David 0:00
Are you looking to grow your sales on Amazon? Chances are if you’re not selling on Amazon’s international marketplaces, you are leaving some serious money on the table. What keeps a lot of people from selling internationally are all the confusing hoops you have to jump through to get started. That is why we worked with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce on our international expansion. Kevin and his team take care of the details and guide you through the process of expanding so that you can grow your sales and reach new customers. If you’d like to find out if working with Kevin and his team is right for you head over to https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire, once again, that is https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire.
Dr. Travis Zigler 0:46
Manual campaigns should be the majority of your campaigns, exact match. Campaigns are scale campaigns, those are what’s going to scale your brand at the most efficient way possible. Do not focus on selling, focus on serving them and solving their problem. And you will not get spam complaints. And you’ll actually grow your sales as a result of that.
- Zigler, Dr. Travis (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 127 Pages - 03/07/2021 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Intro 1:06
Welcome everyone to the firing the man podcast a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you were capable of more than join us, this show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs, David shoma, and Ken Wilson.
David 1:30
So I really, I just want to let you know mid podcast, I am loving this conversation, we’re going deep on PPC and and it’s such a huge part of these types of businesses. And so thank you for going deep with us to continue this conversation. A lot of our listeners have product variations, where they’ll have say like a two pack, a four pack and an eight pack, the two pack would be the lowest price, right? And is I’ve heard it referred to as like an alpha, like like, this is what we’re going to drive traffic to. And so in then, while they’re there, they may say I don’t really want a two pack, how about an eight pack and so that you get them in with a low price. And the hope is that they leave with a higher priced offering. And so from a PPC standpoint, I’m curious if you have any brands that you manage that have something similar, and how you strategize around this like tiered pricing system. Yeah, so
almost all the brands have that kind of including my own. So that’s actually one of our my big strategies around defensive product targeting ads, is having variations. So we have a one pack, three pack, a six pack and even a 12 pack on one of our products. And the one pack is full price $30. The three pack is 2.25x the price, so not quite. buy two get one free, it’s a little bit more expensive than that, but it’s lower price than if you bought three separately. And then the six pack is buy four get two free. And how we position it with PPC is everything goes towards the hero product that one pack, because that’s going to be by far your best seller. To give you an example, we sell 100 of the one packet per day, we sell two to five of the six pack per day. And then we sell two to five of the three pack per day. But you got to realize this, that three pack and six pack are higher margin and you’re taking somebody off the market for a longer period of time, which is good. And what we do is on the one pack listing, we’ll run product targeting ads in both sponsored products and sponsored display for the three and six pack on that one pack. So when you’re on the product listing for the one pack, if you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see the three pack and the six pack down there. And you can do this with other variations as well you can do this with colors. So if you have a brown one, and you can advertise your black, your purple, your blue on it’s called a product targeting ad. And it’s both in sponsored products. And it’s in sponsored display. So that’s how we position PPC with variations to kind of promote more people to buy that the the multipack varieties or different colors as well. And it kicks your competition off the listing as well. Because when you have a six pack, you can bid higher, because a six pack has more profit than a one pack. So you can bid a lot higher. I’m talking like 10 to 15 to $20 per click, because it will kick everybody else off that listing as a result. And you’ll be that first.
Ken 4:27
Yeah, like that strategy does to one is your you know the higher price products as long as it has a good conversion rate. Yeah, you can afford to bid way higher and protect your lower variation or your lower quantity pack. So that’s a really good strategy. Something that David and I have been kind of taking a look at within our companies is as we try to be more efficient with our Amazon spend is auto versus manual campaigns and kind of the ratio of spend between them. And that’s something that’s kind of we’re looking at to say okay, if autos are not as efficient and manuals are more efficient It was that level of what should it be to be optimized? And so do you have? Can you share your thoughts on that?
- Gildner, Gil (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 205 Pages - 03/28/2019 (Publication Date) - Baltika Press (Publisher)
Dr. Travis Zigler 5:06
I hate auto campaigns. So that’s my thoughts on it. But no, I don’t hate them, I just don’t get along with them very well, because they are so broad, and they just don’t make sense. But there is a place for them. So manual campaigns should be the majority of your campaigns, exact match. Campaigns are scale campaigns, those are what’s going to scale your brand, at the most efficient way possible. And then when you go down to broad and phrase, those are discovery campaigns. The goal of a broad and a phrase match campaign is to discover new search terms, to then take over to your exact match to then scale. So that’s the whole goal, exact scale, broad and phrase discovery. Now, where does auto come into that? Auto is good for placement versus search. So automatic campaigns are going to put you all over product pages more than they’re going to put you on search, they will find some search terms for you to be able to scale and move into that exact match group. But they’re mostly going to place you all over product pages. So you’re going to find ASINs, that you can then target later on, with like product targeting ads, like we talked about earlier. So that’s where an auto campaign comes in. Now, I’ll caveat that abroad a phrase in an auto campaign, they’re all still discovery campaigns, you’re just trying to discover what to take to scale. When you do that, you want to have a great negative list. Now, a very common misconception with negative lists is people think it has to be this long, extravagant 500 word negative list of exact match keywords. And it doesn’t have to be, what you need to do with a negative list is make a 10 to 20 to 50. Keyword long phrase list, I’ll give you an example to kind of illustrate this, I sell a facewash. I don’t want to show up for body wash. So body will be a phrase negative for me. And I’ll put that phrase negative in all my broad auto and phrase campaigns, because I don’t want to show up for that in any of them. Another one hand, I don’t want to show up for a hand wash, or a foot wash. So hand foot body hair, those will all be phrasal ones because I am a facewash. I don’t want to show up for anything like that. But if you let Amazon run wild with your broad phrase, NATOs, it probably will wreck it will probably show you for one of those just to test it out, see what happens. So coming up with a list of 20 to 50 of those phrase negative keywords that you absolutely don’t want to show up for. And then putting those into your auto campaigns can save you a ton of money. Putting them in your broaden phrase as well will save you a ton of money. I’ll give you one more example. Let’s say you sell a classic colander, you know the little things that drain pasta, you don’t want to show up for metal. Because some people want a metal colander you don’t want to show up for I don’t even know what else. This is a bad example cuz I don’t have kitchen products. But you kind of get the idea from that. And that’s kind of I do with manual versus automatic is exact a scale, broad phrase and auto are all discovery campaigns, but we upload negative phrase lists to them as well. If you
David 7:59
were to break down spinned do you think you’re probably 90%? Manual 10% Auto What do you think that mix is?
Dr. Travis Zigler 8:06
I have never looked at that set on my account. To tell you the truth, we do take a look at like what sponsored products versus brands versus display, we look at that breakdown. For manual versus automatic, I only run automatic campaigns on my, the 20% of my products that are making most of the money. So like 20 of the 8020 rule applies to everything I do with PPC. And I only run auto campaigns for the 20% of products that are producing 80% of the results. And so if you have 10 products, I’d run it on two, because those are your best sellers. And so I want to discover more to scale those. And that’s where a lot of people go, this is going to be a side rant real quick. A lot of people go wrong is they’re trying to go after all their products equally. When 20% of your revenue and your profits are coming from 80% of your or excuse me 20% Your products are producing 80% of your revenue and profit. So what if you took all your ad budget and put it towards those 20% of products, people hate it when they onboard with us. Because it’s like, well, I have 20 products and you just want to go after these four. I said, I guarantee you we’ll see more profit, and we will raise your revenue as a result. And then as a result of that race, profit and revenue, we can then start going after the other products as a result. But even in my own brain, we only advertised for the six top products. And now seven, seven top products, and then the other, you know, 13 or whatever, they’re just there and they’ll get spill off as a result of creating a brand. They answer your question. I don’t know if it didn’t answer your question. But
David 9:26
