#340 – Amazon PPC And Launch Strategies

What’s new with Amazon PPC and product launches? Today’s guest, Mina Elias, an Amazon FBA and PPC expert, shares his insights, strategies, and experiences in this episode. Listen and learn his specific system for managing his personal and client’s PPC campaigns. He also talks about the benefits of networking and why meeting up and chatting with other sellers can help you level up your Amazon game.

In episode 340 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Mina discuss:

• 02:00 – What’s The Latest With Mina?
• 06:30 – Mina’s Main Approach When Doing Amazon PPC
• 09:50 – Sorting Keywords By Using Helium 10 Search Volume Data
• 13:20 – Launching PPC Campaigns Is Like Fishing
• 14:00 – What Match Type Does He Use For His Campaigns?
• 15:50 – What’s Is Mina’s Positive Threshold?
• 18:40 – Manually Updating PPC Campaigns
• 21:40 – Preventing Double Clicks From Your Ads
• 24:50 – Amazon’s New Tools And Metrics
• 27:00 – What To Do When You Have A Good ROAS In Top Of Search?
• 28:00 – Mina’s Launch Strategy
• 34:00 – What Services Does Mina’s Agency Offer?
• 35:20 – The Benefits Of Networking With Other Sellers
• 39:20 – Mina’s Thirty-Second Tips
• 43:30 – How To Get In Touch With Mina Elias
• 44:30 – Catch Mina At The Sell And Scale Summit

Transcript:

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got one of the brightest minds in PPC Join us, Mina Elias, and he holds nothing back with giving us his top strategies for PPC in 2022. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or as we say indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for not? You can actually use Helium 10’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want for more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers 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 Amazon or Walmart world. We’ve got a guest back here with us today. Mina, Mina, how’s it going?

Mina:

Amazing. It’s Tuesday already. It feels like the weeks already flying by

Bradley Sutton:

It is, it is, it is. I mean, this year is flying by already. I mean, it’s actually been like a year and a half since you’ve been on the show. It’s kind of hard to believe. So I wanted just like to catch up with you, you know, see what you’re doing. If you guys wanna get Mina’s entire backstory, it’s actually pretty interesting. We’ve had a couple of things where you can see his history first. He was on a previous episode of the Series Sellers Podcast, and then he was also on a series that we called Elevate here on YouTube that you can catch. So we won’t go too much into his backstory this time since you can go check out those two pieces of content, but today we’re gonna talk about, you know, all the things that have changed with PPC and just kind of catch up with what you’ve been up to. So let’s just first of all, do some catch up. You know, you had that really cool supplement brand. I used to remember having that– sampling it out. It actually was a supplement that actually tasted good at the same time as being good for you. Have you expanded that out anymore or what’s going on with your actual Amazon brand?

Mina:

So that’s actually started to take a backseat. So I think our last time we spoke a few months after of that I was approached by a big aggregator. So for those that don’t know, aggregators are basically really big companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars and buying all these Amazon brands. And so they hit me up and they asked me to build their in-house Amazon advertising team. So their PPC team. And so, because I’ve been on so many podcasts and share so much about PPC, they’ve found me, they kind of interviewed me, and then I submitted a proposal. And so they said we’ll hire you, for now, to run one of our brands and test you against six other agencies. And if you do perform better, then we’re going to hire you for that project to build the in-house team.

Mina:

I said that’s fair enough. And they ended, I ended up beating out the six other agencies and they ended up hiring me to build all of their systems and procedures and everything in terms of like PPC. And so at that point, I kind of started getting a little bit more confident in myself. The fact that I’d be able to run people PPC for other people pretty effectively. And I was always afraid of clients because I didn’t want the headaches and all of this stuff, but I talked to more and more people and they were like, you know what don’t worry about it. The right clients are amazing. The wrong clients are the ones that give you headaches. So as long as you vet them well enough, you shouldn’t have a problem. And so that’s when I took on one friend and then another friend and then it just kept expanding.

Mina:

And I really found my passion a lot more in PPC. I was already super passionate about it, talking about it. I still love supplements and everything like that, but after doing PPC advertising for some people it just felt like a, a better fit for me. And so I still have the brand it’s probably, I would say like 60% the size that it was when we last spoke things are getting a lot tougher on Amazon. I’ve had to do a lot more. Supply chain. things are getting expensive. And so since it hasn’t been a focus and, and the agency’s been more of a focus that’s kind of the agency’s grown a lot more. I put a lot of my energy there, all of the team is now dedicated there. And then my brand just became a client of the agency.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay. All right. You see, I’m learning all this stuff along with everybody else here. I didn’t know about this. So that’s interesting to me. So this kind of like test as it were, so you and these 6, 5, 6 other agencies, were you each given a, a different brand as your test? Or how did that work?

