When it comes to Amazon PPC management, our PPC knowledge and in-house strategies are all about improving client accounts. But what helps AMZ Pathfinder run so smoothly? Other than the amazing team, we rely on our software tech stack and various Amazon PPC Tools on a daily basis to communicate and report to our clients, coordinate our work together as a team, and implement procedures, tactics, and strategies that ensure the success of our clients.
We get questions about the tools and software we use as an Amazon PPC management agency all the time. Even though we are laser-focused on being an advertising agency, these tools can be used for any service business as well as ecommerce businesses selling on Amazon.
In this article, we will discuss how we use some of the best Amazon-related software and general communication tools to achieve daily success for our clients.
If your goal is to research new products, conduct keyword or competitor research and optimize your product listing to its fullest potential, then finding a better tool than Helium10 will be hard.
With an innovative and ever-expanding set of features, Helium10 is, in our assessment, the most well-rounded Amazon PPC tools currently on the market.
At AMZ Pathfinder we use just some of the tools available in Helium10. We frequently use the keyword research tools Cerebro and Magnet, the listing optimization tools Frankenstein and Index Checker, and the analytics tools Keyword Tracker and Market Tracker.
These help us with a range of different tasks such as doing extensive keyword research, analyzing competitors and the competitive landscape, optimizing backend search terms and assessing listing quality and indexing for keywords.
We sometimes track our clients product keyword rank when running experiments, or use the Chrome plugin to help us gather targets for various types of ASIN targeting campaigns. Helium10 allows us to quickly execute on these tactics with grace.
Helium10 contains a whole suite of 20+ Amazon tools, which makes it incredibly versatile and a great value. Better yet, in late 2020 Helium10 purchased Prestozon and with their combined resources and talent we can’t wait to see what killer features they will come out with next.
Intentwise is our newest automated Amazon ad optimization and analytics platform that’s helping us get on track with our ad management and campaign optimization tasks.
This platform acts as our virtual expert which allows us to maximize returns from our Amazon advertising spend by helping us by providing us with automated recommendations about product targeting, keyword targeting, and our account structure.
It also allows us to manage our bids through their AI-based bidding algorithm and by giving us the option of defining our own bidding rules.
To better our clients’ chances of ranking, Intentwise tracks their competition through the platform’s marketplace intelligence capabilities, helping us move forward by showing us where our clients stand against their competitors along with information around organic and paid competitiveness.
With Intentwise’s analytics platform, the challenge of having scattered data from our clients’ accounts is resolved by letting us collect the specific data we need in order to make custom reports.
This way, we can create actionable insights from the data we collect rather than simply gathering and managing them. Among its other beneficial features include simplified reporting via a custom API along with data connectors for reporting tools such as Excel, Google Data Studio, and Tableau.
Slack has become synonymous with remote team communication in the last 5 years. There have been others trying to compete in the same space like Microsoft and Facebook, but we’ve found more reasons to love Slack than these other platforms. Despite the pending purchase by Salesforce, we still think they are the leader of the pack.
Now you might be wondering why we are even talking about Slack when it comes to our tech stack. The truth is that even though it’s not an Amazon PPC tool, this is the single most used software in terms of “time spent” for those on the AMZ Pathfinder team. It is where our culture lives and is the nexus through which all of our communications flow. We try as a team to reduce the use of email as much as possible and Slack is the modern solution to this problem.
Not only is it great for the team, but it’s a great tool to have direct conversations with our clients. If you’re an ecommerce brand that also uses Slack, we can connect with you and your team through it so you have direct access to us.
This direct line of communication facilitates very fast communication and execution on client requests. Since Slack is asynchronous in nature it ensures that no matter the time zones we’re communicating across everyone on the team is up to date as soon as they navigate to the right channel.
We pride ourselves on our strong communication which is one of the things that sets us apart from other agencies. It’s not only important to partner up with our clients but it’s also important that we are incorporated in your team like an in-house department as you are with ours. It’s important that our clients feel like we’re an in-house advertising team for their brand.
We believe in consistent, clear, and structured communication to keep up with the quickly evolving marketplace.
Created by Amazon Sellers for Amazon Sellers, SmartScout is an Amazon FBA product research software that’s perfect for providing insights about our clients’ marketplace and for helping them discover more opportunities to level up and find more ways to make a profit.
