#414 – Your Amazon PPC Questions Answered With Dr. Travis Zigler

Today, we are going to have our monthly TACoS Tuesday program. In this episode, we welcome our host Carrie Miller, Sr. Brand Evangelist of Helium 10, and our Amazon and Walmart PPC expert, Dr. Travis Zigler of Profitable Pineapple Amazon Ads. They talk about Dr. Zigler’s insights and unique Amazon PPC strategies that work well for him and his clients. He also answers all your questions, like what is the best ad you can create for your Amazon brand? How do you find your initial keywords for PPC? Do you use dayparting? And more!

Carrie and Dr. Zigler also tackle Google ads and brand-building strategies for Amazon and Walmart businesses. So make sure you listen to this episode until the very end!

In episode 414 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Travis discuss:

• 02:30 – Dr. Travis Zigler’s Brief Backstory & Amazon Journey
• 05:40 – Winning Awards For Best Hacks And Best Speaker
• 06:35 – What Is The Best Ad That You Can Create?
• 08:25 – Utilizing Virtual Bundles And FBM Bundles
• 10:40 – How Do You Use Amazon PPC To Scale Your Business?
• 11:50 – Utilizing Pareto’s Principle For Amazon PPC Success
• 14:50 – How To Find Your Initial Keywords For PPC?
• 19:40 – AMA Question: Do You Implement Dayparting?
• 21:10 – AMA Question: What Niches Do You Find Your Strategy Fits Best?
• 23:10 – Single Ad Campaigns Is Dr. Zigler’s Preferred Strategy
• 23:50 – AMA Question: How Do You Track Different SKUs? Using Portfolios
• 24:25 – Product Differentiation Tips And Strategies
• 27:40 – AMA Question: When Do You Decide To Remove Keywords Vs. Optimizing Them For Better Results
• 29:40 – Google Ads Brand Building Strategies
• 36:10 – Targeting Competitors One By One
• 37:25 – Creating SEO Blog Content Around Your Competitors. Does It Work?
• 39:40 – The Advantages Of Sending Traffic To Amazon
• 41:00 – Does Their Agency Serve Smaller Sellers?
• 41:40 – How To Get In Touch With Dr. Travis Zigler
• 42:10 – Dr. Zigler’s Charities, Charity Work, And Foundations
• 47:00 – How To Submit Questions For TACoS Tuesday

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re gonna go all over your most asked PPC questions from one of the most respected names in the game when it comes to Amazon and Walmart advertising, Dr. Travis. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Helium ten’s got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you’re gonna learn how to use everything or maybe even to know which ones you wanna get started with. So for a completely free course that’s gonna guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today we are doing our monthly TACoS Tuesday. This is a show that we’ve been doing for quite a while now, and what we are doing here in 2023, and we started this last, at the end of last year actually, is every month we’re inviting a specialist, an Amazon advertising or Walmart advertising specialist onto the show to answer all of your questions. Some of this was answered live if you guys were tuning in on our LinkedIn channel or our Facebook group. Some of these questions were submitted beforehand. Some of them were from our host of the show. But at the end of the day, you are gonna come out of this knowing more hopefully about PPC. So today’s host is actually not gonna be me, it’s gonna be Carrie and today’s guest is Dr. Travis. So I’ll let her go ahead and make the introductions.

Carrie:

Hello everyone and welcome to Taco’s Tuesday where we talk about all things Amazon advertising. I’m so excited for today’s episode. We have a very, very special guest. My name first of all is Carrie Miller. I’m a Brand Evangelist here at Helium 10. And so I’m gonna go ahead and just start off and bring our guest and his name is Dr. Travis Ziegler. I’m really excited because I just, I don’t think there’s anyone better to talk with about Amazon advertising and I think he’s one of the best in the business if he’s not the best. So I’ll go ahead and bring him on. Thanks for joining me today. I’m so excited to have you,

Dr. Travis:

Carrie, I appreciate you having me on and I always appreciate everything you’ve done for us.

Carrie:

I wanna give the audience an idea for anyone who doesn’t know you, like what your background story is and how you got into Amazon advertising in the first place.

Dr. Travis:

Yeah, it’s a great story in my mind cuz it’s just kind of one of those unique things that I was a, a doctor, I am a doctor I should say. That’s why I do say Dr. Travis Ziegler. And I am an optometrist, so I’m an eye doctor by trade. And I graduated with my optometry degree in 2010. Practiced for about four years here in Columbus, Ohio. And I worked for my uncle and kind of felt an itch to do something more. Didn’t know what that itch was, but I had to scratch it. So I quit my job, I moved across the country to South Carolina and I opened up two practices of my own before I left. My uncle was like, you’re an entrepreneur, you have an entrepreneur’s brain, you’re gonna be just fine. I had no idea what an entrepreneur was at that time.

Dr. Travis:

But we moved to South Carolina, opened up these two practices. My wife is also an optometrist, so she worked at one, I worked at the other and I went from seeing six patients an hour to one patient an hour. And as with all entrepreneurs, when you don’t have something to do with your hands, you tend to do something with your hands. And I came across a course and this was back in 2015, learned how to “create an Amazon business.” And we started as a sunglass company and we built that sunglass company up to almost 3 million a year. But it was just selling pieces of plastic so there was no fulfillment there. And so what we did is we shifted from being an “Amazon business” to then a “real business.” And what we saw in our practice was a lot of dry eye sufferers, people that have itchy, dry, irritated eyes.