Mina:

Correct. Yeah, we were each given a brand. And then basically they wanted to see like the processes that each one would go to the software how much control they have and based on like a baseline, like, let’s say the last three months, the brand was doing 60,000 a month. How much would you grow it over like three months. And so over three months, I think we were able to grow the brand, like nothing crazy, right. Maybe like 15% a month on month. So 45% at the end of the three months, which is still, you know pretty significant for just three months. And, and you know, think they just liked the way that we did everything. We don’t use software, we have Excel. Like, it makes it very hard to mess things up, right.

Mina:

Because you’re not setting some things up and letting them run and then kind of blaming the software if things go wrong. We also operate a little bit differently as opposed to having like an account manager. It’s like the full team partially. So it’s like renting out the full team. So if I were to come and I wanted to do a podcast, instead of like just talking to you, I would just rent out you and the entire team at like Helium 10 for like an hour a week or something like that. So it kind of, it would work like that. So that’s, I think the difference that set us apart and then the transparency in the procedures and all that kind of stuff. And so they ended up just liking us plus the results were there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Now, this I imagine is maybe similar to how somebody listening to this episode, who already selling on Amazon. You know what I need maybe a slight tweak or I need a reset of my PPC. So you were taking over like this account that was already existing. So let’s talk about your approach for this test, because again like I said, this is like maybe the same way that somebody who’s been selling on Amazon. They’re like, you know what I wanna grow 15% like I need to do something different. So, you took a look at what they were already doing, I’m assuming on PPC, what did you notice that this account was doing right and wrong? If you can remember at that time.

Mina:

Yeah, totally. So, it’s kind of actually that started my audit process. It’s now like a system that I have every single new client, we audit them. But basically, the first thing I look at is how they’re like managing their portfolios and do they have like multiple products in a portfolio? And do they have like portfolios like done, right? So usually we like to say, okay, if you have a one product, you have one portfolio, it makes things like easier to look at. But also if you have multiple variations and you’re going to advertise all of the variations together, put them all in the same portfolio. The next thing I’m looking at is the budgets. So a lot of times I see people with 10 and 15 and $20 budgets. And then if you go a little bit deeper, they have a, let’s say $20 budget.

Mina:

And then they have three ad groups and each ad group has 50 keywords. And their average cost per click is a dollar. So basically you can only afford 30 clicks a day. And there’s about 90 keywords in your campaign like they can’t even all get clicks one click a day. So I notice that that’s something that inhibits people a lot. So the budgets is the first thing. If you have any campaigns that have a good, good return on ad spend, or like a low ACoS, you should definitely scale the budget. You know, why not? Right? If it can spend more and, and for every dollar, you get $4 back do that. Then the next thing is I go like into the campaign, look at the ad groups. When I first started on Amazon, people were saying you do like three ad groups, broad phrase, and exact.

Mina:

And, I never understood why I just kind of followed, but then I realized that that was hurting me because you can’t control the amount of money that goes into each of the ad groups. So the next thing is, if I notice people have multiple ad groups in the campaign, you could have a hundred dollars budget and like $80 could go to one 20, could go to another, and then zero could go to the third and you don’t understand. And so that’s the next thing is like we identified, okay, let’s look at all of the ad groups that are really not performing. Those ones you think that you’re advertising for those keywords, but you’re actually not. You think you are, but Amazon’s like sending the money somewhere else. And you’ll notice like one of the ad groups is getting $30,000 month in sales.

Mina:

The other one’s getting 2001 is getting like 500. So that’s where we’re like, okay, like this turn these off, or let’s turn everything off. That’s not spending money or getting enough impressions and let’s relaunch them in their own campaigns. And then the third level is again seeing that they have so many keywords in a campaign. And then what I do is I go into the ad group and I see that they have 60, 70 keywords, 120 keywords, 300 keywords. And I sort by spend, and I notice that the first 10 are getting spent significant spend, like maybe over like five or $10 in 30 days. And the rest are getting nothing or maybe a dollar or $2, you know, one or two clicks in, in 30 days. So I’m like, okay if you’re getting one or two clicks in 30 days, you’re not really advertising for that keyword.

Mina:

And so that’s the next area of opportunity. And so we’ll turn everything off where they think they’re advertising, but they’re not really and then we relaunch them in their own campaigns, one campaign, one ad group, and then up to five keywords will also sort the keywords by search volume. That’s where Helium 10’s has been amazing because you can really just dump in a bunch of keywords. And it’ll tell you the search volume of all the keywords. But we can like sort by search volume, because if you have a very high search volume keyword and a low search volume keyword, what I’ve noticed is the most of the spend will go to the high search volume keyword, and nothing will go to the law. Now like speculation is probably because there’s a higher chance that the higher search volume keyword will convert, even if it’s at a lower, a higher ACoS, so lower profitability.

