advertising data from the time you first sync your account, including search term and keyword data. So, you always have access to the data that you've paid for. With this product having a 26% breakeven ACOS, the ads and themselves were a net profit on their own, in addition to significantly contributing to organic sales through increased search term ranking. After ad spend this resulted in 32,500 hours in profit for this single product over the course of the 2021's holiday sales season.

Month to Date Results

Now we're going to take a look at this year's month to date results for November and compare them to the same time period for last year last year between November 1st and 17th. This product sold 1,700 units for $8,500 in royalties, compared to this year is 1,400 units and 7,100 in royalties this year has seen a lot of changes in advertising.

It's gotten much more competitive, requiring much more aggressive bids, and resulting in higher cost per clicks and less profit. While we're only a little behind in unit sales this year compared to last, the cost per click on this product has increased significantly to be as competitive as last year where we were at about a breakeven a cost last year. This year we're at 52% ACOS making the ads themselves unprofitable this year.

If we compare BSR charts however, we can see that we're in a very similar position ranking as last year with the aggressive spin that we've made, with both years following a very similar trend in sales ranking across the month in November with increased competition and costs and Black Friday following a couple of days earlier this year than last.

It's going to be interesting to see how profitable this product will end up this season compared to last how long of a holiday sales season this product will have before Amazon's shipping times reach past December 25 is also going to play a significant role in how profitable this product will be. So, make sure to subscribe and enable notification If you haven't already, so you can follow the results.

Current Campaigns

Next, we're going to take a look at the campaign's I'm currently running for this product. We'll start with an overview of the general structure that I'm using. The campaign's I'm using for this product are segmented into three different general categories, automatic campaigns for harvesting keywords, and ASIN targets, manual testing for keyword and ASIN targets that sold from auto campaigns, as well as any other manual tests that I might perform and manual performance for the best performing keywords and ASIN targets the automatic campaigns I've segmented by targeting group one campaign for close match, one for loose match and one for substitutes. That way I can take better advantage of placement adjustments.

Complements targeting generally hasn't worked for me, so I usually skip that one. Manual testing I'm now doing all under one campaign and those tests are segmented using different ad groups for each match type or other keywords and asin testing them performing, such as close competitors, I'm manually adding myself or any other kind of tests that I decide to run for this product.

The performance category is made up of a single performance campaign with an ad group for exact match keywords and another ad group for ASIN targets. And then part of this performance category are all the multiple single keyword campaigns for all my best performing keywords with each campaign housing only a single keyword. And this is again to get the most out of placement adjustments. If we look at the actual campaigns inside of the native ad console, you'll see the three automatic targeting campaigns one for close, one for loose and one for substitute. I have them underlined in the green there, the manual testing campaign underlined in blue and the manual performance campaign and one of the single keyword campaigns which I abbreviate SKC underlined in red. And you'll see I have multiple SKC campaigns as well. You'll also notice a couple other older campaigns like the SPM competing ASINs and the SPM priority product targets. These are a couple other campaigns that I still have active for this product that I haven't disabled since they're still getting sales, I may need to do a little bit of cleaning up which may be part of this video series here. Inside of the manual testing campaign, you'll see the exact broad phrase and asin targeting ad groups. And again, a couple older ad groups that I'm still running and that are still generating sales. And finally, inside the manual performance campaign are the exact match and ASINs targeting ad groups.

Conclusion

So that is the current state of my hero product as we head into the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Throughout the next month I'll be documenting my ad optimization for this product and all my other products as well including lottery campaigns.

I'll show you how I'm managing my bids and budget campaign strategies. I implement outrank my competition and the tools and strategies I'm using along the way. So, make sure to hit that subscribe button to follow along and I'll see you in the next update.

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