Mike Zagare, is the founder of PPC Entourage and a serial entrepreneur. In this episode of “Sell Rank Win” Mike and Tommy discuss beginner and advanced PPC tactics that can have a measurable impact on your Amazon business right now.
Tommy Beringer:
What's up you data-hungry Amazon sellers. This is your host, Tommy Beringer of the Sell Rank Win Podcast from MerchantWords. And in this podcast, we give you the answers to your most burning questions, actionable insights that you can take away and implement into your business today. So let's go ahead and dive right into today's episode. What do you say? Let's go. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Sell Rank Win podcast. As always, we have a very special guest on with us today. He is a serial entrepreneur, a recovering physical therapist, and the founder of PPC Entourage. He has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in all things Amazon and loves sharing that knowledge with other sellers. And that's why he's here. And so without further ado, Mike Zagare from PPC Entourage. How are you doing today, Mike?
Mike Zagare:
Hey Tommy, fantastic. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for listening, and excited to share some really good stuff today.
Tommy Beringer:
Awesome. Awesome. If you could just start out and tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into e-commerce and your journey into the Amazon space, and then how you start PPC Entourage.
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. So my journey started back when I was a physical therapist. I was kind of one of those guys who woke up every day and miserable with my day. And I really didn't like to have to see 40 people a day and it was just taking its toll. So I started working with a coach and he introduced me to e-commerce in a really roundabout way. He basically told me, "Hey, you have a lot of energy and I see you working with imports and exports." And I was like, "What the hell does that mean?" Two days later, I get something on my phone. I don't know if Facebook was spying on our conversation, but two days later I get something on my phone and it was an advertisement for selling on eBay.
And I'm like, this could be decent. Let me check this out. And it was all about dropshipping on eBay. And then I tried that, failed miserably. Then it was retail arbitrage, which was a total waste of my time because it was more of a job than anything else. And then online arbitrage, which I actually closed down the post office in the process of starting an online arbitrage business, because I ordered like 500 units to the post office. And they called me up, they're like, "Dude, you got to get down here because we don't have enough trucks to get this to your house." And I literally had an army worth of Star Wars figures sent to my house. That's what it was. It was like three-foot tall Star Wars stormtroopers. So just imagine that.
And then I was like, you know what? This is not sustainable. And then I got into private label. And I had my first product. And really, I was one of the lucky ones that my first product was my best product. And it still is my best product. We took a product that was out there. We made it unique and different in the marketplace and we just got a lot of momentum and then built a brand off of that product. So one thing led to another, but in that year, advertising was, still in its infancy. But back then, it was really in its infancy. It was so basic and that was 2016. And if you remember, if you were a seller back then, there really wasn't much by the way of tools.
A lot of it was spreadsheet-based. It was very basic in terms of the strategy involved, but it took a lot of work to optimize because a lot of the tools weren't available. So I thought to myself, okay. This is an ideal time to take a problem that I'm experiencing in the marketplace as an Amazon seller and create a badass tool around that. And that's how PPC Entourage was born. And just to let you know, early on, I had absolutely no idea how to code. So we made a ton of mistakes and it's been a journey along the way. And now we are, been around for five years, like the old guys in the block now at this point.
Tommy Beringer:
Well, that's how you progress and get better, is you have to fail. And I have had a lot of failures along my way as well. That's how you find your way and that's how you ultimately become successful. And I know you can attest to that. Funnily enough, I started back in private label FBA in 2014 in the golden age there as well. And my flagship product is actually still doing very well and it is one of my best products out there. Looked at all the bad reviews, made some improvements upon the product, hit the market and it's been doing good ever since I hit the market. I know that's a whole nother podcast. We're here to talk PPC strategy. Mike, I feel like I need to have you back on for at least two or three more of these. So what do you say? Let's talk some PPC stuff. So sponsored ads, what do you say?
