Bid Management

Howdy manufacturers! Jon Hoch, Founder of Power Equipment Direct, and I am back with our video series on our brand new Preferred Placement program.

So when we last left off, we talked about our three different strategies in which you want to use preferred placement. And we talked about Jon's favorite filters, right?

We talked about Defending Your Turf, we talked about Promoting New Skus, we talked about Leap Frogging the Competition, and that's all great and groovy, right?

So you'll see that here's a manufacturer that's on a little bit of the too new stuff, and a little bit of the high letter grade products. Great, right?

But this is not the Ronco Rotisserie, it's not "set it and forget it," right? So in some cases, you need to come back and check this out to see how it's performing. So we created another one of Jon's favorite filters called "Potential Poor Performers."

If you click on this, it's going to tell you what is "burning in your kitchen," okay?

Here's an example in which a manufacturer has some products that are going on, and we have some letter grades that aren't so good. So let me see if I got this right. We're investing money to bring people to products that have really poor letter grades.

Do you think this is going to be successful or not? Probably not so much, okay? So here's what we should do. We should pause the advertising for now, and we should be deploying our efforts on getting the letter grades higher, we should be writing reviews, and we should be responding to those negative reviews to get these letter grades higher. Then we turn it back on.

But I do want to point out one for you on this list. This product here actually had a B+, and I kind of scratch my head and go "why is this even on the list?" It's got 76 clicks, and it's even got 24 sales, right? So why is it on the potential poor performers list? Well let's take a look.

We click on the particular product, IT'S SOLD OUT! It's no longer available, right? So we're advertising something that no one can buy. So here's what I recommend. Believe it or not, I want you to stop advertising in some cases, I want you to deploy those dollars to other products that you want to draw attention to.

In addition to that, check this out, I've got a new system here for you to give you an idea of how to do this bidding properly. So say, for example, you sell lawn mowers and snow blowers. What I would recommend is obviously not looking at the lists for both of them, but sort them.

You could do two different things. You could say, "I'm just going to bid twenty cents for all of my lawn mowers," and what is going to happen is you're going to get - a third of the time this shows up, a third of the time, a third of the time, and it's gonna just randomly pick these products.

But say, for example, this particular sku is one you want to show up a lot. Because either A, it's brand new, or B, you think you can sell large quantities of this thing.

If you want to deploy your digital dollars properly, check this out. This is the way to do it, right? So this one isn't very important to us, but we do want to do preferred placement just in case someone's looking for it. So we just keep the bid at twenty cents. And then the second sku is a little bit more important than the first sku. So what we should do is, we should actually bid a penny more than this sku so that now this one is going to get all of the visibility and exposure.

But, we really want this one to get all of the visibility and exposure. So what we should do is we should bid twenty-two cents, okay? What this is gonna do is, by using this kind of priority bidding strategy, it tells us that this is the product you want to show up.

Instead of a third, a third, and a third, this one is going to show up the vast majority of the time.

Now keep this in mind. Even though you're bidding twenty-two cents, it doesn't mean you're paying twenty-two cents. Remember my prior videos, we talked about you always pay a penny more than the second highest bidder. So if there are no other bidders, you're not competing against yourself.

If there's no other bidders, you're paying twenty cents for this one, you're paying twenty cents for this one, and you're paying twenty cents for this one. But the key here is that you want this one to show up all of the time. So you bid accordingly, and it'll show up, and you'll get the visibility, you'll get the impressions, you'll get the traffic, and hopefully you'll get the sales to go along with it.

I hope this was helpful, thank you for watching, and have a great day.