Innovative PPC Strategies for E-Commerce Growth

And now your hosts , serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson .

When we were talking to him about his podcast , we said what would be the best starter episode or the highest impact episode , and he recommended an interview that he did back in December of 2022 with Matt Altman .

Matt is part of Right Side Up , which is a third-party agency that mentors rookie and veteran brand sellers to scale from zero to three million in monthly sales through optimization , including advertising and analytics . Now I listened to this episode and was blown away with the amount of knowledge that I learned .

You're going to want to pay attention to is launch strategy for PPC . It was the most in-depth , comprehensive launch strategy I've ever heard and applied real numbers and gave somebody the ability to budget in a good way . Pre-launch . I absolutely love that part . You're also going to want to tune in for the part where he talks about the plum cart .

This is something I've never heard of and I'm going to let you learn about it during the episode , but this is a cross-promotion podcast . We've become good friends with Josh and this is an outstanding episode with a lot of great information and we want to share it with the Firing Demand audience .

So , without further ado , matt Altman as a guest on the Ecom Breakthrough Podcast .

Feel free to check out those past episodes . This episode is brought to you by Ecom Breakthrough Consulting , where I help seven-figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond . Listen , matt . I started Hadley Designs back in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years .

However , I made a lot of mistakes along the way that made the path to getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it probably should have . There were times where I had a lot of self-doubt , where I , you know , struggled with feelings of do I have a real brand or could I be a successful business leader ?

I wish I would have had a guide along the way to help me overcome those stumbling blocks and also move faster .

If you've hit the same plateaus and you want to know the next steps to take to take your business to the next level , then go to ecombreakthroughcom that's ecom with two Ms to learn more and as a special bonus to my podcast listeners , this month I'm giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session for free .

Email me at josh at ecombreakthroughcom with the subject line strategy audit and tell me why you think you should win the free strategy audit for this month . And don't worry , if you don't win this month , you'll be entered in for future months to come . Today I'm excited to introduce to you Matt Altman . Matt leads the marketplace at Right Side Up .

Matt has over 12 years of selling experience . He's launched and sold multiple personal brands , all starting from a retail arbitrage budget . Four years ago he started an agency Right Side Up to help high-growth CPG brands focus on dominating the marketplace . They've been able to scale many brands from zero to three million in monthly sales .

Welcome to the podcast , matt . Thanks for having me . Josh , how are you doing ? Doing great , super excited to have you on the podcast . I know we met at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit a couple months ago and we hit it off in terms of talking about PPC management .

At the time we were switching over from an agency that we were formerly working with to bringing PPC in-house and you were a wealth of wisdom and I know that that wisdom runs deep in your knowledge base , and so I'm super excited to have you on the podcast .

I know our listeners are going to be excited to hear from your experience how you've been able to exit multiple brands and how you've been able to really take other brands from zero to 3 million . So let's back all of that up , matt , and why don't you just kind of walk me through your journey ? It sounds like you started there in retail arbitrage , right ?

Was buying a lot of clearance items at like Target and Walmart and things like that for a few years and then parlayed that into my own products . Back then you could honestly sell anything on Amazon . It wasn't that hard . You just had to be kind of that first mover , get some reviews and you're good to go .

Um , so did that for a while until we just started getting knocked off on everything that we were releasing and we couldn't compete with some of the the shady things that people were doing to our products or their own products to boost them up .

So then we got into supplements , which is where I've kind of been for the last like five , six years now , mainly just because we know we actually have to have some certifications there .

It's a little bit harder to like get into as a foreign seller and things like that , but obviously supplements is super competitive and we have our own other issues in that category now .

Yeah , I know there's a lot of barriers to entry there in the supplement space and there is a lot of good competition , but because of that , I think you know how to compete , how to make an offer stand out , and if you can succeed in the supplement space , I'd argue you could probably succeed in any of the other spaces there on Amazon .

So tell me a couple of the brands that you exited from . You know when were those exits ? How did you get them ? You know to that point .

Really sold that one just because we saw where the category was going . Um , we were seeing new listings pop up every other day and then there were thousands of reviews on them within a month and we're just like , nah , we don't want to be in this um , so sold it privately to someone that was interested .

Uh , actually I haven't even looked at it in like seven years , so I have no idea what they're even doing now . Um , but very glad we got out of that one , because it's definitely dying . The other one was actually interesting , though .

So when I was in commercial real estate , I met a doctor at the time who had a bunch of patents on products and we were just going back and forth and like he loves creating products but didn't really want to be involved in marketing or selling them in any capacity , and then come to find out he had quite a few patents that he's just never done anything with

um so basically bought them out from him , whipped up some products around those patents and grew that for about four years and then uh sold that off and those were all kind of in like the uh , I would say like medical , like remedy space . So we didn't need like FDA approval or anything . But there were certain patents he had on how to make the formulas .