Dr. Travis:

And for those that are asking themselves what is dry eye, that’s a good thing. That means you don’t have it. And what we did is we built an audience around that. So our Facebook group is now around 20,000-21,000 people. And our email list, we built that up to about 150,000 people and we’ve helped over probably 200,000 people now with our products. So we first came out with just value, we were serving an audience and we built up this audience and then we started coming out with products as a result of them coming to us with product recommendations. And most of the products we came out with were organic, healthier for you options that wasn’t in our space. And so most of the time you have dry eye, you get a prescription. And so we were teaching people actually Eastern Medicine, functional medicine along with using our products for natural solutions.

Dr. Travis:

In that period of time, I tried six different softwares for Amazon PPC. I tried three or four different agencies and didn’t get the results I wanted with any of ’em. And I felt like I was pretty good at PPC. So I did what any entrepreneur would do and I started my own Amazon PPC agency in the process. So we had about four clients for a little while and then we decided to start taking it seriously and that was about three years ago and here we are today. I’ve actually sold my business I love about a year and a half ago and I worked for them for about 18 months after that to help with the transition. And then now I get to focus full-time on the agency, which I’m pretty excited about. And this is all like recent developments. So it’s weird to have one full-time job, I’ve always had a slide hustle, but I’m actually happier now that I get to focus completely on the agency. And so that’s kind of where we are today for that’s kind of a long story long and I probably shorten that a little bit. But yeah, that’s where we are.

Carrie:

That’s awesome. And something I like about you two is that you, you do an amazing job with PPC but you also look at the bigger picture. And I think my first encounter with you is at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, which for any of you who don’t know Kevin King hosts Billion Dollar Seller Summit, some it’s some of the top sellers in the world come to this and you actually won the hack contest. How many times have you won the hack contest?

Dr. Travis:

I have won the hack contest once.

Carrie:

Okay.

Dr. Travis:

And I play second last year. And then I won Best speaker in the spring.

Carrie:

Yeah, I mean that’s pretty amazing. So that’s a pretty good resume right there. And that’s how I met you. So I was impressed with all of the techniques and tactics that you shared there. So I’m excited to start asking you a few things just about ads. So the first question I have, for those of people who are just starting out what is the easiest and most effective Amazon ad that you can create?

Dr. Travis:

So one of the most easiest and effective ads that you can create on Amazon is a defensive ad, believe it or not, even if you are just getting started, your brand name carries weight. It doesn’t matter how big of a brand you are because whatever you’re doing, you’re bringing awareness to your brand. If you’re making sales on Amazon, you are bringing awareness to your brain because somebody is getting your package in the mail and your branding is on it. And so no matter what stage you’re at in business, especially if you’re making sales, you need to definitely be doing a defensive ad and that’s simply just going after your brand name. So making a manual search campaign for exact, broad, and phrase around your brand name, our brand name is Hydrate. So we had Hydrate and our other brand name was, eye love, like an eye.

Dr. Travis:

And so those two words we focused on broad phrase and exact and we’d always do misspellings or different spellings, one word, two words, different variations of that because you wanna protect your brand name cuz even if you’re only getting like 10 searches a month, it’s still going to increase over time. And so I think by the time we sold our company, we are getting close to 10,000 searches a month for our brand name. And that’s just cuz of everything we were doing. So as you’re building that brand awareness and building your audience, you wanna make sure those defensive ads are in place. And then a second type of defensive ad is a product targeting ad. And so you wanna make sure that if you have multiple products or multiple variations of a product, you wanna make sure those products are advertising on each other and therefore when somebody lands on your page, you don’t have your competitors trying to steal your sales. And so product targeting ads are now in pretty much every category sponsored product, sponsored brands, and sponsored display. And so you wanna make sure you’re across all of those product targeting areas to make sure that nobody else is advertising in that spot. And then if you’re not advertising for your brand name, going back to the first ad, somebody else might be doing that and getting cheap clicks based on your brand awareness.

Carrie:

I have actually seen some top sellers utilizing that strategy and I also saw they use bundles to as kind of like taking up another space to use that as a strategy too for defensive strategy?

Dr. Travis:

We’ll do both bundles. So you can do virtual bundles through Amazon FBA and that’s where Amazon just fulfills it when a bundle’s sold. And we’ll also do FBM bundles. And so an FBM bundle is pretty much your fulfillment center that you have, maybe for your Shopify store or just outside of Amazon, they’ll fulfill the bundles and we’ll do that with multi-pack variations too. Cuz with virtual bundles you can’t do multi-pack variations yet. And that hopefully will change. And it’s not something I’ve tried recently so they may have even changed it, but it’s where you have a one pack, a three pack and a six pack. And so we sell eyelid wipes and so we sell the one pack for 30, the three pack for 2.25 times that 30 price, I think it’s around $50. It’s not exact exact math, but it’s about, so they get a savings when they bundle and then the six pack is actually a buy four get two free and we’ll advertise that we’ll have a higher profit margin on those so we can bid higher and we’ll advertise those variations at six pack on the one pack.

Dr. Travis:

And so yeah, we use variations quite a bit with that strategy.

Carrie:

Would you say you get a lot of clicks on those bundles or is it just more of like a defensive strategy?

Dr. Travis:

It’s both.

