On this 38th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Mina Elias. Mina is a multiple seven-figure sellers in the supplement industry, investor, Amazon PPC expert, and founder of Trivium Group, an Amazon advertising agency. He’s a total pro at Amazon PPC and in this episode, listen to Mina as he breaks down tested and proven strategies on how to create, optimize, and track Amazon PPC ads.
Tune in and enjoy today's E-Comm Show!
If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to rate, review, and of course, SUBSCRIBE!
Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com
How to Crush Amazon PPC and Dominate the Amazon Advertising Space
SPEAKERS
Andrew Maff and Mina Elias
CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com | Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff
Mina Elias
Mina is a multiple seven-figure sellers in the supplement industry, an investor, an Amazon PPC expert, and the founder of Trivium Group, an Amazon Advertising agency. Mina excels at developing cutting-edge supplements for different target audiences and combines his passion for supplements, his background in chemical engineering and chemistry, and his expertise in PPC to crush the competition on Amazon. He has spoken on every major stage in the Amazon industry, consulted over 400 brands, consulted 3 aggregators worth $1.2 billion combined, has been on over 100 Amazon and E-commerce podcasts to share his knowledge, and continues to be a leader, innovating in the Amazon advertising space. His goal is to change the way people perceive Amazon PPC and empower them to take back control and dominate their ads.
Transcript:
00:03
If that one is profitable keep it if that one's not profitable after a certain threshold, cut it and just do it again and again and again and accumulate so many different keywords.
00:11
Hey everyone this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro, I am Linda and I'm Paul and we're Love and Pebble. Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA you're listening to and you're listening and you are listening to
00:23
The E-Comm Show. Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets about how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello,
00:51
everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff and today I'm here with Mina Elias, the founder of Trivium group as well as MMA nutrition. Mina, super excited to have you on the show you ready for this? Are you ready for a good one?
01:05
I'm ready, bro. But I'm just disappointed that you didn't say that my name is Egyptian prescription, which is a part of my main man.
01:15
So obviously, I wanted to have you on the show super excited to get you on. And so when I was told like, you responded, and you didn't want to be on the show. I was like, Yes, I was like, alright, so I follow you on Instagram. And I wanted that story so bad. And I was like, All right, why is it a different prescription? Like, what's the background behind that? Because obviously on Instagram, you've done pretty well. It's starting to slowly develop yourself as, you know, one of this kind of like, let's call it like, let's just call it it is like an Amazon influencer. So what's your journey been in that direction?
01:46
Dude, so the story behind Egyptian prescription. I'm in like an MMA fighter. And I've been fighting since 2013. And I think something like in 2016 My coach is like, dude, do you have like a fight name? I said, No, I don't have a fight name, you know, like, like, the killer or whatever hammer or whatever Silverback like that those names. And then they start making fun of me, because I posted a picture that I was like discussing one day, and they're like, Oh, he's going to the casinos. And he's like finding girls and saying, Hey, like I'm a pharmacist from Egypt. I'll give you the Egyptian prescription. And then, and then that name stuck. And that became my fight name. And so it's that's been my fight name ever since.
02:30
That's great. So actually, that's, what brings up an interesting point. So your, your, your eCommerce company name, we'll get the other one in a minute. But it's MMA nutrition. Is that around mixed martial arts? Is that what that name is from?
02:44
Yeah, so I mean, it. Yeah, it is, like I started, I didn't know anything about business. So my background is in chemical engineering and chemistry. And I worked in the industry for a long time, five, five plus years in like big, big corporate, like $30 billion company. And then I was just kind of sick and tired of working nine to five corporate. And so I wanted to start a supplement brand. And I also happened to be an MMA fighter at the time. And but I have had a huge passion for supplements, ever since I was 12. So when I started the brand, I'm like, What should I call it? And then I'm like, You know what, like, I'll do a supplement brand for MMA fighters and I'll call it MMA nutrition. But obviously, I think that was a horrible idea. Looking back, right? It's like not the best branding. Also, MMA fighters don't buy supplements that much. So yeah, whatever man. So that's what happened but the company is doing well you know, everything's good. It's just the power of Amazon, right? It's no matter what your company name is, you can still sell a ton of products.