That basically made it so that no one else could knock us off , so that one got a really great multiple .

I mean , back then in supplements margins were absolutely insane and really just kind of figured . Hey , I'm going to have to put in the same amount of work no matter what products I do . I'd rather gain a customer for 12 to 16 months versus a one-time purchase . You don't have to work as hard and let that continue to multiply as much as possible . Yeah .

You have a lot of experience optimizing products on Amazon , so let's talk about you know , when you get into the supplement space , or we can just talk broadly on Amazon itself . What are some of the key things that you advise or recommend when launching a brand new product on Amazon that are working today ?

Because , as you know , a lot of those black hat tactics you know have come and gone . You also have the you know the rebates that everybody was doing and now it's kind of leveled the playing field a little bit more . Tell me what you're doing that's been working for you guys .

So we usually overestimate our budgets by like 20 to 30% of what we actually think it would be , just to make sure that we're at a good place in case it doesn't go the way that we want it to . Um , but outside of that we're looking for a couple major things . Uh , one is we want to see continued growth in the category .

Amazon's making that way easier now with , like the search query reports , the product opportunity explorer . There's so many internal tools that they're giving you access to now that you can really easily find that . And then the other big thing that we're looking for is categories that you've got maybe like three or four power players in and by power players .

They aren't really doing that much , they're still kind of growing , but they're ahead of like the other 20 items there . Really , it just kind of is showing us that , hey , there's enough sales to go around if these four people can all kind of be around the same and customers really don't care which one they're choosing right now .

They're just basically picking whichever one's at the top from what we can see . So yeah , we used to go into very heavy like categories where you would just I mean like launches would be a half a million to a million dollars and if you can make them work , yeah , the payback is amazing because of the volume that some of those categories do .

But if you lose , like it absolutely sucks , it absolutely sucks . So we're looking at like $50,000 to $75,000 to launch a product right now and the supplement space that we're kind of going after and we've seen it , it's kind of the sweet spot for everything .

So if we do find a product and we think it's going to cost more than that to actually launch it , we'll hold off for a bit and see if we can find some other ones that are within our kind of thresholds .

If we wanted to spend to get that conversion rate on that keyword , like , what would it cost us per day and working that backwards . The other big thing that I don't know anyone else that's kind of touched on this , but what we've been doing here recently is we have a seller accounts where we'll create the product beforehand .

It's not the product that we're actually going to sell . We'll put some items as merchant fulfilled and then we'll just have ourselves buy the products . So that way we get all the search query report data for that product before we actually launch it .

So really the big things we focus on are you obviously get the add to cart , the click through rates , the overall impression rates , things like that , but taking those out and breaking them down , like a lot of people always kind of go by that old method of I need this many buys per keyword per day , and they were just like oh , we need to add in some add

to carts here and there to make it all look kosher .

Through the search query report you can basically know exactly how many add to carts you need , how many detail page views you need , and then you can equate that out to the exact same for the top sellers if you marry the brand analytics data into it and basically it'll tell you exactly you've got to hit between these three numbers each day , for we've been seeing

like 25 to 30 days is how long we usually like launch on a certain keyword , and then you'll pretty much stay right like we haven't really had any issues interesting .

Tell us , you know what type of ad campaigns you're launching . How many keywords are you focusing on in that ?

But really the main focus is taking those top keywords for that product as long as our budget can withstand them . Usually we always go for the top ones . We've seen . Yeah , you can go for the long tail ones . You can extend this launch out and it may take you 90 , 120 days to get to where you want to go to .

But we'd rather spend the budget up front and get there as quickly as possible . But what we do is set up exact match campaigns . We set the bid at the suggested bid from Amazon and then we put in a 300% top-of-search modifier .

Basically we wait two to three days , pull the data out and we're using PackView right now to do this , but you can easily do this in just a bulk sheet if you want to do that .

But we're pulling out that data and then we're comparing our conversion rates on products or sorry , not products on keywords by the brand analytics data day by day to see , kind of , are we matching the brand analytics , like conversion rate or sales rate ? And if we are , we keep spinning against that keyword . If we aren't , we decrease the bid .

And then we basically just keep doing that every two to three days . We don't worry about ACOS , we don't worry about tacos , we don't worry about anything except for our conversion rate .

As long as our conversion rate is within two percentage points of the brand analytics conversion rate for the top couple people , we keep running that keyword until we're either ranked in the top three or we just fall off completely because Amazon didn't find us relevant . Then the second campaign that we launch is a sponsored product campaign as well .

But we do ASIN targeting and basically we'll take those five to seven keywords that we're targeting in our launch and we use e-com analytics for this . But you can do it through the API or brand analytics yourself .

But we pull the weekly data going back for the last 12 months and we target any ASIN that's ever been in the top three for the five to seven keywords that we're going after and we're hoping that that gives us relevancy towards those keywords as well .