Mina:

And so Amazon will just send the budget there. So there’s a much higher chance if you converting, even though that lower search volume keyword can convert at a very good ACoS. And so that’s kind of what I noticed. So it was just these changes where you’re advertising for let’s say a thousand keywords, but you’re actually only truly advertising for 50 because you have all these other ones that are the ad groups with keywords that are not actually running. And then the keywords inside the ad groups with big lists that are not even running. So we fixed all that and the budgets issue. So after we fixed all that, we started slowly you know, we cleaned everything up. We didn’t launch everything right away. We just turned everything off that wasn’t even running. We went in, we added negatives.

Mina:

So that’s the next easy one. You go into the search term report last 30 days. You should have like some sort of cap. For me, it’s one to one and a half times the cost per acquisition target cost per acquisition. So if I have a $30 product and I’m willing to spend up to $10 max to get a sale, then up to like 12 and a half to $15, I’m willing to spend on one keyword. And if it doesn’t convert, I’m just adding it as a negative. Or, you know, if it’s exact, I’ll just keep lowering the bid. But if it’s not, if it’s auto broad or phrase, I’ll add it as a negative. So went in the search term report identified all those keywords. And I’m like, okay, it spent $15. It’s not like when it spends 16 or 17, then it’s gonna become profitable.

Mina:

It’s just, that it’s losing me money. So I take all those and add them as negatives. And so that cleans up a lot of spend. Maybe let’s say you were spending 5,000 and you’re making 15,000 in sales. Now we’re spending two and a half thousand or 2000 and, and making that same amount in sales. And so there we just got our profitability and then we took all of those keywords and then we slowly started a launching them. And over time we were able to find more and more and more profitable search terms and keywords in product targets that we were targeting. And then we had like type control on, like, if this didn’t perform, we’re adding it as a negative, if it’s an auto broader phrase, or if this didn’t perform as an exact, we’re just gonna lower the bids pretty quickly to make sure that we minimize the damage. And so that’s kind of the step by step if you’re looking at your account.

Bradley Sutton:

So I remember, you know, the last episode, the kind of like big takeaway or the, the most unique thing that you were doing, you’re doing a lot of unique things, but you had three products at the time and you had like 1000 campaigns and it was part lane fact due to that five target limit that you had put on the campaign. So is that still kind of like, could you get, you know, like still hundreds of campaigns per a product due to that cap that you’re doing?

Mina:

Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s still going to be a really large number because of like that thing right, where it’s like, you’re, you’re probably gonna max out at five keywords per campaign. And so if are like a supplement brand, there’s thousands of keywords, or, you know, at least hundreds of keywords that are all going to convert. And so even if you have 500 keywords, that’s a hundred campaigns you know, right away. And so you know, in that case, we have to keep launching the goal. Like the analogy I always use is it’s like if you’re going fishing and you don’t know which bait is gonna work for this fish, so you throw like 10 in the water and then like two of them work and then eight of them don’t work. So you pull out the eight and then the two that work, you figure out like, what kind of bait is this? You throw another 10, like similar bait, and then another two work, and then another eight don’t work. So you take out the eight that don’t work. And so now you have four active baits that are working and you just, just keep doing this process again. And again, and again, until you get to a point where, you know, you have a hundred bid, that’s working, so you test 10 new ones and you get two more and now you have a hundred, two and eight that didn’t work and you pull them out. So

Bradley Sutton:

Now is it still, you know, auto, broad, exact you you’re doing phrase at all

Mina:

All match types. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

All match types.

Mina:

The thing with match types, it’s people like think that it has a meaning other the only meaning that a match type has, it’s like a combination. It’s like you bought like a variety pack. So when you do a keyword that’s broad, you, you bought the broad variety pack. If it’s phrase, it’s the phrase, a variety pack, it’s just in broad, it’s like 50 different keywords that you’re advertising for, and Amazon’s gonna shuffle through them based on whatever it thinks. And then you’re gonna get data later on that says, Hey, you know, 10 of these keywords worked really well. The other 40 were like, eh, you know, and then you start adding negatives and cleaning them up until you’re left with a, a broad keyword that has all stuff that works. And anything that doesn’t work you’ve negative did out.

Mina:

And then you can take the stuff that works and then launch it in more campaigns if it’s unique and you’re not already targeting it. So same with phrase except phrases like a smaller variety pack. It’s like a piece variety pack. Broad is like a 50 piece. And then exact is just like a one thing. And so that’s the only difference. There’s nothing deeper. There’s no reason to do broad and exact and not phrase because literally all you’re doing is just when you launch broad, you’re launching one keyword that represents 50 different keywords. And then a week later, you’re gonna look in the search system report and you’re gonna get the data on those 50 different keywords. Some of them will be good. Some of them will not, that’s it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now I think it’s kind of, self-explanatory how you get to the different exact campaigns. You know, you’ve got your broad, you’ve got your auto, you’ve got your phrase, finding words, you told us what your negative threshold is, you know, as far as when you negative something, what’s the positive threshold. Like what makes you take something from the other one and put it into the exact, is it the number of conversions? Is it the number of conversions plus what the, ACoS is? How are you deciding that?

