How I Doubled My Amazon Sales With PPC

Gut feeling is good at a certain point, but if you really want to grow heavily, data is so much important. Data, it's a source and you should really go into that.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. It's your host, Neil Twa. As always, like, share, comment, engage, leave me some love or hate comments. I don't care. Just give us some engagement and help us beat big tech so my guest today can hear what's going on. You can hear what's going on and you wanna listen to what she has today. We're talking about SaaS, Amazon PPC optimizations, and of course making more money and more, most importantly, more profits. So if you are interested in making more profits in your Amazon business or your DTC world, then please pay attention to this episode because Stephanie's gonna drop some good stuff for us today. So. Welcome to the call.

Thank you for having me here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you. Well, tell us a little bit about you real quick, like your background. How'd you get into this and where'd you find your love of PPC?

Oh my God, I hope you have enough time. So, so first, I grew up in East Germany. So if any of you or the listeners may be asking what kind of sentence was that, I learned Russian, the most, not the most popular language anymore. So please be patient if maybe not sentence make 100% sense. In my opinion, every sentence makes sense.

Every sentence.

And it works out.

I talk fast, so I'll try to make sure we, we combine the 2 things into one really great conversation. I'm sure you'll be just fine. No worries.

I'm a passionate entrepreneur since now 25 years. I start very early and to be honest, when I start my first startup, I had absolutely no clue what I'm doing. With my second startup 13 years ago, that is what we are talking about today. I thought about I know everything and I would say after 1.5 years I was on the same position. Okay, I have to learn a lot to grow that business because my first company was a really a small company. We worked for banks, so we optimized stock portfolios. We had a small group of clients and we worked with an AI algorithm.

Okay.

And back then, if you mentioned to anybody AI, everybody was totally scared. What is that? We know all AI is a big thing. So, but 25 years ago it was, it scared everybody. I would say even 3 years ago everybody was scared a little bit. And I jumped from my first into my second business. Again, not very planned because with our first business everything was running quite smooth and we thought about what can we do next with our AI algorithm? And we found out that there is a similarity between stock markets and online marketing. And that is auction-based system. So, totally naive, we jumped into our new business starting optimizing Google accounts and yeah, and we ended up with Amazon. Corona was one part of that, but we also thought about, and very important, maybe one of my first tip, if you be an entrepreneur, you have to focus.

Mm-hmm.

Even their clients, they want to give you money and you need desperately that money. At some point you have to make a decision and not following every money. That is, for instance, what we did for a long time. We were not focusing enough. the beginning, we worked for Airbnb, but we also worked for small companies. They just want to getting leads, uh, from Google. So we were not really focused. And at some point you figured out working for everybody is not driving us really good. It's not bringing us to the next step and next level with our company. So then we thought about what is our ideal customer profile. I did that, I think, to building the ideal customer profile, I think maybe 10 times. And every time I find something new out. So we did that 5 years ago and then we saw about our ideal customer profile is an e-commerce customer because they're most happy with our profit optimization.

Okay.

And so we thought about it, okay, we have to be more focused. And that was the breakthrough for our company. We are now working only for e-commerce customers. Our main platform is Amazon. We are focused on regions. We go region by region. And that's helped us. But on the other part, we had also some money on a bank account to go that road. So when I say don't follow the money, follow a strategy, you need some money.

No, that's great.

It's, it's purpose, what I call purpose over profits. I mean, profit, profits are obviously, obviously very important. I talk about it a lot in everything we do in the podcast and the business and the numbers and things that we run. But if you don't have purpose and you put profit over purpose, you're going to fail.

Mm-hmm.

And what you're really talking about there is the purpose-driven strategy, the reasons why you're doing it and, and the intent behind it.

Yeah.

So the profits will follow, if I heard you correctly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That is also what I learned.

Yeah.

And I would say also be open-minded for new concepts in the market.

Okay.