And we're hoping that that gives us relevancy towards those keywords as well and those other products that are converting . Well for those keywords Fascinating .

So I love this approach because you're so focused just on the conversion rate . And so , to dive into that a little bit more , matt , when you're focused on the conversion rate and for the particular campaign that you're set up , right , you have one campaign that has all of your exact matches in there , right ?

So how many keywords would you put into a single campaign and is there any limit to the number of keywords that you're putting into that campaign ? To begin with , yeah .

So we really focus just on those top moving ones . The main thing that we really look at and we compete a lot in kind of like the healthier for you foods , so like the keto foods , the like low carbs all of that and keto snacks gets like half a million searches a month .

If you put that keyword in an exact match campaign with other keywords , it's just going to gobble up all of the budget .

We still see the same thing happen , where that one keyword gets most of the budget and it won't even spend us all the budget . So we really don't know why it does that . So we just separate them out to keep it easier .

Maybe we move into a little bit of product optimization here , but tell us like what's your approach at that point .

A lot of times you'll see that's the answer , and we just increase our top of search placement on that keyword by 100% or whatever it is , until we start to see more impressions and see what happens to our overall conversion rate . The second piece is exactly what you said .

We would then take out our product we have to look at what everyone else's products are in the top three for those keywords and then we would basically send it off to like a PickFu or different services like that and just get analysis from people that are in the market for the product and see if there's anything we can do to really tailor our product more for

that keyword .

Um , other times , like a lot of our , our snacks or items that we're selling , like there's these benefits that you don't really get across until the second or third image . So we'll , we'll change the way the box looks or we'll , we'll add something over the wrapper , like it's not really there .

We're just seeing if , hey , if we add like one , one net carb to the outside of this package on the main image , does that increase the click-through rate for low carb snacks and things like that ? Uh , most of the time what we've seen is yes , that's usually like .

The one thing that changes it is changing the image , because , if anything we've seen , no one really reads the titles that we've been changing . It doesn't do much commercially wise , but it makes us kill it . Even if you add text to the image , people are more likely to read the image from what we've seen , and are you just ?

Or are they kind of the same thing where it's like , well , nobody actually reads those , right , what are your kind of thoughts there ?

I'm not getting it today , but where the first and second image are appearing now in search and , like you can , kind of , if you hover over it , it will flip between the two , so we've been testing if we do see that pop up like bigger call outs on our second image , to try and at least be be readable in search , because I've seen a lot of times where

people try and do this in search and the text is so small by the time it's actually there it's not even worth putting it there .

I don't think I've come across that one yet , but I'll have to go take a look now , after this .

What are some of the things that you've done to that main image to increase those conversions you talked about ? You know , applying a label around maybe a product package , even though it's not actually on that particular package . You're just photoshopping it in .

What are some of the other things that you've been able to do that have worked successfully , as you've tested this out multiple times ?

We have a tool I'm actually blanking on the name right now , but it'll search a keyword and basically take a full page screenshot of that keyword every day and then they're kind of looking and seeing what products come into the first page of search for that keyword and we aren't really caring what products come in , we're caring what that main image looks like .

Like , we compete a lot in the keto bar space . Almost everyone in the keto bar Like if you search keto bars , you're going to see a bar and then a box behind it and it's just like okay , they're all exactly the same . So what can we do to to stand out as a whole from that and really just get that click through as quickly as possible ?

And you'll see a lot of people like breaking terms of service and putting like flavor call outs where they put like bits of chocolate and different things like that . It's just , you can play that game , but you're going to get caught at some point .

We'd rather just change the actual like packaging of the product a little bit in the image and a lot less likely to get like flagged by amazon internally .

Um , yeah , but we , we mess with the colors , we mess with making certain text , things bigger , really all different types of things because , like , at the end of the day , I've learned we have no idea what the what the heck's going to convert like . I don't . I , we sell keto products .

That's like our best seller of one of , like my personal brands , and I don't even eat keto foods . I've never . I did keto diet once , like a month , and that was it . So I'm not the end customer . I don't exactly know what I want to see .

I'm just putting up what , like , market research tells me , and nine times out of ten , we've found that a lot of those market research studies , like those people are lying or just like filling it out nonchalantly to get paid on the internet . So , yeah , we test everything nice and mainly through pick food then .

That I think is pretty amazing as well , because they go a bit further , where you can add in like all of your top competitors and they'll make it look like an Amazon search results and then you get like different things . You can change your star rating , competitors , star ratings , like it's really cool .

But we've been doing something basically like what IntelliV's been doing for years .

We just had our graphic designers mock up Amazon search results and then we were using Amazon MTurk to actually do it , because it's so much cheaper and with MTurk you can actually put one of your settings as an Amazon customer who has bought in a certain category within a certain timeframe .