03:43
Exactly. I mean, so actually, that brings up a good point. So your product line is it's all supplements do you brand it specifically to MMA nutrition or do you kind of just brand it to whatever it is the product that you're selling at the time?
03:57
No, no, I follow like you know, the traditional brand way so basically like mmm nutrition was a brand for performance athletes and so it's all dry powders I started a second company that was for women and it had a different brand I started another company that was a nootropic coffee alternative and that had its own brand so you know as much as I would love to just like put up a product and sell it and not have to go through the whole like branding process. I created everything as separate entities and separate LLCs and separate brands and all that stuff.
04:31
Nice. Okay, how many products do you have that make the product line
04:36
did total between all the brands 12 Two of them like belong to one brand and they're going to be sold pretty soon so I'm very excited about that? Yeah to make a sale and you know I'm so I'm downsizing all of my brands because I would love to just focus on Trivium group, which is the agency. So that's been what I've always told myself a pile of never getting married to a business. That was like one of the things that someone told me when I first started, like, never get married to a business. And so I just realized, like, every dollar, and every hour that I put into Trivium, the agency, it like, is a way better return on investment than anything else. So that's where I want to stay focused, I've made so many mistakes in the past of like, you know, shiny object syndrome, like I'm gonna create a course, for consulting, I want to do this, and then someone partners with me, and we'll bring them on Amazon. So I've done so many different deals and things like that. And I'm like, I'm over this, like, I'll just focus in one direction and things will grow.
05:37
Yeah. So there are a lot of Amazon sellers out there that eventually find their way into starting their own service-based business one way or another. There's definitely a ton of Amazon ads agencies out there, which I'm sure we'll touch on, there's a lot that just does operational services or listing organizations, things like that. So what made you realize that you wanted to maybe not necessarily completely get out of being an Amazon seller, but start to pivot into more of a service-based approach, as opposed to focusing more on the product approach.
06:11
So it's a couple of things, I started the brand. And when I started the brand in 2018, I didn't know what I was doing at all. So I mean, the branding the product, that everything was kind of back, you know, 2018, Mina, who wasn't like a, like the greatest entrepreneur, obviously. And so as I like gotten deeper and deeper into the, you know, Amazon Seller space, and I, you know, the company became successful, we hit over seven figures in revenue. But then what happened was, I like looked at my salary, and my salary was pretty low. And every time I would pull a little bit more out of the business, it would hurt the business. And I would need to keep reinvesting into the business. So I kind of like didn't see too much of an end in sight in terms of that. I wasn't also in the supplement niche or super competitive in all this stuff. And then at the same time, my name was getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the Amazon space. So I started, basically, I started Facebook groups, and people would ask questions, and I would answer, that's all I did. There's no, I didn't want anything out of it. Because I took so much from the group I was just giving back. Then I hopped on podcasts, I started sharing my story, my success, my mistakes, my lessons, and my knowledge with everyone. And so my name got pretty big. And then in early 2021, this aggregator who had raised like 300 $400 million, hit me up, and they're like, We want you to build our in-house advertising team, we need like systems and processes and all this stuff. And we heard like, You're really good. So I said, Sure. I'd be happy to help. I gave them a proposal. And then they were like, we want to test you on one of the brands. So they had like 14 brands at the time, they said, We'll test you on one. And then as I like, started running it, me and like my little team, they had six other agencies running the other brands, and then they're like, Hey, by the way, like we were putting you up against other agencies, you outperform everyone, so we can move forward with the, you know, proposal and everything. And so at that point, I was like, wow, like, these guys were paying me good money. It wasn't a lot of work. I was adding a lot of value. Like I could see, like, I took the revenue from I don't know like we increased it like 10% a month, which is you know, solid it over like six months, it grew over 50%. And then I was like, some good at this, I have a big name. And I always envied like, people, like, you know, like, maybe like Simeon Panda, or whatever, who has like a supplement brand. And I'm like, Man, I love how these guys have a huge audience. And then they just create a brand or Logan