Cracking Amazon’s Algorithm: Brian Johnson’s Latest Tips on Organic Rank and PPC Cuts

In this episode, get expert Amazon-selling insights! Let’s discover winning strategies for organic search ranking, PPC optimization, and how AI is transforming Amazon search.

Join us as we welcome Brian Johnson to the AM/PM podcast, where we reflect on nearly a decade of experiences and insights in the Amazon-selling space. Brian and Kevin go way back to around 2014-2015, meeting at local meetups and SellerCon, and even sharing a mastermind group with some industry legends. Listen in as we reminisce about the evolution of mastermind groups, the significance of collaboration, and the transition from learning various tactics to transparent data practices in Amazon strategies. We celebrate Brian’s dedication to sharing his expertise openly and his remarkable journey in e-commerce.

In this engaging episode, Brian and Kevin discuss the challenges and creativity required to succeed in the competitive Amazon marketplace. From launching a Julian vegetable peeler to mastering Amazon PPC advertising, we share our entrepreneurial journeys and the innovative strategies that emerged from them. We explore how tracking factors for search rank optimization can significantly boost organic sales and revenue, while also emphasizing the power of data in providing actionable insights. Brian’s transition into the Amazon PPC realm, the evolution of strategies, and his exit from a PPC software venture are some highlights of our conversation.

As we look towards the future, the episode explores the transformative impact of AI on search technology and user behavior. We discuss how AI is changing search processes, leading to clickless searches and streamlining research tasks. Despite changes in search results, we emphasize the importance of staying adaptable to new technologies. The episode wraps up with reflections on the value of networking and wisdom in the e-commerce industry, and Kevin encourages listeners to stay tuned for more exciting episodes. Whether you’re a seasoned Amazon seller or new to e-commerce, this episode offers valuable insights and inspiration from Brian Johnson’s experiences and expertise.

In episode 420 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Brian discuss:

• 00:00 – Decade-Long Relationship and E-Commerce Insights
• 09:58 – Amazon Organic Ranking Strategy and DeepM
• 11:19 – Entrepreneurial Philosophy and Competition
• 15:23 – Organic Rank in Amazon
• 19:48 – Amazon Search Rank Optimization Strategy
• 22:49 – Amazon SEO and Deep Learning Analysis
• 27:41 – Optimizing Search Rank Factors for Sales
• 27:45 – Amazon Search Optimization Strategies
• 31:23 – Rank Destroyers in Amazon Search Marketing
• 34:49 – Secrets of Amazon Ranking Factors
• 45:22 – Future of Search Engine Optimization
• 45:55 – Future of AI in Search Optimization
• 49:56 – Dynamic Titles in Amazon Search
• 54:32 – Kevin King’s Words of Wisdom

Transcript

Kevin King:

Welcome to episode 420 of the AM/PM podcast. This week, my guest is Brian Johnson. Brian and I go back almost 10 years in this space. We’ve been doing this for a day or two. We share a few stories about the past and then we talk about what he’s doing right now, which is absolutely amazing. If you wanna know what you need to do to rank organically, cut back your PPC and beat out your competition, this episode is for you. So enjoy this episode with Mr. Brian Johnson. Mr. Brian Johnson, look at who’s on the AM/PM podcast. How are you doing, man?

Brian:

I’m doing great because I get to talk to you, so I’m having a good time already.

Kevin King:

That’s good, and I haven’t even said anything yet. Now we go back, man, I think we wouldn’t. We like, we’re like I hate to say it, but we’re like some of the old guys in the space, I mean we go back to 2015. I think we met somewhere around there.

Brian:

Yeah, that sounds about right because I got started in the Amazon space about 2014.

Kevin King:

You were in Austin at the time. I think we might have met up at a local meetup or something like that, and then somehow that evolved into you were in a mastermind group with about 10 or 12 guys and I remember I think we’re at SellerCon. That might have been 2016. You’re like, hey, Kevin, you want to join this mastermind group? I’m like sure, you know it’s invitation only. Another member has to recommend somebody. And we were standing at SellerCon and Manny Coats and Guillermo were there, yeah, and you didn’t invite them and you invited me and Manny gave me hell for that for the longest time.

Brian:

Did he really?

Kevin King:

 Yeah, he gave me like what the hell? At the time he was still selling. He had just hit a million bucks or something and I don’t know. I was behind him and he’s like what the hell? When did I get an invite? I’m like I don’t know. I guess you’re not cool enough. But he can shove it in my face now. He had a massive eight-figure exit twice off of that. So he’s doing all right.

Brian:

All right. He’s doing all right. Theoretically, he’s put it all in the past.

Kevin King:

Yeah, it’s all good. So that mastermind group was pretty cool. We did that. It lasted about a year and a half. It’s like every Tuesday, I think it was. We got on there. We didn’t pay. I think Dave was running it. He tried to at the end tried to–

Brian:

Try to get everybody to pay.

Kevin King:

Try to get everybody to pay and then nobody basically wanted to pay, but for a long time that was a good group. There were some really like OG legends in there–

Brian:

Yeah.

Kevin King:

And sharing. I mean Dr Travis was in that—

Brian:

Yup.

Kevin King:

And a couple other. Sanjay, I remember Sanjay. I think, Yev was in there for one and there’s a really strong group and we would just go in and share tactics and I don’t know if I know there’s some people that still do that today, but I don’t think it’s as common as back then.

Brian:

Well, I mean like so I’m usually I’m perpetually in two or three masterminds at any given time throughout the year.

Kevin King:

Paid ones or free ones?

Brian:

Both.

Kevin King:

Both, okay.

Brian:

Yeah, so both paid and free. Some of them are, you know, invite only where it’s not necessarily. None of them are my masterminds, but actually that’s not entirely true. I have like a nerd one, it’s like a technical Amazon technical one, but yeah, usually it’s kind of like hey, I’m going to bring in, you know, I’m going to bring Brian in, or I mean, you get the same kind of stuff where it’s like, hey, come fly out to some some other country and join us for a week, and that kind of stuff, those kinds of mastermind, you know groups, and then those, and then, of course, then you’ve got the recurring ones that occur, you know, like every month, for instance, or even weekly, but yeah, even those are. Yeah, usually the caliber is pretty good.