Carrie:

Some people ask if it’s okay,

Dr. Travis:

You don’t get a lot of clicks, but you get some. And so the sixpack sold one a day, which isn’t bad. I’ll take one a day, I have a six pack. Yeah. And then the three pack I think sold two to three a day. And so you’re still selling a decent amount. And then the one pack of course is the one pack and that’s our bread and butter. That’s the one that sells 75 to a hundred a day. And so don’t be afraid to make those variations. They may be low profit or not low profit but low sales value, but the profit margin’s much higher. And then you take that customer off the market for the next six months or the next three months or whatever that variation ends up being. This is huge in the consumable space. Make sure no matter what, if you’re in the consumable space like supplements, you need to have a one-pack, three-pack, six-pack variation.

Carrie:

Very cool. How do you use Amazon PPP C to scale your business? It’s the most important thing. One of the most important things. So how do you use it to scale?

Dr. Travis:

Yeah, so let’s, we’ll we’ll talk about my strategy that we use inside the agency, but we’ll also talk about a mistake that a lot of sellers make. And we see this cuz we audit a lot of accounts, we look into a lot of accounts and of course we have a lot of accounts that we bring on as well. But the number one mistake that I’m seeing is that people follow too many strategies. They’ll listen to me on my YouTube channel and try to implement my strategy while then going over to helium 10 and then listening to their strategy, which is completely different from mine. There’s not one that’s right or wrong. Each strategy may not work for everyone. My strategy will not work for a hundred percent of people. And I’ll be the first to admit that helium tens isn’t gonna work for everybody, but it will work for the majority of people.

Dr. Travis:

And then there’s other strategies out there and there’s other softwares out there and everything isn’t gonna work for everybody. And so the problem that I see though is people are following 20 different strategies and they’re trying to hodgepodge it all in together to make one strategy. And you just can’t do that. You gotta stick to one strategy, see if it’s gonna work after three to six to 12 months and if it doesn’t, then move on to the next strategy. I went through six softwares and three agencies before we figured out the strategy that we wanted to go with. And how we figured it out is we hired a mentor that really resonated with me. I saw her on stage, I hired her to coach me one-on-one and she coached me for almost a year and a half. That’s how we developed our strategy. But then moving on to what that strategy is, it’s simply Pareto’s principle.

Dr. Travis:

We follow Pareto’s principle in almost every area of our business and even in our life. And Pareto’s principle is just simply 20% of what you’re doing on a daily basis produces 80% of your results. And Pareto found this by noticing, I think he used Italian and he noticed that 20% of the landowners owned 80% of the land, 20% of his garden or 20% of the seeds in his garden produce 80% of the crop. And so how does that apply to your Amazon business? 20% of your products are producing 80% of your revenue, 20% of your products are producing 80% of your revenue. I didn’t just have a stroke there, I repeated it for emphasis. And so you have 10 products, not you in particular, but let’s say you have 10 products. Two of those products are producing 80% of your revenue. I guarantee it.

Dr. Travis:

No matter what business you have, if you have a thousand SKUs, 200 are making the majority of your business. And what we do with most people that we bring on is it scares ’em to death, but we’ll be like listen, we’re gonna ignore all these and just focus on these two. And when we focus on those two, we can then put more budget behind those, get those selling more at a more profitable rate and then therefore we have more profit to play with to then go after the others. But what happens is you’re starting to bring your brand awareness even higher because you’re making more sales cuz you’re focusing on your top sellers. And so then what happens is you get spillover sales to the other ones as well, especially when we implement that defensive strategy as well. The second thing is, from a PPC standpoint, 20% of your search terms that you’re going after are producing 80% of your results.

Dr. Travis:

And so that’s the second thing we do is we eliminate all the discovery campaigns that are going on. A lot of sellers that aren’t as good at advertising usually have a lot of discovery campaigns going on. A discovery campaign is just where you’re out there looking for more search terms or ASINs to then be able to scale. And so then what we do is we eliminate a lot of that discovery. You still need to have some just because you always wanna be discovering new search terms and keywords and ASINs for that matter, but I’m not getting into ASINs yet. And so we focus on those 20% of search terms that are producing 80% of your results. Again, if you look at all the keywords you own, after 20% of those are producing all your results on PPC, we then take those 20% of search terms and apply it to the 20% of products and we just focus on that to begin with and that’s what results in scale. And then once we get that scale and that profit, we then start spilling it over and bringing more budget to the next product and the next product and the next product. And so we focus on the top and then we work our way down.

Carrie:

That’s pretty amazing. Yeah. I guess I’m also curious I know a lot of people are like, oh, I just start with an auto campaign, and then that’s how I find my keywords. Do you do a combination of both keyword research or, and you know, like what, what do you do to find your initial keywords when you’re starting up a campaign?

Dr. Travis:

I use Helium 10 . So but auto campaigns, I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them when they’re used correctly. I don’t love them because most of the time they’re not used correctly and auto campaigns is just like hiring Amazon to be your agency and hiring Amazon’s bot to be your agency and there’s not a problem with that. But you’re gonna waste a lot of money and you could do a little bit of keyword research. Keyword research was one of those things that like I avoided at all costs from my first two years of selling on Amazon and then I grasped the importance of it and then I was like, oh yeah, if you actually get good at this, this could be like, this could make or break everything around Amazon PPC and your Amazon business because  I grew up in the wild, wild west of Amazon and it was very easy.

Dr. Travis:

You just bought reviews and then that’s how you rented. And so you didn’t have to get good at stuff, but then once it started getting harder, then you had to start getting good at stuff again. And so keyword research is key. You should know by coming out with the product what your main base keyword is. And what I actually like to do is put that main base keyword into Helium 10’s Magnet tool and then populating the keywords. The first thing I do after that is I actually create my negative phrase list. And a lot of people kind of, I don’t wanna say have a confusion around what to use negative lists for, but most people focus on negative exact lists. And negative exact list is gonna save you pennies compared to what a negative phrase list can do. And so a negative phrase list is just pretty much looking for words in the frequency list of your magnet tool.