Mina:

So a lot of people, I think consider like if a keyword converts two times or three times, that means it’s definitely a good keyword and it’s going to convert in other match types. I have a different philosophy. If it converts once to me, it means that there’s a signal, that there’s a possibility that it can convert in the future, but there’s no guarantee. And so for me, the threshold is one. And generally, obviously it’s gonna depend on like how profitable the product is. So for my products it’s anywhere between one to 20% ACoS. So in the search term report, I’m gonna show me everything that has a one to 20% ACoS and one conversion. I’m gonna take those keywords out and I’m gonna identify which one of them are unique in each match type. So let’s say unflavored electro powder, I’m targeting in broad and phrase, but not in exact launch it in exact or sugar free electro powder on target inexact, but not broader phrase.

Mina:

So I’ll launch it in broader and I’ll launch it in phrase. So I’m looking at those keywords, those search terms that converted profitably what match types are they not in already? What match types are they unique in? And I’m gonna test them all. And this does not guarantee that they’re gonna convert profitably. They could all not convert at all. I base everything on the data. So you have to show me that there is data in whatever match type that it converted. And that’s why when people were saying, you know if you find something in the auto campaign, extracted, launch it in exact and negative it in auto. And I said, that’s operate under a huge assumption that it is a hundred percent gonna work inexact, and then you’re gonna cut off your income from auto, so don’t do that. And so that’s kind of, I’m, I, I follow the same structure with any, any search term. Don’t negative it out, just launch it in which whatever match up it’s unique in.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, you know, you, you talked about having, you know, all these campaigns and that you’re not using software now, obviously me, if I’m using Helium 10 Adtomic, you know, sure. I could have 200 campaigns and I could see all, all, all these different things and it’s, you know, I just do a couple clicks and it all happens. Actually, me personally, I’ve never used Adtomic automation. I’m just one of those control kind of people where like, I like to be able to say yes or no, and I don’t wanna have to blame software for a software glitch or maybe Amazon had an error, but, you know, that’s just me, you know, I know most people use it and then they’re totally fine with it, but me, I’m just a control freak, but you take it to another level where you’re like, Hey, I’m not even gonna use software, or, but I’m just wondering, like how in the world do you manually make all these updates? Like you got one product, 300 campaigns, and yeah, of course, you can download all this stuff to Excel and use your pivot tables and you see which ones, but then you have like 200 adjustments you have to make, you have one of your staff, one by one entering those into Amazon or using bulk edits. How does that even work?

Mina:

Yes. So everyone on my team is required to be able to do everything manually. So if one day I say guys like the, our macros outdated, like what happened last week when the Amazon updated the bulk sheet formula. So our macro was no longer working and we had to kind of do everything manually. So everyone in the team has to do things manually. Now, the reason that I don’t use software, I’m not like Adtomic is a great software. I’ve looked at it now. I’m also responsible for other people’s accounts. And at the same time, I can’t guarantee that no one in my team is, is gonna kind of maybe day get a little bit lazy and say, you know what, I’m tired. Like I just fought with my mom or my girlfriend. Like, I’m just gonna do like a bot thing like this.

Mina:

So that’s like where my level of control comes from. Automation, I’m definitely against because you have to always it’s like a feedback loop. You do something last week. You look at the changes. If that didn’t work, then you have to adjust it or that it’s never gonna work perfectly. It’s always gonna work to a certain extent. So you always have to be adjusting. So there’s no point in that automation criteria, the way that our team does it, everyone needs to be able to do it manually. So if they have to spend some time doing 200 adjustments, first of all, we sort, it, everything we color coded, this is profitable. This is not profitable. This needs to erase. This needs to lower. And then you go in and you like, look at things and you update 200 updates will take you not more than 15 minutes.

Mina:

So it’s totally fine, right? It’s not a big deal, it’s Excel. And then you upload it to Excel back to Amazon in an Excel file. So it’s totally fine to do it like that. We also have step further, which is a macro. And so the macro is just, you put in all of your criteria. So between zero to 10% ACoS to this, between 10 to 15 do that. If it has like if it’s driven more than 10% of the sales do this, whatever, and then the macro color codes, everything highlights, everything does whatever you ask it to do based on the criteria. And then you kind of get it and you have the final say, you have to review and say, okay, this looks good. This looks good. This is not good. Change it a little bit, override this oh, this is a ranking campaign. I don’t care if the ACoS is 150%, it doesn’t matter. We’re trying to rank organically and then you upload it to Amazon. So that’s how we operate. It’s I mean, yeah, like I’m not trying to have 15, 20 clients per employee. That’s not the goal. I can scale the number of employees. That’s fine. But if I have everything tight and I know I’m delivering it you know, good job then, you know, we’re good.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. So you know I know now your strategy about how you discover exact targets or even how you populate some of the broad and phrase, you know, something converts an auto, you’re not just putting it directly to, to exact, you’re also putting it into the broad and phrase. What about when it’s a ASIN conversion in an auto campaign? Are you putting it in the product targeting campaign and like a sponsored display campaign right away, or is it only going into the product targeting campaign?

