Dr. Travis Zigler is a recovering optometrist turned eCommerce entrepreneur. He is the founder of Eye Love, https://eyelovethesun.com, whose mission is to heal 1,000,000 dry eye sufferers naturally. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free clinics in Jamaica and the US through their charity, the Eye Love Cares Foundation, https://eyelovecares.org.
Due to the success of Eye Love (over $4 million per year as of 2020), others have asked if Dr. Travis would help them grow their business online, and more specifically with Amazon, which is one of his superpowers. Dr. Travis and his team have helped hundreds of clients. Learn more here: http://profitablepineapple.com/
We talk about the easiest and most effective Amazon Ad you can create, the basics of Amazon keyword research, which metrics to consider when managing and creating your Amazon PPC campaigns, this easiest Amazon ad to launch, why sponsored product ads are the most important type of Amazon PPC ad, and much more.
Kenny Soto 0:00
All right, sounds good. All right, we are recording and 54321 Hello everyone and welcome to Kenny Soto Digital Marketing Podcast your resource for quick tips, tactics and career advice in the world of digital marketing. Today I have a very special guest who’s going to teach us all about Amazon, which is going to be awesome.
His name is Travis Ziggler. Dr. Travis Sigler is a recovering optometrists turned ecommerce entrepreneur. He is the founder of I love whose mission is to heal 1 million dry eye sufferers naturally due to the success of I love, which is over $4 million per year as of 2020. Others have asked if Dr. Travis would help them grow, help him grow their business online and more specifically with Amazon, which is one of his superpowers. Dr. Travis and his team have helped hundreds of clients. And you can learn more about him today during this podcast episode. Welcome, Travis.
Travis Zigler 1:02
Hey, Kenny, thanks for having me on.
Kenny Soto 1:04
So I mentioned before we started recording that this podcast is designed for two people in mind. One is the small business owner or the client facing practitioner who wants to just get a different perspective on strategies that they can use to help grow their businesses. And other type of listener that we have for this audience is the general practitioner who’s a digital marketer, specifically, who has just started in their career and they want general tactics, but also career advice that can help them grow not only due to a competitive job market, but also because 2020 has been hectic, and they’re looking for any resource that can help them get an edge over their competition. So my first question for you so that the audience can get a better understanding of your background and your skills is how did you get into digital marketing?
Travis Zigler 1:59
That’s a great question because I’m actually an optometrist by trade, as you mentioned, and I am still an optometrist, I guess you don’t ever lose that. It’s a degree and everything in a license. But back in 2015, when I was practicing optometry, my wife and I own two practices. She’s also an optometrist, and we came across a course called Amazing Selling Machine.
And Amazing Selling Machine just teaches you how to sell on Amazon, it’s as simple as that. And when you start practices, you only see about one patient an hour, because you know, you don’t have that big clientele or that big patient base, that load that you usually have when you have an established practice. And so plain and simple, I was bored. And so we bought this course, and just learn how to sell on Amazon.
And then in 2015, we actually started as a sunglass company, we’ve shifted into more of a dry company. And so the reason that happened is because with sunglasses, we weren’t really serving a person, we were just kind of out there selling sunglasses, we were just selling pieces of plastic, and it just wasn’t as fulfilling as serving a person. And so we found the person that we wanted to serve, which was a dry eye sufferer. And to give your listeners kind of a background into dry eye, I’m just going to use the US statistics, but you can kind of apply it to worldwide statistics as well.
40 million sufferers suffer from dry, which is about a little over 12% of the US market, or the US population. And so 40 million just in the US alone. So if you expand that to the world, there’s about probably close to a billion people that suffer from dry worldwide. And so we want to serve that person, we teach strategies on how to do that naturally.
But then we also sell products as well that are more natural, organic, they don’t have nasty preservatives in them, no junk in them. And that’s kind of where we got our start was sunglass company shifted to serving a person. And now here we are about three years into the dry business. And we’re loving every second of it. And as you said in the intro, as a result of the success we’ve had with I love, people ask us to help them grow their brand on Amazon, and we specialize in Amazon pay per click or Amazon advertising. And so when people come to us, we manage their Amazon as well.
Let’s talk about the beginning stages of I love. What were the initial challenges that you faced when you were starting off and marketing not only the sunglasses, but after you made that pivot to helping people with dry eye. Yeah, so the main thing with dry and the still, the challenge today is just getting your message out there.
And I think that’s the biggest challenge for all of us as marketers is getting your message out there to everyone that you want to serve as a mentor of mine always said that. Sales isn’t necessarily selling somebody on your product sales is serving someone with your product. And if you don’t serve them, and you don’t get it out to them, then it’s a disservice. You should think you’re the best in the world at what you do.