Dr. Travis:

And in that frequency list you’re gonna see words that just don’t apply and you can get rid of those and that will eliminate a ton of keywords for you. So I’m gonna give you an example. So we sell a face wash and so the face wash, I don’t wanna show up for body wash, so I’m gonna use body as a negative phrase keyword cuz I don’t wanna show up for body wash at all and it’s a foaming foaming wash and it’s liquid so I don’t wanna show up for soap bar. And so bar will be a negative phrase cuz it will eliminate tons of keywords. And so when you focus on those keywords that are huge and make a big impact, another example would be if I sold a hand cream, I don’t wanna show up for foot cream or body cream because I wanna focus on hand cream as my keyword.

Dr. Travis:

So once I start eliminating those phrases, I’ll then actually add that into the helium 10 magnet on phrases to exclude and then that narrows down your list even more. And I look for the most relevant words around what I’m going after. And we look for long tail keywords just like everybody else does. You look for that doesn’t necessarily mean long phrases. It means phrases that get high search volume or keywords that get high search volume with low competition. And we’ll find about 10 of those to really hone in and go after. And then we’ll even go after that main keyword. And so an example of this would be eyelid wipes is the main keyword. Eye wipes would be kind of one of those long tail keywords, eye wipes for people, eyelid wipes for people. Believe it or not, there’s eyelid wipes for dogs and everything too.

Dr. Travis:

So that’s why I have to specify that. But those are all long tailed keywords that we can use to then be able to go after those. And then what we do when we launch with those keywords is we’ll do exact match campaigns individual, we do single keyword ad campaigns. So we’ll do that means one keyword per ad campaign, one ad group, one ASIN that we can customize the whole campaign for that keyword. And so we’ll do 10 to 20 of those. We’ll even do some broad just to start discovering a little bit and then we’ll do some ASIN targeting around that. We can get into that a little bit more later. And then we’ll actually do Google ads over to your listing as well. And so we’ll do a combination of all that to get lots of traffic to your listing to do a launch.

Dr. Travis:

And so going back to your question of do I like auto campaigns, I don’t because you’re giving Amazon PPC the keys to your, to your business and I don’t think you wanna trust a bot to do all that. But with that being said, if you do an auto campaign, right, which is that negative phrase list, if you upload that negative phrase list I just talked about how to create, then that’s gonna be a huge difference maker for you if you add that to your autos, your broads and your phrases because it’s gonna save you hundreds if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. ,

Carrie:

Wow. That’s amazing. Cause I get that question a lot about negative targeting. So that was a really amazing explanation of that. All right. It looks like we’ve got some questions here too. So Gina, and we know Gina. Hello Gina. Do you implement day parting for example, smaller budgets to advertise when most orders occur historically?

Dr. Travis:

Do I implement day parting? No, but my software that I use does. So day parting is one of those things that don’t even try to do it as a human because, there’s no reason to to do something like that, that a software can do much better than you cuz you’re gonna have to constantly be calculating different times a day. But yes, we do use dayparting quite a bit and it’s funny because we educate our clients on that, but our clients still come to us and say, why aren’t my ads showing? And it’s like 10 in the morning. It’s just cuz you don’t convert it this time. We convert when you convert. And so what that usually do does is it decreases your cost or your, your bid in the mornings and you know, early mornings especially. And then it usually raises it in the afternoons and evenings when your conversion rate’s higher. And so day parting is definitely something we implement and it’s something that we use quite a bit, but we use software for that.

Carrie:

So another question. What niches do you find your strategy fits best?

Dr. Travis:

So we specialize mostly in supplements and consumables. And I’m not saying that our strategy works for that cuz we have others in other strategy as well. Carrie is not in supplements and consumables, well kind of consumables

Carrie:

Kind of, but not.

Dr. Travis:

Yeah. But it’s one of those things that that’s what it seems to work best for because what we focus on is branding and bringing an overall brand. But what we find any strategy works best for is if you have a real brand and not just selling cheap plastic widgets from China. Don’t fall into that trap. It doesn’t work anymore. Some people will get it to work but they kind of have the money to be able to get it to work. But if you look at all the aggregators in the space, they’re kind of struggling now because they bought all these companies and some of ’em did that. And that’s the unfortunate thing is that it’s not as good a really good aggregator in the space. It’s elevate brands and they choose wisely when they choose to buy a brand. They’re not just trying to buy as many as possible and the brands that they’re buying into or buying, they’re working well because they’re actually brands. And so creating a brand is the ultimate strategy. Doesn’t matter what Amazon PPC strategy you use, if you don’t have a brand that’s all that matters.

Carrie:

Do you think kind of Amazon’s pushing more towards brands, like they’re just kind of making it easier if you’re a brand and kind of more difficult if you’re not or

Dr. Travis:

Just look at the accessibility of the tools you have when your brand registered versus not. And so they’re really pushing that and being trademarked just helps out tremendously on Amazon and building your brand, I wanna say quote unquote off Amazon. I don’t mean building a Shopify store, but just building an audience and building a brand around that audience and building something to serve somebody is going to be a lot better than just coming out with a product. And our sunglass business doesn’t do anything anymore. It barely does 300 to $400,000 a year, which is still good, don’t get me wrong. But compared to the 3 million that it was at one point, it’s a big difference. And the brand that we actually serve somebody with Dry Eye, that brand has really taken off and it’s, it continues to take off.