Paul has a huge audience and creates a brand. And then they can just sell. And then I just I already had that. But it just wasn't in supplements. It was in the Amazon space. And so when I, when people like kept hitting me up, do you manage? I kept saying no. And then finally, I'm like, yeah, we'll take you to know, we'll take on one person. And so I took on one person, and then the next and the next. And then, you know, I realized that we were doing really good, we were adding a lot of value. We were making them more money than they were paying us. So I was like, it's kind of like a perfect fit. So I started leaning more into that. And then I hit a fork in the road. And I was like, I'm either gonna put my time into this or that. And I talked to a lot of people who have like, brands, agencies, all of this stuff. And everyone was like, listen, like, you know, at some point, you're gonna have to put all of your effort and energy into one thing if you want to really see that thing grow. And honestly, I already knew that answer. Because as I was building my attrition when I did the second brand, and I did my PPC university course, and I did like all of these, you know, consulting on the side, it just all diluted my efforts into the brand and I ended up I mean, you know, I could have done way more. So, that's kind of where I made the decision. I said You know what, I'm just gonna go all in on this, like, just from a business perspective. If an investor came to me and said, I'm gonna give you like, $100,000 I'm gonna invest in you like, where would you put this money in? Trivium or I may or whatever anything else Are you consulting? And then I would be like, yeah. Trivium 100%. And so that was kind of my answer to, like, Okay, this it's now time to focus on on the best vehicle that I have right now.
10:13
But you got MMA, you know, well up over seven figures, what is it? You think that was the secret sauce there that got you to that point, that now you have this ability to be like, You know what, screw it, I'm gonna go service.
10:26
So I think it was really how good I was at PPC. So when I started, I mean, I started with 500 bucks. So every dollar mattered. And then I couldn't compete with just being in the front. So I noticed two things happen. When I increased my number of reviews. So I was asking people all the time, like, Dude, can you please buy my product? asked everyone, in every single gym that I've ever met all of my exes, everyone, I was like, Can you please dress off, I was like, I'll give you money, just please leave me a review. And so as I got more reviews started selling more. So I knew that was one thing, but I also knew it was, you know, pretty Blackhat it's against Amazon's Terms of Service. But then as I spent more money on ads, then I started making more money. And I looked and I would look at the ads and it'd be like, some of these ads like they're, they're bringing me good money and other ads are not bringing me good money. So I just started getting more and more and more granular. And then I realized that it's it was all like testing an accumulation of keywords that are converting. So I'm testing 1000 keywords at let's say, like one a day. And if that one is profitable, keep it if that one's not profitable, after a certain threshold, cut it and just do it again and again and again, and accumulate. So many different keywords. So and I'm like an engineer, so I developed systems and processes behind it. And I think that's what helped me figure it out. And if you look at my brand, it's still very, very heavily based on advertising. So if we cut down the ads, everything goes down, if we increase the ads, everything goes up. And but I hit a point where I was spending maybe I think 60,000 And I was making 150 Something like that, you know, and I was like, okay, you know, I'm making the same amount of profit, every single month. However, I need to order so much more inventory, and my cash flow cycle sucks. It made me sad, that bad, right? Because I actually get like, you know, two weeks to weekly times, and I pay after the products been done. So my cash flow cycle wasn't that bad. I just didn't have a good handle on the finances. Like, I know people like Fernando Cruz, like, those guys are like, incredible with finances. And they know like, every, every little way of how to make your dollar stretch. I just didn't know that, you know, because it's I'm just kind of learning as I go. So I ended up scaling things down keeping the exact same amount of profit but having a much lower revenue. And I was like, this is fine. You know, I'm still making some amount of money and the revenue is lower. It's a vanity metric. But for me, it didn't matter. Right? Because at that point, I was kind of anyways, slowly shifting towards the agency.
13:01
Yeah. Okay. All right. So then let's, let's cut to the agency, let's get right into this then. Amazon ads. What's the secret sauce? How are you structuring them? How are you doing your keyword research, which you know, different aspects of that so much real estate now between products, brands, display, DSP, all that fun stuff? Like, what's the approach that separates you from all the other guys?