And if you don’t think that then you shouldn’t be in the industry that you’re in. So I think our agency is one of the best in the world at Amazon PPC there’s a lot of great ones out there. But I think we’re one of the best in the world at what we do. Same thing with I love I think we’re one of the best in world at helping you solve dri naturally. And the reason is, is because we’re not a big pharmaceutical company, we’re not going to shove drugs down your throat, we’re not even going to shove your own product down your throat.
And so the challenge is, is just getting it out there to as many people as possible, we’re trying to serve 1 million people, we’ve only served about 70,000 At this point, which is only 7% of our goal. And then 40 million sufferers suffer in America alone. And so we’re not even close to that number. And so just the biggest challenge back then, and even today is just getting the word out there about your product, because you want to be the best at what you do you want to be number one, you want to win that gold medal and that one thing, and you it’s a disservice to not get it to your client. And so that’s what we want to do.
We don’t want our client to buyer, our competitor, because we think we’re better than our competitor. And that’s not to sound cocky. That’s, that’s how you need to have. That’s the mindset you need to have. So the challenge is go back to your question is just getting it into more hands and getting people this knowledge.
Kenny Soto 5:58
Why did you choose Amazon over all of the other marketing platforms and channels out there? There’s Facebook, there’s Google, there’s LinkedIn, potentially LinkedIn, why did you choose Amazon over those other options?
Travis Zigler 6:10
Yeah, Amazon, people go to Amazon to buy plain and simple. People go to Google to find research or to research content to learn. And they sometimes go there to buy too, but it’s not always their first intent. Google is more of a research platform. Facebook is more of a social platform, it’s interruptive.
Marketing, there is an area for each one of these. And there’s a skill set for each one of these. But with Amazon, Amazon, people go to buy. And so we’re like, let’s just focus on one channel, we have a Shopify store, we do Facebook ads, we do Google ads, but we don’t focus on them. They’re just there. And we’ve tried to focus on him in the past. But quite honestly, the best ROI we’ve ever had for money in money out is Amazon Pay Per Click Amazon ads, because people go there searching to buy something.
And so once you get on Amazon, it’s Amazon is growing 30% year over year, which is absurd. At the level they’re at, I think they’re gonna hit like over 300 billion this year, 350 billion or something like that. And they’re still growing 30%, which, if you grow a million dollar business, 30% is amazing. But you’re growing a $350 billion business at 30%. It’s just the people that are getting on Amazon every single year, they just keep growing. And as they grow, we grow our business as well. And it’s not getting more competitive.
There’s actually the sellers that are coming on to Amazon, there’s just as many sellers leaving Amazon and so the sellers have increased but not by a significant a lot and or not by a significant amount. And so Amazon, although people think it’s competitive it is, but there’s a space for everyone there. And it should be a part of your overall strategy shouldn’t just be your only strategy. It’s about 75% of our income. Now, that’s because we focus on it so much, but it’s not our total strategy. And we still do those other things.
But like I said, with Facebook, people are on there to get away. They’re good. They’re on there to be social, quote, unquote. But they’re just on there to mindlessly get away from the world that they’re in. Yeah, exactly. They’re just flipping, they’re just flicking their thumb. So you’re trying to interrupt that, that mind that that process of them trying to get away to then get them to go buy your product, which is very hard to do.
And then same thing with Google, they may not be searching for a product, they may be searching for education. And again, going back Amazon is they’re trying to buy they’re looking to buy. So that’s kind of why we focus on Amazon.
Kenny Soto 8:42
So just to make sure that I’m personally digesting this wisdom, the correct way. The reason why you focus so much on Amazon is just because it’s a better quality, like opportunity or lead to target. Correct.
Travis Zigler 8:57
Correct. And it’s huge.
Kenny Soto 8:59
Got it. And you mentioned something that I want you to like expand upon, if possible. You mentioned that people are stopping or like leaving Amazon. What did you mean by that?
Travis Zigler 9:10
Sellers, sellers. So seller specific. A lot of sellers that try to get onto Amazon are scared and the biggest like so I run an Amazon PPC agency. And the clients that are scared to onboard with us are they always say we’ve tried Amazon in the past, Amazon’s too crowded. We can’t grow on Amazon. But it doesn’t matter how big your brand is or not. You need to be on Amazon. Because going back to if you focus on your website, and you’re doing Google ads and Facebook ads to your website, the first thing I do as a shopper and I’m not the only one is if I see a Facebook ad for a product that I want. I go to Amazon and search for it. And so if you’re not on Amazon, then I might buy your competitor.
And so you did all that Facebook advertising to get me informed about your product. Exactly. But now I’m gonna go buy some else because you’re not on Amazon. Amazon is like two clicks. Literally, I search by. That’s it. And so I hope that answered your question. But that going back to what you were saying is, the amount of sellers that are going on to the platform of Amazon is equal to the amount of sellers that is leaving the Amazon platform. So seller wise, it’s same pretty stagnant. But buyer wise, it’s increasing dramatically, specially Prime members.
Kenny Soto 10:26
Yeah, so it’s like low hanging fruit, that you could take the opportunity to at least attempt some kind of marketing campaign marketing strategies to deploy on Amazon. But if you don’t, then you’re leaving money on the table.
Travis Zigler 10:39
Yeah, so we have clients that want to grow on Amazon. So we focus on scaling tactics with them, it costs a lot more money. And then we have clients that just want to protect their brand. And so we do that for clients as well. Of course, when you protect your brand, it’s going to be the best return on your investment, you’re going to make more money as a result of that. And if you want to scale, it’s going to be a lower return on your investment.
But you might get more sales in the long run as a result. So it just depends on the strategy you’re going with. We focus on scale for most clients, but we have a couple clients that are just like I want to profit as much as possible right now. And so we’ll scale their ads back and just focus on the ROI. So we do both.
Kenny Soto 11:15
What does it mean to scale?
Travis Zigler 11:20
It’s a great question. So scale means scale is a sexy term in the business world. And I’m glad you asked this, because everybody wants scale until they have it. And then once they have it, it scares the crap out of them. And we have clients that tell us they want to scale. And then once we start scaling, everything breaks.
And this includes my own business, we we have completely broken our business this year as a result of scale. And the reason that happened is because COVID was a big part of it. But also, when you go from, you know, doing 3 million a year, even just to four to 5 million a year, which is what we’ve done is it’s a big process, and you need the resources there. So to scale just means to, you know, increase your sales exponentially, and to increase your market share, and on on Amazon.
And so if somebody searches for just like a generic item, let’s say somebody, this is my example that I give, because it’s one of my products, eyelid wipes, we sell eyelid wipes. So when somebody searches for a generic term like eyelid wipes, you want to be at the top of that search. And if you’re at the top of that search, then you’re going to scale very quickly, most people buy one of the top three of the searches. And so if you can get to that top three position, we’re at number three right now.
And guess what we broke it. So once we got to that number three, our supply chain got messed up, because then we had to order 27,000 units, which equates to about $75,000. Wow. And you have to have that money to both buy inventory, but to buy advertising. And so scale happens, and it can happen incredibly fast. And when that happens, you have to have the cash to support it. And then when you do that across multiple products, it gets even more complicated. So we have about 20 products now.
And when you start to scale, we have one product that’s really scaled, and it’s pretty steady scale. So like we’ve got the cash to order more inventory to pay for the advertisement. So it just kind of keeps cycling this loop. But now we’ve started adding about six more products that are starting to scale. And when we started adding six more products, that’s when it started breaking. And so we were like, Okay, let’s focus on the first one that got us here. And then we got to figure out what to do with these.
And then things happen, logistics problems, you know, we got something stuck in FDA customs clearance, because we have one product that we shipped from China, the rest is made here in the US. So it makes a lot easier, but it got stuck. And so now we’re trying to not go out of stock while trying to get those through. So with scale, you have to have your supply chain buttoned up, you have to have money for inventory, you have to have everything because sales will increase quite a bit and you probably will run out of stock as a result of that. And then when you run out of stock, you run out of that your momentum goes down.
And then you have to regain that momentum. And then you have to make sure you don’t run out of money. And so it’s it’s just it’s a constant battle at whatever level you’re at to scale. And like I said, a lot of people want to scale until it happens. And then once that happens, they may not want it anymore. We have a client that we’ve they have one product, and we’ve taken them from about $10,000 a month in sales to now doing about 90,000 a month in sales.
And it took us about two years to get to that point because every time we started hitting a little bit of scale, they’d run out of inventory. And then we hit it again after we got the momentum back and then they’d run out of inventory and then they that now they’re running out of cash because when you’re managing $10,000 a month in sales and 90 $1,000 a month in sales, it’s completely different, because now they have to have cash to order the inventory to then use that cash to buy more advertising.
But you can’t run out of inventory, or you’ll lose that momentum. So we’re kind of with them, we go up to 90,000, then we dropped to 30. And then we dropped to 10. And then we go back up to 80,000 a month. And so we’re just this constant roller coaster. And you’ve probably heard the term the entrepreneurial roller coaster. And it’s 100% accurate, and especially if you’re trying to scale so with them, they’re a great client, and we love working with them, we just can’t keep them in stock. And it’s a great problem to have. But it also causes a lot of problems. People go bankrupt from trying to scale. And it’s not that they’re not profitable, they just run out of cash,
Kenny Soto 15:42
is that the only reason they become they fail, excuse me, they go bankrupt.
