How CPG Brands Can Win on Amazon

Luke Tierney is the Founder and CEO of Waypoint, a growth partner helping better-for-you consumer brands scale through data-driven e-commerce and Amazon strategies. He works with food, beverage, supplements, and CPG brands to improve profitability through stronger unit economics, marketplace positioning, advertising, and operations. Luke’s e-commerce expertise grew from founding an immersion school in Colombia, where he developed the digital marketing skills that shaped his approach today.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:33] Luke Tierney’s journey from founding a business in Colombia to helping CPG brands grow on Amazon
[6:41] Why CPG brands need to think about Amazon as a profitable growth channel
[11:24] How brands can build a strong foundation before investing in Amazon growth
[13:37] The role of positioning and differentiation in standing out on Amazon
[18:05] What successful Amazon growth strategies look like in the early stages
[20:44] Luke’s insights on balancing paid advertising with organic growth
[26:20] Creating Amazon listings that better connect with customers and drive conversions
[29:21] Why a thoughtful advertising strategy is critical for sustainable Amazon performance
[38:09] Luke’s perspective on AI search and the future of e-commerce discovery

In this episode…

Amazon has become a critical growth channel for many CPG brands, but success requires more than simply increasing ad spend or chasing higher sales numbers. Brands need to understand the systems behind profitable growth, from marketplace positioning to customer acquisition. So what does it take to build an Amazon strategy that creates long-term value?

Luke Tierney’s answer is that brands need to treat Amazon as a profit driver, not just a marketing expense. As an Amazon growth strategist and e-commerce expert, Luke explains how brands can strengthen their foundation through better unit economics, stronger product positioning, and smarter advertising decisions. He emphasizes that sustainable growth comes from understanding margins, optimizing listings, and creating a balance between paid visibility and organic momentum. His insights provide a practical framework for brands looking to make Amazon a more effective part of their growth strategy.

In this episode of The Missing Ingredient, CJ Bruce chats with Luke Tierney, Founder and CEO of Waypoint, about how CPG brands can win on Amazon. Luke shares strategies for profitable Amazon growth, building stronger product listings, and creating more effective advertising systems. They also discuss organic ranking, AI search, and the future of brand discovery.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“Amazon should be a real profit driver for you.”
“At the end of the day… we had a good digital strategy.”
“There is an awful lot of opportunity for brands that are willing to… test and iterate.”
“If your base structure isn’t sound, then none of the rest of this is going to matter.”
“This is a good time to really think about how you’re going to include that.”

Action Steps:

Audit your unit economics before investing in Amazon growth: Understanding pre-ads gross margin, costs, and reinvestment capacity helps ensure Amazon becomes a profitable channel instead of an expensive experiment.
Optimize your product positioning and listings before scaling ads: Reviewing pricing, pack sizes, keywords, visuals, and product pages helps brands create stronger differentiation and improve conversion opportunities.
Build a balanced Amazon growth system across ads and organic ranking: Reducing dependence on paid sales while improving organic visibility creates a more sustainable path to growth.
Structure advertising campaigns around clear goals: Separating brand defense, customer acquisition, keyword targeting, and product campaigns allows teams to optimize budgets and identify what is truly driving growth.
Prepare your brand for AI-driven discovery: Creating detailed, contextual product information helps AI systems understand and recommend your products while strengthening your overall digital presence.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. They partner with purpose-driven brands to drive growth through smart, results-focused marketing — without the “set it and forget it” approach.

From brand awareness and paid media to content, influencer partnerships, and loyalty programs, they act as true strategic partners invested in your long-term success.

To learn more about how they help food and beverage brands grow with impact, visit themissingingredient.com today.

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Full Transcript

Introduction and Guest Background

Intro: 00:01

Welcome to The Missing Ingredient podcast with CJ Bruce, where food and beverage founders, operators and experts share the real strategies behind building successful brands. Let’s jump into today’s show.

CJ Bruce: 00:15

Hey, I’m CJ Bruce and welcome to the show. This is the podcast where founders and leaders of high impact food and beverage brands who are serious about scaling. Each episode, I sit down with the people who power the food and beverage industry, brand operators, agencies, vendors, creators, and retailers to uncomplicate the strategies that take brands from early traction to serious scale.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency with over a decade in the industry. We take a different approach, starting with your business goals, looking at the full picture and building a marketing strategy that actually ties back to growth. From content performance marketing to influencer partnerships and AI powered workflows. We’re an extension of your team, not just another vendor. Learn more at themissingingredient.com.

Now for today’s guest. Luke Tierney runs Waypoint Growth Partners, the agency National Brands call when they’ve stalled out on Amazon flat revenue thin margins, and they’re ready to break the ceiling and scale. He works with national brands across food, beverage, supplements, and more, where he’s cracked the code on one of retail’s most brutal channels an outdoors enthusiast, climber, and better for you, better for planet product devotee. He donates 5% of Waypoint’s top line revenue to the Against Malaria Foundation, Rainforest Foundation, US and the Clean Air Task Force, saving lives, protecting rainforests and advancing climate action every year. Welcome to the show, Luke.