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. So I want to start off with some more foundational stuff, not like super basic, but more of the foundations in terms of, if you already have campaigns set up, you can use these principles to just make some tweaks that could have some really big impacts. Or if you're just getting started, knowing this information now before you get started is really going to help you get set up the right way. And I just did a podcast about scaling and we actually went back to this talk because the foundation for scaling is to have a strong foundation. So Tommy, I'm going to go over a couple of things that may seem a little basic, but it also could help sellers make some tweaks to their campaigns, which could help them move the needle. Ready to dive in?
Tommy Beringer:
Let's do it.
Mike Zagare:
All right. So the first one is to make sure you have a proper naming scheme and this sounds kind of basic, but if you don't have a proper naming scheme, you're going to end up with dozens and dozens of campaigns. There's going to be no rhyme and reasons to those campaigns. And it's going to make it very difficult and hard to optimize, which is going to cost you money. And it's also going to make it very difficult to expand, which is going to cost you money. So having a proper naming scheme is absolutely important. And typically, we recommend having your ACoS target in your naming scheme, coming up with a name for the actual campaign type.
So for example, we have something called the ACoS Scraping campaign where we're finding the search terms from the search term report, and we're putting it into a manual campaign. We have the name for that, ACoS Scraping, it's kind of coined that term. So we call it the ACoS Scraping campaign, put in the target ACoS, and then also the product identifier so we know which product we're actually targeting. Super important, but often overlooked when we look into accounts.
Tommy Beringer:
No. I totally agree. That's very, very important for anyone starting out or even some advanced sellers, I think might not even have that figured out yet, to tell you the truth.
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. And it can be changed. In our management team, we just rearranged a lot of our campaign naming schemes. It really helps when you make a couple of small tweaks, it really makes everything a lot better, a lot smoother. So to that tune, the next thing you could do to improve your foundation is to have portfolios. Because portfolios gives you the ability to easily see how that skew or those campaigns inside of the portfolio is performing so you can make decisions.
So let's say for example, you have, Tommy, your best product, the one from 2014 or one of them. Let's say all of the campaigns from that product are inside of a portfolio. Then you can go see how that portfolio is performing, but you can also see if it's over-utilizing its ad budget. You can do a portfolio level budget cap, which makes it a lot easier when you're taking your money and you're growing, you can distribute that more evenly and have a better way to distribute your budget across multiple skews if you use the portfolio level. So that is the second foundational tip. And once again, that's good for new sellers or sellers who are seasoned as well.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah. Some great stuff there. And any other beginner tactics that you have that you can give to the listeners out there?
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. I call this the less is more principle and I'm going to lump these two together using less ad groups and also less keywords per campaign, and that means more campaigns. So the reason why we do the less is more principle is because we don't want to have too many keywords inside of one campaign. Sometimes when that happens, there's the chance that some keywords that even are relevant are not going to get impression share. So we take a certain amount of keywords between 10 and 30 keywords and we put them inside of an ad group.
And the other thing is less ad groups inside of a campaign, because let's say you have multiple ad groups inside of a campaign and they're separated by, I know a lot of sellers do, separated by match type, that doesn't give you ultimate flexibility if you're looking to do things like top of search modifiers. Where once you get a little bit more advanced, you can change your modifier based on top of search or product detail pages. You can't do that on an ad group level, you can only do that on a campaign level.
So to make it really simple, we call it the less is more principle, less keywords, less ad groups, more campaigns. And you're probably asking, well, doesn't that mean I have to do more work because I have to do more optimization. Well, if you have a tool or if you're good with spreadsheets, it's really not that much extra work. It just gives you a little bit more granularity when you're doing your creation and also when you're doing your optimization and it gives you a little bit more flexibility and options.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah. And I always preach that too, is to not too many keywords inside of your campaigns, because some of them will never see the light of day. Especially like you said, those relevant ones, some people look back at their campaigns, why am I not getting any impressions? Why am I not getting any clicks? And the reason is probably because they have hundreds and hundreds of keywords inside of those campaigns. And I think Amazon actually says you can add up to a thousand keywords per, but I don't recommend doing that of course.
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. That's what we used to do back in the day when things were so easy. There was just a dump of keywords and it was working back then, but no. That doesn't work anymore. And it'll costs you a lot of money too. And as we get more into this talk, we're going to go into more strategic advertising with the customer journey and how to set up the right ads and all sorts of things that you can get into. And keyword dumping is not part of that strategy.