Travis Zigler 15:47
You know, and it’s not for everybody, it’s not for everyone. It’s tough. Anything can can cause you, especially if only have one product, anything can shut you down. And you know, business is a series of storms that you just have to manage, you’re they’re going into a storm, you’re in a storm, or you’re coming out of a storm.
And it’s these constant little tiny storms that you just have to manage. Some of them are huge. Some of them are hurricanes, typhoons. Other ones are just little tiny rainstorms that just flood the streets. But if you wake up everyday thinking that there’s going to be something wrong with your business than when there’s nothing wrong, you won’t be disappointed.
And, you know, that’s kind of the mindset we take. It’s not a negative mindset. It’s just, that’s what business is. The business is. Yeah, exactly. You’re managing clients, you’re managing customers, you’re managing products, you’re managing expectations. And the bigger you get, the more expectations the more customers, the more clients that you have to do. And so it’s just a matter of having the grit to get through it all. And we’ve had some serious problems in our business. But we’re still here, because our mission is to get to that 1 million dry sufferers.
Kenny Soto 16:53
You also mentioned earlier that aside from scaling a business, you also protect a business’s brand. What does that mean? Can you expand on that? Yeah,
Travis Zigler 17:03
that’s a great question. So the easiest and the most effective thing that you can do on Amazon, is advertise for your brand name. And so many people don’t do that, because they’re like, Oh, it’s my brand name. You know, when people search for it, I’ll show up number one in Google for SEO, or I’ll show up number one in Amazon, because it’s my brand name. But there are there are, there are businesses that are bidding against you.
And if they’re bidding against you, the first thing that’s going to pop up is their business instead of you. And so a brand we call brand defensive ads, is just over your brand name, and they are the cheapest clicks that you can get on the internet, you can get brand defensive campaigns for if nobody knows your brand, five cents, one cent a click, same thing on Amazon.
Now, if you have competitors out there that are going to come after you, it will push that up to 10 to $20. A click but you still want to, you still want to protect that brand. Because when people search for your brand, they’re going to buy your product. And so you need to be at the top of the market, we we pick our competitors. So we have like, you know, 20 products, but seven products are our main products that we go after. And we pick a competitor for each of those products.
And we advertise for that competitors search term, because we want to show up at the top of Google for our competitor at the top of Amazon for our competitor. And it works. It’s worked for every product that we’ve tried it on. And so it works so incredibly well to bid against your top competitors. And to bid on your own brand name too, because most brands as a 5% of brands are doing this, or is in the other 95% or aren’t. And so find your top competitors and do it against them. And then do it for yourself as well.
Kenny Soto 18:44
Now I’m going to shift a little just to ask a question that’s more geared towards digital marketers specifically not necessarily like people who want to outsource Amazon PPC to an agency or to someone else. Let’s say I wanted to get Amazon PPC as a skill part of my toolkit, so to speak, what are the essential considerations to keep in mind when starting off and learning about Amazon?
Travis Zigler 19:12
Well, you can take my free course. That always helps. But so yeah, I put together a free course for beginners that just kind of walks you through. It’s eight weeks of learning Amazon Pay Per Click manually. And so it’s a very manual process. And to learn it, you really just need to learn what’s called keyword research. Keyword Research is just a fancy term and for all you people that are for everyone, all the listeners that do Google, they probably know what keyword research is, but if you don’t, keyword research is just simply finding search terms or finding words that people are searching for when they’re looking for your product.
And the goal of this is to not go after the most competitive words that are out on the market that people are searching for. The goal is to go after the longtail or the The words that people aren’t necessarily bidding on, but people are still typing in to the search bar, either Google or Amazon. And so we mentioned eyelid wipes earlier, eyelid wipes is a highly competitive term, because there’s a lot of eyelid wipes on the market.
And it’s a very search for you, you may not know what it is. But for somebody that needs eyelid wipes, they know what it is. And it’s searched, you know, 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000 times a month. So bidding on the term eyelid wipes is going to be a hard word to go after. But if we look a little deeper and do some keyword research, or research that that word, then will find eyelid wipes for women with fake eyelashes, or something like that. So that’s a longtail keyword that people are searching for, that we could bid on that nobody else is bidding on.