13:25
Cool. So basically, my approach is, like, there's a couple of things. The first thing is I like to track everything holistically. So I'm looking at PPC spending PPC, sales, and total sales because I think total sales are also affected by ads. But then I'm mainly looking at sessions. So sessions basically, that's what I tell everyone, the main metric for ads is sessions. So the more money you're spending on ads, the more sessions you should be getting. That's all it does the ads show up someone clicks on it, that's a session. Now the other half of it is the conversion rate. So I also start tracking conversion rate, click-through rate is important, because it tells me, You know when my ads show up in front of a lot of people, is it desirable, or is it not desirable? And then I'm also tracking profit. That's, that's my number one metric. Like, it doesn't matter what your Ico stock was, whatever it is, that's profit. And then I'm going into kind of two modes. One mode is like the bulking mode, where I'm launching a lot of campaigns, and I'll talk about the campaign structure, all that stuff, but I'm launching campaigns, the goal for me is to find as many keywords as possible that are profitable. So a certain number of them, I'm going to launch 100 certain number, we're going to be profitable, a certain number not going to be profitable. And so it's just all about launching, launching, launching, keeping the profitable ones, and eliminating the non-profitable ones. You know, you start maybe with 10 profitable then you have 20 3040 Next things you know you have to understand your profitable ones, and then you still have the test budget of getting new ones. And then obviously the profitable ones, you have to continuously tweak them. So anyway, in that bulk phase, I'm just launching and I'm trying to get as many sessions as I can. My profits will go down and then In the current phase, I'm leaving everything out, I'm cutting everything that wasn't profitable, adding negatives, in your autorun and phrase, search terms that spent money that wasn't converting. And so I'm oscillating between the two. And then every time, you know, I increase the number of sessions, and then I lean out, and my profit dollar amount goes a little bit higher, a little bit higher, a little bit higher. Then in terms of like campaign structure, I'm structuring, you know, one campaign one ad group, the multiple ad groups I don't like because you don't know how much the money is going to split between the different ad groups. So if I have $100, and then I have two ad groups, it's not gonna go 5050, it might go 9010. And I've seen that happen too many times. Which I'm not saying it's, there's anything wrong with that, other than that $10, that goes into that one ad group, maybe that ad group row as is like 10x, and you want to send it more money, but you can't, because you don't have control. So keep it linear. And then the number of keywords, I usually stick to like five, no more than five, it used to be 10, I reduced it to five. And what I'm noticing more and more is, I'll put a certain number of keywords in a campaign, just wait two weeks, and then or wait for whatever, two months, and then go and look for the last 60 days, which keywords generated sales. And if you notice, like three keywords, generated sales, and the others didn't, it just means that those aren't being effectively used. So just turn them off, and then put them in new campaigns, right? Because what's the point of having that campaign and then when I see campaigns with like, 100 keywords, I'm like, dude, in the last 60 days, these 100 keywords, barely got any money barely got traction, barely got impressions, what you think you're targeting them, but Well, you're not really targeting them. So that's where I would pause and put them in a new campaign. And so based on where I am, if let's say, I'm bulking there's only a certain number of levers, I can pull, I can either increase campaign budgets, can launch new campaigns, can increase bids, can increase bids by placement. So basically, as I can look at the placement, say, at the top of the search first page, as compared to like product pages in the rest of the search, my role is higher, and my click-through rate is higher. So I'm going to spend more money here. So I put it like a bid by placement like 50%, meaning I can spend up to 50% more if that means I can show up just for that placement because historically, I'm showing up there. So those are kind of the levers that are pulling for the bulking. And then for the cutting, it's all the other levers that are lowering the bids. I don't lower budgets, I don't think I think you should keep budgets always big. So to avoid Amazon throttling anything. So lower budgets, adding negatives, what removing bid by placement, if it didn't work, and then analyzing your sponsor brand display, and, you know, video and all that kind of stuff if you're actually effective. So what I've done in the past sometimes was, everything will be fine. And then I'll say like, let's launch some video videos crashing right now, I launched in video campaigns, the spin will go up, I look at the video like campaigns roses, amazing. But what happens is I noticed that the regular PPC sponsored product advertising row as dropped. And I'm like, why is this happening? And then I look at the totals and I noticed that the total spending went up, but the total sales didn't change at all. And then I'll just put the video ads, and then that spin will go down. And so what happens is sometimes the video will get that attribution and take it from the PPC, but not generate any additional sales, because it's the same people that are viewing the ads and also viewing your regular, like the video ads and the regular sponsored product ads. So that's the other thing that I would do to kind of like cut things down. And that's it, man. It's there's, it's just, you know, beyond that, it's being very systematic, very granular, looking at the analytics every single week, and just having like a good plan and being efficient.
18:45
So you mentioned that you stick to basically having one campaign and one ad group, which obviously I completely agree with because like you said, it gets spread out and you never know really where but what are you doing if you're dealing with a really large product line? And how are you structuring that like is that one campaign one ad group one product? Or is that one product line? Is that like a certain type of keyword? Like how are you doing that?
19:13
So generally, what I'm doing is I'm combining all of the children variations into one campaign. So the campaigns are usually based on parent variation. So I'm never splitting the variations out, except what I would do is start everything combined, right? Should child variations be combined, then I'll go and look at the advertised product report. And I'll notice if certain variations are getting better sales and other so if I noticed like the black version is getting way better than the blue and the red or whatever. Then what I'm going to do is I'll try turning off the blue and the red and see the performance. Then I'll try creating the red and the blue on their own and seeing the performance because a lot of times what happens is when everything's together, Amazon will show different ones randomly, and then people will click Go and choose the color they want. And sometimes when you show the blue, people are clicking, and then they're going and selecting the black. And so that's what I noticed happen is they're clicking from one ad and then buying another thing. And so I don't want like kind of, to start spending money on one, but making sales for the other. You know, I just whatever, at the end of the day, I just want the highest profit, right? Doesn't matter how it happens. And so usually, we'll turn everything off, and we'll see which product sells the most and has the highest click-through rate. And I'll just show that one for all that. And if everyone is coming in from that one, and then choosing the different colors, that's fine. So sometimes, you know, you'd make more profit, you would make less revenue, but more profit, because you're not spending on these other ones where people aren't clicking, but like the ROI is, is really low.
20:47
But what do you do for a significantly larger product line? So if you're doing hundreds of skews hundreds of parents 1000s of parents? Are you managing 1000s of sponsored products and sponsored brand and video campaigns?
21:02
So in terms of that, I've never managed a catalog that big, like when we're talking to hundreds of parents. So that's where I think you have to get into software, some level of software, with a little bit of like, automation, I wouldn't say like, like full automation, but I would say like some sort of like filters, where you can say, you know, for all of like, these products do this. So yeah, I think mapping, mapping it out is going to be very important, but I can't say I have like that much experience, I think the most number of parents ASINs, I have experienced with this, like 2020 and then maybe like, you know, 6070 with children. But I haven't dealt with like the hundreds and 1000s. And that's why I also don't touch like clothing. And you're not there's anything wrong with it. I'm just like, not an expert at it. So I just, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it.
21:52
Do you do everything manually?
21:54
Yeah, everything is manual, we have our own, like, you know, macros and stuff and tech in Excel. And it's very streamlined. So we're able to do everything, like pretty quickly, but I force whoever, you know, all of the strategies on the team, that they have to look at the analytics, and then they have to make conscious decisions, as opposed to a kind of just like have something that automatically runs because some, sometimes you sit on automation, and it sounds good in theory or like okay, everything that's above a certain Akos, we're gonna lower everything, that's whatever. And then you just let it run. And in the past, I used to kind of have this format or if it's high Lord if it's low, and then I realized, like some because that like attribution for Amazon's not 100%, there has to be an additional layer, which is like, it's almost like in the shower, right? In the shower. You're not like calculating, you're just turning the hot water on and putting your hand and then turning it down putting your hand. And that's, it's called iteration. And that's literally yeah, that's, that's how a lot of it in Amazon is, is I'm doing a bunch of things. And then I'm like, Okay, guys, like let's monitor and see what happens. And as we monitor and see what happens, if things go in the right direction, we keep going. If things go in the wrong direction, we scale back. And sometimes logically, it should go in the right direction, but it goes in the wrong direction. So that's why it can't be as rigid as like, you know, automation, but having a software where you can, like do things at scale. Like that's, that's totally fine.
23:19
Yeah. So I understand that people can definitely be a fan of automation, especially if they're not leveraging an agency. But even us internally, like we have a little bit of automation when we do Amazon ads. But I'm the same way where I think it's got to be manually done. Because a lot of that automation stuff doesn't take into account seasonality, holidays, or the Prime Day comes in, it throws a whole wrench in everything. So we really just use it as a safety precaution of like, hey, reduce the bid. If for some stupid reason, this thing gets really out of hand. Otherwise, everything else we're doing it manually.
23:52
I think that's it's really perfect for that kind of stuff like you do so many times, it'll be Saturday, and then someone hits me up. And they're like, we had a campaign that just spent $200 with no sales. And I'm like, Dude, why does it happen on Saturday? And it happens, like, literally, it just happens. Yeah, it's always the weekend or vacation, something like that.
24:11
Yeah. Well, that. And then like you said to like, use the attribution, they always say that there's like a 24 or 48-hour window where everything's kind of up in the air. So to automate stuff where it's optimizing things that were done, let's say the past seven days, that means it's taking a day or two into account that we have no idea if it's accurate or not. So that whole concept? Yeah, there's some software that like, they account for that. But yeah, they
24:33
skip the last 24 or 48 hours. Yeah, totally. I think I think, again, the software is a tool, man, like, the way that you use Excel the way that you use any other software. Like, it just makes things easier, but you still need a human brain behind it. And so I think, yeah, like, I mean, I know so many software's, they sell the dream of like, you know, automate and we'll do this and in real time AI, but I'm like, Man You're gonna have to make the decisions because you're gonna have to start making the correlations and saying, I told the automation to do XY and Z, and then this happened. And so if you're testing one variable at a time, you'll eventually start correlating things. And that's how it is like for every single product, you know I've ever managed is it's like a story, it becomes a story and you know, that the story of that product and, okay, it's different than the other products, this product when I when I scaled it, like, and I did this, then this happened and you start developing like this whole story behind this product, and it's very different. So you can't have like this cookie-cutter thing for everything. Yeah.
25:35
All right. DSP, pros, and cons.
25:40
Cool. Cool. Cool. So I love Amazon DSP. There are definitely some pros and cons. So the pros of Amazon DSP, pros of Amazon DSP. So if anyone doesn't know Amazon DSP is Amazon's demand side platform. It's programmatic advertising. It uses Amazon's first-party data and can advertise on Amazon-owned and operated real estate and off it. So like publisher sites and things like that. So things like, you know, Men's Health, or CNN or whatever, like those, those websites that drive a lot of traffic, and they get a lot of people to read their articles. And then they have all of these like little banner ads on the site. So that's Amazon DSP. So yeah, so that's, you know, men's health or whatever that supply side platform. And then we're like Amazon dismiss demand side platform. And so it's super powerful. But because there are a few things that you can't do with PPC that you can do with DSP. So if you have a product that you can buy, like recurring, you can create a loyalty campaign. And basically, I can target everyone who's purchased in the last 30 to 65 days for me but hasn't in the last 90 days, and then start serving them ads. And so that's been an easy campaign to get like a really good rule as on, bring people back who you know, you know, they're not going to come, they didn't come in the last 60 or 90 days to buy, you can also start targeting, you know, people who visited you in the last, you know, 30 days, but haven't purchased in the last like 90 days. So if anyone's visited your listing, but hasn't purchased, you know, let's remind them that, hey, you visited this listing, and you can also negate your competitors, success hasn't purchased for me or my competitors. And then you can start going up the funnel, right, you can target people who have visited your competitors, but haven't visited your page, and then complementary products, and then you can start going up like in the market, demographic, whatever. So it's super powerful because it has that first-party data that you can get, and you can utilize, you can like leverage the audience's and utilize that stuff, to advertise your product, and on and off Amazon. So you can like literally track the people. Now the downside is you can't run it yourself, you need to hire an agency. And then so that's kind of like where, where everything starts getting, you have to be like, you have to understand what the agency is doing. It has to be granular. So I've seen so many, I mean, not even agencies amazon.com, if you use them, like as a service to manage your DSP, they'll combine everything into one order. And they'll just say like, here are all of the products and I'm like, What are you doing? Like? What's the goal of this? Like just you just putting all the products and like launching a bunch of ads? Like who knows where so, think granularity is super important. You should be granular with your audiences, you should be granular with where you're advertising. So is it on desktop or mobile app or mobile web? Is it like Amazon-owned and operated? Or is it like publisher sites, because sometimes I've seen publisher sites perform really badly owned and operated performs amazing? And then you know, from there, it's also the lookback windows. So sometimes people like agencies, what they'll do is they'll say, let's set a look back window of seven days. And what that does is it shows an amazing grace because it says, Everyone, anyone who hasn't purchased in the last six days, you know, that means like that our ad was responsible for that. And I'm like, roll like they were just on your listing like they were going to convert anyway. So if you have like a really short look back windows, you can do like, you know, two days look back windows, or you can do normal back windows, and then it'd be like, Wow, someone who clicked on your listing. From PPC, immediately they get served a DSP ad, right? Because that's what the SP is doing is like who's visited listening with serving them an ad. So they get served an ad and because it's not on a click base, it's not a CPM. It's it's like it's not a CPC. It's a CPM model, where if it just shows up, it's counted, like, Oh, you got served this app, it can literally show up anywhere. And it's like, yeah, we served you this ad. So now we're gonna take credit for that sale.
29:34
Yeah, so we do a lot of stuff off Amazon as well. And so we use ad roll a lot. And so ad roll connects with Google, and Microsoft, and also does its own real estate. And it's basically just running display ads, which is the same exact concept as DSP. We always have to sit down and explain it to people. It's a very simple platform, but you need to be educated when you use it, because they're going to show that you had hundreds of 1000s of dollars in sales on a view through revenue, but then they have clicked through, which is how many people actually interacted with that ad and got sales, in which case, you could actually be losing a lot of money. Now, there's something to say about brand awareness and all that fun stuff. But even with DSP is because you're taking people back to your listing, you're then putting them back into an ecosystem where there are a ton of different ads. So they could obviously be seeing your ad, like you just mentioned, and still get credit for it, they could even click on that ad, but then they're going back to that listing where all of your competitors are or B, your other products are. So they go to another product. Now you're paying for the display, the DSP ad and you're paying for your own sponsored display ad, in which case, both are going to take credit for the sale. So I always have to tell people from a DSP perspective, like you've got to look at like, like you said, like your profit your tacos, like, understand your overall business. Because if you look at just like high-level numbers, you're gonna think you're rich and you are wrong.
30:57
Yeah. 100%. And so that's, that's really a big reason. I always like layers on so I say this is our PPC spend. And this is our DSP spend. And then this is our PPC sales. This is, our DSP sales, and that's the total sales. And so then we can start tracking, okay, as our DSP spend changes, how is our total sales changing? Is it actually going up? And so that's going to be like really the true measure of DSP. There are also some victim fees there. So Amazon bakes in 10%. So you can't advertise on the SP without paying Amazon that 10%. So if you're gonna spend, you know, 30 grand a month, they're gonna take three grand, it's gonna look like you spent 30 grand, so it doesn't even matter, right? So don't even think about that, because Amazon's gonna take that anyways. So no point in even thinking about it, it's just like the cost of doing business. But then agencies can also bake in their feet inside of the ad costs. So you can spend that 30 grand, and get like, technically, you know, 20, whatever, 27 grand, then minus Amazon and other like, so 20 What is that 2324 grand, so you're gonna get only $24,000 worth of ads, but it will still look like you spent that 30 grand because the fees are baked in. And then on top of that, agencies will charge a service fee. So okay, this is the cost of doing our so make sure that you're aware of that. Because if you have really strong branding and products that convert, they're like, wow, like these products are converting really high. If we take like, if we cut it down by 10%, no one's gonna know. And unfortunately, like, the only thing you can do is basically like, have to, like visually confirm the settings of the orders and everything, as they're like building the orders to make sure that there's no