Tommy Beringer:
And before we dive into that, because I want to dive into that customer journey aspect that you had. Going into setting up the ad groups, you're speaking about the ad groups, how do you recommend the sellers out there to set up those ad groups as far as exact match, phrase match, and broad match, how do you recommend?
Mike Zagare:
Right. So we put together a playbook series, which it's free on our website. So essentially in the playbook series, what we have is we have initial launch campaigns and the goal of the initial launch campaigns is just to get visibility on Amazon and start to get the ball rolling, and basically to tell Amazon what you're selling. So there's an [inaudible] launch campaign and there's a keyword launch campaign. And then once we start to get the ball rolling, we dig into the search term report and we start to build out other campaigns.
Now these are campaigns that are going to be manual discovery-based campaigns, and they're also going to be product targeting campaigns. And they're also going to be [inaudible] targeting campaigns and all sorts of campaigns. Now, in terms of the ad groups, we are not using multiple ad groups at this point. We're using multiple campaigns with just one ad group. And of course, there's a million ways to do strategy. We do use multiple match types, but we do not use multiple ad groups at this point. We use multiple campaigns instead.
Tommy Beringer:
Say, for example, for the same product, would you take multiple campaigns and put an exact match in one campaign, then a broad match in another campaign and a phrase in another, is that what you're doing?
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. So you can do it that way. Or what we also do is put the broad in the phrase inside of one ad group in one campaign. And that's more of like a discovery-based campaign where we're taking relevant keywords, but we're allowing the broad match and the phrase match to connect us with more shoppers and give us more opportunities for new keyword opportunities.
Tommy Beringer:
Very smart. Very smart. That's why I have you on here.
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. We ought to keep things simple too. So to have a separate broad match campaign and a separate phrase match campaign, that's adding a little bit too much. I suppose you could do that as well because there's multiple ways to set up campaigns and there's definitely not just one way to do it. But we also want to make sure that it's something that you can duplicate and keep it as simple as possible.
Tommy Beringer:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So in our initial call last week before just diving into what we were going to speak about today, you were mentioning using different types of ad campaigns within the Amazon customer's journey. Could you please explain a bit about what do you mean by that and how to implement that?
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. So before we get there, I think the single most important exercise that Amazon sellers can do right now is to get themselves familiar with all of the different ads that are available to them. So this isn't quite clear to everyone because Amazon is shifting things up and Amazon has unleashed some new ad types recently. So some sellers get onto the page and they're not quite sure if they're looking at a sponsored brand ad or a sponsored display ad or a sponsored product ad, and it can be quite confusing. Once you start looking at it a couple of times and you really start to look for the differences and the nuances, you're going to know the difference between the different ad types.
And I say that it's important because when you create your campaigns, you really want to start to think strategically as to where these campaigns could possibly show up. So very simply and straight forward, if you have a sponsored product ad, that could show up on top of search, rest of search or product detail page. There's some other places as well that like the add to cart that doesn't really help out as much, but it's good to know that it's there. But it's just good to visualize and see all these things. And then for sponsored brand ads, of course, you have top of search, you have rest of search. And just recently in the last couple of months, they're showing up on product detail pages as well. So that's an opportunity if you know that it's there.
Also custom images will show up on product detail pages as well for sponsored brand ads. Then where are the sponsored brand and video ads showing up? And where are the sponsored display ads showing up? Now since sponsored display ads are the newest ad type, I think a lot of sellers may not know exactly where those are showing up. And if you go into your campaign and look up the 10 different locations where they show up, when you go to create a campaign, Amazon will actually show you where they show up. And they're in the search results, in the sidebar.
They're on the product detail page at the very top. They're in really, really good locations, right below the buy box, right below the bullet points. There's even a big billboard ad that shows up on the product detail page that is the biggest ad of all. But the point is knowing that, you can start to strategically think about, okay. What type of ad do I want to make and where do I want it to show up? What is the goal behind this campaign? And where would this ad be best served so that I could help accomplish that goal and achieve that goal.