And so finding a series of those words to bid on, both in Amazon and Google, this works both ways, is going to help lower your costs and bring up your sales faster than going after that top keyword with a lot of money like eyelid wipes. Now, we’ve been around for a year and a half with our eyelid wipes. So now we can start bidding on that top word, and be profitable with it, because we’ve been on those lower term keywords first, and then we’re going to go up from there. And take it a step further, you also want to find words that you don’t want to rank for.
Those are called negative words, negative keywords. And so you want to find words that you may not want to show up like my product isn’t for dogs or cats. But there are eyelid wipes out there for dogs and cats. And so we want to not show up for those. And so you want to also look for negative search terms or negative words.
And then finally, what you want to do is research your competition, find your competitor, that’s number one in the market. And you can take their their product their their page on Amazon, and find out what terms or what words they’re ranking for. And so we’ll look through those words and see if there’s any good ones to go after any opportunity to go after any words there. And so that’s kind of the basic is keyword research.
And for your listeners, just look up keyword research, and you’ll find tons of videos on it. If you want to go through our specific course, you can go to profitable pineapple.com, profitable pineapple.com and our free courses right there on the homepage, we wanted to make it memorable. So we picked a pineapple for some reason, I think it’s because we do our mission work in Jamaica, and we eat a lot of pineapples when we’re in Jamaica. So that’s kind of the basis of it. And then once you get around that, then you just need to get the data.
And so you need to then start bidding, and start advertising on Amazon and then data starts to roll in. And then you analyze the data from there. And then you take that data. And you’ve probably heard of Pareto Principle, which is the 8020 rule, you know, 20% of your activity results or turns into 80% of your results. And so 20% The reason this came about was this guy planted a garden, and 20% of his seeds produce 80% of his crop.
And that applies to anywhere in life. If you look at whatever job you’re doing right now, 20% of what you do in that job produces 80% of your results. And it’s funny because as entrepreneurs, if we just focus on that 20%, your business would explode. Instead, we focus on all the little things that take away from that 20%. And that’s why your business stays stagnant. So if your your your business is stagnant right now, and you’re not growing, it’s because you’re focusing on the little things.
And you either need to eliminate it, automate it with software, or just delegate it to somebody else. So you can focus on the biggest things and just go into a little bit of an example. I’m getting way off topic here. But just to go into a little bit of an example here, my 20% is getting our agency name out there to other audiences. And so coming on your podcast, you have an audience, whether it’s five people, whether it’s 100,000, people, you still have an audience of people.
And so me getting on other people’s podcasts, puts the agency out there. And then we’ll have maybe 20% of the people that listen to this, come over to profitable pineapple.com they’ll sign up for my free course. And eventually they may enroll us in the agency services or they’ll take my paid course. And so that’s my job as the CEO of this company is to get it out in front of other audiences. So you’re one of six podcasts I have today and tomorrow. And so it’s just to get the name out, get the word out there.
And I do this in bunches like that, because it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting, you know from being a podcaster because we have our own podcasts as well. That podcasting is exhausting work in but it’s one of the easiest ways to get your name out there. And I do this for I love as well. I get on other health podcasts, other health YouTube channels, and our I love brand. We have a podcast called the dry show. It’s on YouTube, it’s on podcasts like iTunes.
And then also it’s a Facebook group called the dry syndrome support community. And we’ve amassed about 100,000 followers because it’s about three and a half years old. And me getting on other podcasts brings in more people into my ecosystem. And then Those people want to be on my podcasts, which then brings more to them their ecosystem. So it’s like a give and take type of thing. And so like with this podcast, I could take the video version of this, I know you don’t do much with the video, I could put it on my YouTube channel that would broaden the reach of your podcasts.
But then it also, you know, shows other people how we do things inside the agency. So there’s a lot you can do in that 8020 rule. But it applies to going back full circle, it applies to Amazon PPC, it applies to Google, because 20% of the words that you’re bidding on are producing 80% of your results. So that was really off topic, but it kind of went full circle there. So really focusing on the 20% of work that’s doing the 80% of the results is valuable and everything.
Kenny Soto 25:42
So you mentioned keyword research. Are there any other skills? Or would you say that’s like the main one? Like if you can master keyword research, would you say that you’re well on your way to understanding Amazon PPC.
Travis Zigler 25:56
If you can master keyword research, it is the biggest step in making Amazon PPC successful, also Google, but and then learning how to optimize those keyword bids, and really focusing on the 8020. And Amazon PPC is huge. So great keyword research leads to great Amazon PPC advertising, and then optimizing it to focus on the 20% of the words that create 80% of the results is that next step, because once you do that, once you look at the data and really focus on it on what’s working, that’s when you decrease your costs and increase your ROI.