Luke Tierney: 01:33

Great to be here, CJ. Thank you.

Luke’s Journey From Colombia Immersion School to Amazon Growth

CJ Bruce: 01:35

I’m excited to dig in today. So let’s start about, you know, interesting backstory. You moved to Colombia in your 20s, learned Spanish and ended up launching an immersion school. We had to figure out digital acquisition with no budget. So I’m curious, how did that trial by fire shape, you know, the way or what kind of learnings stick from that to the work that you do today?

Luke Tierney: 01:58

Yeah. No, it’s a, it’s kind of a day and age and a day ago, but it is, you know, in its own interesting way, sort of how I ended up to be doing what I’m doing now. So this is back early 20s. This is just out of college. I had the goal of becoming fluent in Spanish.

Definitely did not grow up learning any other languages. But you know, this for combination reasons ended up being, you know, a life goal. And so I ended up moving abroad for a couple of years and went from learning Spanish to realizing that, you know, there’s a lot of scenarios in which the standard solution is not like the industry standard is not very effective. Language schools was an example here. So like just the very, very short version, most language schools don’t work because you’re only contact with a native speaker is your teacher.

So. You know, I founded a school called Columbia Immersion. At one point, we had, you know, two locations in the city, about 40 students a week. Like we really, we really grew it. We were in a really special part of, you know, medellin’s sort of growth.

And there’s a lot more students that were really interested in having, you know, really authentic experiences. So we had a more immersion based program. So it’s a lot going on outside of the classroom as well as inside. And that interestingly, led me to be doing what I’m doing today because even though Columbia immersion isn’t around anymore, like the pandemic took out a lot of. Tourist based businesses.

But that was my first real exposure to, you know, traveling location independent marketers and entrepreneurs. And there were a lot of people running Amazon Businesses in those days. This is kind of like the end of the heyday of like Amazon lifestyle businesses. And so the way that we got Columbia immersion off the ground was we had to get good at digital. We had to be scrappy, super scrappy.

I had like no dollars to put into this. But one of the ways that we got students is that most other schools in the area were not very sophisticated on the digital front, and so we had to use like some guerrilla marketing tactics. We had to get really creative with how we were doing work stays and some other things. But at the end of the day, you know, we had a good digital strategy. We built up a really good reputation online, and then students started to really flow in.

And so eventually when I left that school in other hands. You know, I started collaborating more with digital marketers that I had come to know through that time. E-Commerce and Amazon was a really big topic even back then. And then when I move back to the States, I was already getting pretty dangerous at it.

And really what I wanted to do was apply, you know, I knew so many people making a lot of money on Amazon. The capacity for innovation was really interesting. You know, you and I could go create our own product, CJ and, you know, apply it to the infinite digital shelf and see how we do with a level of investment that is, you know, if this was like 20 or 30 years ago, it would just be way different. So, you know, that was, that was about a decade ago that this happened. But I wanted to apply this channel marketing on this channel to better products, hence natural and natural CPG, maybe especially.

And all these years later, that’s what we do. That’s what Waypoint is all about is helping these brands grow and grow well and really scale our impact on the world by scaling those brands.

Building Profitable Amazon Strategies for CPG Brands

CJ Bruce: 05:55

Love it. Yeah. We have a lot of parallels in that. And for, you know, for me on the entertainment side background and these like large brand viral campaigns and same thing bringing that to, you know, brands that are having a positive impact and where we can really impact their business. So let’s dig into Waypoint.

So one piece I want to jump into, you know, a lot of you talk about is, you know, installing brands on, on Amazon. So if a, if a food brand, say, you know, do rough revenue range and you can take this however you like, but say between 10 million and 50 million in revenue and they come to work with you. What are some of the, you know, operational red flags that you see that maybe would make you say, this isn’t this isn’t quite the right fit, or you’re not ready to to throw ad spend behind this.

Luke Tierney: 06:41

Right. So one of the positions that we have in the industry, that’s the basis for really everything that we do is we take a stance against this common perception that Amazon is just a marketing spend, and that this is a channel that you’re likely to lose money on for a long time until you hit scale. And, you know, there’s, there’s brands that we’ve spoken with that have, you know, that treated Amazon this way and they scale and sold. And it seems like a lot of people have heard those stories, but we have case studies for days showing that it does not have to be that way. Amazon should be a real profit driver for you.

Now there’s a couple of predictable areas where brands will lose money on Amazon. One of them is treating it like just just ad spend, right? There’s a combination of three basic pillars that are really that, that we look at and we guide brands through and educate on anytime we’re doing an audit in a roadmap. Which we do for free. Shameless plug.