Tommy Beringer:
And speaking of all the different ways, now that Amazon is allowing you to get even more granular with these types of ad campaigns, which is awesome. I had a question about sponsored video ads, and I started doing this over the last month or so, and I'm seeing some really good results. And I wanted to see, where exactly do you see those video ads showing up? And what is the best placement, I should say, for those video ads that you have seen?
Mike Zagare:
Unfortunately, we can't control the placement. At least at this point we can't say, we want this top of search or product detail page, that doesn't exist. So you'll see that at the beginning of the video, as it was showing up at the very bottom of the search results, and now we're seeing more mid to even at the top of search, I have not seen it above the sponsored product ads. So I'm sure based on where the actual video ad shows up, it's going to have a big impact on the conversion rate.
Of course, things that are above the fold tend to convert better, but unfortunately at this stage you can't control the placement for those video ads. I'm sure that's going to come out soon. And then I'm sure they'll give you an option to either control the bid for top of search or modify the bid, or do like what you do for sponsored brand ads, which is called automated bidding, actually it's called. So eventually, hopefully they'll do that feature.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah. You answered my question there thanks. Because I was trying to figure out if there was a way to kind of put it at a top searcher one as we all know, that's where most of the sales happen, is above the fold there. So let's go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for all that, Mike. And then let's go ahead. What do you say to dive into the customer journey, the strategy that you wanted to discuss.
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. So real quick, I experienced the customer journey one night at two in the morning. I was flipping through my phone on Instagram and there was this video ad that showed up and it was a two and a half minute long video ad. So Tommy, I have really big feet, size 16 feet. And this video ad targeted me for whatever reason. And it was all about low-profile socks and it was this really great video. They were actually pulling this guy by his socks, across a football field with a tractor. And I'm like, "Oh my gosh! What the hell is this?" So it caught my attention and I'm always looking for ways to minimize the size or look of my feet because they're huge. So it just hooked me in right away. I'm like, wow! Those socks are low profile. And in my experience, I've had problems with that.
They went over, that was the discovery phase and I'm going to hook this into the customer journey. That was the discovery phase. So I was now discovering a product on Instagram. Then they took me through all of the different comparisons to the competition. They told me why their product was better. And that was because other products, low profile socks, slip off your feet. They're sweaty, they're whatever, all the different issues that came up. And they literally went through the consideration phase in the whole thing, where I was considering their product versus another product and they were helping me to overcome those objections.
Next, they went into the call to action or the decision phase with an irresistible offer. And I just went to my PayPal and I tried to log in and I forgot my password so I never ended up buying it. But the point was that's the decision phase or the bottom of the funnel of the buying cycle. And then after that, had I purchased that product, I would have been a customer and there's the post-purchase phase. So we all go through these different phases when we are shopping and it could be something like shopping for a house. You could go years in this buying cycle, looking at different locations, different price points, different features, different backyard, big backyard, a small backyard, a car.
Or let's say you're buying a $20 pair of socks. You can go through the customer buying cycle in literally two and a half minutes or less. So the point of that being is, shoppers are in different parts of the buying cycle when they're looking for your product. And there's a lot that goes into it. But the gist of it is you want to spend some of your budget going towards the discovery phase. So helping customers find your product that may or may not be aware. We're going after relevant customers. We're going after people who are likely to purchase your product. We're not going after a totally irrelevant audience, but we want to help shoppers become aware of your product.
Then you could use ads to help shoppers who are considering different products. They may be considering different price points. They may be considering products with less reviews or prime eligibility, all sorts of things. So we want to target those shoppers when they're in that phase as well with different types of ads. And then finally, the shoppers who are ready to purchase. We want to make sure that for those search terms that really connect where we have high conversion rates that we show up right away, usually at the very top of search. Because obviously that converts the best and has the highest click through rate percentage, but that's for the people who are really ready to buy. And identifying what those search terms are and those ACoS are, is really important.