When it comes to targeting the best brands, filtering through best-selling products, and understanding the traffic flow created by our clients’ prospective customers, SmartScout is an amazing tool that allows us to make all of that happen.
To help our clients get organized with categories and sub-categories to target, SmartScout offers a category directory system that gives us a clearer view of sellers, products, and brands within specific subcategories.
This tool helps us become more organized during research by allowing us to generate more data outside of Amazon’s search tools and explore beyond our clients’ niches.
It also gives us access to powerful filters which allows us to set our target parameters based on relevant information from our clients’ businesses and eliminate those that don’t meet our criteria.
Another great feature that our clients take full advantage of is SmartScout’s Traffic Flow tool which identifies which pages their competitors is getting the bulk of their traffic from.
Amazon’s recommendation engine can take up a lot of our time and effort, but with SmartScout’s Traffic Graph tool, every “frequently bought together” section of other Amazon products is highlighted, helping us target those specific product pages and redirect traffic flow to our clients’ products instead.
We make good use of the traffic information that the Traffic Graph provides by plugging them into our clients’ ads, eventually boosting their sales by advertising their product on the product pages where their competitors are recommending their products in the frequently bought together section.
One of the biggest hurdles when reporting for clients is extracting accurate and timely data from their accounts and displaying it in a customizable and legible fashion. This is especially true with clients selling in multiple Amazon marketplaces that have to deal with different currencies and formatting challenges in the dataset. Our integration with Tableau gives us an edge on reporting any way we see fit or need at that time.
Tableau is an interactive data visualization software that allows you to plug into a database and analyze your data in the way that makes the most sense to you and your specific needs.
We use Tableau paired with Prestozon analytics to give us a comprehensive understanding of what is going on in client accounts so we can make better informed optimization decisions.
Since we have years of data in the tool we can also look at past performance and benchmark based on time of year or holiday periods.
For example, by looking at the 2019 holiday period we were able to anticipate when we’d see a drop in search demand and conversion rate, allowing us to make proactive changes to budgets and bids instead of merely reacting to marketplace conditions after the fact. The end result being less confusion and more actionable insights made accessible on time.
Not only that, Tableau also helps with in-house reporting. Whether determining the effectiveness of specific strategies, quarterly reports, or satisfying our curiosity about aggregate trends derived from data across all client accounts, Tableau can easily manipulate the data to serve those needs.
If Tettra is the ‘brain of the company’ and Slack our communication hub, Tableau is the all-in-one data store for analysis and reporting of client account data.
Project management only gets more complicated the bigger your team gets. That’s why we ditched Trello, Asana, and Teamwork for a more robust application with ClickUp.
We switched to ClickUp because of its ability to serve as a task management platform and a brain trust of our in-house knowledge.
We consider ClickUp as our ‘shared company brain’ as it houses our steadily growing collection of in-house procedures, processes, and key knowledge that helps us train and guide all the members of our team.
It also does a great job of organizing valuable company information from our agency’s ‘secret sauce’ tactics to archives of important communications.
ClickUp helps us deliver the level of quality and consistency that we practice and deliver as a team. By providing us with a space to iterate on standard operating procedures, our team members are able to track and perform their PPC Management tasks efficiently and on time.
Within ClickUp, we stay accountable with client accounts by creating a base framework of tasks such as:
managing optimization tasks
account check-ups
reporting
automate recurring tasks
assess account health
budget allocation
several types of audits
keyword research
client communication
campaign launches
etc.
These tasks serve as our basic framework for account optimization but account managers are expected to go above and beyond using their judgment and expertise. We also assign our account managers to accomplish new training certifications tasks to keep the company up to speed and ahead of the changing Amazon PPC landscape.
It can be as simple as ‘read this article’ or ‘listen to this podcast episode,’ but sometimes requires hours of taking a course to complete a new certification. Every company may have its own version of task management, but this is how we do it at AMZ Pathfinder.
Our Complete Tech/Software Stack?
These are the major Amazon PPC tools we use to run our agency. We do have one-off web apps or pieces of software for specific tasks but the ones mentioned above are our daily drivers. If you have any questions about how we can help your brand scale with Amazon PPC, schedule a call and we’ll be happy to discuss further!
Matt Tran is Chief Marketing Officer at AMZ Pathfinder. AMZ Pathfinder is an official Amazon Advertising Partner specializing in PPC ads, DSP ads, and brand storefront designs. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn or reach out via the website.
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