Kevin King:

I think that’s crucial and that’s what both of us have been doing for years. I mean, you’ve volunteered a lot of your time going on podcasting and going, like you just said, to Costa Rica or to I think you went to something in Greece one time and you’ve been to and trying to, to give back, and that’s one of the things that you’ve always been really good at is sharing, and always, uh, that’s one of the reasons you’re in the dream 100 is you. Some people hold things tight, tight to the vest, but when you figure something out, you share, and I remember you did a even back in the days when everybody was doing black hat black hat that’s not as common now, that seller, but since Amazon’s released a lot of data and you don’t have to like, try to get this secret data now, but back in the 2016, 17, 18, every, there’s a ton of black hat stuff, people buying reports out of China and all kinds of craziness going on, and that’s some of that still happens. Don’t get me wrong, but I remember you. You were, uh, you and Danny and somebody else went to some. You were over in China for something uh, for Canton Fair, for something and y’all end up going somewhere and it was this like crazy meeting and out of that you’re like holy cow, this is what they’re doing. You came back.

Brian:

Yeah, they did a whole like, uh, like uh sport court, you know, like basketball courts, and they would just be full of these stands of cell phones and every single one of them was wired up to pretend to be a persona that had an account and everything.

Kevin King:

Doing Add to cart. Purchase this just like that.

Brian:

Yeah some of the stuff we saw was just like man, we’re not playing same level.

Kevin King:

It was crazy and then you did a really popular YouTube video that you a couple years later, where you kind of broke down some of the craziness is out there and how to actually, as a seller it’s not that you you weren’t, you weren’t saying do this. You’re like this is what’s happening. This is how you deal with it as a you know, a white hat person. This is what you need to. You need to know what’s that saying keep your friends close and your enemies closer, or something it’s like know what they’re doing. You know how, do you know how to counter it?

Brian:

Uh, yeah, but that’s where you got introduced the uh, the, the uh, the cowboy hat. That was the first time that had yeah.

Kevin King:

That’s what it was.

Brian:

Buy a cowboy hat. Yeah.

Kevin King:

You know, every time I see that picture there I used to do CD-ROMs. I go back to the day of CD-ROMs and back in like the when was this? Early 90s, I guess, right around the time of CD-ROMs. I think they came out in the late 80s or 84. But somewhere around 91, 92, 93, I was doing something with strip clubs and I had a directory. I had gone through the phone book, gone to the library and gone through every phone book. I could find there wasn’t an internet back then and I compiled a list of 1,300 strip clubs in the United States, every strip club. And then I had a buddy of mine in college, call him. He sat on the phone for a summer and called everyone. I’m like what are your hours? Do you have what, what? What kind of special buffet do you have at lunch? Is it a $5 ribeye lunch? What are table dances costs? What are all this? And we created this database and I put it out in a print format. But then people, I was like people need to be able to search this and back then there wasn’t, you know, the internet where you could just put it up in a database. So I put it on CD-ROM and I licensed it with a guy who had distribution in all the stores and all these different places and he was always the guy in the black hat and his logo was like a black hat and he’s like the guy in the black. His little slogan was the guy in the black hat, he didn’t do anything, black hat, it wasn’t anything illegal.

Brian:

Right.

Kevin King:

And every time I see you in that picture with that, with your head bent down, I’m like that’s the guy in the black hat. It just reminds me of my old days.

Brian:

You might need an opinion about the strip clubs.

Kevin King:

It reminds me of like exactly of a directory on CD-ROM of a strip club, a searchable directory of a strip club.

Brian:

Before I entered into the Amazon space, I was selling on eBay for about seven years and my core product lines were like money counting equipment, like fraud detectors and money sorters and coin counters and that kind of stuff, and one of the regular customers was there was either. I mean, I sold to everybody and I didn’t really know until after the fact, but it was quite you know a lot of cash businesses, drug dealers and strip clubs. As it turns, out. One time where somebody actually had an inheritance and their grandparents apparently had gone through depression era and so they had a bedroom, you know a mattress, a bed mattress, and it was stuffed completely with bills. So they bought money counters specifically so they could count all this cash that was stuffed into this mattress for decades.

Kevin King:

You know what my grandmother was the same way. She went through the depression, my father’s mother, and she died in 2010. I think it was, yeah, 2010. And when we went to her little East Texas town to move her out, we were money was falling out of everything. I mean her deep freeze, like where she kept her, her, her meats, and all that’s like a little deep breeze. We’d pull something out and there’d be a a Ziploc bag full of money, you know cold, hard, cold cash in there. We’d open a drawer and there’d be a hundred dollars, a hundred dollars underneath some panties or whatever. And then there it was like everywhere throughout the house, spread out everywhere. And I guess that’s a thing back.

Brian:

Easter egg.

Kevin King:

Yeah, it’s like. It’s like damn man, glad we were moving this, the family’s moving it, and we didn’t hire some local movers because they’d be putting this stuff in their pocket.

Brian:

Yeah, I’ve heard of horror stories where the mattress was taken to the dump and then later to find out it was stuffed.

Kevin King:

So you did eBay and you’re doing some affiliate marketing stuff too, right before you got into the Amazon game.

Brian:

Yeah, I was doing eBay, I was doing affiliate marketing, things like Google adsense and some of those things back in the day, way back in the day. And then I got the call to to come over to Amazon side of the house and the money counters at that time were not a good play for Amazon.

Kevin King:

So you tried money counters on Amazon?

Brian:

I did yeah. But some of the ones I had I mean I, I arranged they ranged from, you know, $200 all the way up to $4,000, you know. And so I think at that time I was I was getting hit with quite a bit of fraud on some of the more expensive units, and so it was just kind of a good transition point of like you know what? I’m going to burn this ship. I’m going to jump over to Amazon and  just try, you know, just bleed for a while and see what, to see what you know what I can make work.

Kevin King:

So you did some. What was it? Supplements or something right, or what were you doing? What were the products you were selling?

Brian:

It was a. So my first product was a julienne vegetable peeler, kitchen utensil, right. And then it was at the amazing selling machine, their second it was for amazing selling machine two. They had their Austin convention and so I was there in the audience and if you remember Jason Flaley and he was up on stage and that was back in the wild west days of Amazon, and he, he says like look, Amazon is so easy. All you got to do is just go up and just look for every single product listing that where they’ve got one image and it’s a garbage image and everything. And they started bringing up some examples and he, he brings up my, my direct competitor, and there’s, you know, a thousand people in the room and apparently there’s not that many creative. You know people. You know because within two months I had 50 new competitors selling the exact same thing. You know just because, like somebody in the audience said like, oh, I don’t have an imagination, I’m just going to copy what he said, you know.

Kevin King:

That always happens. Any sample product on any webinar or any teaching, always there’s tons of. I mean, Bradley’s had that problem with hitting them with a coffin shelf. He used that as an example and now there’s tons and tons and tons of people doing coffin shelves. I just I don’t quite get it, why people just yeah, I don’t know.

Brian:

Well, I think there’s a philosophy. Of course, especially when you’re getting started, you’re either a young entrepreneur or you really have no business being an entrepreneur, and so it is certainly in the beginning it’s like okay, you know, imitation is flattery. Well, copy the success that somebody else has had and then get creative. That was kind of a common statement. But when you’re the one who gets copied, that kind of sucks, you know cause it kind of derails, you know something that you did. But sometimes that puts pressure on us to get more creative, to get a little more savvy, to out, you know, to get into that line of thinking of how do I outsmart the competition, you know, and I don’t think that line of thinking ever stopped. They just kept on getting more and more and more.

Kevin King:

So you sold for a little while. But then you started doing PPC and you realized I think, hey, this PPC thing is kind of fun. You have that analytical mind, that really smart mind, and you kind of went down the PPC route right.

Brian:

Yeah, so I mean there was a couple. So, to kind of address the product side, is that I still had to this day. I still have product partnerships and I have new product partnerships all the time. So I’m never it’s never like, hey, this is my personal brand, I’m sourcing everything. I’m always partnered with somebody who is doing a lot of this. My superpower is historically always been, in the, the Amazon advertising realm, and then it switched over more to the, the conversion rate optimization, and then now it’s certainly into the organic search ranking and that is where I excel at is on the organic search rank side. But I still have that history so that from a general marketing standpoint, I become a pretty valuable partner to those who are launching products. So, yeah, so I still have quite a few product partnerships. I don’t have one empire under my name only, as many do, as you probably do, frankly but I certainly have my hand in a lot of dealing with Amazon seller support and all those kinds of stuff you know, account validations and all that kind of stuff on a regular basis.

Brian:

But yeah, PPC it was actually. I had a friend of mine who’s actually made a big name for himself. It was actually. Uh. So Brian Kelsey, if you, if you’re familiar with him, um, he’s, he’s done a phenomenal job with a job in the Amazon space, now moving on to TikTok as well but, um, his girlfriend at the time wife now had a large beauty brand. It was like 800 SKUs in beauty back in 2015, 2014, 2015. Um, still has the brand on Amazon. But they were they were saying like you know what? We don’t understand this whole advertising piece, and I didn’t either, and so I kind of had to just go out there and figure it out. And there was no training, there was no, nobody saying, hey, here’s best practice. It was Amazon saying, yeah, set up a broad match campaign and that’s it. That’s all you could do back then. You know. So I would do things as far as like start, you know, Facebook group and say, okay, I’m going to get 50 people in here. You know, today it’s like 20,000 something people in the group or whatever, but it’s, I was just solving my own challenges and a year later is when I had built that first PPC software. I’ve exited that long time ago.

Kevin King:

I remember I bought a. I think you offered $400 lifetime.

Brian:

Yeah.

Kevin King:

I remember that.

Brian:

And it was the life of the product, not your life.

Kevin King:

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Brian:

Yeah, I mean it ran for I don’t know—

Kevin King:

It ran for a while and you got—

Brian:

Four years, I think.

Kevin King:

Training off of. You had a whole course uh off the back of that and all it was good. I mean you were like—

Brian:

Yeah.

Kevin King:

You were the leader in that and the PPC kind of led that march. Now there’s, they’re dime a dozen out there.

Brian:

Yes, exactly yeah.

Kevin King:

But yeah, you were, you were like on, you were the guy. Uh, when it came, came to PPC that everybody went to.

Brian:

I like the blue oceans. Blue oceans are a lot of fun to swim in.

Kevin King:

And you leveraged that into you, started an agency with Brian Burt and a few others Canopy Management. That became one of the bigger agencies that helps with PPC and search engine optimization and listing optimization and all that kind of stuff. My good buddy, Mark Dawn. He manages a company here in Austin, a beauty brand, and they use Canopy still to this day and happy with it. I know you’ve exited that now and moved on.

Brian:

We’re actually still working with Mark now.

Kevin King:

Oh, on your new company. Yeah, on the new company yeah, oh, awesome, awesome.

Brian:

So yeah, it’s funny how it just kind of carries through.

Kevin King:

That’s awesome. Let’s talk about more of what you’re doing now. I mean, we got a little bit of the past, but now you said that your superpower is organic rank, and organic rank has become it’s the holy grail for a lot of people. As Amazon has moved more and more towards pay-to-play and sponsored ads has taken up more and more of the real estate, getting that organic positioning is becoming even more critical or more valuable. And so you’ve. You have a company, what’s it? DeepmindAI? Dot AI?

Brian:

It’s DeepM actually. Yeah.

Kevin King:

DeepM.

Brian:

Deepmind are a Google company actually.

Kevin King:

That’s right sorry, sorry about that. DeepM DeepM dot AI.

Brian:

Lawyers, please don’t come after me on that.

Kevin King:

Sorry, that was Kevin misspeaking, that was Kevin. Put that on Kevin. What is DeepM then?

Brian:

So DeepM is the actual the deep learning platform and the modeling that we built. We built it. We started building it prior to my partner—

Kevin King:

You said we, who’s we?

Brian:

So, I’ve got a business partner out of Israel.

Kevin King:

Okay, okay.

Brian:

And so, and then we’ve been building a team the past couple of years. But, yeah, so my co-founder is out of Israel and he was one of the co-founders for one of the big pricing software in the Amazon space as well, and he had developed a lot of the machine learning and AI and stuff that they had used. This is, of course, this is all prior to the language models coming on on the market, which changed a lot of things but didn’t change really what we were doing.

Kevin King:

Yeah.

Brian:

But we were doing it from a standpoint of we consider it to be like a competitive ranking intelligence platform and the short version is that we took a big data approach to organic search rank on Amazon. Now, technically, part of our future roadmap is pretty extensive in that the same data analysis and modeling that we can do on Amazon we can do across all the other Amazon marketplaces. We can do it on other channels, whether that’s, you know, mercadolibre, whether that’s Walmart, Target, you know, potentially, TikTok shop as well. As long as there’s a search functionality to it, then we have the ability to collect as much data as possible. Amazon US, of course. There’s a lot of data that we can collect from multiple sources, and so that gives us the big data that we really want, and so that’s where we started.

Kevin King:

As a client, what am I doing? I’m engaging your service for analytics. Or is it some sort of underlying SaaS that goes underneath my backend and it’s helping me? Or is it doing something remotely and it’s somehow helping me sending remote signals?

Brian:

Yeah, so it’s not an agency, it’s not a done for you, it is. We are a competitive intelligence consulting company and so we, essentially, we tell our customers or our clients, depending on how you want to word it. Essentially where the first thing is for their specific subcategory, for the niche that their products exist in, what matters most to A9? And this is something that we discovered is that it does vary from one subcategory to another, sometimes significantly. But we can actually pinpoint and say, okay, here’s the top 30, 40 elements that matter to A9 for your product group, for your product niche. I should say, and here’s maybe the top five that you focus on first, with the ability to dive into all the rest of them if you want to, but usually it’s the top five to 10 will usually cover everything you need as far as to get a competitive advantage. And that competitive advantage is that when you optimize various search rank factors common question okay, what’s the search rank factor? This is not unknown territory. Most people are familiar with these. They just don’t realize that they’re weighted differently and they’re sorted differently depending on what subcategory that you sell in. But things as far as like conversion rates, sales velocity, title optimization, price reviews, category alignment, whether or not you’re selling off Amazon on Amazon, that kind of stuff. So, like I said, we’ve got over 40 that we track and if you optimize the more of those that you optimize, the easier it is to pass your competitors as far as search rank.

Brian:

So we essentially just tell the brand, first and foremost, here’s how you beat your competition on the search terms you want to go after. And then also here is a collection of search terms that add a significant amount of new monthly revenue to your catalog. Once you essentially rank for these and by the way these are, you know, what we provide is these have the fastest pace as far as getting to a high search rank and kind of the easiest path. If you will, I don’t want to ever say, like you know, get rich quick, because we’re talking, you know, three to six months. Typically, we see, you know four months is usually kind of a sweet spot that we see pretty commonly of ranking top five for target search terms that may add on a 15% to 20% additional new revenue off of organic search alone for a brand’s catalog. And you just keep on compiling, you know, essentially compounding that over time as you expand out to maybe more product families within your catalog into other niches that maybe the brand works in, maybe just continuing to optimize, to continue to beat competitors at optimizing the search rank factors that make the significant impact on A9 for that specific subcategory.

Kevin King:

Is this text-based stuff only, or is it also image-based and messaging-based?

Brian:

We’re not doing image-based yet right. So that is something that we are actually building out and we’re testing because obviously, with Cosmo, we need to make sure that we’re taking into what are the contextual relevance of images, and so primarily, this is going to be text-based. As far as the content fields, it’s going to be text-based, and then we’re working on the image side of it to support Cosmo. Rufus, we’re not concerned about because we haven’t seen any the way that we observe the data and when I say the data we’re usually like a single. The amount of data points that we’ll analyze for a single product subcategory is usually like in the 20 to 30 million data points. That’s not feasible for a human team to analyze that. You’re talking 20, 30,000 man hours for a single product subcategory. It’s just not feasible. But now that the data and the technology are accessible and available, we’re able to to look at, be so much more aware of what the competitive levels are at the search term, at every single search term. We know exactly how one product, what its strengths and weaknesses are at the search term level for every single product inside of a product niche. It’s like that level of like way down into the minutiae kind of detail.

Brian:

But here’s the big thing that it allows you know, yes, the biggest outcome we see is an increase in market share and an increase in organic sales because of the organic ranking that produces the additional organic sales. But the cool part that I like is if somebody comes in and says, like okay, I have a product and I am ranked number four for my favorite search term. Why am I not beating the next three? I can tell them precisely why they are number four instead of number one, two or three and exactly what they need to do in order to beat the next three in front of them. There’s no way I could have done that prior to having this amount of data and the deep learning, and the, the deep learning modeling and our algorithm that allows us to look at that data properly.

Kevin King:

And so an example of that might if you’re ranked number four and like, okay, you want to, here’s exactly what you need to do to beat them and be number one.

Brian:

Correct.

Kevin King:

One of those suggestions I’m just making stuff up here might be you need to send more outside traffic from Google and TikTok specifically.

Brian:

Yeah.

Kevin King:

Not from Instagram and not from it could get to that granular level. Or am I following or you need to–

Brian:

It’s not going to go so granular because of the way that Amazon limits the reporting of which channels carry weight to A9. So they try to mask that. It’s where we can observe it. So we know, for instance, if you know, sometimes, because we go through and we go back, we do an initial search at the entire niche and then we shrink it down so that each week we look at what the competitive set is, you know the closest 20 or 30 that are going after the same search terms as the brand that we’re working on, and we’ll see things like oh, this competitor, they’re doing A-B split testing. We can see they’re currently doing A-B split testing. Oh, they stopped and they settled in on this new title. What is it about that new title that has a higher conversion rate that they stuck with? We’ll see like, hey, their unit sales velocity spiked unnaturally for a period of eight days, let’s say, and then it shrunk back down again. We know, okay, what effect did that have to their ranking? And if we see it right, when it’s while it’s occurring, we can go out to the different platforms and we can probably find that, oh, you know what they’re doing. They’re doing a big TikTok shop promotion right now and if they continue that, then it may continue to carry. Or sometimes, if they’re just doing like a, you know, like a rebate giveaway, it’s going to stop. They’re going to fall right back down again. And the funny part is those brands that do like the rebate giveaways they’re like scratching their head like man. Why? You know, my search rank went way up, you know top five, and then now it’s sliding right back down again. They don’t know why. The service provider doesn’t know why. And we laugh because we know exactly why because it’s a 1% difference on this search rank factor and a 4% difference on this other one, and we can see all that, which is immensely cool. In other words, I geek out heavily on this every day.