absolutely. And that is something that makes sense. Like that makes sense. And I think it’s something that a lot of we personally that fall into that where we’ll talk about ad coverage, what we just launched, you know, new products, let’s pour some PPC budget into them. And you’re right, the 8020 rule. It’s the rule of the universe. It holds true here. So one follow up question every month when we get our financials back we do a deep dive. And one thing Ken and I have had this conversation a million times well look at how much we spent on people See? And we’ll ask ourselves, boy, is there another spot that we could put our dollars to work that would result in better company, right, you know, growing your customer base selling more products, adding more profitability to the bottom line. And I’m sure you’ve run into the same question. And so curious if there are any areas that you’ve put your dollars to work lately, aside from Amazon PPC that seemed to be fruitful, not only lately, but
Dr. Travis Zigler 10:27
we’ve been doing this since 2017. So this is a strategy that we use to not only build our customer list, but we built our website as a result. And we built our Amazon business as a result. And I’m going to kind of talk you through it because we’re on a podcast. And it’s pretty simple. What we do is we create a blog posts around the product, the problem that your product solves. So we have the Central blog posts around the problem that your product solves, not the product itself. But the problem. We then actually drive google ads traffic to that blog post. This doesn’t work for everything, but it works for a lot. Google ads to that blog posts, and then the blog post itself actually has an Amazon attribution link to go buy on Amazon, instead of on your website. Now people have called me crazy for five years, like, why would you take people from your website over to Amazon to buy because Amazon will increase your organic rank, you’re essentially, you have them on a warm up page, Amazon converts better than your blog ever will, or your website ever will. Your website, if you have a great website, you will convert it 3% tops, some people get up to five to 7%. But most of the time, it’s in between one to 3%. Amazon, your same product could convert 10 to 50%. And so we send Google ads to this blog around the problem that our product solves. And then that goes through an attribution link over to Amazon attribution link. So we can track it to buy increased rank, increase external traffic from for Amazon, which Amazon loves. And then you also get a 10% kickback from that sale price through the attribution link. And so you get a bonus from Amazon. With this, we get anywhere from a three to seven row as on these blog posts with unlimited traffic because it’s cool. As long as the traffic’s there, as long as you find the right problem to address, then you’re going to be able to just keep pumping traffic over to Google right now. In our brand, we’re spending $700 a day. And with PPC since we had to cut the budget, we’re spending about $2,200 a day, we were up at one point up to like six $7,000. Today, when we’re up at that 40% Tacos, but we’ve had to get more efficient. And what we saw is as we sort of bring things down, you know, our role as in Amazon PPC was around two to 2.2 2.3. But our role as over on the Google Ads side, Google ads to blog post to Amazon was anywhere from three to seven. And so we’re starting to shift our PPC budget over to Google. Now. You have somebody on your blog, you can pixel them pixels will be dead soon. But pixel them still, you can then you can pixel them because they clicked on your Google ad you can pixel them inside Google, most people think of Facebook as a pixel because that’s what it’s called Facebook. But Google also has the same thing. They’re called Custom affinity audiences. And you can get into a whole deep dive of that. But now you’ve pixel them, they’ve clicked your ad, and then you can remarket to them. And you can also get an email lead as a result. And so there’s so much you can do from them, just being on your website, get their email address, get a pixel, etc, but then also sending them over to Amazon. So I’m actually starting to shift more of my PPC budget over to Google, to a blog post. And it’s working incredibly well.
David 13:33
Sorry to interrupt the episode, you may have heard Ken and I talking recently about a new tool that we’re using for Amazon refunds. Now I have used other refund tools like this. However, I can tell you in the first seven days, they scrubbed it, the back end of my Amazon account going back 18 months, and found $5,000 of refunds. And the nice thing about this is, it’s my money, Amazon made a mistake and they are just auditing my account. The other thing I really like about this tool is there is no monthly fee, they only charge a commission if they are successful in getting you your money. Go to catina.com GE T ID a and enter promo code FTM for firing the man FTM 400. This is an awesome tool. I can’t say enough good things about it. Now back to the episode.
- Marshall, Perry (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 398 Pages - 10/27/2020 (Publication Date) - Entrepreneur Press (Publisher)
Ken 14:26
That’s pretty cool. So a couple of follow up questions on that. One is how do you capture their email? If you haven’t? If you have a link to Amazon, how are you getting that
Dr. Travis Zigler 14:35
two ways? One way is a pop up. So there’s a problem that your product solves? Why not make a little book or a short little PDF or something around it. So for my brand, we have a book called rethinking dry treatment. And they get a free pdf version of that. It’s a full book. It’s 200 pages. It’s something that my wife and I wrote a couple years ago and it converts really well. The second thing you can do or another example is when you go to my agency’s blog Ugh, and you’re on that we have a free Amazon PPC masterclass. And so they’ll opt into that. And they’ll opt in to take that. And I say that our Amazon PPC masterclass is better than any paid Amazon PPC masterclass, that’s out there. And so giving them value upfront, as a result, we’ll get the email address. And there’s a second thing you can do, which is there’s software’s out there that you can actually scrape the user that’s on your website, and you can get their email address, I limit that certain amount per month, I don’t like to do a lot with that, because it can also lead to increased spam rate, because you have to do it right. And I don’t like to say that publicly too much, not because I’m against it. But I believe that truly what I’m doing is the best to serve the client. And while I’m not going to spam you, with my email, follow up, I’m going to serve you at the highest level. But we’re all logged into our browsers. And when you’re surfing the web, that relays information, and the software picks that up. And so you’ve probably sold your name and your email address to a sweepstakes somewhere, if you’re signed up for anything. And it combines that your data software, with the sweepstakes that you sold a long time ago, combines it gives you an email address. So you can do that as well. Like I said, limit that because you don’t want to get spam spam complaints, and you want to focus your email list on service, do not focus on your email sequence on service, do not focus on selling, focus on serving them and solving their problem. And you will not get spam complaints. And you’ll actually grow your sales as a result of that. So that’s the two ways we get the email address is mostly pop up. Then we also do some scraping as well.
Ken 16:30
Awesome. i Yeah, that’s an X. Those are next level. Two more quick follow ons on this one, one D on the attribution link on the link over to Amazon, do you take them directly to the PDP or do you do add to
Dr. Travis Zigler 16:44
cart, you can do both. And so we just do directly to the product page. But you can finagle some links in there and make it so like, let’s say you’re talking about three different products on your blog posts that are all yours. You could do an add to cart link for all three of them. That has an attribution link in
Ken 16:59
there. Okay, perfect. And then last one on that follow up is is this are you seeing best results with like Google Shopping ads, or Google Performance Max
Dr. Travis Zigler 17:09
search? So Google search, ads with maximizing clicks, and then we go after the keyword around the problem that our product solves? Not the product keyword, those are going to be competitive, that are on the problem. And we’ll do phrase and exact match only. And I’ll give you a quick example. Eyelid wipes help with dry. So we target dry, go to an article about dry. Here’s the eyelid wipes go by. Okay, perfect.
Ken 17:38
It’s an excellent customer journey. So awesome. David, over to you.
David 17:42
Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed this discussion. I think we could probably go a couple more hours. But I want to be respectful of your time. Before we get into the fire round. Can you talk about profitable pineapple and how you could help our listeners?
Dr. Travis Zigler 17:55
Yeah, so I believe in service first. So everything I put out there is pretty much free. And we have the free PPC masterclass, profitable. pineapple.com is where you can get that if you also go to profitable pineapple.com forward slash audience, that kind of last strategy I talked about, I actually have a free course around that. And so I believe in giving away all my secrets for free, you guys can take it and run with it. Because what I found is, the more I serve people, the more people come back to use us as an agency. So we are an Amazon PPC agency, we help with Amazon PPC, of course, that’s the bread and butter. That’s your ad 20 All the other advertising platforms even though Google started to take over for me, but Amazon PPC is your bread and butter, that’s going to be the biggest opportunity for you. We also do Amazon DSP, which is demand side platform. Those are display ads on Amazon and off Amazon. So if you’re on Yahoo, and you see an ad, usually that’s from Google or Amazon. So we’ll do Amazon, PPC DSP. And then we also do this for clients as well. So the Google ads to a blog to Amazon strategy or just google ads dammuz on through an attribution like itself, lower ROI, as on those I like the blog strategy in the middle, just because it just is a warm up page, you get a cookie, or you can cookie on seeing a pixel you can get an email address, you can do so much with it. And so we do that for clients as well so you can ply to work with us at profitable pineapple.com as well.
Ken 19:13
That’s awesome. We’ll have all those in the show notes as well for the listeners. Cool. So Travis, are you ready for the fire round?
Dr. Travis Zigler 19:19
I don’t know if I’m ready, but I think I’m ready. All right.
Ken 19:22
What is your favorite book?
Dr. Travis Zigler 19:23
My favorite book is ready fire aim is probably the one that I read over and over again. I don’t want to do this but I’m going to in a second book is profit first. So if you ever read Profit First in your you’re an Amazon seller or if you’re an E commerce seller, you have to read Profit First.
Ken 19:40
Nice. Yep. I like that. Both of those. What are your hobbies?
Dr. Travis Zigler 19:44
hobbies? I play the ukulele and most of my hobbies are around my kids. So it’s hanging out with our one and four year old and just trying to survive and survival is the hobby right now.
Ken 19:56
Nice. What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the Man,
Dr. Travis Zigler 20:00
it’s funny because I worked for the man. And then I became the man that I fired myself as the man. And then I went independent. And then I now work for the man again, which I’ll be done in a little bit. So I don’t miss the never ending meetings. It’s crazy how many times you just have meetings to have meetings? And it’s just insane. I don’t know, this is my first time in a corporate environment. And I just don’t know how they get anything done with
Ken 20:20
all the meetings. Yeah, that’s I definitely agree. All right. Last one, what do you think sets apart successful ecommerce entrepreneurs from those who give up fail or never get started?
Dr. Travis Zigler 20:30
Persistence, it’s just taking something to do and sticking with it long enough to see success. I mean, knowing who you serve, and deciding to serve that person and do it persistently by showing up every single day is going to outperform anything else. Because what we did with I love is we focus on dry sufferers, and we did a video every week. To those dry sufferers. We were in there helping them answer their questions. We emailed them all the time. For the Amazon PPC agency, we come out with a video pretty much every single every other week on YouTube, we come up with a YouTube short every single day, we just show up persistently. And when that happens, it attracts what you’re trying to achieve. We never tried to sell. We just try to and we do it persistently. And that’s the difference between success and not having success.
- McDonald Ph.D., Jason (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 379 Pages - 02/04/2019 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Ken 21:16
Excellent answer. That’s awesome. David, you want to close out show?
David 21:19
Absolutely. Dr. Ziggler? How can people get a hold of you? Let’s Yeah, so
Dr. Travis Zigler 21:23
the easiest way is Facebook, just look up PPC pros. And that’s our Facebook group, you can find me in there. And Dr. Travis Ziegler is my Facebook URL as well. And then if you want to apply to work with us, or you just want to reach out profitable pineapple.com Just fill out that application and come straight to me, I actually still do all the sales calls in our agency just because I like chatting with entrepreneurs. So it’s a lot of fun. So if you fill out the application and we end up jumping on call, I’d love to chat with you. And that’s at profitable pineapple.com
David 21:52
Awesome. And we’ll post links to all that in the show notes. I want to thank you for being a guest on the firing man podcast and looking forward to staying in touch. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Thank you everyone for tuning into today’s firing the man podcast. If you liked this episode, head on over to firingtheman.com And check out our resource library for exclusive firingtheman discounts on popular ecommerce subscription services that is firingtheman.com backslash resource. You can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business, or that head on over to www.firingtheman.com/library Lastly, check us out on social media at firingtheman in on YouTube at firing the man for exclusive content. This is David Schomer
Ken 22:43
and Ken Wilson. We’re out
David 22:44
before you go fun fact for all you Amazon sellers out there when you start selling in international marketplaces, all of your reviews come with you. At the beginning of this year, Ken and I sat down and talked of ways that we could double our businesses in size and landed on international expansion as our number one initiative this year. We partnered up with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce and he has made the process an absolute breeze walking us step by step through the process. If you want to grow your revenue and reach new customers head on over to maximizing e commerce.com/fire and connect with Kevin Sanderson today. Now back to the show.