For instance, in the past we worked a lot with mission, vision, and every time we had new employees, of course, onboarding process, mission, vision is very important. I struggled a little bit to distinguish between mission and vision. Every time I prepared myself to explain it very good, And then I checked in the market, maybe there are other strategies with the same context. And what we found is BHAG is not as popular. For instance, Google is using it, Apple is using it. It means big inherent longtime goal. And that is what you, what would you like to reach? And you don't talk about mission, vision. When we built our, our BHAG, we want to be the most recommended solution for growing e-commerce businesses. And then with that sentence, it was so much easier. Everybody was understanding. And also internally, it was much better understandable. In our mission in the past, we tried to squeeze in every small piece, customer, what we want for AI. And it was a sentence nobody could remember, even me. And I was presenting it several times. And with that BHAG, Everything was so simple at the beginning. I can say the sentence with our mission 3 years ago. I could not remember that sentence. I need a small letter to read it.

Yeah, acronyms are good. In fact, on the BHAG side of the world, and I explain it, it's Big Hairy Audacious Goals.

Yes, thank you. Ah, you know it perfect.

Yeah, Big Hairy Audacious Goals are great, and it's good to have that vision. It's also good to remember to give yourself time and to not necessarily feel like this constant sense of urgency I get from folks that they're always behind. So they rush and they make mistakes and they don't test long enough and they don't wait long enough. What is a good amount of time from a campaign perspective when you say to your clients, okay, we're launching this campaign, this is our mission, here's our big hairy audacious goals. What's a realistic timeframe for them to set on that and really understand what it means in the timeframe?

Cool. Here in the German market, not a lot of people know that.

Well, we're not the general market, are we? But for people who are on here, what's What are the goal timeframes? Is it like I should be waiting for 30, 60, 90 days? Should I be looking at 180 days? What, you know?

So we set our goal for 10 years and then we break it down to a yearly goal and break it down. We use, we use a different concept for that. So I'm mixing up, I try to get from different concepts one individual here, um, uh, for AdSpot.

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. And what kind of brand, is there a predominant segmentation of brands that you work with on clients, or is it kind of a broad range of niches and brand types?

So we specialize more and more into B, so the smaller group of clients, because we see their potential. Because for the big ones, for the enterprise, they're huge agencies, they have strategy builder, but for the smaller ones, they are by themselves and they're struggling with so many tasks.

Yeah.

And so we build, we, we made our tool quite easy to use and simple to set up goals. And that's why we've, we figured out over time that more and more smaller companies join our software and we investigate a little bit in that and we figured out, yeah, that is our future group of clients.

When someone's just starting a campaign, maybe their first one, what would you tell them?

Have a strategy and have money on a bank account. It really depends if you have one product, if, if you have 100 products, it depends, is it a, is it a What is the price of that product? I would love to give just $10, but it could be also $1,000. So it really depends.

It's the competition of the market, really. Yeah. Let's do just 1 to 5 products just so we can kind of define the 1 to 5 product person who's just getting going, maybe just launching products and starting to figure out it's, you know, some momentum is moving. So now they want to jump on their ads better, right?

Yeah, I would say at least $1,000 should be, you should invest in a month to go into that. I would prefer the answer, it depends. But I know when I talk to consultants, give me something. I give you some ideas, give me an answer. So it's always a little bit hard, but I see the point if you sit on the other side, give any clear answer.

Yeah, well, generally, and this is just our kind of gauge, we'd always say put 50 to 100 a day towards a test for the first 7 days, see the data over 7 days, and then from there, decide over the next 7 days, do you increase that or leave it the same depending upon how it's performing, but you need at least 7 days worth of data.

Yeah.

Would you agree?

And I would also, yeah, I agree. I agree. And also at the beginning, even it's painful, you have to spend a little bit more to get data.

You will. Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah. If you have one click or one impression, one click, one conversion, it doesn't mean it's worked perfectly.

Right.