So we know we're getting people that bought within the protein bar space within the last like 90 days , so should be a pretty engaged customer for our audience and we try and get a few thousand people through .

It literally takes an hour , maybe like two hours , to get that many people through and we'll test like six or seven different things , and then we'll run split tests on Amazon with them .

The big piece that's kind of when we were doing it ourselves we couldn't figure out is , we don't know , like when the peak traffic times are on Amazon , like we obviously can get like hey , mondays are awesome , things like that but we don't know what's happening in specific categories or how it's all kind of correlating down .

So yes , we can switch out the price , the images and things like that , but you can't really get a correlation to any of that since we don't know the other variables that are there . We're hoping that Amazon takes those variables into consideration when they are doing these tests and that way we'll get a little bit better results from them ?

And really , yeah , the big thing that I think people forget as an amazon seller is take some time on like the app or the site and actually just be be a buyer . Put yourself in their shoes . If you go to any product on mobile , the bullet points are like three quarters of the way down the page . No one , no one's fucking reading your bullet points .

They're reselling other parts and things like that . So we're constantly competing for Buy Box , but they do have a lot of their own , I think , like 300,000 private label items that we just want to maximize price on Amazon as much as possible .

So they have some awesome tools that really they some of the smartest reprice I've ever seen , where you can set it like hey , increase my price by this percentage every two days , but if you see declining sales , like revert back to this price until you see a steady again , and like it'll do all kinds of crazy things . So can't recommend it enough .

And for the price , I think it's one of the cheapest repricers out there for really anyone , even if you're small or large . That's fantastic .

So we used to use this for all kinds of things , to be honest , like we used to use it for add to carts back in the day or like upvotes on reviews , because it was Amazon accounts . But you can pay like a penny for people to do this and get thousands of responses for like 10 , 20 bucks . Interesting MTurk is what you said . Right , that's just MTurkcom .

It's all fluff based on whatever's happening , which you can do the same and create your own manual roles . That will be way better . So that's why we ended up with Packy , because they allow you to not only use that AI if you want to , but you can set your own manual rules and really dig into things . We also use DataDive daily , brandon Young's tool .

I cannot say enough good things about that . I think you probably use it as well , like anyone that's , anyone in the space is using data dive . Um , it saves hours upon hours of work for us . Yep makes sense , makes . Yeah , I'm trying to think if , uh , in ecom analytics , um , we , we use that quite a bit as well because they do .

Before the search query report , they were the best way to pull like estimated sales from the brand analytics data . I'm not exactly sure how they were calculating it , but it was pretty close , um , so we used it quite a bit fascinating those are some awesome tools .

So let's rewind and go all the way back to PPC , right ? So you're starting with these two campaigns . We talked about the exact campaigns .

We got off on a tangent of product optimization from hey , if your conversion rate is not where it should be and that's the key thing that I think you've summed up so well , matt is like you're just looking at the conversion rate and then you do all that troubleshooting . If your conversion rate isn't up to par , then what's the next approach , matt ?

Let's assume our conversion rate is 10% . We're meeting that minimum that our other competitors have . Where do we go from there after those first 30 days ?

We'll bump that up and look okay , we increased our impression share last week by like 20 percentage points . What was our actual like increase in sales for that keyword ? You used to not be able to know this . You had to guess .

But you can use the search query report now and figure out your organic sales plus your ad sales for that week and you can see okay , incrementally I spent this much more to get that 20% more share . Is it actually quantifying out as more dollars in my pocket or a higher run rate for me as a whole ?

So that makes it super easy If we continue to see that we're like all right , let's keep spending and we'll keep bumping things up from there as much as possible . Only time we really back off is if we're ranked like number one .

But in a lot of the categories we're in , if you are ranked number one and you pull back ads for a couple of days you instantly fall to like number four or five because really you just lose some sales . So we're constantly checking that . We actually we use PackView to manage that .

They actually have a if my organic rank drops below this increase , my bid kind of role , which is awesome because we were having someone pull it in Helium 10 , drop it in a spreadsheet and then they were uploading bulk files and it was a pain in the ass .

We're trying to get people to get out of that mindset of ACOS and tacos and direct ROI on ads , because Amazon is turning more into really it's a brand-dominated space and you have to build the audience , build the brand and continue to grow that and that costs money .

So , like one of our kind of hero brands that I'll actually share a case study over with you afterwards we can kind of run through some of it here . But they came on with us about a year , year and a half ago . They were doing about $10,000 a month in sales . We'll close out this month at about 5.7 million .

And the main difference is they came to us saying we want to have like a 15% ACOS and I'm like yeah , we can do that , but you're leaving so much on the table . And basically the founder came to me like mid COVID and they were just like hey , we , we've got this much money left .