Carrie:

All right. We’ve got another question from Gina. Do you put Target ASINs in their own campaigns or put all nine in one ad group?

Dr. Travis:

So I am obsessed with single anything ad campaigns. So single ace and ad campaigns, single keyword ad campaigns. I like to individualize as much as possible. Where I don’t do that as much is defensive campaigns and so I’ll tend to put defensive campaigns and clump ’em together into one one campaign. I still will separate ’em sometime, but if you’re thinking of like that’s gonna take me a lot of time. Your defensive ones you can clump together but offensive ones against, against your competition. I always like to do single ace and ad campaigns and single keyword ad campaigns. The reason being is cuz you can customize every single part of that campaign to that product and to that competitor. And so you can really do a lot with it.

Carrie:

All right. This is a good question too. How do you track and keep separate different, I think skews do you do this in portfolios? Like basically how to keep it all organized and Yeah.

Dr. Travis:

Yeah, so definitely use portfolios. Portfolios is really helpful. But the nice thing is about the single keyword ad campaigns in the single ASIN ad campaigns is that you don’t have to click into each campaign to see the results. The results are right there on the main page. And so, but we do use portfolios and we’ll separate ’em into portfolios. But the nice thing about this is you’re not clicking into multiple campaigns. Everything is right there in front of you.

Carrie:

All right. I think that’s the end of those questions. And another question is cause I think we were talking about some of the brands maybe that don’t work. Do you think that you can go more in detail about like differentiation? Cause you were talking about building a brand. What kinds of things do you think that you should do to differentiate the products so that the PPC like your ads work more efficiently?

Dr. Travis:

Best thing you can do, I’m trying, I was going the brand route, but I’m gonna try to keep it on Amazon route. Main images are key. Your main image has to be different. Go look up silicone coaster on Amazon, just go do that right now and tell me which one’s your brand because every single one looks the same. So it doesn’t matter, like for all those plastic widgets from China, everything looks the same, but what can you do to differentiate it? And the unfortunate thing is if you sell something that everybody else sells with no differentiation, then you can make a change to your photos, that works, then everybody else will repeat it. And so what can you do to make your product better and differentiated? And then how can you show that on the main image? And if you can show that on the main image that’s gonna lead to a higher click-through rate, what can you do with your branding and your copywriting to make it a little different to make it stand out a little bit more?

Dr. Travis:

So one of our big differentiators for us was our mission. And so we do charity work in third world countries. We go on two to four mission trips a year and we do eye exams, glasses, sunglasses and surgeries for people in those countries. So we went to Mexico and Jamaica last year and we discussed those with pictures and to copywriting and bullets and everything on our listings. And so if you’re choosing between this product and that product, which one are you gonna choose? The one that actually has like a charitable purpose that actually shows it. Like we don’t just donate, we actually do it and we have pictures of it to prove it. And so how can you differentiate your brand and your product by you can make your product better, better quality, better everything. And then showing that on the main image and then doing something else to differentiate your brand like charity work. And don’t just donate, actually do it and show pictures of you doing it.

Carrie:

So are there any kind of, I mean I know there’s a lot, you have to have a white background, but are there any kind of things that maybe you won’t get really penalized for if you do that might make you stand out on your main image? Are there any kind of little hacks you have for that?

Dr. Travis:

Yeah, show everything that’s in the box. That’s kind of one of the simplest ones. So we sell eyelid wipes and everybody just shows the box, we show what’s in the box. So we have eyelid wipes that are fanned out and then we’ll have even the eyelid wipes like ripped open and showing. So we’ll do little things like that to make it stand out more. There’s a couple products that we have that need better pictures just cuz there’s nothing really exciting about ’em. But those are little things that show what’s in the box and when you show what’s in the box, you might have some bonuses in there. Yeah. And just show that and hire a professional. Don’t do a 3D rendering actually hire a professional cuz it will look a lot better than when you have a crowd of 3D renders, you can stand out by actually having a real photo and then having real lifestyle images is a lot better than having 3D renders.

Dr. Travis:

When I go onto Amazon and shop, when I see that it’s 3D renders, I don’t buy that product because that tells me that the brand is too cheap to do lifestyle images, pay $500 or whatever it is. And therefore that scares me because if something happens to the product, how much are they skimping on the cheapness of the product? Are they just going for a profit? And so really focusing on those photos is gonna help you out with differentiation. And then most of the photographers in the Amazon space will do something with your product to help it differentiate as well. Or they should know how to do that.

Carrie:

All right. We have some more questions from the audience here. When do you decide to remove keywords versus optimizing them for better results?

Dr. Travis:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And so we will remove keywords if they’ve made, and this is just kind of a general, so it can be different in every category. For example, our sunglasses get six to 7% conversion, which doesn’t seem that high, but in sunglasses it is. And then our eyelid wipes get 50%. And so this is a very generalized statement, but if we have 10 clicks or more with zero sales, then we will actually pause that keyword and so we’ll get rid of it. We may relaunch it later at a later date if it’s shown to do something in a different campaign but we couldn’t get it working in this one, then we may just relaunch it and try it again. We optimize it if it’s actually made of sale and it’s close to the conversion rate that we want, but the ACoS maybe 150%, we’ll try to optimize that down to our target ACoS.