Mina:

Only product targeting for now? The thing with sponsored brands in display and any of the different types that are not sponsored products is that there’s an ability for someone to click twice. So, you know, Bradley could type in electrolyte powder, go in click on like a liquid IV, find my product, click on my product, and then find my product again is a display ad and then click on my product again. And so it’s the same person who pay twice. Fundamentally my goal from PPC is to drive as cheap as possible. So every session needs to be in the most cost effective way. And if you click twice, that means you just spent twice. So that doesn’t mean that I won’t use it, but I have to be very, very careful when I do use it.

Mina:

I have to launch it on its own. And wait and watch like for a week or two weeks, what happens if my cost procession starts going up? That means that it’s the same people that are clicking. So there’s no point in having that ad because it’s capturing the same people, you know, the same way, like DSP people like will run DSP. And then you’re like, well, the retargeting captured everyone that was already gonna convert. And so you’re just spending an extra couple thousand a month for no reason, same thing with this. So I learned that when I launched video for a client once, they said, we want to video one video. I said, we have to be careful. We launched a bunch of video. The video ACoS was beautiful, like 15% or whatever. It was getting a lot of sales, but all of the sponsor products, ACoS like went really bad and they kept saying, you need to optimize, you need to optimize the sponsor.

Mina:

I said, I don’t think the issue is, is in the sponsored product. I think it’s in the video. And then finally I said, listen, just, you know, listen to me. And like, you’ll see if I’m right or wrong. And I turned off all the video and then everything went back to normal and it, and we just realized that we were spending a lot of extra money for no reason because it was the same people who clicked on the sponsor product ads were also clicking on the video ads. So the PPC didn’t get us what we wanted to, which is new people, you know, which is the whole point of running like a second type of ad.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you mentioned video I’m just us like it’s too early in the morning. I can’t think, but I remember before, wasn’t it like sponsored video ads where it doesn’t actually tell you the exact search term that converts or am I getting confused here?

Mina:

I’m not sure, but we do one keyword per campaign, so for video, so we always can figure out what the keyword is. Cause we only have one in there. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. There’s a way around that. Cool. What are you using as far as all of the new metrics that Amazon is giving in sponsored advertising since the a year and a half ago, there’s just so much more visibility. It seems that Amazon has giving you on things that maybe previously were maybe only for vendors, you know, access to this kind of things. But now, even, the smallest seller has access to, to different things, whether it’s top of search or, or just all these different ways that you can kind of gauge how you’re doing, what are the top ones that you have found most helpful to running your campaigns?

Mina:

So, here’s the main metrics that I use. So you know, obviously PPC spend PPC sales and total sales. That’s a, given sessions is a huge one. The whole purpose of using PPC is to get more sessions. And so I’m always tracking my change in PPC spend versus my change in sessions. Are they growing at the same rate? If they’re not, then my PPC is not running efficiently. Then I have a calculation which is session or PPC spend divided by sessions, which will give me the cost of each session. So that’s kind of the metric that tells me how expensive my traffic is. If, if that number is creeping up, it just means I’m maybe overspending on, on PPC or CPCs are going up. <Affirmative> or you know, I’m using like video or whatever.

Mina:

And now it’s like the same people clicking twice. So that’s another important metric. Then I’m, I’m you know, tracking conversion rate, of course, the other metrics are basically just to calculate profit. And then I do a cost of a per acquisition, which is going to be the PPC spend divided by the number of units, which is gonna tell total units, which is gonna tell me blended between organic and PPC, how much I’m paying for each conversion. That number needs to constantly keep going down. And then the two ways to make it improve is to have better PPC so spending less or launching more keywords that are profitable. And the second one is ranking organically. So the more that you rank organically lower, it’s gonna be also, if you improve your conversion rate, it’s gonna be better.

Mina:

Now, the only new metric that I like to use sometimes is the top of search impression share. And I’ll look at the two metrics top of search impression share. And then on that placement in top of search what my RoAS is. So when I notice that I have a really good RoAS at the top of search one of the things that you could do is, is increase the bit by placement, right? So I’ll look at my top of search impression, share if my top of, of search impression share is like low, not like 50 or 60, that is a huge signal that there’s a lot of room for growth in that placement. So I’ll increase the placements significantly to win there, because I know that the more I show up there the more I’m going to, so that’s been the only new one that I’ve really used, but those are kind of the main metrics of it drive all of my analytics.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now the last time we talked I had asked you about your launch strategy. And now at the time you were just actually launching, you looked it up here your Energizer product. And you had mentioned about how your, your strategy was that, Hey, you, you’re gonna start with four auto campaigns. And that was interesting in itself, you know you know, having four different auto campaigns and just focusing on that, you know, the close match and loose match and for, for each one. So are you still using that method for launch using those different auto campaigns and just in general, what is your launch strategy now? Because now, you know, back in the day, like there was a good number of people who are using PPC only as launch, but now it’s almost like everybody because, you know, you’re not supposed to do search, find, buy and two step URLs and, and things like that anymore. So I think people are looking for more PPC related strategies as far as launching new products.

