I spent $3,523,818.31 on Amazon PPC... here's the truth

I've spent over $3 million on Amazon PPC, and you probably hear that number and you might think that's outrageous. And I agree with you, that's a lot of money. I don't even know how I spent that much money. And I'm going to go ahead and show you guys proof because there's always this misconception on YouTube that if you don't show proof, um, you're a phony, you're a fake, you're a fake guru, whatever it might be, right? Obviously I don't care, but here is the proof. So you can see Maverick, a brand that I talk about a lot, $1.2 million, over $1.2 million. You can see Relax Support, just under $700,000. And then you can go ahead and see Factory Laced, which is over $1 million. And again, this is spend. This is not the sales that I'm going ahead and generating from Amazon PPC. This is just spend. So in this video, I'm actually going to go ahead and condense it down. And show you exactly what I've learned from Amazon PPC, because if I'm spending $3 million, it's obviously worth it, right? And you can search back on my YouTube videos. You can see that a lot of my popular videos are actually regarding Amazon PPC. So I hope that you think that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to Amazon PPC, because these are brands that I own. I am not an agency. I don't handle other people's PPC or anything like that. These are all mine. And I've outsourced to agencies before to try and run my Amazon PPC. And I fired multiple of them because one, no one's going to go ahead and care for your business as much as you are. And advertising is probably the most vital piece of actually scaling your Amazon FBA brand. So buckle up, you're going to get a lot of information here, but I do want to make one thing clear. In all my past videos, I used to actually go into my Amazon Seller Central account, into my Amazon advertising console and actually show you the backend of exactly what I'm doing. I'm not going to do that in this video. And the reason why I'm not going to do that in this video, and you guys are going to hate me for it, is because I've created like a mastermind group. And I feel like it's unfair for me to go ahead and show this type of value for free, as far as what I'm personally doing in my businesses. Right. Um, and hate it if you want, hate it if you're not. The thing is people pay valuable information or valuable money for this information. But I'm still, you're still going to go ahead and get a lot of value out of this. So if you are interested in that mastermind, um, the course, the people around, people in the actual community, there's going to be a link in the bio. I don't want to go ahead and pitch it, but that's the only thing I'm going to go ahead and say about that. But again, you're still going to get a lot of value because obviously $3 million is a lot of money. So what did I learn? Well, the first thing I learned with Amazon PPC is that there is a funnel taking place. Right? And you're going to go ahead and see this funnel right now, which is testing, gathering information, harvest, get rich. And that means more sales equals better ranking. So in turn, we're not basically wasting our money here, right? We're going ahead and spending money because eventually we're going to get organic ranking as well, especially when you first get started. So we're going ahead and using Amazon FBA or Amazon PPC as a flywheel to go ahead and get more information. And again, I'm gonna try and go ahead and just do one take. I hate going ahead and editing these type of videos. So if I make a mistake, if I pause, if I— whatever it might be, you guys are gonna get the raw, unedited version. And if you hear my dog, I'm sorry, he's outside right now, but he likes to go ahead and bark. But here it is. So what is the first phase of this actual funnel? So let's say you're starting brand new. You have no idea what you're going ahead and doing with Amazon PPC. You're watching all these videos and somebody went ahead and told you about auto campaigns. Well, great. You're off to a good start when it comes to Amazon PPC. So as you can go ahead and see here, move myself out the way. This is your top of funnel to try and gather as much data as possible. You're throwing spaghetti at a wall and finding out what is going to actually stick and work. And within auto campaigns, there are 4 different types of groups. One is close match. One is loose match. One is sub— substitutes, and one is complements. And there is this misconception that I used to always have that close match and loose match are the only ones that actually work because you're gathering keywords, right? Because usually with close match and loose match, you're going ahead and targeting key— or Amazon's going out there and trying to find keywords that are going to convert for your actual product. And for supplement or for substitutes and complements, they're finding other products to advertise on where you get a sale. I used to always say that close match and loose match is the best of the best, but I've changed my tune because of data that has come out. And there are some substitutes and complements that actually show keywords as well. So what I like to go ahead and do is when I first get started on launching any new product, I always make 4 auto campaigns. I turn 3 of them off and turn one of them on, which is a close match, a loose match, a substitute, and a complement. That is, you know, an independent campaign. And the reason why I go ahead and do that is because I don't want to commingle different data that Amazon is trying to go ahead and gather for me, because auto campaigns are going to be, I want to say, the lifeline of your entire campaign structure. And I say that because I don't pause any of my auto campaigns. A lot of people, when you listen to Amazon or, you know, information on Amazon will tell you, once you gather enough information, you don't want auto campaigns because they're just going to go ahead and bleed your budget. That's not the case. I've had multiple auto campaigns that have actually been the most spend on my accounts. And I would go back and show you, but again, that's what the link in the bio is for, right? So again, do not pause these ever because these are constantly trying to go and get you more and more sales. And sometimes you're actually able to get certain keywords that cost a lot, cost per click, and we'll get into all that in a second, you're actually able to get them cheaper here on the auto campaigns. Don't tell me why, that's just how Amazon goes ahead and works. And I also have here, only negate if you know that keyword or product will never convert, right? Because there's all this misconception that you want to go ahead and start negating a bunch of keywords that are getting a lot of clicks and not a lot of sales. My thing is that If there is a golden keyword, I'll use this for example, my shoe cleaner, right? Shoe cleaning kit is probably one of the most vital keywords in my category niche for one of my products. If I have an auto campaign that's going ahead and generating clicks for shoe cleaning kit, let's say I get 20 clicks and no sales, right? I still would never go ahead and negate that keyword. Why? Because that keyword is very vital to my ecosystem. And that's how you got to go ahead and think about that, right? You can also create competitor ads here as well. So you can, in this whole auto campaign section of where you're testing, you can also create some manual campaigns where you're targeting the competitors that you think, well, you'll go ahead and get a sale from, right? So obviously when you come out with this product, you're going to have competitors. You're going to have some other products that you think you can go ahead and compete with. This is a good place of going ahead and testing out that theory. Okay. So then we, we're going to go ahead and watch the bid modifiers. And you guys know what bid modifiers are. If you're watching this video, that means top of search, rest of search, and product placements, right? Product pages. So you want to go ahead and watch and optimize these bid modifiers as you're getting data. So if you see that you're only getting product pages clicks, that means you have to go ahead and up your bid, right? So you can go ahead and get it rest of search, top of search. If you're only going ahead and getting rest of search and product pages, go ahead and increase the bid modifier on that top of search. I hope you go ahead and get what I'm saying here. The thing is that these auto campaigns are testing grounds, right? We're trying to gather as much information as possible because you and I can think that a certain keyword is going to convert, but we don't know until Amazon's tested it. For us, right? And there's going to be a lot of different long-tail keywords that we're going to go ahead and find out as well based on these auto campaigns, because we can't possibly know every single keyword that people are typing into Amazon that converts into a sale, right? And I start saying here, start optimizing. And what I mean by optimizing is go ahead and fix those modifiers, right? Go ahead and heighten them when you have to go ahead and lower the actual bid and heighten them. The list goes on and on as far as what you can go ahead and do as far as optimizing is concerned. But once you start gathering this data right now, we're not going to go ahead— so what people like to go ahead and do is once they gather, let's say, you know, 3 orders, what some people like to do is they want to go ahead and group all of these keywords together and start making a campaign there. And I don't like to go ahead and do that. The reason why I don't like to do that is because there's only going to be a select few keywords that you want to make single campaign or a shortlist of campaigns for. This is all going to make sense as I go forward, right? So let's go ahead and just go to the gathering information portion of it, right? So this is when we start going ahead and actually making manual campaigns of keywords. This is where you're going to go start testing these keywords and gathering as many converting keywords as possible. So now we're pulling a different lever on Amazon. Not only are we pulling the lever of auto campaigns, now we're going to start creating manual campaigns. But there's a few caveats to that. We're only going to go ahead and make broad match campaigns, phrase match campaigns, and expanded competitor targeting. Right? So let's go over broad match campaigns. Again, I don't know the knowledge factor of people going ahead and watching this. If you're an experienced Amazon FBA seller, if you're brand new, I would want to hope that you guys know exactly what broad match, phrase match, and expanded competitor targeting keywords is. But if you don't, let's go ahead and just go over a quick little summary of it. Broad match means if I'm going ahead and targeting that word shoe cleaning kit, right, I'm allowing Amazon to not only target shoe cleaning kit, I'm also allowing them to go ahead and anything resembling shoe cleaning kit. So that can be sneaker cleaning kit, that can be sneaker cleaners, right? It can be shoe cleaners. It can be shoe cleaner kit. There's all these different broad match keywords that Amazon can go ahead and target if I'm telling it that I want something to resemble shoe cleaning kit. Which again, this is a gold mine. I'm telling you, if you guys aren't running broad match campaigns, you're leaving so much converting power, um, on the table, right? I don't even know if that's a saying or not. Obviously that's money on the table, but whatever, you know what it is, right? All right, phrase match campaigns. This is becoming less and less popular, especially when you go ahead and start like, you know, adding the plus sign to these broad match campaigns. And I'm not going to go ahead and confuse you with that. That's a different video for a different day. That's That's somebody that if you're really, really advanced and you kind of want to get extra strategies, you can go ahead and do that. But phrase matching means that I'm targeting shoe cleaning kit and anything that comes before or after it, but shoe cleaning kit has to be a word that I'm telling Amazon to go ahead and target. Right. And then expanded competitor targeting means that I'm expanding not only that exact competitor that I'm going ahead and targeting here in the auto campaigns, but I'm also telling Amazon that go ahead and target other competitors that resemble the competitor that I'm trying to go ahead and target. And that might sound a little bit confusing, but let's say I want to go ahead and target, uh, Jason Markk, um, shoe cleaner kit, right? But I want to know anybody else that's going ahead and being related to that specific shoe cleaner. Maybe it's RESHOEVN8R, maybe it's Pink Miracle, maybe, you know, Krepp. And I'm sorry that I go ahead and I'm naming just like different brands. It's just that I've been in the industry of shoe cleaners since 2018 that You know, I kind of know my competition, competitors inside and out. All right. So once you go ahead and start getting all this information back, and again, you're going to go ahead and start doing, you know, bid modifiers, you're going to go ahead and start testing them. What I want you guys to do is once you start going and how do we get these keywords, right? So we're getting these keywords based on these matches, right? So once we start gathering data on search terms reports and everything like that, and once we start seeing that particular keywords are converting, For example, let's say shoe cleaning kit, like I mentioned before, we're going to put that into a broad match and we're going to put that into a phrase match, right? And we're going to start getting a bunch of different subsets of keywords. Okay. Okay. So we get there. So harvesting, what does harvesting mean? Right? Once we start getting those keywords that are actually getting sales, and again, you have to know your conversion rate. You have to know exactly how many clicks it takes for a keyword to actually convert. So we know what are good and what are bad. Keywords to go ahead and harvest. Obviously, if we have, you know, an ACOS of 90%, but we have 10 sales, obviously that might not be a keyword to go ahead and try and harvest away from, right? Maybe we could go ahead and lower bids, see if we actually start still getting clicks and start getting sales once we get to a threshold of actually being profitable with that keyword. So harvesting just means that we're taking information and we're going to go ahead and pull these keywords and put them in a single keyword or a different type of subsegments of keywords on Amazon that we're going to go ahead and target on exact match. And we'll get to it right now. Obviously this might be confusing you guys, but hopefully if you guys know about Amazon PPC, you're staying with me. All right. And again, that's why I'm stating here, you're going to negate based on conversion rate, right? Example, 50 clicks, only 1 sale. Maybe it's time to negate, but obviously this is not one size fits all. I have products that are at a $250 price point. That obviously convert at a lower threshold than my $16 product, right? So this all ranges from the data that you have. That's why data is really important. And you have to understand all the pillars of Amazon FBA in order for you to go ahead and scale your business. Okay, let's go forward. So it says optimize bid modifiers as needed, check for seasonality. This is huge, right? So seasonality is huge because you might not know if your product is actually seasonal or not until you have a dataset, or let's say you have a few years of Amazon data, right? So for instance, let's take one of my brands, Maverick, for example. I know that January is the worst month for Maverick. And it might be counterintuitive because Maverick is like a running chest pack weighted vest. So you would think that people who have New Year's resolutions would want to go ahead and buy more. So you would think it's the best month, but it's actually the worst month, right? So I'm not going to go ahead and make judgments based on seasonal products, right? So I know in January, I'm going to go ahead and optimize everything to be lower cost per click, lower modifiers, because I know that January is my worst month. So in turn, if I see a keyword like weighted vest, that's not converting, I'm not going to go ahead and negate it. Right. So this is why seasonality is important. You have to understand your niche. When are you getting the most sales? When are you getting the least sales and judge it from there, because you don't want to go ahead and negate a good selling keyword if you don't have to. Okay. So do not negate converting keywords no matter what. Again, same thing as these auto campaigns. You don't negate top keywords. For example, weighted vest. For example, shoe cleaning kit. I would never, never negate those keywords. I would lower those bids if they're not converting, but I'm not going to go ahead and cold turkey that. And you can get this information from like brand analytics. Like I put here, you can go ahead and see, one, what is your conversion rate based on other competitors? What's your click-through rate based on other competitors? What is your purchase rate based on other competitors, et cetera, et cetera. I hope that, you know, you get me with Brand Analytics so you can go ahead and get that information. You can also go ahead and start making— let's, let's say you don't want to wait for these, or you're not getting a lot of data from these keywords, but you're seeing that you're getting a lot of organic sales, right? Which, well, first, first off, congratulations that you're going ahead and getting a bunch of sales without doing a bunch of PPC because you have a game-winning product. But let's say you are getting, you know, more organic sales than anything else. And you can now use Brand Analytics to go ahead and start creating broad matches, phrase matches, based on what is already giving you sales on Amazon. So there is Brand Analytics. So again, what we're doing next is single keyword campaigns, hyper-focused on the top converting keywords. And this— you'll get different advice from different people when it comes to single keyword campaigns. And I used to be the type where if any keyword gave me, you know, a bunch of sales, or let's say 10 sales for a certain keyword, I would put them on an auto campaign. And I'll show you, this is the only example I'll show you, right? So let's actually get to this campaign right over here. You can see when I, when I go down here, I have 732 different campaigns that are running. Obviously That is overkill, like extreme overkill. So I've obviously opted not to do single keyword campaigns for every single keyword that actually convert, but that's why you watch a YouTube video to go ahead and get advice. That's why you joined the actual course and mastermind to get even more advice in my actual seller accounts, right? Again, I'm not trying to pitch it, but if you're interested, link in the bio. Okay. What does it say here? Amazon does not compete if you are targeting the same keyword. Also a misconception. People say if the auto campaign has it, you have broad matches, go ahead and negate them from both auto campaign broad matches, phrase matches, and only have it running as a single keyword campaign because you don't want to compete against yourself, right? And this is completely false. Amazon has come out repeatedly saying that you are not competing against yourself. You are only competing against other competitors, right? So again, you can believe, you can choose to not believe Amazon, but based on my experience, they are telling the truth there because I have a bunch of different campaigns that are targeting the same exact, same broad, same phrase match. And I only get, I only get impressions or spend based on a certain campaign, right? And this can be different. Maybe one campaign is getting a bunch of spend on product pages. A different campaign is getting a bunch of spend on rest of search and different campaigns getting it for top of search, right? So it can be spread out that way. But you are not competing against yourself. Okay. Only make a single keyword campaign for top converting keywords. And this is huge, right? Obviously I don't know your niche. I don't know your product, but you obviously know, you obviously should know the search volume on certain keywords. You only want to go ahead and make independent keywords or converting keywords if you're going to go ahead and get impressions and you're going to go ahead and get clicks. Right. So don't worry, don't worry about shoe cleaning kit for my Yeezys that are 3 years old. Right. Don't worry about those keywords. Only go ahead and go after keywords that actually have search volume. Okay. So let's get into it. So this is where the magic happens, but it can get too overwhelming if you have too many. Again, that's what I'm trying to go ahead and say, as far as you have too many keywords in one, you know, on your actual advertising console, right? And then bid modifiers is crucial and why you do this. So bid modifier, exactly. So what I'm trying to say here is this is the reason why, because bid modifier is going to be a game changer because now you're able to go ahead and actually use this bid modifier, sorry, based on certain keywords. So if you know a keyword does well at top of search, you can go ahead and identify that really quickly. If it's doing better at rest of search, you can identify that really quickly. Again, check for seasonality. And obviously single keyword campaigns are only for exact matches Or else it can get very overwhelming if you have a broad match, a phrase match of all single keywords, right? Again, it says, do not panic if you do not see yourself at the top of Amazon. Okay. So this is another one, right? So when you're going ahead and doing these keywords here, you might go on amazon.com, you know, search up a different keyword or search up a certain keyword like shoe cleaning kit, and you don't see yourself at the very top. Don't panic because Amazon is A/B testing all the time. You are being seen. If you're getting impressions, you can look at that in the backend. You're going to be seen already. So don't worry about if you go online, because people that are going online in California and somebody going online in New York are going to get different people in the top of search placement. So again, don't panic. This is why Amazon goes ahead and does A/B testing and only picks the people that are actually converting for them, right? So check for seasonality. If you see ACOS shooting up again, same concept as we went ahead and went over previously, you have to go ahead and check for seasonality. So you only do that. You only have that if you have enough data to see what years prior did, right? And then stop worrying about cannibalizing organic sales here. There's a misconception that why am I going to go ahead and bid on a top of search and spend all this money on PPC if I'm already ranked number 1 or 2 organically, right? Again, Amazon is a pay-to-play type of service, right? Amazon wants people to— are going to go ahead and advertise people that are converting and making them money. The last thing you want is somebody else going ahead and taking your customer away from you. That is why you have to stop worrying about spending all this money. Like, this money is going to come back to you. People are going to choose you organically. When somebody purchases your product, even if you don't have a recurring type of product, eventually they're going to come back and buy the same product over again, regardless of what product you're going ahead and selling, right? Even if you're buying a dining— you're selling a dining room set, Maybe 5 years down the road, they're going to pick the same dining room set because they loved yours. Stop worrying about cannibalizing your own sales. This is an Amazon game. This is a long-term game. This is why you're building a brand, especially in private label. So again, stop worrying about that. All right. So let's get to it because I don't want to make this video super long, but here it is. Sponsor brands. This is the last step of your funnel to create a flywheel effect on Amazon. Without top-level funnel, you will end up losing money. Okay. So if it's good enough for a single keyword campaign, it's going to be good enough for sponsored brands and sponsored brands are a good, good, good, good type of advertising strategy. You get a lower cost per click. If it's good enough for a single word campaign, make it a sponsored brand for it. And negating is still key here because even if you're running an exact match on sponsored brands, I'm sorry to tell you, Amazon's still going to go ahead and target other keywords. And that's just the name of the game with Amazon with sponsored brands right now. Hopefully in the future, they'll go ahead and change that. But for right now, you have to look at the search term reports. You have to go ahead and negate some keywords that, you know, just aren't converting. But again, if they're good enough for a single keyword campaign, they're good enough for a sponsored brand campaign. And right here, you can go ahead and group them together. So you don't have to have single keyword campaigns. You can go ahead and get all the best single keywords and shove them into a sponsored brand campaign and see what Amazon data gives you back. Top of search is still best converting for me, but test it for yourself. Right? So you can go ahead and do top of search only and like have, you know, negative 99 as far as like what your bid strategy is going to be with sponsored brands campaign. Just test it for yourself before you actually do it. Um, display is good for retargeting. So sponsored display, I've worked with it before. Obviously I'm not an expert with DSP or anything like that because, um, I don't want to spend so much money on an agency that has it or anything like that. But I've realized that DSP or display isn't quite there yet and doesn't give— it's very, very top of funnel is what I'm trying to go ahead and say. So don't worry about, you know, sponsored display here. You're only going to go ahead and do it with targeting— retargeting, I'm sorry. And usually it's retargeting after 7 days of viewing your product. So that's a golden nugget there. But again, this is my— I'm sorry, this really quickly. I just didn't want to make the video super long, but I still want to go ahead and give you guys value. So again, if you guys are interested in my perspective, this and that, one-on-one coaching, mastermind, getting with people that are like-minded individuals like you, getting to see my backend and seeing my strategies, hit that link below. But if you got any value on this video, again, I'm not trying to pitch you, but I have to go ahead and pitch you just because I have a team around me now and we have to go ahead and make some sales on this course that I have now. But again, it's one of the best ones out there. But again, I'm not trying to pitch it, but if you got any value on this video itself, I really would appreciate a like on this video, comment on it to see if these strategies actually work or if I'm BSing you, right? So again, until next time, guys. Peace.