Kevin King:

How much can I influence that? If I’m a beauty brand and you tell me these are the five things I need to do to achieve my goal, is it actually possible for me to do them? Or do I need unlimited money on some of those to do it? Or is it where, okay, you say you need to do this, this and this? Put this keyword here, send this outside traffic here, change your title to these three things. The first word needs to be this and the last word needs to be this. Whatever it is, some of them are probably straight up simple, but some of them may be like how am I going to teach the algorithm or train it or manipulate it, or whatever you want to call it to do this?

Brian:

That is a fantastic question that we get on a regular basis. There is some other. You know there’s a lot more detail in this that we simply just wouldn’t have the time to go into. Things as far as, like, time on Target, you know what does Amazon expect. You know the fact that Amazon slow plays organic search for a few weeks while you’re running ads. There’s some nuances that we’ve discovered because of the amount of data that we’re looking at. Here’s an example. Let’s say, for instance, that one of those recommendations like look, you’re way out of alignment. In other words, you’re at a significant disadvantage as far as your price point compared to your competitive set. The brand may come back and say I’m not changing my price point because I want to protect my net margin. Cool, that’s fine, that’s normal. Here’s four others that you do have control over, because not every one of these you’re going to have control over, or you’re going to have a little bit of control versus high control, versus low control is what we call it. So you’ve got high control, low control, high impact, low impact, and so the ones that have a high impact on A9, you hope that you also have high control over. Content fields would be an easy one. Running in-house, you know sponsored ads, you know PPC. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Brian:

The advantage that we have is a lot of the recommendations can be simple and they do work, because their competitive set is not that well optimized. A lot of brands think it’s like yeah, I’m one of the big sellers, I’ve got my systems all put together and I’m optimized for everything. And they’re really not. They’re just kind of applying general best practices and hoping that’s enough. And it’s not anymore because of people like us that can see the subtle differences. So it may require that somebody increases their unit sales velocity. What we see here’s kind of a thing that most people are aware of is if I do a rebate giveaway, I know that I can leapfrog past many of my competitors for the search terms, for a few search terms. But once I stopped doing that then it shrinks right back down again. So I know that affecting the unit sales velocity and the conversion rate are going to essentially impact A9 and sort my product way high in search results. But what they don’t realize is they don’t know what else do I need to optimize of the other search rank factors, even if it’s just a little bit on a few others bring up my foundation so that let’s say, I do a you know, like a rebate giveaway or a TikTok, you know, sale or something like that. When those stop, I may sink down a little bit, but I don’t sink all the way down. I still have a very high search rank because I’ve taken the time to acknowledge this is what’s important to A9 for my subcategory. This is what I have control over and has a high impact on A9. So I’m going to control everything that I can control and that is going to raise me up above most of my competitors, because most of my competitors don’t know to look at that level of detail.

Brian:

Now, the exception might be if you’re in an extremely hyper-competitive field where you’ve got you’re selling a supplement and those supplements are you know you’ve got $40 cost per click, which we’ve seen, and you know they’re driving traffic from. You know, externally, from they’re running Google ads and in other words, they’re gaming the system. You know by gaming, unit sales velocity and some of these. In those cases, yes, it does become more difficult to optimize. But knowing the difference of okay, do I just kind of do a full listing optimization or do I specifically work on bullet points? On features, how much impact do this feature content specifically have on A9 for my subcategory, for my product niche? Knowing that, versus saying like, hey, I’m playing with my price, but that may be the, the subcategory where price doesn’t really impact A9 that much. It can affect things like conversion rate, of course, but knowing exactly let’s say there’s 40, you know there’s at least 40 different search rank factors. Knowing what the top five are that I have control over and have a high impact, do everything to focus all my energy, all my resources on those specific optimizations. I’m going to get past most of my competitors. Does that guarantee you’re going to get to position number one? No, but on certain, because we’re dealing at the search term level, I can say these are the five search terms that I’m going to work hard on because I want to own those five search term rank number one, rank number three, whatever the case is.

Kevin King:

How about something like I don’t know, using heat maps or time on a listing, scrolling up and down? That’s something. If that’s a rank factor, how do you influence that?

Brian:

We don’t have any kind of reporting that shows, as far as heat map, um, as far as the time on target is more like how long are you committed to the relevance of what you’re trying to the audience you’re trying to target, the terminology you’re using in your content, where you’re applying your advertising? Uh, A9 does respond well, uh, when you spend a significant amount of time focused, in other words, if you’re changing your content every week, maybe even dynamically. I’ve seen some companies do that every single week and it just shuffles the deck because they think that Amazon wants change, when in fact that completely destroys their ability to rank, because A9 wants that time on target for an extended period of time. It’s kind of like signaling commitment to a target audience.

Kevin King:

What are some things that are rank destroyers, that people like you said that changing the pictures. What are a couple other things that people may be doing that they’re misconceptions that are rank destroyers?

Brian:

Well, I mean. So part of it has to do with, you know, having sloppy titles. In other words, I put in like, for instance, I word stuff a title to try to get in front of as many search terms as I can, but they fail to go back and look to see maybe in brand analytics, maybe in search term impression share, does my conversion rate compete on this search term? In other words, is my conversion rate on this search term above average to my competitive set, to my competitors? Right, we’re paying attention to that? Or do I have a disadvantage? And I’m essentially I’m pointing all my content, all my advertising, I’m trying to get ranked for this specific search term, but that particular search term I’ve got a disadvantage of when it comes to, say, conversion rate or click-through rate. And it’s kind of like that blind obsession focusing on something that you’re never going to get there because you have a significant disadvantage. They end up doing things like oh, Amazon doesn’t work, or my competitors must be gaming the system, they must be doing a black hat because otherwise I’d beat them. It doesn’t have to be any of those. It could be that you haven’t done a good enough job of focusing in on the search terms where you have a competitive advantage over your competitive set for conversion rate. That’s probably the easiest one that any brand today could go out and go like huh, let me go look at brand analytics and see like, okay, which ones are my conversion rate better or worse than most of my competitors? Okay, maybe I shouldn’t spend so much ad dollars on where I’ve got a disadvantage on conversion rate both my advertising conversion rate as well as my organic search conversion rate because that can make a significant difference. That’s one thing out of a whole list of things that can make or break a brand’s ability to rank well for a bunch of different search terms.