I’ll talk more about that later. But we, we’re the, there’s, there’s an order of operations. And the first thing we need to take a look at is your unit economics. So one number that we look at that I would encourage anybody who is looking at this to consider is what we call pre adds gross margin. So a lot of brands will publish listings, the publish their SKUs on Amazon with maybe the same offer that they have on their website or worse, the same offer that they have in retail.

Not only is this a good way to make a lot of your retail partners angry, it’s also, you know, Amazon has its own fee structure that can be kind of opaque. And so, you know, some of the foundational work that we do and some of the double checking that we do, even just during, you know, initial calls with, with partners and brands, is doing an audit of their catalog and making sure that their cogs are at, you know, certain thresholds or we know this is going to be a bad idea. So pre adds gross margin is after Amazon’s fees and after your Cogs. Ideally your landed cogs. Everything, everything before marketing everything before you have to pay your marketers a dollar or spend anything on ads.

We like to see an absolute ground floor at the SKU level of 30%. Ideally, if we can get up to 40 or 50% and above. And so that tells us that there’s going to be money to reinvest back into the channel and that we’re not setting ourselves up for failure later. Yeah. We’ve declined to work with brands that we do this exercise.

Their pre ads, gross margin is 15%, for example, like the, you know, they might be, especially if they’re an emerging brand, like the level of performance you would need out the gate in order to get this channel profitable is it’s just, it’s going to be a really, really tough road. And so we declined to work with brands who insist on maintaining, you know, a margin that is that low. So first things first, we need to make sure your unit economics are sound to a lot of people listening. That’s probably not that might sound like a relatively obvious place to start, but you’d be surprised. Amazon’s fees are changing all the time.

What they are today is probably not what they were even a year ago. And so this is the kind of thing that needs, you know, it needs vigilance and it needs, you know, to be updated. And you really need somebody who is, who’s keeping track of, of these things and how your catalog is balanced. If you have a product that is a little bit of a, a little bit lower cost, a little bit lower margin, like, like, do you have larger pack sizes to raise that AOV? And, you know, do you, do you have customers coming in and are they moving across the catalog like we want them to?

So that’s one of the first things we take a look at regardless of size of the brand. Any questions there before there’s two others with two others that are really important to mention here, but that’s, that’s a really critical one. And you’d be surprised at the brands that, that, that miss them that, that, that miss setting this up and setting this up.

CJ Bruce: 11:00

Well, yeah, that was me. My one follow up question for the next two is how are brands often? Do they have this stuff set up? And if they don’t, you know, even understanding their numbers in some cases or thinking about it like that or modeling like that, when you speak to them. And if they don’t, then is it, you know, they kind of get some homework, go back and you need occurrence these numbers and put this together to even come with that clean data for you to analyze.

Understanding Unit Economics Before Scaling Amazon Ads

Luke Tierney: 11:24

Yeah. So you can, so we have our own like calculator that we use Amazon itself. Like you can Google Amazon profitability calculator. There’s a calculator native to seller central that you can, that you can use and get an idea of what, what your Numbers by skew are going to be. So there’s there’s self-serve tools that can be used.

It helps to talk with somebody about how that looks as you scale. But that’s, that’s the number that we hear that I don’t really hear too many other providers talking about, you know, before we get to before we even like, before we even get to ad spend. How do we, instead of treating this as an exercise of, dear God, how do we get to, you know, 100,000 a month or a million a month or, you know, 5 million a month in sales? What will it take to get there? Well, that’s the second part of that stage two of a conversation that needs to start with, how much money can we reinvest back into this channel before it’s a losing prospect?

Because if we don’t know that, then we are one conversation with a CFO away from this having been a bad idea all along. So if anybody’s listening wants to go check out this number themselves. You can if they’re on Amazon, then you can pull an Amazon P and L and that, you know, Amazon’s a little fuzzy when it comes to those numbers. They make that opaque on purpose. There’s other ways to go about.

There’s other, there’s, it’s better to use a third party tool to go about analyzing that. We use Nova personally, and we’ve used many others to help out with this. But often step number one is just take one of your best sellers, go into the profitability calculator and just run the numbers and see, see what see how you’re set up and what you’re set up to reinvest before you know, the it’s the channel starts to be starts to go underwater. And then that can really help guide strategy from there.

CJ Bruce: 13:32

That’s great. That’s great. All right, let’s jump into the you said there are two other ones that you like to take a look at.

Luke Tierney: 13:37

The second one is positioning and I’ll take a little bit less time going over, going over this one. But, you know, once we once we have the first set of numbers, then we know once we have your pre adds gross margin and we understand how your catalog is structured and what your cogs are, you know, we can, we, we will know what we need to do in terms of pricing and pack sizing to make sure that Amazon is working for you and not the other way around. So let’s assume we’ve gotten past step one. So once we have that information, we can take that and then go analyze the marketplace and see, okay, what price points are selling really well under category, what pack sizes are selling really well in your category? We know that we have numbers that we can’t go below, but we can take a look at not only from a pricing perspective, but also and, you know, an offer perspective differentiation, where can we really win in this category?

Where are you already winning in this category that you might not have really considered? If you’ve been on Amazon for a little while, then you should have like you’re going to have data on your organic rank. You can dig into. It’s a reports that are called search query performance reports. You can see what market share you have for any given keyword that Amazon sees as relevant for.

If you’ve been running ads effectively, you can dig into that data. And that’s just on Amazon. Like ideally, we’re incorporating inputs from a number of different places and we can really reconsider, you know, are you being marketed well on Amazon? Like, are your PDPs world class? Are you positioned well against competitors?

Are you getting ahead of reviewers questions? You know, there’s, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of things to approach there. But the second pillar is effectively positioning and everything that goes into that and making sure that your visual assets are everything that they need to be. And then number three is efficiency. So once we know unit economics, once we have what to look at your positioning.

Maybe made some tweaks, maybe released a couple of a couple different skews. We might want to dig into additional pack sizes or variety packs. Like it really. It really is case dependent. Then we really start to get into, okay, what kinds of promotions are we running?

What is your ad structure look like? I don’t want to start throwing around too many marketing terms like, you know, tacos and, and, and ACOs and some of these things. But, you know, do you have reasonable efficiency thresholds? And then depending on, you know, how hungry for growth we are versus how much we want to optimize and really pull as much profit out of this platform right now as we can, you know, we will set efficiency metrics and balance things out so we can stair step growth profitably. And this is if you do all of these things together, you know, to succeed on Amazon.

We have what we call an Amazon profit system. And that’s a combination of economics, good positioning, efficiency metrics, and really, really tight operations to make sure that Amazon isn’t charging you more fees than you need to pay. They will nickel and dime you if you get the chance. If your inventory is too low, they’ll charge you. If your inventory is, you know, if you have too much inventory in their system, they’ll charge you.

There’s always something new coming up with them. So we’re here to do this for brands, navigate the system and really optimize for what they are ultimately taking home instead of, you know, just showing up and giving a thumbs up. If we have a, if we have a row as that seems to be above a certain threshold, like we want to make sure that we are leaving a certain amount on the table for the brand to take home as we, as we invest in, in new customer acquisition and, and the rest of it.

CJ Bruce: 17:30

Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. That’s awesome. I want to jump into, the first 90 days.

So if you’re coming in, you’re working with the brand. You get past, you know, those initial hurdles and now we’re actually running things. And I know, you know, things take time. And so Chris, if you have any examples, you could talk a little bit about, you know, what does it look like at the beginning, say the first 45 days and things turn around in the second 45 days. You could take the timelines however you however you like, but that kind of setting expectations of, you know, how things start, things get optimized, things get better.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

What the First 90 Days of Amazon Optimization Look Like

Luke Tierney: 18:05

Yeah. So it depends on what the. It depends on exactly what we find when we jump into this roadmap. But pretty typically, you know, that first 30 days where, you know, we’re going through this exercise of, you know, going deep on your unit economics, talking about if there’s any additional pack sizes or pricing changes that we may want to implement, you know, re optimizations of, of your PDPs, you know, we’ll like, I’ll well be implementing those within the first 30, sometimes up to 60 days. Well, it depends on the size of the catalog, how many revisions are needed there.

And then alongside that, like we’re implementing like, like ads are getting going as well. And then we are where we’re operating towards like the goals that we’ve, we’ve shared with that we’ve the goals that we’ve arrived at with the brand in order to get to where we’re trying to go. But if done well, I mean, like, no. No marketer is going to be able to tell you definitively what number you’re going to hit once, you know, once you’re launched. But, you know, we did an analysis recently of the average lift that brands get when they work with us.

And it’s, it’s by month three. You know, it’s pretty common for brands to hit about 140, 4,150% of what their sales were beforehand. So when done correctly, like we have a number of case studies of brands that, you know, we’re stuck at, you know, 25 K for the past, you know, couple of years, 50 K for the past couple of years. You know, 110 K for the past couple of years, you know, really have sort of flatlined. And then we’ll come in, we’ll take a look at everything from the ground up.

And then once everything starts working together, you know, we can we’re looking to come in and scale the account to. That’s what we’re that’s what we’re compensated on.

CJ Bruce: 20:13

Yeah. So let’s dig into that a little bit on a case study you talked about. So I know talked about a functional beverage brand, right? Stuck at 9KA month, scale it to 47,000 a month. And one of the, one of the interesting things there was, was reducing reliance on paid and, you know, scaling organic.

So can you talk a little bit about how you, how you move from, you know, paying for every single sale to scaling organic and how that connects to your strategy? Yeah.

Luke Tierney: 20:44

So beverage is always interesting with e-commerce simply because it’s, it’s a little tougher to drive trial there than it is for, say, a bar brand like a snack bar. You know, it’s pretty common for beverage brands to need to, to have to price it, you know, 40, you know, 39.99, 40.99 and sell, you know, a pack of and sell larger packs in order to justify the, the expenses to, to ship this. So, you know, we had a beverage that, that was one of a couple different beverage brands that have that have come to us, you know, saying like, hey, we’ve never really taken Amazon like, you know, to be the center of our strategy, but we want to see what this channel can do for us. But we ran them through the program that I just mentioned. You know, we took a look at their unit economics, made sure they’re responsible.

We took a look at their positioning. We revamped absolutely everything. And they had all of this opportunity that they weren’t taking advantage of. And you mentioned organic rank. So on the few sales they were getting were almost all coming from ads, which is obviously an expensive thing to do.

Like you in terms of the percentage of sales that you want coming from ads like you, you do want to mix. It’s a bad sign if you have a mature account, for instance, and 60, 70, 80% of your ad sale of your entire account sales are coming from ads. It means that you’re not sticking organically. So on Amazon, it’s important to understand, at least at a base level, how the flywheel works. So one example of this is, you know, if you’re advertising on Google, for example, and you place an ad for, you know, I want to keep the case anonymous, but functional beverage, you get a sale for that ad for bidding on that key term, you’re not going to move up in organic rank because that’s not how Google works.

That is how Amazon works. So, you know, they, when we re-optimize their listings, we, you know, really, really, we, we did, you know, our typical in-depth research of what keywords we thought we could rank for given this, this brand was like fairly young. And then those listing optimizations, a lot of brands make the mistake of trying to go too broad, too fast in the terms that they’re chasing after. We want to get really niche and make sure to own those niches and then build from there. And so it was really a classic case of just really solid in those days, SEO strategy.

These days, we have to incorporate AI as well into it, and then ads will pull from those listing optimizations. And then, you know, the ads are the initial visibility, but we started climbing in organic rank as well. And we started sticking for, you know, right at the top of, you know, of a lot of these niche keywords. And that allows us, that gives us the authority to then chase after these larger head terms, as we call them, that are more competitive in the category. But you have to stair step up to that.

But yeah, if you’re too reliant on ads, then it might mean that there’s something in your positioning that needs to be revisited.

CJ Bruce: 24:07

And so I want to double click on that, the stair stepping just for a second. So that like if you so I’ve got a brand, I’m going with the niche keywords. So I’m optimizing my product page for that, plus targeting that with ads. Now we start to rank organically for those niche keywords. So then are you, you’re then kind of shifting, you know, up to, you know, more broad or higher volume search terms.

And then are there changes that are happening to the product page, like throughout that process?

Improving Product Detail Pages for Better Conversion

Luke Tierney: 24:35

So you can tweak it, you can tweak it. You don’t want to be overhauling your PDPs regularly. Amazon rewards consistency over time. So once you have a really solid foundation in base, you shouldn’t have to do more than like occasional tweaks and updates from there as you get feedback from the marketplace. And as you know, you, you perform like if we see you, if, if we start to perform particularly well for a certain set of keywords that, you know, may or may not be very visible in the listing or that are new keyword combinations that are coming through the system.

Like we just want to consider what the overall mix and the PDP is. But by and large, like if you if you change too much on your listings too often, then like it can trigger a reindexing, which means that Amazon kind of takes away your organic and sponsored rank temporarily while it figures out where you are in the system, and then you have to climb it all back over again. So, you know, if your listings need a total rehaul, it’s frequent that you’ll see a short term dip in sales before you see growing above and beyond where you were previously. But yeah, you don’t want to you don’t want to be doing this too often. You just want to be periodically doing a refreshed analysis and making sure that everything is as it needs to be.

CJ Bruce: 25:58

Nice. I want to dig in a little more just on the product page, the PDP Analysis and optimization. So when you’re looking at a PDP before, either before spend starts or wherever it fits in your process, what are you what are you looking for that page to contain before you’re like, okay, we’re ready to drive paid traffic.

Luke Tierney: 26:20

So. I’m thinking through a couple different scenarios here. I mean, generally speaking, like you want to have just just to talk through listing basics. You want to have optimized copy titles, bullets, descriptions, something to double check if you’re not sure if your team has done this correctly. You can look at your back end.

Your back end metadata for the listing. It should have. There’s back end fields to fill out as well as the front end. And the back end is where you get to put things like, you know, misspellings of keywords and terms that might not be hyper relevant. Like you might not want to put on the detail page, but you do want to, they do show up in SEO research, you know, to make sure that you’re at least indexed for those, you can place ads on those.

Your listings are in English. You want to have terms that are in Spanish that show up, things like this, and the terms on the the terms on the back end should not repeat anything that’s on the front end. Amazon’s going to treat all of this as like a big combination of fields. There’s no value in repeating key terms on the back end. So that’s just the copy.