And then finally, this all ties together with the post-purchase phase, which if you've gotten to that stage and you have shoppers actively looking for your brand, the post-purchase phase is where you protect your brand. And all three ad types can be used to protect your brand. In fact, that's where we start with our clients. We look at a brand that's been around for a while and we ask ourselves, what is that stage like? How are they doing with that stage? Let's build up a rock solid brand protection campaign and then go from there and branch out from there, because it's really low hanging fruit. And believe it or not, you can lose a lot of sales if you don't protect your brand. And it's also an ideal opportunity to upsell other products to the shoppers who already know, like and trust you, which is really a good opportunity.
Tommy Beringer:
Very cool stuff. So when you say protect your brand, I think of putting a product targeting ad on my own product. Kind of like as defense in a sense that's part of a bit of what that is. What would you recommend doing something like that?
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. That's a really good strategy. So product targeting on your own product. And now just keep in mind, you can do that across all ad types now, because sponsored brand ads show up on your product detail page, sponsored display ads and sponsored product ads. One of these listings, what did I see? It was Genius Supplements. When I went to their page, their product detail page is swarmed with their own products. There's almost no room to lose a customer. So that's a really good example, guys, if you want to see this in action, go to Genius Supplements and look at one of their products to see this in action. And that's really not a hard thing to set up. Our team, we've figured out exactly how to set that up and been able to replicate that. But I think most people will be able to figure it out. It's not that hard.
Tommy Beringer:
Very cool. Very cool. What do you say, because there's another way that you said was really good for setting up some sponsored ads, is to dig into your brand analytics inside of Amazon. And so what would you do inside a brand analytics? There's probably a few things you do. If you can give me maybe like the top two things that you dig into inside of brand analytics, what metrics do you look at in order to turn that around and turn it into a profitable ad campaign?
Mike Zagare:
Right. So the first thing that I would love for a lot of sellers to start thinking about is looking at things like repeat purchase behavior and new to brand sales and also subscribe and save. Those three things, if we look at the lifetime customer value and we start to look at those metrics and we make advertising decisions based on those metrics, then it's going to really make a shift in the way we think about advertising. Because if we're just looking at ACoS and we're saying, okay. I want to hit this ACoS target. Well, if you're not looking at the fact that five to 10% of your customers come back and purchase from you again, or 3% of them also purchase this product, you're missing a big portion of what that advertising is doing for your business.
So when you go to the brand analytics, the first thing I recommend going to is the repeat purchase behavior tab, which is relatively new. You can go in there and you can see the unique customers, and you can also see the percentage of repeat customers total for a given skew. And you could see, okay. Well, if 10% of these customers are repeat customers, then the cost to acquire a new customer for me, I may want to make that a little bit higher. Because I know that 10% of those customers are going to come back and purchase from me again.
Tommy Beringer:
Awesome. So that is very useful there, because now you're able to see how many are coming back. And even if it's going to be worth it to start scaling your brand, even bigger than it is.
Mike Zagare:
Right. So then you start looking at things like new to brand sells, which their metrics is only available for sponsored brand ads. And you start thinking, okay. Well, if I have an 80% ACoS but I have a very high new to brand sell, I'm acquiring all these new customers. And then I start to go into, what else are these customers doing? Are they purchasing other products? Are they repeat customers? Am I going to now build up my customer base, kind of retarget them? And that's another thing you can start to do now is retargeting on Amazon. They just released that in sponsored product ads. So it just shifts the mind a little bit, thinking more like a bigger brand, as opposed to just looking at the ACoS.
Tommy Beringer:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you for those tips on the brand analytics, I'm going to have to try some of that stuff out. And Mike, I wanted to bring up one of your things you have called Days of Nuggets. Can you tell us a bit about what Days of Nuggets is?
Mike Zagare:
Yeah. Tommy, thanks so much for bringing this up. So last year we started the Days of Nuggets and what we did was we reached out to several influencers in the space to help us create small bite-sized pieces of really good content. I'm talking about needle moving, badass content that's going to help improve the bottom line of your business. So the reason being is, let me go back a little backstory. Two years ago, I went to Freedom Fast Lane with my business partner. And we, for the first time, heard about child trafficking through the organization called Operation Underground Railroad. And they were the keynote speaker on the third day. And absolutely just blew everyone out because we were just didn't know how bad the problem was to the tune of millions of children going missing every single year.