Mina:

Yeah. so the strategy, the four auto campaign strategy is great. It’s still the same. I think it’s, you have to do it because when you mix the auto campaigns together, you just you’re inhibiting the growth of, of the different ones, because–

Bradley Sutton:

It seems like it always just focuses on one, like, as one of them is the one that gets all the spend, like one type.

Mina:

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s happened. And, and then then when you try and scale the budget, then you start seeing that the loose match is the one that’s like, you know, the bad one is getting more spent and you’re like, no, I wanted the good one to get the more spent. So four auto campaigns for the keywords that we wanna rank. So I now always look at what are the, the top keywords that I wanna rank. There’s Helium 10, you know, I’ve shared this with Vince you know, on TACoS Tuesday as well. But basically like you can look at the keywords that you wanna rank for organically. You can also do data dive, which is Brandon Young’s thing based on Helium 10, when you can look at where all of your competition is ranking very high organically.

Mina:

And so those keywords I’ll do one keyword per campaign, broad, phrase, and exact I’ll put them in Keyword Tracker and I’ll monitor their organic cranking. The main goal is not to be profitable on those keywords that I’m ranking for. It’s just to increase the organic crank. And then once they’re high organic crank, we’ll kind of lower the bits to get to somewhere that’s like reasonable, you know, where the finances will support. And then, from there I’m, I’m getting everything that I’m not trying to like significantly rank for organically and doing five keywords per campaign, broad, phrase, and exact, I’m usually targeting around 50 keywords total. And then I’m also doing newest arrivals. So I’m targeting all of my com my newest arrival competitors you can type a keyword in the search on Amazon and on the top, right.

Mina:

It it’s default is featured sort by featured, you can sort by newest arrivals and you can see all of the new ASINs that are in their honeymoon period and Amazon’s probably gonna show them in all of these different places. They might have like an auto campaign that’s running and that, but they have zero reviews. And I’m assuming that we’re than that, right. We’re gonna have a few reviews right off the bat, and I’m targeting all of those. Those are usually like low hanging fruit. And then obviously I’m gonna do everything to protect my brand name. But that’s kind of the, the launch strategy. The goal is to, to go to build velocity in the first 30 to 60 days. And so I actually launched my girlfriend’s brand. It’s a feminine health brand. And we went from zero to a hundred units a day in the first, like 14 days.

Mina:

And then we sold out of like a thousand units or so in like three weeks. And then, you know, we had to restock and do it again. And the conversion rate was significantly high click through rate was high. And I, I don’t think it’s by accident. I think it’s because of the honeymoon phase. And I’ve said so many times, like with the Energizer, I didn’t launch it as strong as I wanted to launch it. I launched it with a lot of reviews, but not enough spend in traction. Also, that product was a little bit of like a, you didn’t know if it was an electrolyte or you didn’t know if it was a pre-workout. And so that, that was also a fundamental issue there that I didn’t really follow like, you know, if someone is searching for a product, what’s the keyword for Energizer, right? It’s no one is really searching for electrolytes with energy. So that was a mistake that I did, but when I did hers, we spent a lot of money where we spent about $20,000 in PPC. But then we sold about like you know, $40,000 or so in the first three weeks and then went out of stock. But that velocity was, I think, was able to get really high because of mainly because of like the honeymoon period.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I’ve noticed too, you know when I’ve talked about, you know, the Maldives honeymoon strategy, it’s not just about your keywords and your launch, but the honeymoon period, like Amazon is very generous. It seems with, with your PPC impressions as well that, you know, maybe on you know, mature product, you’re not gonna see, you know, this kind of numbers. So that’s–

Mina:

It was the highest clickthrough rate. Like her, her conversion rate was about 55 percent right off the bat with zero reviews. And her click through rate was the highest click through rate I’ve ever seen, which was over 1% you know, with again with zero reviews, which means like, the impressions really were significant. Like now, for me, I consider like a really good clickthrough to be a half a percent based on like, everything that I’ve seen. So when you have zero reviews in your click through rates it’s that high, it just shows you that Amazon is really giving you a chance.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So that’s, you know, that’s a pretty significant investment then. So you, you talked about how you went through $40,000 worth of product. So, you know, I’m assuming your cost on that was, you know, at least $10,000 or something, and then yeah. You spent $20,000. So, you know, for this kind of aggressive launch, you’ve gotta have a couple of dollars saved up, you know, for this.