Could be, but also 100 impressions, no clicks, no conversions. Don't say that keyword or that product isn't working.

Yeah.

So you really need a little bit of time and money also at the beginning. And at the beginning, I would say a little bit more and then to get fast data to fail fast.

Yeah. Well, in 3 days on Amazon and in this market, if you're doing at least 50 a day for 3 days, you're going to have enough statistical initial impressions and clicks and hopefully a sale to kind of guide the next 3 days, the next 5, 7 days out. Most people are getting the first couple of days and they're like, well, I haven't made a sale in the first 2 days and I've spent $50. And I'm like, you're just barely getting started.

Yeah.

You just, you need to have the chops to run advertising these days, don't you?

Yeah, definitely. It's, it's not as easy anymore as 6, 7 years ago where you can just with getting a product from China, putting some margin on it and sell it, even use all the Amazon tools for storage and everything. It's different days now.

It is different. Data has to be differently analyzed all the way through competition more so.

Yeah.

And that's, uh, definitely something we see ourselves dealing with more and more and we're building it into our data and analytic toolsets more and product opportunity data to really help define that competition better so we can really touch more of the organic at the beginning as much as possible before we start running ads.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. That's very important. Yeah, I agree.

Where would you say you're bullish this year in, as we go through the second half of 2024 at the time of this recording, what are you bullish on? What are you strong about? What are you excited about?

We growing our profit optimization part inside of AdSport. So I would say changed dramatically 2 years ago. Before, everybody was saying, yeah, profit optimization, yeah, it's interesting, but nobody was really jumping on it.

No.

It changed dramatically. Everybody is now desperately searching for the last dollar to find to run the business. We see a lot of clients struggling with competition, with everything around. And I went to a congress recently and everything, everybody was talking about reimbursement, How do I get money from Amazon back what I'm losing somewhere in that process? So everybody is searching for the last dollar.

Mm-hmm.

For surviving. Well, but we, on the other hand, we have also a lot of clients that is growing with some niche products.

So it's really— They are growing. We're watching a number of that occur too. And I wanted to talk about the differences in the, in the gap. I also wanna ask about Product Optimizer too. Mm-hmm. In terms of, of how that works. But there are, there is a separation and I, in our minds, in our study, in our history, in 12 years, of doing this on Amazon, it's basically coming into that $30 to $50 retail price point range. They're separating out those who are doing well are $50 to $100 in range, and those who are not doing so well are less than $30. And so obviously, is that what you're seeing as well? Yeah. Because it's just data and time and experience, and we're watching the data and it's showing that this is what's starting to separate. So the people who are trying to squeeze every last dollar are selling those $30 sub-dollar products. And those of us who are selling $50 to $200 in retail price point range are going like Fast, like faster than we can keep up with inventory at times. It's separating very quickly. It's fascinating to watch because I haven't seen that happen since I've been selling in the platform. Have you?

No.

Yeah. No. Now there's a lot of economic situations and socioeconomic situations occurring, especially in the United States, which I believe is part of a big part of your business base.

Yeah. It's also a big part, but we are also strong in the China, Chinese market and they struggling as well.

Yeah, they will struggle a lot more if I, if certain policies get into place here in the coming year with a possibility of threats of 60% tariffs and stuff like that. It's going to be a, for those of you who are paying attention to the Chinese situation with the geoeconomic conditions and this year we're an election year. If you're not paying attention to some of that, you should be listening to some of the cues because there's some things coming that may want you to change your ad strategy for sure. And your acquisition strategy, I see it as opportunity, blood in the water, as Warren Buffett says, blood in the streets. You need to go out and those would be bullish. On buying that market share. As those people actually fall out, you can fall into position very quickly to overtake market share. But ascend your brand. That's the second thing I always want everybody to know is to ascend your brand, product price points, take your differentiator, take your bundles, take your digital bundles and physical bundles and get them in there. Stop questioning whether or not you should do it and actually start getting there as quickly as you can.