This, it’s amazing what it’s done for our clients. And that’s when we start to hit scale is when we can start to scale those words. Sometimes those words aren’t scale words. And what I mean by that is they just don’t have search volume, people aren’t searching for those words. And so if you know the words that are working for you only get 1000 searches a month, you’re gonna hit, you’re gonna hit a cap.
But if those words are getting a million searches a month, you’re going to make a lot of money off that word. And it’s gonna scale, but those words are usually the most competitive. And so it’s just a matter of finding the words that work, you know, increasing the bids on those words, and really focusing on scaling those words.
Kenny Soto 27:14
Now, I’m going to ask something that relates to Amazon, but more so media buying in general, this is another personal question that I have, because I just started as a media buyer, or I’ve done media buying in the past, for several channels and platforms. But now, it’s specifically media buying, I’m not doing anything else.
So let’s talk metrics. With Amazon. Getting lost in the data, I’m assuming can happen very fast, especially if you’re inexperienced with doing any campaigns on the platform. What are the most important metrics, and you can categorize them by objective? What are the most important metrics that you look at when you are deploying a marketing campaign? on Amazon?
Travis Zigler 27:57
So this is this is a fantastic question, because in my mastermind group last Wednesday, there’s this long discussion, it was like 30 minutes about, like what metrics you need to be watching on Amazon PPC. And I have a blog post called the 13 best metrics to watch with Amazon PPC. But there’s only one that matters, one. And that’s sales. Sales is the the end all be all for all of this is sales.
So we had people in the group in my mastermind talking about how they focus on impressions and clicks and cost per click and cost per acquisition, and all of this stuff. But sales and profit are all that matters. If your sales are in profit or increasing. That’s all that matters. And so what we do as an agency, and what we do inside of I love my brand, is we track all 13 metrics per product, which is very manual, it takes a long time to do it, because there’s no program out there that does it yet that I found.
We’re thinking about building one, but we haven’t yet. You should. But yeah, no, I think there’s something wrong with Amazon’s API that doesn’t allow us but what we do is we track sales and profit. That’s the most important thing. So I get these reports every Monday for all of our clients. And it’s a report from one of my team members.
And then of course, the one that manages I love my brand. And I look at sales and profit, I just go down look at sales and profit. It allows me to look at, you know, 15 different clients in 30 minutes or less. And I can see if something’s wrong, and if sales and profit is something’s off, then we dig into the other numbers, because then we’re looking into impressions. If our impressions go down, that means our ads aren’t showing why aren’t our ad showing so we know where to investigate.
If our clicks go down, that means our click through rate or something clicks go down, but impressions stay the same. Why did our click through rate go down? What happened with our advertising did somebody not like the ad copy or something like that? So you need to explore that. Like why did it go down all the Sudden cost per acquisition all the sudden went up what happened could be a competitor started coming in and bidding on the same words that we’re going after.
And so sales and profit are the one thing that matters. That’s all that matters. That’s all your clients care about. That’s all anybody cares about sales and profit. But if you see something wrong with that, then we need to dig in to those other metrics and figure out what’s exactly going on. And so that’s what I follow. That’s, that allows me to stay high level and really look into it. And then if something’s wrong, then we dig in a little bit more, and start looking at other problems that could result from other metrics. That answer your question. Yes, that’s
Kenny Soto 30:39
perfect. My follow up to that is what is the easiest and most effective Amazon ad you can create?
Travis Zigler 30:46
Oh, the brand defensive ad that we talked about earlier, it’s the first thing we always do with clients is make that brand defensive ad and it’s so simple to make. It’s just a brand name. That’s done. But if you want to get more specific than that, there are different platforms inside Amazon. So think about Google ads, Google Ads has their display network, their search network, their partners network, their YouTube network, they have video network outside of YouTube, I think I’m missing like 10 of them. So Amazon, same way. Amazon has sponsored products, sponsored brands sponsored display ads. So sponsored display ads, just works just like display ads on Google.
It’s all over the internet all over Amazon, just randomly here and there on different websites, sponsored brands is more of a brand play. So they’re like they’re called headline search ads. Or when you type in something on Amazon, you probably see that big banner at the top, that’s a headline search ad that’s a sponsored brand. And then there’s sponsored product ads, sponsored product ads are very simple.
You bid on keyword, product shows for keyword. That’s it. And so sponsored products, is by far the number one thing to focus on. That is where most of the inventory the advertising inventory is. And so if you focus on sponsored products, and focus on nothing else, you will win. But that’s what we do for our clients is we focus on sponsor products, until we get it to where we want it to be. Once we get to where we want to be.