It's a global pandemic. And it's really quite overwhelming when you think about it and they bring a lot of hope because what they do, is they go into these trafficking links and actually poses traffickers. They work with local law enforcement and they break them up and they free these kids. And then they also rehab them. And if you go to their website, there's a couple of stories of a couple of them going on to starting their own business, which is really cool. So two years ago, I didn't know what I could do, but then last year, the idea just struck. I was at the gym. I wanted to give back. And then all of a sudden this idea struck, what if rather than me contributing like a certain dollar amount, which I was going to do, what if I took that money and I put it towards an event and we raised money in a different way.
So we came up with the 12 Days of Nuggets, which essentially is four to five bite-sized pieces of content that is really needle-moving content to help grow your business or to help raise money or we owe you our charity. And last year we raised $50,000 and we had a bunch of people involved. And this year, my goal is $100,000, but I honestly think we could do much better than that. I think we could hit a million. And here's the other thing that's cool, if you donate $89 or more, you get a $50 Pick Food credit. And also the entire event every donation is a tax deduction, because we are a nonprofit organization at this point.
So there's a lot more that goes into it. We're going to have a lot of fun during it. We're going to do some live events. We're going to have a couple of giveaways. And also this year we're introducing the nugget submission contest. So sellers can submit their own nugget and have a chance to win a $500 prize, which will be matched by one of our sponsors for a donation as well. So that's the Days of Nuggets in a nutshell. And you guys can go to daysofnuggets.com to learn more.
Tommy Beringer:
Awesome. Yeah. That's horrible, but good stuff that you're doing this to help the human trafficking. And guys out there, I will be shooting a nugget for Mike. So that'll be on there as well. And Mike, what do you say we wrap up the show and what I like to do at the end of every show is give... You've already dropped so many value bombs, so many nuggets, and if you could just give someone something that's going to move the needle for them, that they can take away and implement in their business today, whether it be PPC, whatever type of tip you have for them, if you can just give that away.
Mike Zagare:
Right. I'm just going to give one PPC tip and one personal tip. The personal tip is always work on yourself, the biggest asset that you have. And for me, that's meditation and exercise and mindset, work and reading, and all sorts of things. To me, that is the biggest needle mover that I've ever experienced in my entire life. With regards to advertising, I would say building out an army of sponsored brand ads, not being lazy with it. Going into your listing and going into your reviews, like finding different phrases and different search queries and stuff like that, to put into your headline search ads to be very relevant to what shoppers are actually searching for.
And just starting to create an army of those. I don't think shoppers or sellers are doing that very well because it requires a lot of work. And my third tip is to get creative and have fun with it. Get creative with your advertising. The beautiful thing about Amazon ads is that it's a mix between data and creativity. And if you can use that creativity to your advantage, you're going to have an advantage over your competition. So get creative with it, have fun with it, and good luck with everything.
Tommy Beringer:
Great stuff, Mike. Thank you so much. And where can everyone out there contact you if they wanted to get ahold of you?
Mike Zagare:
Sure you can find me at mike@PPCentourage.com is my email address. We also have the entourage seller community on Facebook, and I just started a YouTube channel, well, it's been around for a while, but we just started really posting every single week about seven months ago. So there's a lot of content up there. That's the Entourage Seller community on YouTube.
Tommy Beringer:
Awesome stuff, mike. Thank you so much. Mike Zagare from PPC Entourage and Days of Nuggets. Go check him out and again, Mike, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate you taking the time out of your day to come on with us. Always appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Mike Zagare:
Thanks for having me. Bye, everyone.
Tommy Beringer:
Bye guys. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. And if you got any value out of this podcast at all, please let us know at the place that you listened to it at, whether it be iTunes, Stitcher, whatever it is, give us some love. Give us an awesome review and let us know maybe some things you want us to talk about on the next podcast. Until next time guys, stay awesome and be awesome.