Kevin King:

And what about the A10?

Brian:

I knew you were going to bring that up, because that’s very funny I like to call it A9 and three quarter. I do laugh at that because I actually had somebody say it’s like yeah, I understand that they’re coming out with the A12 now, so I can’t—

Kevin King:

Did you really?

Brian:

But they actually believed that that was the case.

Kevin King:

Oh my gosh. Yeah, what we’re referring to, if you don’t know, is there’s a lot of little gurus that’ll use this as clickbait. They’ll say, oh, the Amazon’s changed. It’s no longer the A9. It’s the A10. Here’s the seven things you need to know to rank better and we’ll help you do this. It’s total, it’s the A9. It’s always the A9. Does the A9 evolve? Yes, it does evolve and does change, and they do fine-tune it, but it’s always the A9. So anytime you see someone say, oh, there’s a new A10 or A11 or A12 algorithm, you just need to run.

Brian:

So here’s a fun fact. A lot of people don’t realize this. So A9 is actually for algorithm.

Kevin King:

There’s nine letters.

Brian:

There’s nine letters in the word algorithm right. So that’s kind of where they were saying the A9 came from. But the fun fact here is Amazon’s tracking, your domain is A8. Tracking has eight letters, oh wow. So A8 is its tracking domain, A9 is the search algorithm. So yeah, fun little things. It’s not that complex. It’s not a version number, like most people have been led to believe.

Kevin King:

Yeah, it is not. I remember in 2018, I went to a mastermind from a fellow I’m not going to name that we all know very well and he had brought in. It was in Las Vegas at his mansion and it was a private mastermind, it was expensive and it was. He brought in a few sellers from China that didn’t speak English and they were passing out stuff like this is how the A9 works. These are the ranking factors. This is okay. Your title I forget the exact terminal. I’m kind of making some of this up a little bit, but it was like your title is there’s 230 points or something and your title is 72 points of that and you’re this and that. And they had some sort of breakdown of like they had reverse engineered some Chinese computer guys that reverse engineered how this works and that’s what everybody’s like. Oh wow, this is like the secret sauce. Now we’re all going to crush everybody, but a lot of that turned out to not be necessarily true, right?

Brian:

Yeah, I mean we. I mean we had whole mastermind groups where we flying. We had a group of us that flew into Seattle and we spent three days trying to tear that thing apart, just debating it and everything and just trying to figure out like okay, how do we actually do something with this? So yeah, I think there was a bunch of like groups like that. It’s like like I’ve got this piece of information, we all need to look at it and it didn’t really come out. You know doing anything. We at this point, you know, with DeepM, ofcourse, you know we took a large data approach, you know a big data approach to it, and we were able to identify patterns and, frankly, there was things that we did not expect that we’ve discovered. We continue to find new things the more data we collect. You know we’re on pace to get up to probably 50, 60 million data points here by the end of the year.

Kevin King:

You got some expensive server time on this.

Brian:

Yeah, it does add up that is absolutely true. But the nice thing about it is that there’s certain data feeds that we haven’t added on yet that are going to multiply that, and so we have to kind of be careful as far as, like, where we pick our battles. Um, but at the core we can identify what a9, what kind of the sequence and the end, the, the priority is for a9 for a specific product niche. Um, we, we did not realize before ofcourse it does change from subcategory, subcategory, you know there’s, there’s—

Kevin King:

It’s not just the master category, it’s subcategory, so it’s not just everything in beauty.

Brian:

Yeah, the browse node.

Kevin King:

Oh, it’s down to the browse node. So there’s an infinite number of permutations of this, almost.

Brian:

Yes, yeah. So you’re talking 20, 30 million data points in a single browse node. Imagine doing that for your whole catalog.

Kevin King:

Jesus.

Brian:

Yeah. So it seemed like a fool’s errand, frankly, but we were able to make it work. We were able to get the technology and we continue to improve on the technology and make it faster and everything. So we are hiring for our software development team, just kind of like that. That’s my plug, I’ll throw out, so reach out to me.

Kevin King:

You were in beta for a while, right, or is it publicly?

Brian:

We’re still in beta for two years.

Kevin King:

You’re like keeping it on the down low, because I remember, like a year ago I was like Brian, let’s talk about this. Like no, I’m not ready yet, uh, no, I’m not ready yet, no.

Brian:

Yeah we were, we were developing it early and it was it. You know it. Certainly, as with any startup, you know we certainly have had our rough points. I had finally left Canopy back in March and that was. You know. I’m still on a very good you know relationship with our whole crew and everything, and they continue to grow, of course. But, yeah, we’ve been working on this thing in beta and so we’re currently on our beta two. So we have a private group of beta two testers. We’ll do a beta three and then we’ll probably do go to actually live production first quarter. But it has been tempting because of some of the use cases that we see where it just like just blows up organic sales and they can actually pull back on their PPC. That’s ultimately the goal we want for them to achieve, and quite a few of them do. It’s been tempting to say you know what, what if we didn’t go public with this? What if we just started working with our own brands and just kept it in house and kept it secret? That’s still on the table. We might do that and that’s not like some gimmicky takeaway, it’s a business decision.

Kevin King:

I know a company that will work with you. Uh, that Norm and Kevin are starting that. Um, if you go that route,

Brian:

Like like, it would have been good for, like, say, an aggregator, for instance, to have access to this, you know, for those that still actually exist um, because–

Kevin King:

I mean, what kind of price pointer? I mean this should be a no brainer. I mean the way you’re making this sound, this is be like, this is a duh, uh, uh. If you’re saying here’s the fourth, you know, here’s the four things you need to do, or five things you need to do, and it’s very specific. Is this expensive? I mean for a client, maybe you’re still working on the business model, but is this a monthly engagement? Because these things will change overtime right. This is like, you might tell me these are five, but three months from now, during prime day. Actually, those are not the five. These other ones are the five for this two week period.

Brian:

Yeah, we do a three month advance of a peak season. So, like for this, you know, for, like you know, for whatever the next prime day is, we’ll look three months ahead of time to see what do we predict based off of last year. What is competition doing so that we can help the brand position properly? Ultimately, what we try to get them to do, and we see most commonly, is we increase their market share, primarily the organic market share, and then when these you know the tentpole events come, or their peak season arrives, they’re at the top of the food chain because they have a higher market share going into it.

Kevin King:

And they ride the wave.

Brian:

Yeah, they’re not trying to catch up. After the fact, using PPC, for instance. Nothing wrong with PPC. It’s a tool, but it is not. There’s no one-stop solution out there for anything within Amazon. It’s always a combination of things. Um, as far as the price point goes, so our beta testers, I guess I don’t really have a problem, you know, because we state it is. We have a setup fee and then we have a monthly recurring because we go through and do a weekly scan and say, okay, here’s how things are progressing based off the recommendations we gave to you. Here’s how things are progressing as far as the rest of your catalog, and the nice thing is that, as we continue to build out, part of our roadmap is to continue to build out, you know, pushing out alerts, like the example of like saying, hey, your competitor is doing AB split testing on their title, we’ll let you know and when the final is decided, when they, when they settled down on one, we’ll let you know what that new title is so you can compare it. We’ll let you know when you’ve got somebody who creeps into your competitive set that wasn’t there before. We’ll let you know when a competitor runs out of stock or they’ve got some any one of those search rank factors. If it’s significantly changes, we can see it. A competitor finally found ChatGPT and they optimized their product listing and all of a sudden their search rank factor increased by six percent. We’ll know.

Brian:

And does that affect me or not? Like, do I care or not? Um, so that we know what we can do about it. The we haven’t started like, say, a performance percentage, which would be very narrow on net new growth of organic sales, but I don’t have a problem as far as stating it is. We do a $995 setup fee. So it’s got to be. It can’t be a brand new brand who’s bootstrapped at the moment. So $995 setup and then a $495 monthly recurring. We’ve got a little different relationship with agencies that work with us because they’ve got multiple brands, but that’s pretty straightforward.

Kevin King:

Is that per ASIN, or that’s just for the brand?

Brian:

No, so so as far as the pricing goes, that’s going to be, technically, we cap it at about three sub. You know, browse nodes, three, three product um subcategories. So it may not be for the entire brand, depending on the size of the brand um, that one, you know, browse node, may have five ASINs, it may have 40 ASINs. It’s more about separate target audiences with overlapping search terms. That’s how we observe the data and that’s where the cost is when it comes to the data collection is based off of. You’ve got 300, 400 search terms. If they’re all similar to you know, whatever you know you’re going to know on your own brand, okay, this particular product family or these multiple product families with child variations, there’s like three or 400 search terms that I tried to you know say is relevant to my niche. That is would be a single scan for us and so that would be a single effort.

Kevin King:

So are you adding subcategories or browse nodes as clients come in? Because that’s a massive amount just to be doing without a client needing that.

Brian:

Yeah, we’re not just out there just doing it, you know.

Kevin King:

Yeah, so you’re adding them as a client comes in. This is what you need, and you’re supplementing, building the database as you go.

Brian:

Correct. Now we’ve done several that have operated in the same. You know where we happen to have a brand. You know several different brands that operate in the same and the nice thing about those is we can run different scans throughout. You know different times of the year and it’s nice to be able to see it’s like. Okay, the A9 is staying consistent on its priority of what it cares about, what search rank factors matter to it. But we are checking periodically. You know every. It’s not every quarter usually, it’s not necessary, but it’s usually a couple of times a year and we’ll do a full rescan in part to see to help a brand prepare for their next upcoming peak season or tentpole event. But we’re also checking to see did A9 stay on this set of priorities? Are they still sorting the same way or did they change something?

Kevin King:

It’s not exclusive to a category, but if you’re two competitors, will you work with two competitors? Because you’re telling one how to beat the other and the other how to beat the other?

Brian:

That is. We haven’t had that come up yet, but that is kind of one of those ethical things where we have to determine is there a way that we can position them together? I would say that by default it’s going to be first come, first serve, which can make for some tough decisions on our side when you have somebody like oh, I’m working with somebody who’s in gummy and then goalie comes knocking on the door, you know it says like, hey, we want to throw your business because it’s not about the size of the brand, it’s how much can we help them grow individual product families. A larger brand may have a bigger catalog and so there’s more to work with over time, but it’s not like it’s more lucrative for us. We’re simply just helping somebody to. You know, double triple their organic sales, uh, in a few months at the product family level. And whether that’s a small brand or a big brand, sometimes it doesn’t make any difference to us.

Kevin King:

I mean, I just saw something I can’t remember if it was Microsoft or OpenAI, one of the CEOs, or maybe it was NVIDIA. They said they predicted by 2026, search is going to go down across the board Google, Amazon, everywhere by 25 to 40%, because AI is going to be doing a lot more of it. And you know the perplexities and the AI bots, the Rufus type of things, and it’s going to keyword optimization and all those kinds of things are going to matter less, um. So what are you seeing on that, or do you agree with that? Or what are you seeing on that front, and how are you adapting deep in to what may or may not be coming?

Brian:

So one of the things that we see certainly and if you look at both like, say, Google and Amazon is AI agents will have more of the. You know well. They’ll be using more things like APIs and some of the other data connections in order to do, like, multi-searches on behalf of somebody. So you’re not necessarily going to have where you have the same person has five different search sessions, and so that kind of search volume would go down. What’s interesting to see you see this a lot more on Google, let’s say, or Bing or one of these search engines is they’re trying to bring back more information so that you don’t have to click through. They’re presenting you with the information. If you do go out and say, hey, what’s the Excel formula for whatever it’s in the search result, you don’t have to click through the website in order to get it, and so it’s the clickless search. So the search is still the seeking out information through contextual search. I think is should stay relatively steady. It may be happened more by bots than by humans. It’s the click through is going to happen far less unless there is a successive or recursive you know, you know data collection by a bot, by an AI agent, in order to collect from multiple web pages and it requires multiple searches, then the searches actually could go up. Right, because we may, as a human, we may go out and do a search, find a couple of things. Oh, that’s not quite right. Do a slightly different search, okay, done. Okay, I got enough information from what I read. I’m tired of reading. I’m just going to take this as gospel and I’m going to use that.

Brian:

But what we can do with AI and with the chat, you know, with LLMs, with AI agents as those become more popularized, is we can say, okay, I still don’t like to read, I still don’t like to spend a whole lot of time in the research side, but go out and scrutinize all these different products that are aligned with what I’m searching for. Go out and find all the history, go get some feedback, check social media, check all these other things, bring it back, summarize it and then give me a TLDR synopsis at the top and say just pick this one here. That’s what the agents can do. But the agents are going to have multiple searches. So human search goes down. Automated search goes way up, because now we’re asking it to do a lot more than we would have normally done ourselves. That’s the same kind of thing that we’re doing with DeepM is we’re asking, we’re collecting a ton more data, we’re reaching into a lot more data and we’re asking it to do give us a lot more detailed information and scrutiny and looking at the same picture from a hundred different views. I wouldn’t do that myself, but I’ll certainly have the technology do it for me.

Brian:

Now, how does that affect DeepM on the Amazon side? So far it doesn’t. Primarily because even with the you know Rufus of course came in, you know they removed things. As far as the left-hand navigation, they recent, you know they put it up on top. The data is available elsewhere, so it may not be where it was before, but it is available somewhere else. You know, for things like browse node, context and some of these we’re still observing by looking at all the search results. We’re still observing how A9 is bringing back the search results, the one thing that we’re paying. It will actually say two things Cosmo, as far as being able to read images and provide context based off of those. We’re looking at how do we actually do our own version of Cosmo and contextualize or, or, you know, turn to text essentially, what is the meaning of this particular image and how does that impact relevance? You know, and some of the other search rank factors it’ll probably become its own search rank factor. Frankly, for each of those the main image, the accessories, maybe even the videos at some point in the future. The one that we’re paying closer attention to was at Amazon’s last Accelerate event. They said, hey, you know what, we’re going to introduce dynamic titles and people were speculating. It’s like, ok, is this in the product detail pages? Is it in the search results? Changing the titles dynamically based off of a customer search for in the search results is going to create a different user experience.

Brian:

And when you’re using any kind of a tool to look at the search results, that could be. You know Helium 10 X-ray, it could be. You know any of the tools that kind of look at the results? You can’t really. You can’t really trust. Yeah, they’re dynamically changing the title on the search results. Okay, is this actually what their titles are? Maybe not, they’re. They’re changing it based off of my search versus an automated search, versus an actual customer search in New York versus a search in LA. You know it’s going to change the way titles show up, but it may not affect any of the other search rank factors, so I don’t feel threatened by it. But it is absolutely something I’m paying attention to so that we can start testing early on it.

Kevin King:

This is cool stuff. We could keep talking, I think, for quite some time on this and geeking out, but we’ve been going over an hour already and we got to. You know, some people got to go out and make money. They’re listening to this. They got to go implement and reach out to DeepM, DeepM dot AI, right, if they want more information?

Brian:

DeepM dot AI. And then you have a new podcast. Now, too, you’re doing with Brian Burt, right yeah?

Brian:

So actually, yeah, so that was kind of a we had kind of an interesting theme that we had talked about for years and, you know, while we’re not business partners anymore, we decided, hey, let’s come back and do. It’s called Million Dollar Moment. So Million Dollar Moment we just started publishing our episodes recently and the focus is on those who are in business in general it’s not necessarily Amazon, it’s e-commerce quite a bit, but business in general. And it is those that have either had that moment, that realization that they were going to have a business that was worth well over a million dollars, or they reached that million dollar point. In other words, it’s kind of an inspiration business podcast that says, like I was in this situation, here’s where my setback, here’s where I basically screwed it all up, but then I had this realization and that propelled me into what I did today.

Brian:

Here’s some of the rocks that I had to jump over along the way, and it’s really some fascinating stories that we come across that a lot of people, especially the entrepreneurs, can resonate with and say, like you know what I’ve? I’ve felt things like, you know, imposter syndrome, or I’ve had something that stopped me from moving forward. This guy pushed through and it worked for him. Maybe I should, you know. So it’s it’s. It’s kind of a fun format.

Kevin King:

That’s awesome. And how, and they can find that on any podcast platform, or it’s out there everywhere.

Brian:

Yeah, Spotify and Apple is where it’s at right now, and then sometimes on YouTube it’s not. We’re still working on some automation when it comes to YouTube and then getting it out to some other distribution but Spotify and Apple. So that’s a Million Dollar Moment.

Kevin King:

Well, Brian, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this with you. Some fascinating stuff and cutting edge for sure.

Brian:

Yeah, I can honestly say, I’m having fun every day.

Kevin King:

I can tell I can tell on your face and your voice you just just glow when you’re talking about it. So it’s awesome man. That’s that’s. That’s what it’s all about. You know, find your passion and double down and enjoy life and make some money along the way that’s what it’s all about and have a little fun every once in a while too.

Brian:

Absolutely.

Kevin King:

Cool. I appreciate you coming on, man. This has been great.

Brian:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Kevin King:

If I was you, I’d be running to go check out DeepM dot AI right now. What Brian is doing is amazing stuff. This can set the difference between you and your competition. It’s a major competitive advantage, and Brian is one of the smartest guys in the space and when he sets his mind to something and starts geeking out, the results are usually pretty amazing. So DeepM dot AI this is revolutionary the way they’re doing things and analyzing the A9 and can tell you zero in perfectly on exactly what you need to do. Great, great stuff. Thanks to Brian for coming on.

Kevin King:

Brian’s also a dream 100 member of BDS s, so he’s someone that I recognize as someone in the space. That’s actually someone you should pay attention to and, speaking of paying attention, to be sure to share this episode, if you enjoyed it, with some friends. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and subscribe to this channel. Whether you’re listening on a podcast platform or you’re watching this on YouTube, we’ll be back again next week with another amazing episode. Before I leave you today, I’ve got some words of wisdom for you. It’s the phrase, the motto that I live by in life. Life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet. Life is all about the experiences you have and the people you meet. Notice I didn’t say it’s about how much money you make. See you again next week.

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