Mina:

And you know, obviously, not everyone has to do this, but I’ve done it like a bunch of times. And I really have realized like the times that I go in hard a lot of budget, you know, spending a lot of money on a product, it really works out. I also partnered in a coffee brand and I run the ads there and we went in spending 500 to a thousand dollars a day in ads. And in like less than two months, we, the product is doing 85,000 a month in sales. And so, you know, it’s, it’s things like that where I’ve seen that end of things that I’ve seen my end of things, where it is like, I launched like blue rasp and mango, very conservative because I didn’t have that much money. And then Energizer again, like, you know, maybe I was spending like a hundred bucks a day on it. And so after doing like both ends, I obviously wanted the highest chance of success. So I was willing to kind of put up the money spend that kind of money to be really successful.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now at your agency, are you, you guys just strictly PPC, or do you ever handle other aspects of the business?

Mina:

So mainly PPC and DSP. We also do SEO optimization. So title, bullet points you know, because I feel like it really, really influences for creative and things like that. We, like, we have very strong partners, they have studios and things like that we can just refer out to, but I want to be the best at one thing. I maybe, maybe not now is the time to be a generous, but I think once I become like the best at PPC, the best and the biggest then I can kind of like say, okay, let’s open it up to some other things.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now you know, switching gears a little bit, you know, I know networking is kind of an important aspect to you, you know, you organize events for the longest time, you know, here in here in California and, and you attend a lot of events. Talk a little bit about that. Like why that’s important to you and what kind of benefits you’ve seen from networking with other sellers.

Mina:

So this honestly all started in March of 2019. It was about four months into when I first launched my Amazon product. And I didn’t know anything. I was so lost. I was in the groups and I was in on YouTube and everything, like, I was completely obsessed with Amazon every single day. I was like living and breathing like in the Facebook groups and just, and every day was something different, right? Like someone would say, oh, no, like you shouldn’t have a budget of more than like $50. Or, and then this person would say, oh, you should put at least 300 keywords in a campaign, stuff like that. And so I never really knew what was right and what was wrong. And, but I really wanted to succeed. Like, I was very desperate at the time and I wanted to get out of my nine to five job because I was just very kind of unhappy.

Mina:

And so a friend who works at the company that manages all of Barbara from shark tanks products on Amazon she said, Hey, by the way, like, I mean, we had dinner and I was asking all these questions. She’s like I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s like, actually you should go to this conference. It’s, it’s hosted by, by CPC strategy at the time. They’re now called annuity in New York City you’re gonna benefit a lot and it was $300. And to me, I had to miss a day of work and spend $300, which is a huge thing, like, I wasn’t even buying like $300 concert tickets and stuff like that, you know, so to me, like it was a huge investment at the time, but I said, you know what? Like it’s worth it.

Mina:

I called out of work sick and I went to like the conference and in that conference, I spent like 16 hours eight hours, two days at least, you know, and sucking the information drive from people. And I would just like one person after the next I, like, I asked every question and then I would just, I didn’t have any shame. Right. Like if I would see someone, I would like finish a conversation. And then I knew that that person talked about like enhanced brand content. And I would go walk up to that person say, Hey, I loved your talk, blah, blah, blah. Tell me more about enhanced brand content. Like, how do I do this? And so I got like for $300 I got 16 hours worth of consultations. And it really gave me the confidence that like, you know, I could do this, like the, the, the stuff that this, these people were sharing, was crazy, everyone there that had a million dollar, $10 million brand wasn’t anything special.

Mina:

So, you know, they didn’t come from, from money. They didn’t they didn’t have anything that I didn’t have. They just never quit. They never gave up. They just kept looking for the answer and they kept solving problems. And so ever since then, like, that’s really energized me and I’ve had a huge, huge benefit from attending events. And so when I came to LA and I noticed that there was no meetup group, I decided to start my own for two reasons, number one, because I wish that, like, that I could attract those like very smart people. And we really did. I, you know, the LA group brings in a lot of like very smart, successful sellers. And then at the same time, I wanted to create something where I could give back eventually. You know, because at that time I was full-time in my Amazon business.

Mina:

And I was like, you know, if, if little Mina didn’t have the New York city meetup group and didn’t have that conference like I would probably still be a little bit lost. And so that was another thing. And then the final thing is like now having the agency, it’s obviously huge for brand awareness and, and you’re constantly meeting people. You’re staying active. People are recognizing you, they know you’re legit. And then honestly, like this events are my, like my fun. Like I don’t, I don’t really travel that much for fun. If I’m at Prosper in Vegas, I’ll spend an extra day we’ll do something fun. You know, if I’m going to, to Etto in Palm Springs, I’ll take an extra day and we’ll like, hang out by the pool. But that’s I love, I love this. Like my, work, my life are like the same thing.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it now, you know, you’ve been given us strategies throughout this episode, but it’s time for maybe one or two of our “TST”, our 30-second tips, our TST. So what’s something I would assume that we’d wanna keep it to PPC, but it could be about anything that you you want, but what’s a couple different 30-second tips that, that you think people can use as a strategy for some quick wins.