like agency fee in there. But yeah, I mean, DSP is super, super powerful. I think it definitely shouldn't be now people will say, okay, when do I When do I start using it if I'm doing 30 grand a month, and PPC spends or whatever. So for loyalty, I mean, I would say if you're doing 1000 units a month, you're good enough to start doing loyalty, retargeting you need like any audience to build, you need at least 1000 visitors a month. So look at how many sessions you're getting every single month. And I think the number one most critical thing is your conversion rate. If you haven't, if you have a decent conversion rate, you're gonna have a decent conversion rate on the SP if you have a bad conversion rate, the SP is not going to fix it. So the DSP just kind of like gives you more. And then when you're looking at your metrics in DSP, for anything, that's not retargeting, you have to look at click-through rate and detail page view rate as the main KPIs because as soon as someone clicks on an ad, like from let's say, a competitor targeting or complement their targeting campaign, immediately a retargeting ad is going to be shown to them. And then if any sale is made, only the retargeting campaign is gonna get the benefit. So whenever you're looking at it, you just want to kind of combine retargeting and everything above it as what's the total spend there, and what's the total sales there and that is your true like spending to sales realize whatever. But anything above retargeting, just look at the detail page, you're sorry, detail page viewer and click-through rate. Those are the main metrics. So if they're high, keep them running in there. And then certain audiences are obviously going to be higher than others and, you know, certain placements are going to be better than others. So just focus on the ones that are you'll slowly refine the placements, refine the frequency, and you can get a better click-through rate by doing that, but that's essentially a summary of the SP why it's good why it's bad.
34:30
I think if we were to name this episode, it would be like buyer beware of Amazon DSP. Ya know that shit inside and out otherwise? Not gonna work?
34:39
Do you know? Honestly, man, that's the number one thing for anything I don't know about you. But even for me, like when I started doing Facebook ads or Google ads, like on my own brand, initially, like I thought like I was gonna hire like some Google Ads guy and he's gonna make me a million dollars. But it's never the case and I had to always get educated and so from now on like anything I do like let's say I was gonna do email marketing for my agency or email marketing for my brand. I'm gonna go hire someone, you can go find them anywhere like clarity, whatever and mentor pass hire someone who really knows how to do email marketing, have them explain everything the fundamentals, the metrics, KPIs, how you measure success, all of that stuff. So you like kind of like a good enough to keep someone accountable. And then when you hire someone, it's like, okay, now I understand what's going on. So at least the expectations number one are like, kind of better, right than thinking, you know, PVC can just solve all your problems, or Google's gonna solve all your problems. And then at the same time, you know, what that person is doing? So, like, if I'm, let's say, like, not adding negatives for like, six weeks in a row, and there are keywords that are spending like $80 and not making sales, you could be like, dude, like, what's going on? Like, why do we have these keywords that are spending money, you're not adding them as negative. So that's why I encourage you always like to kind of learn before you delegate. Yeah.
36:00
Mina, Egyptian prescription. Thank you so much for being on the show. I don't want to take up any more time. And I can definitely tell that we could do this for hours on end. So really appreciate it. Having the show. I'd love to give you a minute here to let everyone else know where they can find out more about you and Trivium group and we'll go from there.
36:17
Cool. I mean, Trivium Trivium, the website's Trivium.com T R I V I U M .com. And then my name is M I N A space, E L I A S, that's Facebook, LinkedIn. Hit me up anytime. Instagram at Egyptian_prescription_Elias. So yeah, feel free to hit me up. I'm pretty accessible and happy to answer questions on anything. You know, brand-building supplements, PVC, DSP, whatever it is.
36:43
Beautiful. Buddy. Appreciate thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in thank you as well please make sure you head over to ecommshow.com Check out all of our other episodes. You can subscribe to us on whichever podcast platform you prefer. And of course head over to YouTube you can check them out all there and you can watch everything live. Well, it's not live yet. But thanks again. Appreciate you all and we will see you next time. Have a good one.
37:06
Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by blue tusker, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to BlueTuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.
Community for E-commerce Sellers
Leave a Reply