Dr. Travis:

And so if the ACoS is too high but it is making a sale, then we’ll try to optimize it. And then also if you have 60 days worth of data and you have one sale in that 60 days and the ACoS you know is 75% or whatever it’s above your target, just pause it. It’s only making one sale every 60 days. It’s doing nothing for your sales velocity. We focus on the keywords and the search terms and the ASINs that are making sales velocity, meaning one to two to three sales per day. We may keep one that’s doing a half sale a day and we may do one even that’s doing one sale every three days. But the ones that are doing say six sales in 60 days, that’s one every 10 days. That’s not contributing to sales velocity. Don’t be afraid to pause those. They’re doing nothing for your campaigns. . And so really focusing on the ones that are driving lots of sales velocity, cuz the name of the Amazon game is two things, conversion rate, sales velocity, you have a high conversion rate, Amazon’s gonna show you if you have sales velocity, they’re gonna show you. So that’s why we focus on the 80 21st and then we trickle it down from there because when you focus on those, it increases conversion rate and sales velocity, which increases your organic rank for everything else.

Carrie:

All right. I do think that you have a really good kind of Google brand building strategy. Do you wanna talk a little bit about kind of Google ads and you know, what you think that, how that contributes to just your overall success on Amazon?

Dr. Travis:

The Google ad strategy is pretty much what helped us build our brand and it’s what anybody can pretty much do if you have a brand that’s worth building. And so if you have somebody that you want to serve, then this is a strategy for you. Our who was dry eye suppers, pretty much a post-menopausal female that suffered from dry eye cuz menopause can really mess with your hormones, which then causes dry eye. And so we knew that that was the purpose or the, the person that we wanted to serve. And so we thought, how can we serve this person and help them? So we’d ask ’em what their biggest pain points were and what we’d do is we’d write articles around those, those pain points. And so one of the biggest pain points that around dry eye is people that have blepharitis. Blepharitis is just a fancy word for inflammation of the eyelids.

Dr. Travis:

And so inflammation of the eyelids, the eyelids have oil glands that release onto your eye and if your eyelids are inflamed, the oil’s not getting out anymore. You’re getting, you’re gonna get dry eye as a result. So what we focused on is building blog articles around the problem that our product solves. And so we’d write an article that was titled What is Blepharitis or The Three Simple Steps for Blepharitis Treatment. We talk about what blepharitis was the causes. And then the three simple step treatment is cleaning your eyelids. This is how you clean your eyelids. Number one, warm ’em up with a warm compress cuz that melts the oils inside the eyelids. Number two, eyelid wipes, wipe your eyelids clean with eyelid wipes. Number three, use a hypochlorous acid eyelid cleanser. All three of those products were our products. And then what we’d do is we’d send Google ads to that blog and then that blog actually sends them over to Amazon and you can use an attribution link now, but we used to have to use Associates links but then we send ’em over to Amazon to buy.

Dr. Travis:

Now I hear some of you saying, why don’t you just keep them on your website? My website’s conversion rate is one to 3%. My Amazon conversion rate’s anywhere from 30 to 50%. Wow. So we’re gonna send them to reduce the friction to get the product in their hand cuz we know they’re gonna be back to buy more. And we did the strategy, we’ve started it in 2017 and again, we’re not focused on product-based keywords. That’s where the amps of the world, I think Helium tens coming out with the tools sometimes soon with Google ads direct to your Amazon listing. Those are gonna be product-based keywords that you’re going after with those. Nothing wrong with that, we do that too. But in this strategy we’re going after problem-based keywords. So Google ads based on the problem left, right? And the product based keyword would be eyelid wipes goes over to an article that talks about what it is and how to treat it.

Dr. Travis:

And then our products solve the problem. So it’s, it’s like an advertorial, it’s warming them up and then sending them over to Amazon to buy. You get the 10% bonus from the attribution link. But with that strategy we’ve been able to build our email list. We were getting 200 email leads a day at one point during the strategy. And it helped build our audience, like I said, to over 150,000 at one point and really helped us build our brand to then exit. Now the cool thing about this whole strategy is at our peak when we owned it, we did about 4 million on Amazon and we focused entirely on Amazon, but we did a million on Shopify. We actually did 998,000 on Shopify. And

Carrie:

So And that’s what the email list that you built?

Dr. Travis:

Yes. And we never focused on Shopify. We ran very little advertising, maybe $5,000 a month in advertising to Shopify. Even our email list though we’d send to Amazon to buy cuz we’d wanna boost that algorithm to boost up sales. So everything we did to build the brand and email list and the Facebook group, all our sales were always to Amazon because we wanted to boost that algorithm to get us further up in the, in the organic ranking. But as a result, residual, like I talked about earlier, spillover when you focus on the top spillover happens, we almost did a million on Shopify as a result of spillover from our Amazon business.

Carrie:

Wow. And cuz people trust Amazon, right? So they’re like, oh I, it’s gonna be easy to return if I need to. And then once they buy it then you, they’ve already got the product and then you email ’em, then you’re gonna have more, you’re gonna have better results. So you just do a popup when you have this kind of like blog article which just pops up on the screen. And is there an incentive for them to add their email address or how do you do it?

Dr. Travis:

There’s two ways we did it. There is the blog popup. So we wrote a book called Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment. It’s a real physical book and we’d give away PDF copy of that for free. It’s a 200 page book and then we, it’s on audible and all that. So we try to sell that cuz that sells more of our products cuz it creates trust. And the second one is a company called retention.com. And this is a software that it actually scrapes the user not legal in the US or excuse me, not legal in Europe, legal in the US and cuz we’re an optout society, Europe’s an opt-in. And what it would do is it would just match up. So you’re logged into your browser. You’ve shared your data through a sweepstake somewhere in the world at one time. And what this software does is it takes your login from your browser, matches it up to sweepstakes data. It’s not, this isn’t exactly how it works, but this is my understanding. And then it pops out an email address to you. And so we’d also have a cold sequence going to them with that because we were driving so much traffic to our website. That’s how we were starting to get 200 emails a day. Usually, about 50 of those came from people opting in and then about 150 would come from that software.