That, that is really a good point. What we see here also in the European market, bundles are very important because Amazon is Comparing more and more what you sell on Amazon to all other places with the same product. And even you have a good price, they cut you off. They're monopolists. They decided for which, if they're accepting it, what, how do you sell it or not? And by bundling, you can overcome that problem.

Yeah, it's very smart. The third thing was just kind of optimization, right? Which I was gonna come to the profit optimizer question, but just optimization of your business. And we met with a lady yesterday and she's got like 6 SKUs if I'm not mistaken. But 2 of those are making up 88% of her profits. Now what she's done is actually expanded into the other product lines, which are great, but there's still— she hadn't found the additional variations that are selling more, and she's continuing to drop inventory into those and limiting the feed of the inventory on her top products. And so I'm like, you have got to cut the dead weight. If you were asking me to be your CFO for a second, I would draw a bottom line across any product that is not, you know, meeting the total profitability margin of your business. And I would take any inventory you thought you were putting into that money and get it all into the major units. And optimize your brand and remove those additional products from your seller account because they will drag down your seller performance. Most people don't understand that if your account history is green and you have underperforming SKUs with top performing SKUs, it's going to drag the account down. You have to get rid of those SKUs and just mark them inactive. Don't delete them, but just mark them inactive once they sell out. So that comes to profit optimization. And that was the whole point of that. Maximize your profit, maximize your money that you have available to deploy to capital and inventory that's going to beat your selling position and get that inventory level up for those top products. And then hang on, right? Um, because you're going to have a lot more sales for darn sure. So that the profit optimization of the business is what we were discussing on the ad side. You mentioned this profit optimizer. What does that do exactly? How does that work?

To be honest, it's quite simple. So usually the most tools doing a revenue optimization or a sales optimization, so driving more sales to you. And you usually, you set up a kind of a performance goal, but that is mostly an average goal. And you cannot be sure that every sale with ads is profitable.

Right.

What we do on top of the revenue optimization, we take into consideration all the cost of goods sold on product level, plus all the FBA and all the Amazon fees. You will find a lot of software outside for profit analytics where you can see all that data.

Yep.

But the next step is doing something with that data. So what you, for instance, suggested everybody then selecting products, how they sell it, when they sell it, try to optimize by price. What we do, we make sure that how we advertise this product, every sale is profitable inside just with adding more data than just the ads data. And then underlying it's the same AI algorithm. It's just putting more than just the revenue data and the advertising data and it's Product data plus. It sounds quite simple.

Yeah.

But a lot of companies struggling with delivering that data and it's challenging.

It is challenging. Well, and what ends up happening is if you get into the fundamentals of the business for a moment and you analyze their conversations, topics, and decisions and strategies, you find like the very lovely lady I met yesterday is just not aware of what strategy might be the most important or the outcome might be the most important for, for their businesses. They're struggling. To kind of just keep it moving without actually dealing with the business itself, the numbers.

Hmm.

They are, they're, they're kind of afraid to look at the numbers because of what it might mean. Is that, yeah. And so without looking at the numbers, they just keep coming over here to their ads and marketing and say, do more, we gotta make more money. And it's like, no, you've got 2 components here. Obviously sales and marketing and sales fix is everything, of course. But where are you not optimizing the business over here? Where are you not paying attention to the numbers over here? Where are you not looking at that average cost of sale? What's your lifetime value? If you're not acquiring that customer through PPC campaigns on Amazon, but you did acquire them even at 89% ACOS, now what are you doing with additional products to get the engine to put them in front of you? What are you doing with your packaging? What are you doing with any follow-up opportunities? And a lot of times that falls on deaf ears. It's just, they didn't do anything and they're not willing to do anything, unfortunately, but that is their opportunity.

Am I wrong?

Yeah. Or am I right?