And then for your image carousels your A plus content your storefront, you know, these are all separate areas of listing that require a lot of care. But generally speaking, you want to make sure that like one really common mistake that we see brands make is they’ll just have nice looking photos of the products. Like you want infographics, like assume that a certain percentage of your customers are only looking at the images. For instance, are they getting everything that they need to know from looking at the images? Or are you trusting that they’re going to go and read your entire page?

Because I guarantee they’re not. You know, you want to treat every every aspect of the detail pages. If that might be the only place that some of your customers look like. Sure, you can expand into storefront. Sure, you can expand on unique selling props and A-plus content and have like comparison tables like every, every element of a PD P is going to have its own use cases.

But at the end of the day, are we giving customers everything they need to know quickly so they can make that buying decision? Because they’re like on your PDP, they are looking at other potential products, even right there and comparing them to yours.

CJ Bruce: 28:59

Nice. Let’s talk about campaign architecture, getting into the ad campaign. So this is all, you know, all these things worked out. We’re running ads and in the research you have to show you talked about, you know, separating out campaigns based on their job. So launch scale, defend harvest I think were some of the categories.

Can you talk a little bit more about that and how you structure that?

Structuring Amazon Advertising Campaigns for Growth

Luke Tierney: 29:21

Yeah. So this is a highly technical area and can go really, really deep. And I want to give people who are listening here just a couple, a couple of tools and a couple of things they can check up on just to be a little bit more ads fluent when they’re talking with their team or their agency so they can make sure that things are going well. So, you know, first up, and I should really caveat this by saying like, everybody does ads a little differently, right? You know, there are legitimate competing philosophies.

But what I’m, what I’ll share here are a couple of reliable ways to know if your, if your ads are too. If they have an optimized campaign structure or not. So the first place to look and where brands might think they have great performance, but they don’t is if their campaigns are separated by brands like defense campaigns and non brand new customer acquisition acquisition campaigns. And this is going to answer the question of is your is your advertiser really just relying on brand equity that you built elsewhere to make it look like you have an account that’s performing well, or if you know, they’re actually helping you grow your customer base and scale, which is what you typically hire an agency or a, you know, an internal marketing hire for. Brand campaigns are campaigns that target your own brand name and target your own product detail pages, right?

So you can, you can cross-sell by placing ads for one product on a page of one of your other products. Now, from time to time I will get brands, operators, you know, asking a question of like are like, do I even really want to run those ads? I would I, we suggest across the board, yes, doing that because this is, you know, brands that don’t do that is how we go when we win their customers. We place ads on competitors all the time. And competitors are placing ads on you all the time.

That said, brand campaigns should be in their own separate bucket. You should be paying very, very low CPCs. Those should be very, very easy sales to defend. You just want to take up that real estate in search so that somebody else isn’t potentially trying to take a customer from you. Now, on the non-brand side, though, those campaigns are myriad and there’s a lot of different ways to set that up.

But strictly, you want to make sure that. Your campaigns have a very clear naming convention so you can tell what they’re what goal they have. There are campaigns to target competitor races. There are campaigns to target, you know, different groupings of keywords. There’s different match types, you know, exact matches you’re targeting.

Exactly. Functional beverage phrases. You’re targeting terms that are kind of like functional beverage bodies. You’re loosening up a little bit further. If we have too much of too many match types or multiple match types, and if we have too many products in the same campaigns, we’re not going to be able to optimize very thoroughly.

Now, I know this is kind of tough to get through without a visual, but what everyone needs to understand is that budgets are controlled at the campaign level. So if I’m bidding on functional beverage, exact match, broad end phrase, there’s going to be an entire like this, this massive jumble of keywords and keyword farming activities that I’m doing all within the same campaign, all within the same budget. So if functional beverage, exact mesh, let’s say I kill for that term just for the sake of argument. I’m not going to be able to crank the budget on that and really make as much money as I possibly can bidding on that keyword, if it’s mixed in with all of this other stuff, or if it’s mixed in with like three different products, right? You have to segment out appropriately in order to really, you know.

In order to throttle and put as much budget behind what, what we know is working, what can really make a great profitable campaign and what it’s going to be more research based, what it’s going to be farming new keywords or you know, what, what head terms at the top of, you know, the, the terms that get the most traffic in a category. You know, the what we have to pay in order to bid on those terms is going to change dramatically throughout the year, depending on how much money and budget competitors are dropping into bid on them. So sometimes those are worth separating out, you know, into their own campaigns entirely. It really just depends on the situation. But, you know, if you want to check in and see if your ads are working as hard for you as they could, are they segmented properly?

And like, what is the split between, you know, brand defense and equity that you have built elsewhere? And you know, what, what is your new customer acquisition look like? We just did an audit for a legacy supplements brand. Their margins look great. Their ads on the surface look great.

They’re losing money though. Or sorry, they’re losing, they’re losing subscribers slowly. And so their revenue is going down. On. So while they are there, they’re not losing money in the sense that they’re not profitable.

Their unit economics are great, but the revenue is dropping, it’s dropping significantly. And it’s because they have a provider that was only focusing on, you know, capturing up those like easy to gobble up searches for the brand, their new customer, their new customer engine was broken and not firing well. And a lot of the culprits had to do with how their ads were segmented. And how many different, you know, I can make any campaign look great by throwing in some, you know, some branded terms into it that I know are going to have an incredible return on it.

CJ Bruce: 35:55

Yeah. No, that’s great. I mean, it’s, it’s interesting. Some of these, you know, parallels for other channels as well, like you think about, you know, meta ads and Google ads most directly with brand versus non-brand and keeping that separate and keeping it, you know, keep your data clean, be honest about the performance and then giving yourself the, the room to be able to scale in an informed way.

Measuring Amazon Ads Performance and Customer Acquisition

Luke Tierney: 36:17

Yeah. And, and this is where like, it’s like any, any good ads operator is going to be able to talk, they’re likely to be able to talk circles around somebody who’s not technical on this. So the metrics that I would look to are, you know, well, what, you know, what, what are our efficiencies, you know, is, is this Mark is, are these ad campaigns responsible to our P and L? Like, is this a, if you have a taco, if you’re if it circles back to the economics conversation that we had a moment ago, if you are spending more than you can afford to reinvest back in, then your channel is going to be upside down. So you can set really strict efficiency metrics to make sure that you’re staying within that in your campaign.

So first of all, do you have a PNL L responsible marketing plan that’s being executed and how well you’re performing against that. Second, you know, what is your new customer engine look like? You know, you’re new to brand needs to be outpacing your repeat or you will be shrinking. It’s that simple for a CPG brand sometimes. And so asking questions like this can help cut through a lot of the talk around like, you know, someone who just wants to talk to you about a day parting is like, you know, one of the things that you can now do on Amazon of, you know, like leaning into different times of the day and how high or low the bids are.

Like there’s a really, there’s, there’s a lot of sophistication to it. But at the end of the day, if your base structure isn’t sound, then none of the rest of this is going to matter.

CJ Bruce: 37:50

Yeah. That’s great. I do want to talk about you mentioned AI search earlier. And the shift there. So as things are moving to more conversational AI search and not just direct, you know, 2 or 3 phrase keywords, how are you thinking about that and how are you positioning brands for success in this new world?

Luke Tierney: 38:09

Yeah. Amazon is measuring performance a lot more holistically than it has in the past. You know, are, is your eye is, are, are your products getting returned often? You know, what is the customer’s experience? You know, when they like when they order.

I mean, at the end of the day, if you sell really well for certain keywords, you are going to rank organically and rank highly. But Amazon’s only gotten more complex. And the way that at a base level, the way AI fits into this, you know, you AI in particular wants a lot of contextual information in order to recommend you. It wants to be learning something from you. You need to have a unique answer or position.

And you know, the opposite of this would be simple keyword stuffing, right? Like, and just filling your listing with like as many keyword phrases as you know that customers are searching for as possible. This already had kind of a bad name in the industry. But now it’s like, like gasoline’s been poured on this fire. Customers and Amazon want to see as much as much context.

And if you like, this is really where a unique voice will shine through. And if you have new information on your kind of product and on the space that you’re in, this is a good time to really think about how you’re going to include that. Because this is, this is where it’s not just Amazon, like we’re like across models, if they’re learning something new from you, then that is something that’s going to be much more likely to come up in a query later by somebody else.

CJ Bruce: 39:52

And are you thinking about this within like the product page on Amazon, or is it more holistic and looking at like the brand’s website and their online presence more broadly?

Luke Tierney: 40:00

It’s both. it’s both. Right? Like, I mean, if you, if you type questions into, you know, a into Alexa on Amazon, it’s going to pull contextual information from the listing reviews, etc.. You really want to make sure it’s filled out and filled out well, but the same, like that’s just within Amazon’s ecosystem, like the same rule.

And CJ, I’d be curious to hear what you know, what you’re saying on, on your end, but it’s the same general principle that, you know, we’re saying with like website PDPs as well and information that brands have there. But what, where, what are your thoughts?

CJ Bruce: 40:37

Yeah, I think the same, it definitely holistic. I think that there’s, there’s the, the on site work that needs to be done. And there are a lot of similarities to traditional SEO and there are a lot of things that are new. I think some of the, you know, specific new things of focus, like frequently asked questions, right? Literally like people are searching these questions, answer those questions as the brand, like you said, if there’s any kind of proprietary or unique information and perspective that you have as a brand publishing that.

And then I think an increase in, you know, PR or like earned media around the brand, like, what are people talking about it, which I think is a difference in traditional SEO, where it was very focused on people linking to your website and like, what terms do they use to link to you? But LMS can, you know, they can read large amounts of language and so they can just see your brain was mentioned in these places. Who mentioned you? What was the context? And so thinking holistically about how your brand is showing up, you know, on your website and across the internet as these, these tools are, you know, ingesting large volumes of data.

Building Stronger Brand Discovery Across Amazon and Beyond

Luke Tierney: 41:41

Yeah. I mean, just to think about this from just a purely practical new, you know, discovery opportunity. So everybody, everybody at this point knows or is aware that, you know, customers are double checking Amazon in the aisle when they’re talking with brokers, when they’re talking with, you know, potential retail partners. Everybody’s pulling up Amazon that this brands Amazon listings. They’re taking a look at it and they’re asking questions about how that’s how that’s going.

Or customers want to, you know, this is, this is where they’re going to go see reviews of your product and look for all of this context, do your PDPs, do your brand justice, does it have all the context needed there so that somebody, whether they’re scrolling or whether they’re plugging queries into AI, is, are they going to find all the information that you want them to have?

CJ Bruce: 42:34

Yeah, yeah. That’s great. So I want to ask about, you know, do you have like food and beverage brands that you think are doing a great job in this, this omnichannel economy, obviously mainly talking about Amazon today, but any, any food beverage brands you think are doing a really great job?

Luke Tierney: 42:54

Yeah. I mean, from a marketing perspective, I mean, I also like their product, but like a AG1 I think has knocked it out of the park. Like they’ve, they’ve been really I’ve been really impressed from like everything from like the unboxing, you know, experience that they give the customers to the way they’ve executed on the marketing. I think they’re doing quite, quite well. And that’s, you know, that they’re, they’re not one of ours.

That’s, that’s just, you know, somebody just recognizing that they executed very effectively across the board, I think.

CJ Bruce: 43:33

Yeah, I agree on multiple channels and multiple ways. It’s a great, great example. Okay. I was gonna ask one last question before I get there. I want to make sure to point people to your website.

So growwithwaypoint.com. And is there anywhere else that you want to point people to to connect with Waypoint or yourself?

Luke Tierney: 43:55

Our website’s great. I mean, you can always email me. luke@growwithwaypoint.com. You know, we do audits and roadmaps for free. You know, we’re looking for long term partnerships.

We want to make sure that when we onboard a brand, that we are setting ourselves up for success as well as them. So it’s, there’s, there’s no cost to get in touch with us for us to, you know, really take a look at what you’re doing and give you solid recommendations, whether that’s something you want to use with your internal team. And then, you know, if it looks like it’s a good fit, then we could talk about moving forward. But you know, at the end of the day, we just want to make sure that brands know what they need to know to make Amazon a profitable channel that’s working for them. CPG, CPG brands are working very, very hard out here and they cannot afford to have unprofitable channels.

You know, even with investment dollars behind them, they need, you know, there needs to be a path to success there. So if there’s anything that we can do to. To help you increase the amount of dollars that you’re taking home from this platform, we’d be happy to do so.

CJ Bruce: 45:07

Love it. Awesome. All right, last question, Luke, is just where what excites you about the future of, you know, where these things are going and the evolution? You can take it within, within Amazon or, you know, more broadly with this, this ecosystem.

Luke Tierney: 45:24

Well, it’s interesting. It’s been a bumpy couple of years for a lot of a lot of CPG brands just with tariffs, throwing, you know, throwing wrenches, you know, this, this, this war in Iran that’s going on. You know, there’s, there’s been a lot of interesting tugs that decreases in funding for, for grants for, you know, DEI and we’ve seen, we’ve seen that affect some of the grants that some some brands are getting. I’m looking forward to seeing some of that smooth out, to be honest. Like, you know, CPG brands have enough going on without having additional curveballs thrown at them.

But at the end of the day, like my excitement remains, my optimism remains high. And the excitement that I have for these brands remains very much in line with what got us into this space in the first place. There is an awful lot of opportunity for brands that are willing to, you know, test and iterate. And really, you know, examine. How they’re, how they’re performing and how they could do things maybe a little, just a little bit differently to get to get more out of the, the infinite digital shelf.

There’s, there’s, there’s still an awful lot of opportunity out there for people who know how to, how to measure it and have the operational, like the big stand out now versus maybe five, six years ago is like you, the level of operational discipline that you need to really be successful here is much, much higher than before. But for brands that are willing to, you know. For brands that can, can lock that in and, and really get this to, you know, get this well systematized, like the sky’s the limit of it.

CJ Bruce: 47:23

Going on that optimistic note, sky’s the limit. Okay. We’ve been talking to Luke Tierney, CEO of Waypoint Growth Partners. Be sure to check him out at growwithwaypoint.com or shoot him an email, luke@growwithwaypoint.com. Luke, thanks so much for being on the show.

Luke Tierney: 47:36

Thanks, CJ.

Outro: 47:38

Thanks for listening to The Missing Ingredient podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

How CPG Brands Can Win on Amazon With Luke Tierney