Then we’ll go to the next to the sponsor brands and display. And the reason is, because if you can focus all of your budget, and all of your time on sponsored products, the 8020 rule again, 80% of your sales are coming from sponsor products. So you need to focus on that and that only, and learn the ins and outs of that through keyword research through learning how to optimize your bids, learning how to scale your bids, learning how to scale, the words, all of that through sponsored products.
That’s the biggest thing in sponsored products is just simply like Google search. So keyword gets put into Amazon, you show up at the top, or the second or the third, depending on what you bid. Word works, you better show up at the top every time because it works. And so an example is like one of my search terms that we bid on converts at 40%.
So that means every one person that or every 10 people that click that ad four of them are gonna buy, that’s huge. And other words, convert it 5%. So which one are you going to focus more of your budget on the one that converts at 40% or 5%. And so learning those ins and outs of sponsor products like that is a huge deal. Because if you can put all your money towards that, that word that’s converting it 40% You’re gonna, you’re gonna 8x from that 5% search term. And so you really need to focus on that word until it’s maxed out.
Once it’s maxed out, go to the next word, once that’s maxed out, go to the next word. And then you can finally get down to that 5% word, but you need to focus on the ones that convert higher first. And that’s same thing with Google. Same thing with everything. And so that’s kind of the key takeaway from that, I think is really focusing on sponsored products.
Kenny Soto 33:55
My last question for you is more of a high level from a career perspective. If you can go back in time, and know everything you have, like that all the knowledge that you have right now, but you are back in time, like 10 years. How would you 10x The speed of your career to get to where you are today but just sooner?
Travis Zigler 34:16
Yeah, it’s a it’s a great question. And it’s such an easy answer, but it’s so hard to execute. And it’s a get bored with the routine. And what I mean by that is when I first started this business, both the client side and my I love side the brand. There’s so many shiny objects out there, so many shiny objects.
You want to try everything you learn things on YouTube, you learn things on webinar, you learn things on podcasts, and you just want to chase it all. And when I chased it all all I did was stress out and feel overwhelmed. feel anxious And I almost sold my business for not even close to what it was worth because I was overwhelmed. And a mentor of mine told me that you just need to eliminate everything I said this earlier, eliminate automate delegate, you need to eliminate everything that doesn’t bring you value, that isn’t fun for you. If it’s required for the business, then you need to find software to automate it.
And if you can’t automate it with software, then you need to delegate it to somebody else. So you can focus on what you love to do. And so that was last November, when we about sold the business for nothing. And it was just because we were overwhelmed. And so what my wife and I did is we sat down for two weeks straight wrote down everything we did on a daily basis. And we put a big list out, and it was literally on sticky notes everywhere. And it was like, Okay, I love to do this, this, this and this.
And I hate doing all of this. And so we literally looked at everything we hated doing, and we just throw away half the sticky notes, stop doing them. Because we’re like, we don’t need to be doing this. And then we took the rest. And we found ways that we could automate it with software. And you know, we increased our software cost per month, probably by about $2,000 a month, but it freed up our time. And then we took the rest that we couldn’t automate. And we delegate it to our team.
And so we have about five team members, and I love and then we have three team members in the agency. And so we eliminated automated and delegated. So the biggest thing to take away from that is do what you love, and get bored with the routine because you need to be persistent at doing that. So again, going back to me, podcasts, getting on other people’s podcasts, doing one YouTube and Facebook Live a week, and creating content. That’s what I love doing. It’s a lot of fun. It’s I love talking to like minded people like yourself, Kenny. And these podcasts aren’t, they don’t feel like work, they feel like fun.
And so with the agency, we actually never focused on the agency until last year. And last September, we’re like, you know, let’s start doing YouTube Live. So let’s start just going live on YouTube. Let’s start going live in the Facebook group, let’s build a Facebook group. And the Facebook group now has 1000 people, the YouTube channel has about 1500 subscribers. And not huge but growing. I mean it we’re an incredibly niche area, Amazon PPC.
And it tripled our client load, we went from five clients to 15 that we have now. And, you know, we have we’re not onboarding anybody for the rest of the year, because it’s fourth quarter. And we want to focus on what we have. But we have five people on the waiting list to start in January. And so we’re going to, you know, go from 15 to 20. Right in January, but we’re focusing on what we have 8020.
And then we’ll onboard new people in the new year when it’s not as crazy for us. And same thing with I love we’re we simplified it, I love does three things really well, we create really amazing content. We do a blog post, a YouTube video and a Facebook Live every single week. And then the second part of that is we create great natural products that are organic, they don’t have nasty stuff in them. And then finally we do Amazon PPC really well inside of I love. So those three things were our ad 20.
And we weren’t focusing that much attention on him because we were focusing on so many other things. So being persistent, on focusing on what really pushes your business forward. And what you love to do. If you don’t do what you love to do, you burn out, it’s everybody burns out, even when you’re doing the things you love, I burn out doing what I love, I just take a break, I block my calendar for three weeks, I take no podcast, I take no anything like for Christmas, we’ll take three weeks off.
For you know, around my birthday time, we’ll take two weeks off around my son’s birthday, which is next Tuesday, I’m taking 10 days off, just so we can be present and just take a break, you know, unplug a little bit. That’s the beauty of this business that you can do is you can be persistent. And you can eliminate everything that you don’t love. And when you focus on just what you love, you’ll realize that you’ll work a lot less I work 15 hours in this business and 10 hours in my other business. So 25 hours a week is what my work week is. I can extend it make it longer if I want or I can shorten it because ask yourself this is a long answer to your question. But it’s actually going
ask yourself why you’re doing this. And when you ask yourself why you’re doing it, then your whole mentality changes. Because I’m doing it for my family. You’re doing it so you can travel. So why not schedule your schedule around that? So when I make my schedule out every quarter, it’s family time first or actually it’s me time first. I meditate I have my meditation time I work out time. After I do that I do time with my family.
So my son, he gets three to four every day we have snack time, because he gets home from school. And we have snack together, we play a little bit together, and then we do whatever else. Sometimes I’ll have something at four o’clock, but usually I don’t. So three o’clock my days done, and then it’s all to my son. And then I have Friday mornings is date day. So all day, Friday is a date with my wife. Those are the first three things I schedule time for myself time for my family time for my wife.
And then I put my work schedule in my meetings, my podcasts, everything. So my work day is usually Monday through Thursday, from 9am until 3pm. And so that’s it. So four days, six hours, so 24 hours, but like I said, sometimes it goes further. So it can be 24 to 30 hours. So do your schedule backwards.
The reason you’re doing this in the first place, and it will pay off. And now if you’re just beginning, it’s going to take more sacrifices. When I first started, I work from sunup to sundown, I didn’t have kids, I had two practices. So I worked a lot at the beginning. But that was only five years ago. And I stopped practicing optometry three years ago. So it only took me two years of working full time to starting this, to really get to a point where I felt comfortable walking away from a salary of $250,000 a year to do this full time.
Because we were both doctors, we weren’t like making nothing, we were making a significant amount of money. But to walk away from that it was scary. But it took a lot of hard work for two years with our job, and then we could go full time in it. So just being persistent and doing the things you love, it will never feel like work. And it will grow faster than if you tried to do what everybody else talks about all the shiny objects.
Kenny Soto 41:40
This, and I say this too often, but it’s true. This is now my number one favorite podcast interview that I’ve done so far. Thank you, Travis. If anyone wants to connect with you online, where could they find you?
Travis Zigler 41:52
Yeah, thanks for allowing me to do that. And thanks for the kind words, that was a great compliment. So our YouTube channels called Amazon PPC pros, our Facebook group is called Amazon PPC pros and join us inside of those. I’m in there every day interacting. So and then, you know, if you want my free course on Amazon PPC to learn how to do yourself, it’s profitable pineapple.com profitable pineapple.com You can also book a phone call in there with me or fill out a form on there. If you’re interested in our services as well.
You know, we’re not cheap. We like I said we’re we think we’re one of the best in the world at what we do with Amazon PPC. So if you’re ready to take your brand to the next level, fill out that application comes directly to me, and then I’ll be in touch through email, and we’ll get you started. Or we’ll just jump on a phone call to see if it’s right. If it’s not, I’m not going to extend an offer, I’ll pretty much tell you what your next steps will be.
It could be working with another business, it could be working with my free course it could be any of those. And so we kind of discussed that on the phone call and give you the next best steps. Because I get on the call with about 10 people. It used to be every week, but I loaded that down to every month. And we extend an offer to maybe two to three. So we’re not all about just getting a bunch of clients. We’d like relationships with clients because the real profit comes when we start to scale them. And that’s what we care about is if you’re ready to scale so profitable. pineapple.com is where you can find us.
Kenny Soto 43:19
You just listen to another episode of Kenny Soto Digital Marketing podcast. I just wanted to add to what Travis just said, I can’t remember the book. But I do remember one of the quotes being if you charge a premium on a product or service, you weed out the people that won’t be your customer ever. And I think that’s something to think about. Alongside all the other lessons that we learned today is just thinking about how much you charging for your services or product.
And in most cases, you can always charge more, especially if you want to weed out the fluff from everything else. Again, you just listened to Kenny Soto Digital Marketing podcast. Thank you, Travis, and thank you to the listener. And as always, I hope you have a great week. Bye