Mina:

Okay. So the first one is if you don’t have like a really good analytics, you’re blind. And so this is what I do. I have daily for seven days in seven days, chunks PPC spend PPC sales, total sales units sessions cost per session, click through it, conversion rate cost per click and then sale price, Amazon fees, cost of goods and then the profit. And so you can calculate all of those. And then at the end of the seven day period, calculate the total and then do another seven of them. And then at the end, it calculates the total. And then start noticing the changes week on week. And so if on Monday you made optimizations then you wait a week and you look at the new total and your PPC spend goes up, but your sessions don’t go up then understand what the effect of those optimizations are.

Mina:

So once you have your analytics built like that, and, and I can obviously share my sheet and you can just like duplicate it, but once you have it built like that, it’s so easy to see week on week the change cuz so many people will just say, okay, your PPC spend was a hundred dollars. Your PPC sales was $500. Is that good or bad? No idea, but good or bad is always dependent on, okay, what was it before? So if it was $500 PPC spend and 500 sales, and now it’s 105 hundred. That’s amazing. And so that’s, it’s great to always benchmark you know what you’re doing in the previous weeks then see, okay, what’s new this week. So now your PPC spend, went up, everything looks good. Okay. Let’s do a few more optimizations. And then you notice the new total a week later. And, so that’s how, that’s one of like the biggest game changers for me.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. You have another one for us.

Mina:

Yeah. So I think, I think conversion rate optimization is so that not a lot of people do PPC is like 50-50, right? So it’s like half of it is driving traffic, but the other half you have to convert. And so having a strategy to constantly test your conversion rate, I is a very important through images through your title, through your bullet points, description enhance brand content coupons, lightning deals, all of that kind of stuff. So what I do is I have a change log and in the change log I have the what field I’m changing the old value, the new value, and then the conversion rate and the clickthrough rate at that time of the change. And so I’m constantly testing different things. One thing that really helped 2 different platforms is PickFu and Rank Bell. Actually, Rank Bell’s new service is incredible, but basically like to Rank Bell, you could submit your listing and what they’ll give it out to random shoppers on Amazon and say, would you buy this?

Mina:

Why wouldn’t you buy this? And so to you, like, this is your baby, or like, my baby’s perfect. I’m like, actually it’s not perfect. I wouldn’t buy this because you claim that it’s like FDA approved. But like, that sounds fake. You claim that this is like not gonna break ever. But that sounds like, you know, things like that, that can block people, or you can also submit, you’re listening in three other, people’s listening and say, which one would you buy and why? And then they’ll give you live like video feedback and saying like, I would buy this one because the color pops up more. And so you could identify all of these now new factors to split this, and then having that changelog, you can then split this, the factors you speak food, for example, to say, is the old, is the new better than the old?

Mina:

If they say yes, then you try it on Amazon. And then if you get the new values of conversion rate, you get the new values of the click through rate. And if it’s better, then now you have a good change in, and, and conversion rate optimization. Shouldn’t be like, Hey, I paid a guy $2,000. He made a nice listing, and then it’s gonna stay that listing forever. It’s a, it’s a continuous process. You’re continuously tweaking your PPC. You’re continuously trying to improve and get a better conversion rate and a better click through rate through your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Now, you know, I know people can, can reach you. They can find your contact information in our Helium 10 directory, directory.helium10.com. But what are some other ways that people can find you guys on the webs out there?

Mina:

So Mina Elias on Facebook and LinkedIn, triviumco.com is the, is the website. So if you go on there and if you want me to like, take a look at your account and do like an, an audit, I’m happy to do that. And also Instagram @egyptian_prescription_elias. So those are the, you know, I’m very accessible. So just find me if you find me on Facebook, don’t add me as a friend, send me a message. I have so many friend requests. I have no idea who’s who, so just send me a message. I’ll answer right away.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. And definitely be seeing you in September, right at our Sell and Scale Summit,

Mina:

I’m super excited for Sell and Scale. So that’s gonna be another amazing event where, where it’s gonna feel like vacation you know, just to be around so many cool people. And I know that I’m very excited to hear Gary Vee speak. That’s gonna be super, super cool. So yeah, very excited.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. So if you wanna get tickets to that meet in person and see Gary Vee in person h10.me/s3. All right, Mina, thanks a lot for coming on, and in about a year let’s bring you back and let’s see what’s going on you know, in your life and in your brand’s life. It’s really been great to see you grow in the industry and it’s so awesome that you’re willing to share your knowledge with everybody. So we appreciate that.

Mina:

Awesome. Thank you for having me and happy to help. Take it easy.

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