We've got to make this work If it doesn't work , like the company's going to fold , what should we do ? And I was like , all right , well , we can easily spend three $400,000 a month on ads . We had been spending 200,000 up until this point .

Um started spending that that month , raised it to 150 the first month , about 225 the next and then about 350 in the third month . What we saw is , yeah , our , our ACoS was 120 , 130% , but our repeat purchase on these customers was almost 67% . So we were acquiring people for um . I mean , it all goes back to to what , what the price of your product is .

They were selling a $19 product , so 120% ACoS is really only like a $23 , $24 CPA , which if you're sending traffic to your Shopify site like I , would take that CPA Sure . So we related it all back to that . We're seeing all right , as long as this person continues to purchase for this many months , this is what our profit will be .

And we really kind of edged and estimated our LTV of a customer at that point and we spent towards LTV . As long as on LTV we were breakeven , we were just spending money and , like our A cost was two , 300% some months , like straight up , but now we're running at a steady state of about a hundred percent ACOS across all their products .

A year later , uh , we're acquiring around 12,000 new subscribers a month on our products . That's not all not people that repeat purchase , but people that actually subscribe and save and then our repeat purchase rate is still above 40% . So amazing it's , it's absolutely dominating .

We have over a million and a half dollars in subscribe and saves that go out every single month and they're just like , continue to spend , like if we can keep spending more , let's , let's spend and it works to be able to be willing to basically acquire customers at a loss is because you know the data behind it .

But it's the same math and model that goes into it with just a little bit of a tweak . And basically we were estimating this before . But with the search query report you can pull all this data and figure it out . We know exactly how many organic sales are happening for every single keyword .

We know if you're ranking organically for those keywords , this is what you should potentially get in sales weekly .

So our entire process for products that aren't super replenishable is hey , I'm okay spending at a 150 , 200% A cost if I can maintain that number one or number two organic ranking because I know it's going to pay me back on the sales from those rankings .

And we run everything based off of that model and use a lot of those like , if I'm in this position , decrease my bid and we kind of ride out those top organic placements until they start to drop .

So we'll pause our ads if we're in position one or two , and then we'll turn them back on once we're like in position four or five , and we just keep riding that wave and that's how you make that profitable .

And then ultimately you're , you're counting on the fact that , like , if you're just getting more money down the road , right , like , do you run into cashflow issues that way , you know , with some of these brands and what do you do about that ? Right , Cause it does take money up front . That money goes out the door real quick with that .

We have like 40 employee cards that we just we keep rotating our ad spend through , so we keep getting that forex multiplier you get it , so you get that for every employee card that you add to that it adds on 150 000 for every employee card that you add .

So we pay our gold cards with our plum card , which then gives you another 60 days to basically pay your ad spend . So we're looking at like 90 to 120 days on average is when we're like having to actually pay those ad bills With not taking any loans or anything like that . It's just arbitraging these credit cards .

You do pay a slight percentage on the billcom ACH through the credit card . I think it's like 1.2 , 1.3% , but it's nothing . We just add that into our cost of advertising .

So it's made for small businesses that may have to carry sums for longer than what your average credit card period is . Okay .

Uh , and the nice thing with the plum is it's not a rolling billing period like most credit cards , it's actually from the day you spent that money . So if you spend $1,000 on the 1st of October , you don't have to pay that back until the 1st of December , and it's only that $1,000 , even if you spent $500,000 in October .

I'm going to have to add this now to the beginning of the podcast to say , hey , now we've all we're including , like cashflow um information , because I think that's so many people overlook that and it becomes a challenge real quick for brands that are growing rapidly and so being able to do that without you know , I think there's there's a lot of financing

partners out there in the Amazon space now , as we all know . But my goodness , like if you take a look at the interest rates , like it's beyond ridiculous .

But we just wanted to prove a point because someone was like , well , your product's only successful because you're putting this much money behind it and losing money for four months to make money at the end . And what we did is , if you have a small budget , a lot of times people go for way too many keywords .

Still , like I see it time and time again , they either go for super small keywords which you can do , like under 1500 , like 3500 searches a month , like , yeah , you can do that , you can rank for those , but it's going to take a very long time to actually build your sales up .

And by the time you do get to that point where you can start to spend some money , your honeymoon period's gone . All the stuff that helps you rank with the big boys from the beginning is gone .

So what we would tend to do in a strategy like that is pick one major keyword that's getting at least like 30 to 40,000 searches a month , and that is all we would go for on that entire launch .

And we know if we can rank in the top five for that keyword , you're going to pick up an extra six 700 sales per month organically and all of those small keywords that you're going to target anyways that have that one in it , you're going to rank for them . It happens every single time .

So we were able to launch a supplement it was a $20,000 ad budget for basically three months and we were able to rank it number one for the keyword we were going after and we picked up actually I can check it right now 35 other number one positions with that , for a total of 142 000 search volume in the top 10 per month amazing .

So big thing with Amazon associates or affiliates is Amazon cut their commissions tremendously I think it was like a year and a half ago from like seven to 10% to like one to 3% . It's basically nothing .

So Refersion , which is actually , I think , now owned by Sibulet and Packview and Helium 10 , they created a new Amazon version that allows you to link in your brand referral bonus and hand out affiliate codes to Amazon influencers through your brand referral , and not only can you basically pay them like whatever percentage you want , but like you can add kickers onto

it , you can do sweepstakes and things like that , depending on like who refers the most sales that month , and really push those buttons . So I think it's gonna be a huge game changer . We've only been doing it for a few weeks now and we're already seeing great results in the products that we're putting up against .

So probably a lot to come in that space and will be a number one spot that you kind of want to push things out to . Actually , the main reason we got into this is we did due diligence for a acquisition about seven months ago and through the process , what we found is this product that they were trying to sell this company for .

I think they exited for almost half a billion dollars , maybe a little bit more . They were constantly outselling everyone else that had the exact same product by like 60 to 70,000 units a month , and we couldn't figure it out for the life of us . And what ended up happening is we actually went to SEMrush and pulled all the backlinks for their product .

They were ranking number one in Google for so many freaking keywords because of their affiliate game for their D2C site that they had almost 80,000 people per month from Google clicking out to their Amazon listing and that's where every single sale was coming from .

As you've gotten started there , did you have to go and find the affiliates or did you just , you know , post your offer on reversion and allow you know whoever wanted to kind of sign up there , Because I know running affiliate programs is no small task , right , Like that's a job in and of itself .

And recruiting and maintaining and creating games , and you know , you know challenges to incentivize people . What have you experienced thus far ? I know it's really new for you .

But yeah , this is 100% a full time job and it's like I mean , you're basically selling yourself to these affiliates 24 seven and constantly trying to say top of mind . It is extremely hard to do and it's extremely hard to get the big ones , because everyone will pay them more and more .

But at the end of the day , what we've realized is sometimes it's worth just literally paying them like crazy percentages Like on some of our supplements we'll pay them like 90% of the sale just because of the traffic they can produce and what that does for us elsewhere .

Or you know , getting people's emails Like , how do you maximize that lifetime value if you're giving away the farm , so to speak , on that front end sale ?

um , because , like it used to be huge to do the like supplements . I'm sure if anyone's bought a supplement on Amazon in the last like three years , it's like go here to get a second bottle for free , like everyone does that . We're basically doing a very similar offer , but with an NFC chip that's hidden under the label so they don't realize it .

But NFC chips , as soon as your phone's near that bottle it's going to pop up and say there's something near and people are going to click that because they're like what the hell is near me ? That's making this happen . So we've had great results with that . Would highly , highly suggest it . They're dirt cheap . Like we thought it was going to be expensive .

They're like a tenth of a cent a piece to order these from . Oh yeah , super cheap and you can stick them on literally anything and everything . They're just like little little stickers , so super easy to implement that we just send them straight to a landing page and collect the information we also do do .

Direct mail still still works very well for us across our brands . Our average like age is 54 plus on most of our like my personal products I sell , so they still convert extremely well . Um , the other thing that we were doing that's gotten harder now because amazon's like blocked a lot of the data on both like full addresses and customer names .

We used to scrape those and do like data pins through a third-party data service so we could try and retarget those people on like , facebook or other platforms .

Yes , like a lot of people win free bottles but there's other chances for coupons and things like that .

And then what we're doing from there is , once we have their phone number or their email address , we're pinging them within that first week and basically giving them an offer that's valid on both our D2C site as well as Amazon , and whichever offer they pick from that email is basically how we communicate to them in the future .

So if they pick our D2C site , we're always going to send them to D2C . If they pick Amazon , we're always going to send them to Amazon from there on out , because we tested this a bunch on super large lists that we had and what we found is , when we gave them both offers , people don't like choice .

It converts way less if you give them the choice of which one to go to , versus just telling them . Here's the offer , here's where it's at , so use that first email , get their preference .

If they don't interact with that first email , they basically keep getting an iteration of that email until they react to one , and then they'll kind of follow our flows from there .

We have the brand referral bonus now , but prior to that , or even with that today , people would still make the argument of , oh , you'll have better margins , just send them directly to your DTC shop . So sounds like you have both going on . So what's your kind of strategy and recommendation there , matt ?

If you are not ranking well for a keyword , you can't arbitrage . So no matter what like say , I'm paying an affiliate an extremely high commission plus the Amazon fees , like it's all a cost of business on Amazon , it's all an ad as long as it meets my CPA thresholds .

I'm going to continue to do that because the more you can push sales through Amazon , the higher you're going to rank organically , the more you're going to benefit from just that traffic flywheel that Amazon allows you to arbitrage . So we're in Nausicaa . So where you go , we don't care , as long as you're coming to us and buying .

If you're like our , our main brand sells and whole foods , we're in Walmart , we're in Amazon , dtc , instacart I don't care where you're buying us from , I just want you to be thinking of us and buy . That that's it . So we'll touch you on every channel and whichever one you want to go to .

How am I going to pitch this offer to them and really tailoring it to that specific niche ? So for all of our affiliates , they will only send to one site per campaign . Most of the time it's either Amazon or our D2C site . I would say , like usually it's like 70% Amazon .

Just because we see , like we just did a campaign last week that I'm looking right now , our keywords in the top 10 for our main product went from 71 to 145 , with over 1.2 million search volume now in the top 10 , just from that affiliate push .

So yes , it costs me like $30,000 to do that , but the sales this week will probably do five 6,000 units a day on that one listing for the next week and a half .

They want to break into eight figures and beyond . So , matt , with your experience , you've done a lot of due diligence for some huge brands as well . What is it that you would recommend for those people that want to move to eight figures and beyond ? What should they be focused on ?

to cause problems . Um , it's when you start kind of twiddling your thumbs and you're doing stupid things like should I add this product to this variation ? Should I add this color ? And like none of these are going to move the needle incrementally in your business . Like you can add 20 different colors , it's not going to make a difference .

Um , so , really , focusing on new products and launching new products , we try and launch four to five new products a month , and if they don't perform , we kill them within three months .

Like it's a very quick to market , quick to kill , and what we've been seeing , though , is Amazon favors that , like all of our old products will get a huge boost when we are consistently launching new products on that brand . Whoa , like tremendous bumps . It's actually really surprising , and if you read some of the the Amazon like science papers .

I don't know if you've ever gone there . It's like Amazon Sciences If you Google it , you can find it and then search for . I think it's called Cold Start . Just search Cold Start and you'll find it .

But it's basically a white paper on the patents and how the algorithm works for Amazon and one of the key things is how many new products is this brand launching is how many new products is this brand launching ? So they're weighing that in and they're looking at as a brand . How many units do you sell on a monthly basis ?

How is that increasing month over month ? So , as long as you're launching new products , that should always be somewhat increasing . So you get favorable benefit from Amazon .

But the other big piece that I've seen and this is something that we just I would say like yeah , it's probably been about a year now that we finally figured this out and it was like man , why did we not think of this before ?

So like , pretend you're selling in the Guardian niche and you sell like one of those extendable hoses , because I see those everywhere .

At the end of the day , if you continue to launch products in that niche you're going to launch , let's do like an attachment for the hose like a spray nozzle , you're going to have an overlapping keyword subsegment of like 78 to 80% of your keywords because a lot of those products come with a free attachment .

It's like their free offer when you buy the product , kind of thing . What we do now and we use Datadive and actually a couple other tools to do this but we look and see okay , right now , how many keywords are we ranking in the top 10 for for this entire brand ? What are those keywords ?

Here's the 30 products in our product opportunity list , the top sellers for each of those keywords or each of those like sub-segments . Where are they ranking and what is that overlapping keyword relevancy ? So we're now , instead of launching like the next logical product as of that hose attachment , we're going to go to like a garden kneeling stance .

It's still in the same vertical , you can still brand it under the same brand , but that's almost 100% like non competing search traffic and you're basically , in a roundabout way , increasing your traffic back to your original listing because if you're buying like a kneeling stand for the garden , more than likely you're going to need a hose at some point .

So you're just continuing to build your brand kind of outreach through these new products without overlapping the same customers that you currently have .

No matter what we do , it doesn't matter if we switch the ad spend to higher on the ones that don't normally get those sales , it still goes to that one . So we're kind of like stepping away from keto products now as a whole and working on different like dietary restrictions , just to extend our reach a bit more but try and make it as varied as possible .

And again , that's what Amazon wants , right , they want brands to be bringing new products to their channel . Amazon wants to stay relevant . They want to be , you know , the place people always go to , instead of , you know , becoming an afterthought . So love that .

I think that's a huge mindset shift for a lot of sellers of just keep feeding the Amazon beast bringing out new products and then going back to you know you're quick to launch and then you're quick to kill After 90 days . Matt , you know how do you make that determination of like , yeah , this product's not going to cut it , we're just going to kill it .

What are the metrics that you use to make that call ? Because I think all of us , you know , and again , sometimes it's an emotional attachment to the product . For a lot of sellers it's like oh , I believe in this , I know I can make it work . Like , do you have a case study or two that you could share ?

That's like here's the product like it wasn't meeting these criteria . We did all of the optimization stuff that we talked about earlier in this podcast . Still didn't work and we killed it right ? Do you have anything you could share there ?

For us , our products have to make us at least like 75 , sometimes 100,000 a month , or we don't want to continue launching it or even like paying to play in that position because we know we can launch another product that will get us there and we don't have to worry um . So that that's the first thing .

If after like three to four months it's not hitting those targets or we're just not like mainly because you're not like sticking your organic keywords it , it's just not worth it to continue to to pay to battle that , because we aren't really getting any true benefit from it if we're constantly spending a ton on ads for it .

The second thing is actually user feedback . So we strive on having like premium products and we want to make sure that , hey , if our product is not the best that's on the market , we're going to take it off . We actually we launched a Keto G . Keto gummy did extremely well back in March . We were selling almost 2000 units a day across three flavors .

We ended up killing it three months in because we were kept getting feedback from our customers that like , hey , like there's something wrong with this , like we don't like the texture of it , it's just like it's too sticky this and that texture of it , it's just like it's too sticky this and that .

And we could see that our reviews were already starting to drop . We were like I think we had over a thousand reviews at that point . We were slowly taking down like 0.1 each week and I was like , all right , we're gonna hit like three stars in this product . That's gonna happen . So we figured , all right , we will kill it . And we lost .

This is only I think we lost almost three thousand dollars on . We killed it . We destroyed all the inventory . We had twenty thousand units still left um and we reformulated it and we're getting ready to relaunch it here um the end of next month . But for us it's like , hey , this brand is selling well across multiple products .

If this is your first interaction with our brand , you're never going to want to try another one of our products and we don't want to be putting that foot forward so up front . It cost us a lot , but in the long run it would have cost us 10 times as much .

Right , and as you so eloquently disseminated to us , you've got to understand that this is a much bigger picture . Amazon is moving into the whole brand space . You've got to be bringing a brand to the table . Kevin King was on the podcast . That's the one thing he talked about . He's like you've got to create an experience with the customer .

Long gone are the days of just slapping a logo or a brand name on a product and hoping that it sells . Well , you got to create this cohesive experience and you've established that with a lot of your examples here today . Man , definitely . Yeah , I've got another question I want to ask you , but I didn't want to cut you off there .

Did you have something else you wanted to add on to that ?

of our previous emails , when we just had that one only to followers , we were lucky if we got one sale . Our last four emails have all produced over $30,000 in sales .

So , matt , as we wrap things up here today , I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode . Here are three takeaways that I noted , matt , so let me know if I'm missing something .

I mean , we could go this list could honestly be like a hundred takeaways from today , but the three that I kind of highlighted and these are big overarching themes and then you could , you know , dive deeper into these . But I think number one takeaway is you have to be launching new products aggressively , right , quick to launch and then quick to kill products .

That's your number one takeaway . If you're not focused on finding your next new product , you're already behind the eight ball . You should always have a pipeline of , you know , 18 months , two years , three years worth of products that you know you're going to be coming out with .

Number two is focused on EPC optimization when launching a product and getting rid of the whole thought process of what's my ACOS , what's my TACOS percentage . Remove that and focus more on what is my conversion rate for those specific keywords and how is that comparing to my competitors , and you can see all of that data in brand analytics .

I think that's a big mindset shift that people need to implement today with their PPC campaigns , because you could forever spend money on a keyword , but if your conversion rate's bad , well , good luck trying to improve that performance of that right Yep .

And then , last thing that I have here as an action item is optimization , and one of the first things that you should be doing in terms of product optimization is focused on that primary image and then , depending on where Amazon goes with this , you know , flipping to a first and second image in the search results focus on that primary image and then even your

secondary image , making sure that it's readable . It's easy to understand , quick hit . Somebody can look at it within a second . They understand what that product's readable . It's easy to understand quick hit . Somebody can look at it within a second . They understand what that product's about , conveys a lot of value to them . And differentiating yourselves .

Um , now we have a lot of software tools that you , you shared with us as well to be able to implement many of these tactics here today . Matt , did I sum things up properly ? Anything else that you would add that I missed ?

We did this a couple of years ago and actually found out I was the bottleneck at like 90% of everything that was either not getting done or getting like tossed to the side for that period , and really either hire good talent that you can remove yourself from those pieces or rework the way that you're doing some of these processes to remove yourself in that

bottleneck , because it's you don't realize where most of your time is going throughout the day and you get stuck doing the same stuff . That doesn't really actually move the needle .

My final question for you is who in the e-commerce space should people be paying attention to or following ? You know to stay up to date with the latest trends or to stay ahead of the game when it comes to ranking on Amazon ? Who would you recommend , as some people , to pay attention to ?

Um , I think destiny , over at better ams , is always pumping out great content 24 7 , whether it's like on facebook or linkedin . They're doing some awesome things . Um , and I think there's anyone else outside of that Not many else that we're looking at right now .

Where can people go to learn more about you , your agency , and I think you also have a free gift , as like a free audit that you were going to give people right .