Carrie:

That’s amazing. All right, we have another question from Gina. Have you tried targeting competitors one by one example individual campaign for their brand name and variation target ASINs and do this for your top five competitors in separate campaigns? Of course.

Dr. Travis:

So focusing on the 80-20 is we do not do this most of the time for clients right away. This is something that we’ll do later on because when you start targeting competitors, your ACoS is gonna go up a lot because people, when they’re searching the brand name of your competitor, you have to then convince them why your product is better and why they should buy yours over your competitors. And so that’s the hardest thing to do. It does work. So our top competitor in our space, we targeted them for years, we still do. And they did nothing on Amazon. It was great. And when people searched for their brand name we showed up and it can work at times but most of the time it’s gonna be a lot more expensive. And so we don’t recommend doing it unless you’re getting cheap clicks from it.

Dr. Travis:

And so I would say wait and actually at the beginning of a product or the beginning of we, we sometimes add that competitor’s name to our negative phrase list cuz we don’t want to go after that at all because we don’t want to to pay the cost to get there. But if you’re gonna go after a competitor, don’t go after their search. Don’t go after search campaigns with their name. Try the ace and targeting instead. Cuz usually that tends to be a little less, not for everybody but for most people Ace and targeting is a lot cheaper than going after their actual search brand

Carrie:

Name. See here’s another one from Gina. Additionally, first SEO create content around your competitors on your blog and implement affiliate links. If so, does it work?

Dr. Travis:

You can do that too. Same kind of concept though, but you’re going after your competitors so it’s gonna be a lot more expensive even on Google and SEO is gonna be a lot harder cuz I guarantee that you don’t put their name on your blog as much as they put their name on their website. And so it’s going to be hard. But the cool thing about the strategy I just discussed, this has nothing to do with competitors, but you will start ranking for keywords based on those problem based keywords by sending Google ad traffic to your website. That is if your website is good and it continues to get traffic. And so that’s a side side benefit of the strategy that we implemented is that it works really well for SEO because it doesn’t work right away, but it takes six months to a year to five years to really start ranking for those because you, you’re competing against websites that have been around forever.

Carrie:

It yeah. Everything is surprising to the top together though. That’s the cool thing about everything you’re doing here,

Dr. Travis:

A flywheel. And so you’re creating this perpetual sales machine that you’re pushing uphill for a long, long time and then all of a sudden when it starts going downhill it’s like, wow, this is fun. We get to take a ride now. And

Carrie:

I think isn’t that the called the tipping point?

Dr. Travis:

The tipping point? Yeah. And so yeah, that’s, that’s what you’re building towards and you’ll know when the right time is to sell and you’ll know to hold on it. But the goal is to create something that you love so much that you don’t have to sell it. And that’s where I am now with the agency is that I’m having fun with it cuz we’ve created a culture that’s a lot of fun and I get to do it with all my best friends. And so I co-founded it with my two best friends from college and we hire US based workers and we’re just having a good time. We get to go to conferences together, we get to go on trips together and so we just, we’re having a good time with it.

Carrie:

Yeah, you guys are really awesome. Something I like though is I think a lot of people get scared. They’re like, oh I don’t wanna send too much traffic to Amazon. I really like how you’re talking about. It’s really a winning situation. Everything just levels up when you, you send it over there, you’re gonna collect those emails. You and you got a million dollars in sales. It’s absolutely incredible. So I like that cuz I get asked that a lot of times people are like, should I send traffic to Amazon or is it a waste of money? And it, it really sounds like it’s not.

Dr. Travis:

I don’t think it is. And don’t be afraid to get suspended. I’ve been suspended, I’ve had 45 products suspended in three months.

Carrie:

Oh wow. Okay. I

Dr. Travis:

Think I, the worst has to happen in order for you to get over the fear of the worst happening and once the worst happens it’s kinda like, okay, well I’m still here. Yeah. And you know, once you get through it, it’s just like, okay, yeah, let’s go. And so we just focus on Amazon. If something were to happen to Amazon, we’d just pivot. And so those blog posts, we’d then from Amazon, we’d switch ’em over to our website and you know, it’s just, it’s not hard to do and you just gotta keep going and follow one strategy to figure out if it’s gonna work for you.

Carrie:

Yeah. do you have another question? Do you take smaller brands on under a hundred K in revenue? I’m assuming that’s per year in Andrew? Yeah.

Dr. Travis:

Yeah. yeah. So we do, if we like you and we will if we like you. So I vet all the people. I still get on sales calls. I have one other person that does sales calls with me, but we look at the entrepreneur, the brand and if you have a good brand and you’re a fun entrepreneur to work with, we’ll take you on if you’re just starting off. But usually we recommend 300,000 or more per year to, to come on with us just to make it worth it to you because it’s got an roi, it’s got a return. . But with that being said, we’ve taken on quite a few startups in the last year because I love the entrepreneur and fell in love with them. And I won’t say it every time it’s paid off, but it’s paid off most of the time.

Carrie:

That’s awesome. Let me just, here’s another one. Hi Carrie and Travis, just join Travis, do you have a consulting practice? Can you share your contact info? 

Dr. Travis:

Yeah, speak on that. So profitable pineapple.com is our website, so profitable pineapple.com. That’s why I have a pineapple hat on <laugh>. And there you can apply to work with us there. But we also have a free course on audience building and a free Amazon PPC masterclass. And what we do there is when you sign up for either the free courses, it’ll take you over to our community and we have consulting there where we do weekly coaching calls on Wednesdays and it’s, it’s a very cheap community to be a part of. And you can, you can join that and  I’m in there every week and we have different coaches that come in there. And then yeah, if you wanna apply to work with us, profitable pineapple.com is where you do that.

Carrie:

I think we’re kind of dwindling down on time and I wanted to make sure that we talked a little bit about your charity as well that you started and the work that you do just to tell people about that. And then we’ll also talk again about how people can contact you to make sure that everyone who wants to contact you

Dr. Travis:

Can. Yeah, so my charity, I have to get the name right now cuz we just changed it. It’s called the I Believe Foundation and our website’s ibelieve.foundation don’t judge the website. We actually just got it up and running on Monday cuz we had to change our name cuz we sold, sold our company and it was closely matched to the charity name so we had to change the name. But what we do, I talked about it a little bit earlier, is we go on two to four mission trips a year. And what we do on those mission trips is we do exams, eye exams, glasses, sunglasses, and then we do diabetic and glaucoma surgery as well. And actually we just bought a laser this year, which is cool because we’ve always had to borrow them and a laser is like $20,000. And so now we can do ’em all, we can do that surgery all the time and we get to do cataract surgery as well when available.

Dr. Travis:

And so that’s something that we do. And the the funny thing is we make our money in the charity, the exact method that I just talked to you guys about the Google ads focused on problem-based keywords, affiliating products. And so we take a Google ad to a website, goes over to Amazon to buy and then whatever affiliate product we’re affiliating, they’ll pay us. So the company looks like a donation and then the charity makes money that we can then use for things like lasers in our mission trips. And we also do scholarships for Ohio State optometry students that believe in the, the same type of mission. So there’s an organization in the college and the president and vice president get a $3,000 scholarship every year and cuz they get to, they organize a trip as well. So we pretty much pay for their trips too. So it’s something that is the reason we started our Amazon business in the first place and we thought we were gonna make $10,000 a year doing it and we ended up retiring from optometry as a result. And that’s just cuz we were persistent and we stuck with strategy, the Google ADSD strategy to build our audience and the Amazon PPC strategy to build the Amazon side of things. So yeah, that’s kind of where our charity is right now.

Carrie:

Okay. So and then the last thing here, wanna make sure that people can so if you can go ahead and repeat, I know you said it before, but how can people contact you and what’s your whole process for

Dr. Travis:

Yep. So profitable pineapple.com. Profitable pineapple.com is our website. That’s where you can apply to work with us. You can also join our community in there free Amazon PPC masterclass. Is there my audience building course that I go into, the Google ad strategy is in there. And then feel free to reach out to me and the, if you apply to work with us, that actually comes directly to me. So I’ll see that from you and I’ll, I can email you back and let you know what I’d recommend for next steps. Even if you don’t feel like you are large enough, quote unquote, it’s always worth just applying and then I can still help you from there, even if it’s not through us, it can be through other avenues as well. So profitable pineapple.com

Carrie:

Awesome.

Dr. Travis:

I’ll put the link in the comments after I get off this call.

Carrie:

Okay. Oh, we have another comment for you. I wanna make sure to say it here. Wow. I love what you’re doing with your charity and using your Amazon businesses support it. Congratulations. So yeah,

Dr. Travis:

I appreciate that. And we, we also do it with our agency as well, so that’s part of our expense column is our charity donations. It’s not just our charity, but we’ve done quite a few with other charities as well. We, we actually, we feed one child for every coworker and team members and their family members. So I have four in my family, so we’ll sponsor four children and we have 11 team members total and then they have families. So we’re, we’re sponsoring about 25 children right now and having them vet every month in a recurring donation as well. So we do a lot with charity and that’s kind of, I think the whole reason we’re here is to help uplift others. And that’s what I like to do in our agency is I like to take on brands that have that kind of same mentality of wanting to help somebody else.

Dr. Travis:

And that’s what we’re really here for. That’s why you wanna make money. You think you wanna make money for financial freedom, but once you get that freedom, what do you wanna do then? Because you have to have that further purpose in life. Cuz if you think finances are, are the end goal, they’re not. And once you get them, what are you gonna do after that? And so the old adage of if you had all the money in the world, what would you be doing? If you answer that question every single day of your life, you’ll never have to work a day in your life and the money will follow.

Carrie:

That’s awesome advice. Thank you so much for sharing everything. All of your strategies are amazing and thanks for what you’ve done, even just for me personally, for our brand. So I appreciate you and I’m so glad you could come on and yeah, I hope you have a great rest of the day and we’ll see you again later,

Dr. Travis:

Carrie, I appreciate you. Thanks.

Carrie:

Thanks, bye.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Don’t forget every month we will do this. So next month possibly Shivali will be bringing on another Amazon and Walmart advertising expert to get your to get your questions answered. So how you could submit questions for this make sure to go to our Facebook groups, our Helium 10 members Facebook group, and then just put as a topic TACoS Tuesday and say, Hey, this is the question I would like next month’s guest to answer. Or you can tune in live and be able to ask your question live on the show. Anyways. Hope you guys enjoyed this and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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