How AI Is Killing the 'Art' of Amazon Ads and Turning it Into a Science — Julian Timings | Common Amazon Seller Ad Mistakes, Why AI Ads Give Sellers an Edge, How Sellers Balance Automation with Control, Future AI Advances in Amazon Ads (#349)

In this episode, we explore how AI is transforming Amazon advertising from an art into a precise science. 

Our guest, Julian Timings, co-founder and CTO of Autron.ai, shares insights on how machine learning is automating ad management, freeing up sellers’ time, and maximizing campaign efficiency. 

With years of experience in e-commerce and AI, Julian explains how Autron optimizes ad budgets, adapts to Amazon's changing marketplace, and helps sellers avoid common mistakes—all while allowing control over ad strategy.
 
Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why is AI transforming Amazon ads from an art into a science 
• What common mistakes do Amazon sellers make in their ad strategy, and how can AI fix them 
• Why does AI-driven ad management give sellers a competitive edge on Amazon 
• How does AI handle Amazon's constant changes in ad rules and features 
• How can Amazon sellers balance automation with control over their ad strategies 
• What future advancements in AI and Amazon ads can sellers expect 
  
  

Links & Resources 

Website: https://autron.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/autron/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/autronio 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://t.ly/pe9US 

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Transcript

Welcome to the e commerce coffee break podcast. In today's episode, we discuss how AI is killing the art of Amazon ads and turning it into a science. Joining me on the show today is Julian Timings. He's the co founder and Co-Founder & CTO at autron.Ai. So let's dive right into it. This is the e commerce coffee break.

A top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants. And business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host, Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome to the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Coffee Break Podcast.

Today we want to talk about how AI is killing the art of Amazon ads and turning it into a science. Now, listeners of the show know that I'm a big fan of AI and AI is getting in so many areas now and Amazon ads, something we haven't talked about yet. is obviously a big thing. And we want to dive into this in this episode.

With me on the show, I have Julian Timings. He's the co founder and CTO of autron. ai. He is a serial entrepreneur and tech leader with expertise in areas like e commerce, cloud kitchens, autonomous vehicles, and fundamental research. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, focusing on machine learning and optimization.

Julian also launched and exited an F& B brand called Polpa. So he has a huge background when it comes to AI, when it comes to e commerce and I would like to welcome him to the show. Hi Julian, how are you today? Hey Claus, I'm great. Thanks for inviting me along. I'm excited to have the conversation today.

Cool. Let's dive right into it. So the episode title says AI is killing the art of Amazon ads. Can you walk us through how the traditional approach to Paper Click PPC is being transferred into a more scientific process. Sure. Thanks. Naturally, kind of like, uh, Paper Click is, um, has always been a little less about the creative, right?

And a little bit more around given a set of, of keywords, which are normally the, um, related to the intent of the customer to search for something or buy something. You know, how do you set the bid, um, in that environment to, um, which is a competitive bid to kind of, so your product or your brand or whatever it might be in pay per click is presented to the customer, um, in an affordable way for you, where you get good return on investment.

So it's always. Being reasonably, uh, technical, I would say in its, in its approach, but I think what, um, the traditional approach to that is, has still been, um, a little bit more Google sheets and Excel spreadsheets and kind of like linear based, um, rules to, uh, to decide for these particular set of keywords.

How do I want to bid? What is the budget I need to allocate to each? And I think like, as you touched on in the intro, um, I come from a very technical background in many years ago, as 15 years ago. Now, um, myself and my co founder, Sean, we actually met at Cambridge doing PhDs together. So we're two kind of technical guys.

And, and when we, um, started selling on Amazon ourselves many, many years later, we realized that, um, a more, you know, Technical approach to this that leveraged machine learning and some of the more recent advancements in the area, um, lends itself very well to, um, pay per click advertising. And I think it's specifically around, you know, that budget allocation or a good analogy I always like to give is if you were trading on the stock market, you have a, you know, a portfolio of, of, of stock and you have some capital that you need to allocate and you want to kind of put that capital.

Behind the right, um, company to get the best returns. And it's, it's very similar with pay per click in the sense that, you know, you, you have a budget and rather than, um, stock that you're putting your money behind, you're putting your money behind particular keywords. And you need to decide how do you allocate budget to those keywords.

And they could be thousands, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of keywords. And it's, it's quite a complicated optimization problem to decide how to allocate your budget or set your bid to maximize some outcome, right? And typically for ecommerce sellers, the outcome is I want to drive as much sales as possible.

Given some constraint and that constraint is either budgetary constraint or it's some return on investment constraint. So that's the kind of lens that we look at this, um, from and think that if you're not kind of taking that like fundamental mathematical scientific approach, you're leaving money on the table and, um, you're not getting the marginal gains that, uh, we think is possible if if you apply a bit more rigor to the approach.

Now, you said you were an Amazon seller yourself, and obviously you, you were talking to a lot of Amazon sellers. What are the biggest mistakes sellers make when they run ads on their own? Um, and, and how can AI fix that for them Naturally, you know, humans need to sleep , but, um, e-commerce is a, is a 24 7 business, right?

Particularly, um, if you're operate in many marketplaces. So just purely the concept that this could be an always on service that is, um, optimizing your ads all the time. 24 sevens, 365 days a year is a really important point, right? And I think like, doesn't have to be AI per se, but automation is something that facilitates, uh, facilitates that.

So that's, I guess, one, one area which, you know, we, we strongly believe that AI and automation really obviously addresses that, that particular point. Um, and I guess the other thing to say is kind of, it can take, it can be very time consuming in itself to successfully run ads and run experiments and decide, um, the best approach.

So as a e commerce seller or brand, you're typically, certainly when you're starting out, you're juggling many different things and, you know, getting back the time to focus on product development or sourcing or all the other things you have to do. Um, and getting that winning, getting that time back is, is very valuable.

So I think it's, Taking a step back, it's about the trade off between, like, your time and that, the amount of, like, cost that ultimately incurs if you're plowing that time into, into something a machine can probably do better, basically. Now, you came up with Autron AI, using it for your own business, and then obviously open it for the rest of the world.

Tell me what it is and how it will help me as an online seller. Yeah. So I, um, struggled with those same, those same things in terms of being a relatively, uh, small seller juggling many, many, um, tasks. So I initially started with the Google sheets, like many people do and, and realize that software was a better fit.

And what it fundamentally does It, it does everything that you need to do to be successful with Amazon ads. So it's not really a co pilot, which is kind of quite common. I would say it's actually, we went for the full autopilot. So we have an interface where you set it a high level business objective.

Like I want to maximize my sales and keep my ACoS, which is a Amazon term for return on investment effectively below some target. Um, and then you press go. And then it actually, uh, launches all of the campaigns. I mean, before it even gets there, it analyzes all of your data, both on your, um, about your product, so it can get a linguistic view and picture of what your product is.

And then there's, uh, we, we connect to various data feeds that give us information around what has been successful for your product, uh, in the past and what kind of keywords are relevant. pull that information together and build a model. And then Autron uses that to take actions on your behalf for your ads.

So it starts by creating the ads. Um, and then on a, pretty much an hourly basis, it, it marches forward, optimizing those bids to hit that goal that you set it. So what it does for you is, is fully automate your Amazon advertising from end to end across any marketplace, any amount of products that you have.

It's just. And, uh, that's the primary benefit of, of all trans, I would say. Now Amazon is changing permanently very, very fast. How does your system, how does AI keep up with new rules, new features, everything that Amazon throws into their app? So we're a verified partner with, with Amazon. So we have a good relationship with them on, um, being abreast of the changes a little ahead of, ahead of time.

And specifically on the advertising side. So we're always prepared for, for those changes that are kind of more formal. Typically it's, it's like new types of advertising or ad placements could more recently, it's been like. A shift into vertical video or TV. So we obviously support these changes as they come along.

And so, I mean, the other, and the other thing to say is that obviously the Amazon marketplace is highly dynamic, right? It's like one day is not the same as the next day. So this is where we have these hourly feeds that that draw data into Ortron and it's using that to, um, map out trends, um, both like through the time of day as well as the day of the week and all the seasonality trends too.

So it can be pretty responsive to, um, changes in. The marketplace dynamics. And if you think about it, it is an auction on Amazon, the advertising. So it's, you know, it's millions, probably of sellers who are all trying to vie for, um, the best spots and generating revenue. So on any given day, any given hour, like that dynamic can change quite significantly as new sellers come in and as budget allocation changes.

So having that quick feedback loop is really quite important to be able to adapt to, um, the changing conditions. Now, some sellers might worry that AI takes away their control. How does Outrun let sellers feel in charge while they're still using the automation? Is there some way to manually steer things if you want to do it, or is it completely fully automized?

No, there's a, there's a few things. Um, so we provide these goals and you can set those goals at like an account level, or you can do it for a subset of, of SKUs. You can go quite granular and you can have different strategies depending on the product where different products are in their life cycle, right?

If you're optimizing for profitability over, you know, initial growth to get some traction and market share. So you can, you can make those, um, those adjustments. Next question from my side is what advice would you get Amazon sellers before they use your platform? What kind of homework do they have to do before you get started using Ortron?

I think there's nothing explicit that you have to do in the sense that one of the key things that I touched on before is that Ortron has access to your historic data. So Amazon allows us to go back in time by 90 days on the ad side. for having me. So you do have to authorize Ortron to go get that historical data, and then it uses that to build the model.

So I think, um, having yourself a good understanding of kind of what are the primary keywords is, is, I would say, you know, a good starting point. You don't actually have to feed that information into Ortron per se. You can optionally, uh, seed these keywords if you see particular opportunities you want it to explore.

And this is how, you It can, uh, work in a bit more of a co pilot fashion, I would say, but just before you go in and have a good idea of your unit economics of your, of your products, right? Like if the advertising is, is, is one part of Amazon very much, right? There's, you know, Advertising, you, you aim to put, uh, the right type of shopper onto your listing, then ultimately it's your listing that has to convert, right?

So is that, and that is a little bit out of the sight outside the control of advertising. So you need to work on your fundamentals in terms of You know, a competitive prize. Of course, product reviews is very, very significant in, in, uh, the Amazon world. Um, the actual listing contents, your images, the videos, the actual conversion rate.

So I would say before getting started with something like Orchard, you should, um, you know, know what your top 10 or 20 keywords are. I think that's a good starting point. And, um, try to optimize your listing as much as possible to get the best conversion rate. And we would, we would suggest that, you know, a listing that's kind of got 20 plus percent conversion rate, I, five people, um, land on the page and one of those will buy, I think is a good, um, your listings in a pretty good place when you're getting that type of conversion rate for keywords that match.

Your product, right? Obviously, if you're going, um, if you sell yoga mats and, um, you put someone on your listing, which is looking for, I don't know, like a workout platform or something that's not quite a yoga mat, then the conversion rate is going to be much lower. But if you sell yoga mats and, um, one in five people search for yoga mat, land on your listening and convert, I think you're in a pretty good place in terms of your competitiveness of your, of your listing, I would say.

So that, they're the main things to, to, to know before, before going into to get, yeah, for plowing money, I guess, into advertising in general. Yeah. I think that's a very good insight that you gave there and it should be sort of self explanatory is same goes for Instagram ads, Facebook ads, Google ads is if your website, if your store is not optimized, you won't get there.

the conversion at all, no matter how good your, your ads are. So it just, yeah. And one thing to say is that like, there's a, there's actually a point where your conversion rate is so low that you have to, you can't bid, um, aggressively, right. You have, you have to make the economics work. You have to keep dropping your bid because you can only afford like, you know, um, 50 cent cost per click instead of a dollar cost per click.

So you might be able to, and if you drop out the window of competitiveness, then you're going to struggle for impressions even, right? And then it's very much, um, um, Getting high conversion rate actually allows you to be more competitive with your bids as well, which ultimately could mean that you end up at the top of the results as opposed to halfway down the results, right?

So the super, super crucial point that, um, that we actually, Don't, um, currently offer services to assist with conversion rate, like optimization, but actually we're realizing that it's critical and we might also want to be, um, expand our product to assist and help with that too, because I think it.

Advertising and, um, and advertise and, uh, listings and optimization together. So something we're actively working on and hopefully launching something soon in that area. Mm hmm. On that, could you share some success stories or case studies of brands and businesses that have leveraged your app? Yeah, sure. I mean, I won't go into the specifics of the, of the particular brands, but where we've seen generally the most uplift, I would say is actually going from a traditional agency to a tool like ours, right?

And I, and I think agencies, I don't want to bash on agency model too much, but they, they have slightly different kind of incentives to us, like just to kind of highlight that. Some, some of them would be the way that we charge a customer is actually based on the amount of sales that Autron generates for your business that can be accurately actually attributed back to Autron, which is quite unconventional in terms of normally it's on ad spend.

So we wanted to align our incentives as much as possible with the brand and seller. And the other thing is we have an extremely low, um, Fixed monthly costs. It's only 99 as the base price, whereas typically an agency would be several times that. So I think what we, as I say, what we see generally is people who have been with agencies see a significant uplift in sales and for a given ad spend or return on investment.

And that's, um, a trend that we've seen. On many occasions, I think there's a, there is a kind of sweet spot in terms of, um, size of brand. I mean, naturally the problem is a little bit harder with really small sellers where the number of data points you have, you know, Ortron has quite a lot of uncertainty around the decisions it makes.

So typically, um, someone on a monthly basis in the Amazon world doing like maybe 10, 000 a month in revenue, top line revenue. Um, and above would be where we see the most predictable results. I would say, I wouldn't say we, we can't support the smaller sellers because that's where we started. Like, you know, small sellers ourselves, this is the challenging problem that we felt was underserved.

So we definitely are continuing to work on that. But it is, it's a slightly harder problem because or trans based on, you know, AI machine learning. And this is all fundamentally based on data. And if you have a limited amount of data, then it's a little bit more, a little bit more, um, and challenging, but yeah, there's, um, I could.

a point to a few success stories. We have online case studies, maybe include them in the, in the notes around, um, you know, the facts. Absolutely. Yeah. I think the one thing that you missed out with agencies is they do not work 24 seven. So that's, so I think that's the biggest advantage of all of that. And I like the pricing structure that you have that, um, because obviously If you get paid by the amount of at, um, budget you spend, I think it's the wrong approach.

So I'm with you there. So I'm 100 percent right. Walk me through the typical onboarding process for a new user. It depends very much on the type of user. I think there's a, there's a general tendency these days for people to kind of delve on board. And that's something which we want to support, um, where, you know, it's, it's, it's fairly easy.

Like any software platform, you can sign up, uh, you create an account. The first steps are giving Ortron that authorization to your Amazon account. And what then happens is we take 24 hours to sync your data. Um, and it's on, it's all your ad data, which, as I said, is used to understand what has and hasn't worked in the past.

We also, on the, get the listing data, so Ultron can understand, like, linguistically what your product is and try to, you know, use that as part of its understanding. That takes about 24 hours. And then you get an email that says, Hey, we're, we've got all the data. We've trained the model. You're ready to go though.

At that point, you can just come into the dashboard and you can click, set your goals and click go. And that's literally like a few clicks to kind of go from nothing to, uh, to something. Um, but equally we, you know, we want to support. You know that rightfully so there's always a bit of this questions and can be some skepticism around, um, A.

I. So, um, you can schedule a demo with us at any time and we'll jump on a call face to face and walk you through, uh, the platform, how to get the most out of it very much depends on your preferred approach, I guess. So we tried to be as accommodating as possible. I want to have a bit of a look into the future from you because you're so close to the topic, how on and what will change with AI.

In the future, when it comes to Amazon ads, yeah, that's a good question. Um, I think the space is evolving quite quickly. Um, Amazon itself is, is experimenting with its own AI kind of shopping assistance, which, um, which is interesting. So as you know, similar to Google, who, you know, had a search box, people go to the search box and typed in their intent.

That's very similar to obviously to how Amazon operates. And we're seeing everyone's shift to, you know, other services like chat GPT to get those kinds of questions. So I think Amazon is experimenting with that similar style, um, kind of conversational, um, interact shopping experience. Um, so that one difficult to know exactly where that, that, that, that is going.

Um, I think for sure the space is. The other people you're competing with in the ads auction is predominantly becoming more and more like robots and bots and AIs of various descriptions. So I think there is this Um, notion that everyone will have to move to that in that direction sooner rather than later, just, you know, for the points I mentioned around being on 24 7 and just being able to compete.

And again, back to the trading analogy, right? It's difficult these days to beat the trading bots on returns, right? And I think in some ways Amazon advertising is going to go in a similar direction. Um, and I think the direction that we're. Moving towards is, um, we have a very sophisticated tool under the hood to do all the optimization, but we recognize that human interaction is an important part of the, um, feeling informed about what's going on and the strategies that, that Autron's taking.

But we think that, um, we're very close to, um, having, um, AI agents, you know, both in video form that are kind of indistinguishable from humans. So being a business, which is very much AI first, we think that you could still have that human interaction. It just happened. We won't have, won't actually be with a real person, but it will be with some kind of, um, AI generated avatar of some description.

So that's an area we're kind of exploring to provide like account manager, like experiences, I would say, uh, but in a virtual, in a virtual way. Okay. Uh, interesting times. I'm already, I'm really looking forward to what's happening in the next 12 months, specifically when it comes to video avatars before our coffee breaks come soon.

And today, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? No, I think, I think that's it. I would, um, you know, just strongly kind of encourage people to, um, you know, if they haven't explored, um, Advertising automation. I think it's in the context of Amazon. I think it's it's worth exploring.

Um, you know, there's services like or Trump, but there's there's there's a few others that will have their slightly different approach. So generally speaking, I would encourage people to explore that. And, you know, alluding to what I said earlier around just kind of knowing the basics, unit economics of your products and understanding some key simple metrics around what your conversion rates are and how much, um, uh, how much of your, um, your margin of your product you can associate to ads.

I just think with a, you know, a few. A few critical bits of information you can get on the right path with that. So it can be frustrating at times, but don't don't get too discouraged. I would say it's it's. Unfortunately, it's not going away. So you will have to embrace spending advertising dollars and just look for a solution that gives you the best return on that investment, I would say.

Yeah. And I think betting on AI is the best bet you can do that your budget gets allocated to the right ads and at the end of the day, bring you the sales that you're looking for. Where can people go to find out more about you guys? Yeah, so our website is tron. Do AI, A-U-T-R-O-N ai. Um, or you can connect with me on, on LinkedIn, um, or shoot us an email hello at tron ai and we'll be, uh, yeah, happy to have a chat.

Cool. I will put the links in the show notes as always, and you just one click away. Julian, thanks so much for giving us a very deep insight in the world of. Amazon ads and how you can make it your life easier with AI and a lot of people will click through to your website and check it out for themselves.

Thanks so much for your time today. Thanks, man. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show.

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