Recently, the Helium 10 team published an interview with Vince Montero, Amazon PPC Expert & Adtomic’s Senior Marketing Manager, where they go over one of their most important PPC tools, Adtomic.
Interview with Vince Montero from Helium 10
How are you doing, Vince?
I’m doing well, thanks!
What was your first marketing job?
My first marketing job was in 2005 at a company called Q Interactive. They helped connect digital advertisers and affiliates in both the US and the UK. I quickly learned I had a knack for it and was fortunate to be promoted to run the operations and expansion efforts in their UK office.
How did you get into digital advertising consulting?
Vince: That experience from my first digital marketing role led to many more years consulting with and working for different types of online advertising solutions. I either sold or provided marketing for everything from banner ads to social media ads and my last big company role was as the Marketing Director for a mobile marketing company.
In 2016, I decided to leave that company and go full time as a Digital Marketing consultant, putting all my past experience to work directly for clients.
When did you get into Amazon PPC?
In 2017, one of my clients started doing Amazon PPC. Since I had worked on so many different types of advertising solutions, they asked me to take that over for them. Within a year, all of my clients became Amazon sellers as word of my work on PPC spread from seller to seller.
Before Adtomic, how were you managing Amazon PPC campaigns?
Manually! I created a system that included downloading reports from Seller Central and then sorting them by the different metrics I wanted to look at. I even had spreadsheets that I would track the date I would update specific bids on keywords to then monitor the results. With up to 20 different accounts at one point, managing all of the associated PPC campaigns for them became very cumbersome. But, that is what my clients paid me for otherwise they would have to do the same work on their own.
Why did you come to Helium 10? What attracted you to them in the first place?
At the time Helium 10 reached out to me, I was looking for a PPC software solution that would help me manage my accounts and allow me to expand. I was not looking for a full-time position, but I was intrigued to speak with the team at Helium 10 since I was already familiar with their other tools. As an Amazon consultant, leveraging tools like Magnet and Cerebro were a big part of my process in auditing and updating listings as well as the keyword research required to launch PPC. As a company, I was attracted to the Helium 10 ethos of helping Amazon sellers achieve success in a very competitive environment. So I eventually came on board to help expand that offering with a PPC solution of our own.
What pain points were the new platform created to solve?
The first PPC solution we created was called ADS, (Automated Data Solution) and it was designed to automate many of the functions that I had been doing manually for PPC management. I came to Helium 10 with a very long wishlist and was fortunate to be able to implement many of those items within a year. For myself and for everyday sellers, this meant that processes that used to take hours to do could now be done in a fraction of the time. This included the ability to manually or automatically scan search terms and keywords for an entire account and quickly find problematic ones that were wasting money or driving a high ACOS.
How was it in the early days of Adtomic and how has it evolved as a tool?
Adtomic was born out of the acquisition of Prestozon, another PPC solution that had similar features to our existing solution. In the early days of launch, it was a challenge to serve all clients to our best ability because we did not foresee that combining our two different platforms would be problematic for Amazon itself. We quickly realized that we became one of Amazon’s largest users of their Advertising API overnight.
Fortunately, we were able to work with Amazon to correct this problem and it allowed us to expand on the feature set of Adtomic. We are currently working on a completely new redesign which includes very advanced filters to help users drill down into data even further and launched our Keyword Tracker integration in June.
This is one feature I have been most excited about being able to include. Sponsored and organic rank in the PPC optimization process for specific keywords is going to be game changing for sellers that implement it. Many sellers already use Keyword Tracker to reference their rankings, so having it tied into one tool with some new advanced features is a real benefit of using Adtomic.
What’s some of the positive feedback you’ve received from Adtomic from users over the past year?
Since Adtomic launched in May 2021, we have received many reports of users being able to streamline their PPC optimizations, saving them hours of work and helping them improve their overall performance. The ability to create Rules to let Adtomic automatically source new keywords to target and find poor performers to make them negative has been a huge support to PPC optimization.
What factors are important for PPC optimization to have the most impact?
The ability to focus optimizations towards a specific goal such as ACoS is very important. Depending on the goal, optimizing towards sales or impressions could be equally important. Luckily, Adtomic has custom Bid Algorithms that can work towards all three. Not only can we automatically optimize towards a goal ACoS, but we can optimize for sales if you want to get rid of existing stock or impressions if you are really looking for visibility and/or data collection for your product.
How does Adtomic help new and old sellers alike?
For starters, Adtomic helps new sellers by taking the complexity out of campaign creation. With our custom campaign builders, new sellers can create between 4 to 6 different campaigns at the same time, saving valuable time. These campaigns automatically receive custom rules that help the seller with features like suggestions for keyword bidding.
Sellers with existing campaigns that have been running for some time can still leverage Adtomic’s suggestions by creating custom rules for groups of campaigns. Doing this will also immediately optimize existing campaigns so that manual optimization are not even needed. For all sellers, once Adtomic’s rules are creating suggestions that meet with the overall goal, Automation can be activated so that accounts only need to be checked every once in a while.
Also, you’ve become an influencer in the space with your amazing show, TaCOS Tuesday – where did that idea come from?
Well, I don’t know about that, but I will be working more closely with Bradley Sutton and the Evangelist team, so I am looking forward to representing us in the PPC space even more! But, the idea for the name of the webinar actually came from a metric that we like to reference in Adtomic – Total ACoS or TACoS.
ACoS is an Amazon PPC metric that is most associated with gauging the success of PPC campaigns. However, since we do know after extensive research that PPC sales affect organic sales, it only makes sense to include those sales when considering the success of a campaign. Thus, we feel TACoS is just as important if not more important than ACoS, which is why we incorporated it into our PPC solution.
When we first introduced ADS, we had a launch party on a Tuesday, and so TACoS Tuesday was born. It was such a successful webinar that I decided to keep the name and turn it into regular AMA sessions where I could interact with our users and discuss PPC issues. In 2022, we made these sessions monthly so we could put more time into curating content and inviting the best and brightest in the industry to share their knowledge.
What’s your biggest piece of advice to Amazon sellers looking to use Adtomic or Amazon PPC in general?
My number one piece of advice is to make sure your product listings are completely up to date and the best versions they can be. PPC does not help if your listing is not as good if not better than your competitors, especially if your price is similar to complementary products. That is why in our complete FBA training course, Freedom Ticket, PPC is the very last module. There are a lot of factors to consider to make sure you are ready to spend money on advertising.
Okay, before we go – do you have an inspirational quote you really like?
“Challenges are what makes life interesting. Overcoming challenges is what makes life meaningful.”
About Vince Montero
Vince Montero is the Senior Marketing Manager for Helium 10’s PPC platform, Adtomic. During his 16-year career in digital marketing, he built his expertise around the latest ad tech in both the US and the UK. As a Digital Advertising consultant since 2016, he’s focused on helping sellers of all stages advertise more effectively on Amazon and brought that experience to Helium to design the ultimate PPC management solution.
About Helium 10
With over 20 highly integrated tools, Helium 10 empowers Amazon sellers with everything they need to start, run and grow their business to the next level. From product discovery, keyword research and financial analysis + more, they help entrepreneurs, upstarts, and Fortune 500 companies crush it every step of the way.
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