You're absolutely right. And that is also, if young entrepreneurs ask me what is the most important thing, I say start with BI, start with building your KPIs and not just to see bad things, also see good things, what you maybe overlooked and spending then maybe more money. So data is, it, it's a source right now and you should really go into that. And gut feeling is good at certain point, but if you really want to grow heavily, data is so much important.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Any things you would want people to watch out for today as they're dealing with ads and profits and things? What would you make them aware of that they should maybe, from your opinion, make a change on maybe today, something you could do today?

Info bidding is very important. So if you do manual work, for instance, if you're not working with the PPC software like AdSpot, if you do it manually, it's fine. Everybody should follow his own Gut feeling, how you feel comfortable. I always recommend a PPC software. It's go— it's trying to run, to win a race with a bicycle against the car will win.

It's changed quite dramatically, hasn't it? Machine-to-machine competition is basically what we're dealing with now, right?

Yeah. So really try to find a software for you doing that. If you feel comfortable with manual work, there, let me think about it. So in Twitter bidding, you can do it by yourself if you find the perfect, where you see the perfect days where you sell the most or the time slots. And there are a possibility where you can set up percentages where you manually can increase several time slots. So really going into the data, checking these kind of data out and increasing not a bid, increasing a bid adjustment. I'm sorry, I'm not 100%. I'm missing right now the functionality name of it. It's somewhere in the near of, yeah, budget rules. Sorry, budget rules. I think it was budget rules. And don't go to the bid, go to the budget rules. That was something where I'd say investigate in that if you're working manually.

Yeah. Once you get some impressions, clicks, and sales coming in, your CPC is right where it probably should be. So increase your budget. Exactly.

Yeah.

Very well said. Is there something I didn't bring up or a question I didn't ask you yet that you would like to cover?

No, that's awesome. Yeah.

Well, guys, in case it wasn't clear, there is a software that she's referring to, a PPC management engine with AI backend and profit optimization. You should definitely check that out if you're looking for some additional ways to gain profit from your products. And this is— oh, which asks, do you do Kindle-like advertising books too, or just on the PPC product side itself on the physical?

No, really every campaign type, inclusive of vCPM. So that vCPM, by the way, that's maybe— thanks for bringing that Mm-hmm. The Kindle Summ, I jumped to vCPM. I hope I pronounce that correct. It's a most overlooked campaign type. So you should go into that because if you're not going, if you are not a larger one, don't go with DSP and all that stuff. In vCPM TV stuff going on. So Amazon is pushing that campaign. It's a really small one. It's not on CPC basis. But it's definitely worth to have a look into it.

Good, good. Definitely check that out, folks. So last question I usually kind of like to ask people just to get a little bit into their brain and who they are. But if there was someone that in my network or even in all time and space that I had the capability to introduce you to that you might want to meet and sit down and have some coffee with and just kind of pick their brain for a little bit, who would that person be? If it's somebody alive, we might even tag them in the comments and you might be able to—

To be honest, having a chat with our former chancellor, a chancellor here in a German market, would be quite interesting. She really survived for 16 years in a man-dominated world. I would say not every legacy is perfect, but she brought a long stability here in the German market. And I think having a chat about that could be quite interesting, especially in these challenging times.

Is that Merkel?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I don't know her personally, but you know what they say about 6 degrees of separation. We always like to call that. There may be somebody who is, so tag them in the comments below. Guys, check out the show notes, check out the software if you want to Do you guys have a free trial or something that they can do?

Yes, yes. Yeah, we have a free trial for 30 days and webinars and all that stuff.

Well, yeah, I'd encourage you to check it out, see how the Profit Optimizer works. If there's a 30-day free trial, there's nothing for you to lose to go in and maybe compete against your current software you might be running, or if you're not running a software, you should be. So definitely check that out and see if it's worth it, and the link will be below. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for hanging out with me.

It was a pleasure.

If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand, plus how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us. If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209. And I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click Get Started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast.