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The Top Amazon PPC Tactics From a $4 Million Seller

Dr. Travis Zigler is an Amazon PPC Coach at Amazon PPC Pros and the Founder of Profitable Pineapple Ads, a consulting agency for Amazon entrepreneurs looking to grow through advertisements. Dr. Zigler helps business owners become more financially free by mastering PPC, DSP, and sponsored ads on Amazon.

In addition to his work as a PPC expert, Dr. Zigler is the “SeeEO” of Eye Love, an eye wellness and hygiene company aimed at helping consumers with dry eye. He holds a doctorate in optometry from The Ohio State University.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:07] Dr. Travis Zigler talks about building a career as an optometrist before transitioning to entrepreneurship
[06:58] How exiting your brand can lead to greater opportunities
[14:29] The importance of Amazon DSP for growing your brand
[19:14] Dr. Zigler shares the types of businesses his agency works with
[25:47] How to use keyword data and search terms to create successful PPC campaigns
[29:52] The value of coupons to generate revenue on Amazon
[36:38] Dr. Zigler’s tips for serving your audience and building a raving fanbase

In this episode…

Do you need a tested and reliable advertising strategy to set you above your competitors and generate millions of dollars on Amazon? If you want to take your business to the next level, you don’t want to miss this episode.

With any great advertising strategy, mastering traffic flow and audience engagement can take time. Luckily, Dr. Travis Zigler has the expertise you need to effectively grow your brand and increase revenue through successful ad campaigns. He built his brand on the foundation of serving his customers and creating impactful products. But, he achieved financial freedom thanks to PPC, DSP, and other strategic Amazon advertising methods — and he wants to share his insights with you!

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Dr. Travis Zigler, Amazon PPC Coach and the Founder of Eye Love, to discuss how you can grow your business through Amazon advertising. Dr. Zigler talks about his top PPC strategies, how to scale your brand using Amazon DSP, and innovative ways to engage and connect with your audience.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on its website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi folks. It’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley 0:29

Hey, folks, thanks for joining me for another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast today we’ve got a serial entrepreneur that’s exited and has spent years helping other entrepreneurs as well. We’ll talk about his journey a little bit. Hopefully you get some great stuff out of today’s episode in regards to boosting your audience and growing your PPC campaigns, things of that nature. Dr. Travis Zigler. Welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast.

Dr. Travis Zigler 0:54

Joe, thanks for having me on. I appreciate you having me on and really happy to be here. I’ve been following you for a little while

Joe Valley 0:59

now. Well, I appreciate that. You’re a doctor of Ophthalmology. A doctor of eyes, right?

Dr. Travis Zigler 1:05

Yep. Eyes is the easiest one but optometrists so I have my doctorate of optometry degree.

Joe Valley 1:10

And that sounds like a lot of work.

Dr. Travis Zigler 1:13

was a lot of work is not as much as an ophthalmologist. It’s only four years after you graduate undergrad. So it’s a full doctorate program did it at Ohio State.

Joe Valley 1:22

So what’s the difference between a doctorate or an ophthalmologist and a doctor of Optometry?

Dr. Travis Zigler 1:29

So optometrists are more like dentists. So we have four years post grad training, so you get your bachelor’s or whatever, you go into your doctorate program. You have four years of that. So chiropractic, I think it’s three years, Juris Doctor which is a lawyer is three years dentist is for optometrists for now switching to the ophthalmology side, MD is an ophthalmologist. So they go to med school, and after med school, they do their fellowship and training. And then they go to focus on ophthalmology. So they’re about usually about eight years. And even more specialized, it’s 12 years,

Joe Valley 2:03

way too much way too much. I put in my good years to get my undergrad I want to say good because it’s actually almost six, because I went to Northeastern University, which is a five year school. But I goofed around a little bit. I thought I was going to be an actor for a while, and ended up with a minor in theater and a major in finance. And here I am podcasting. And here you are a podcast guest and you had me on your podcast less than a week ago, which means you’re an entrepreneur as well. So how do you go from a doctorate in optometry got that right to becoming an incredibly successful entrepreneur doing over 5 million in revenue? You sold that business talk about that a little bit. And now running an Amazon PPC agency where you’re handling over a million dollars a year and adspend. How did that transition occur?

Dr. Travis Zigler 2:54

Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s just one of those things that just kind of happens. It’s a little bit of Stir craziness, you know, and you just don’t know what’s going on with your brain. And then all of a sudden, you you figure it out when you discover entrepreneurship. Yeah. But just to kind of go back in 2010. I graduated from optometry school. I worked for my uncle throughout undergrad and throughout optometry school, and he’s an optometrist in Columbus, Ohio, where I went to school. So I graduated from optometry school went to work for him for about four years. And there was just something missing. You know, I hit my goals of making $100,000 a year that was like my goal, I finally hit that and there’s just something missing. And I didn’t know what it was, but my wife and I decided to do the three things you’re not supposed to do. We quit our jobs. We moved across the country from Ohio to South Carolina. And we started to practices of our own. And I remember when I told my uncle that I was leaving he I thought he would be mad, but he was actually happy. He was like, you have you have the you have what I wanted to do. I wanted to move south, I wanted to do all that. But I just didn’t have the guts to do it. And you have the entrepreneur brain, you’re going to be okay, and I had no idea what that meant. So fast forward to South Carolina, we started our practices. And I went from seeing six patients an hour to one patient an hour. And so I got a little bored in there. So I came across a course called Amazing Selling Machine and started selling on Amazon. In my free time between patients. Which level

Joe Valley 4:17

did you do? Because I know Matt actually sent me an email today ASM 1234561.

Dr. Travis Zigler 4:23

I am ASM for there on 12 Right now, I think so. With that being said like it was my I just fully immersed myself in entrepreneurship. Three businesses right off the bat. We pretty much opened our practices in January. We started the Amazon business in May. And what we noticed over the next three years, what we were doing is we are grinding. We’re waking up at seven every morning to work on that seven, like six in the morning to work from like six to eight and then we’d go see patients and then we come back home and work on the Amazon business. We didn’t have kids at the time we do now. And so we were seeing patients all day and working on our Amazon business at night and in the morning. And we did that for about two and a half years. But what we saw as our practices went from 100,000, when we took it over to about 300 to 500, and had this linear growth, but the Amazon business had this, you know, a little bit more parabolic growth. And so it took off extremely fast. And so we knew we had to kind of commit to one, or at least two. And so we sold one of our practices in the beginning in the middle of 2017, then we sold the other one and 2018 went full time into this. And then like you just talked about, we exited in June of 2021. But we didn’t leave the company, we actually still run that company today. And we’ll run it either until the end of 2023. Or if they sweeten the pot a little bit more, we may even run it until the end of 2025.

Joe Valley 5:42

That that’s an interesting exit because most people that want to sell, just want to sell and be done. But you’re, you know, a little different entrepreneur, right? You’ve got your doctorate, you’ve done more educational training than most of us ever want to. And I don’t mean to cut entrepreneurs, but we get that itch early on where we just have to move on to something else. Oh, we get that I can do that mentality. And you’ve done a lot in a very short period of time. And your exit is interesting. First, I think they approached you. Number one, number two, you’re rolling equity, and you’re still running the shop as well, is rolling equity, right that you still own some

Dr. Travis Zigler 6:26

of that company? Yeah, so we still own some of the bigger company now. So the parent company that bought us shares in the bigger company or just a small, okay, there’s Yep. And then we have an urn out as well. And so I can’t tell you all the details, but we have, we had initial buyout, burnout, and equity.

Joe Valley 6:42

These are the things that every entrepreneur that reaches out to Quiet Light and fills out that valuation form is terrified. They want all cash and they want to be done. They don’t want an urn out. They don’t want to roll equity, they just want to move on to their next adventure. Why did you choose the earnout? And why did you choose to take shares and the Newcomb?

Dr. Travis Zigler 7:03

To answer your question, why? I’ll answer it with the question why? It’s finding your why. Why did you get into this business in the first place. And that’s the only reason we stayed on. We weren’t for sale, they approached us. And they had an interesting proposition for us. They were a bigger company than us not much bigger, but they were bigger than us. And they had a model figured out that we didn’t have figured out, we had a model figured out that they didn’t have figured out they went direct to doctor and wholesale, which we didn’t do, we did but it’s just organic, it just kind of came to us more than we do direct consumer, which they don’t do at all. And so that merger was one plus one equals 10 versus one plus one equals two, we got to take over all their companies in their portfolio in the direct consumer side. They’re taking over our company in the wholesale side. And going back to the why question, our Why is to reach 1 million dry eye sufferers. And so people that have dry eyes, I mean, my wife and I are both doctors. So we focused our brand around dry eyes, we took the ASM course, but we didn’t pick products, we picked a consumer that we wanted to serve, which was a dry suffer. And we came out with products around them. And so going back to the why we were at about 50 to 100,000 people that we’ve helped over the course of the five years, but we knew we could put an accelerator on the fire if we teamed up with them. And we could get to that million faster. And so the synergy between the parent company and us was the fact that they could get us to reach more people faster as a result than if we did it ourselves. It’s kind of like the thing that I think about Shark Tank. And people that turn down deals in Shark Tank because they don’t want to give up so much equity. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, you’re getting one to two, maybe three sharks, people that have this massive network that are going to pour accelerant on your fire that’s already burning. And it’s going to help you grow faster, it’s better to own, you know, 60% of $100 million company, then is down 100% of a $5 million company. And so going back all the way back to the question, to reach more dry suffers was the reason that we wanted to team up with them to do it. And we knew we’d be losing, you know, a big percentage of our company because they bought it. But we knew the overall lift that it’s going to occur is going to be greater than if we would have kept it on our own.

Joe Valley 9:20

You did get some cash at closing. You’ve got an earn out. And you’ve got equity in their company now as well. Yep, so three pluses? What about the daily workload that you and your wife have? Is it roughly the same amount of daily workload? Or is some of that daily grind stuff off your plate? Because they’ve got a team that can do it for you?

Dr. Travis Zigler 9:39

Yes and no. So it’s just changed. And so there’s different systems and processes that we now have to go through because it’s a bigger environment. There’s more, there’s a bigger team involved. And so there are some things that are coming off our plate as a result of joining forces with them. But we’re still I mean, we’re, we’re about nine months out now. And so we’re still kind of feeling each other out trying to figure out who goes where, what, who does what. But the resources that we have available now to us, it’s just amazing. Like, I’ve been looking for an eyedropper manufacturer for almost five years. And they came to me with 120 of them. And I’m just like, well, that made my job easy. And so things have just changed. We are busier than we were before. But they respect the constraints that we have. So we had constraints that we’re not moving. We’re staying in Austin, Texas, we like it here. We don’t want to move there in Philadelphia. So we didn’t want to move to Philadelphia. Nothing against the East Coast. I know you’re in North Carolina.

Joe Valley 10:39

It’s really Oh, man, why would you go up there?

Dr. Travis Zigler 10:41

That’s exactly exactly. And we didn’t want to go into an office, we wanted to work from home and work remotely. We wanted our team to stay intact, we didn’t want them to get fired or anything like that. And so there are a lot of things that we are busier than ever now. But we’re also accelerating a lot faster. We’re coming out with seven products, which we never came out with seven products in one year ever. We usually do about one per six months, just because that’s yeah, that was best for our lifestyle and what we were trying to build. But now we’re trying to put some accelerate on the fire, like we talked about earlier, because of the turnouts, because of the buyouts and all that stuff and the equity, so we’re in it to work harder. But it has been a definite change. But some things have been taken off our plates that like the financial side, we don’t do anything with the financial side anymore. We just see a p&l and we go over that with the CFO, the CEO, and some of the financial team tried to figure out some inefficiencies. That was a nice thing to let go of, because they took it all for us. The legal side, we don’t have any more legal that we have to worry about, except we have now legal meetings that we have to go to and figure out make sure we’re doing everything by the book. So it’s just changed. It’s different. And yeah, it’s it’s just a different experience. And are you

Joe Valley 11:52

are you on? Are you on payroll? Or is it just Okay, so you ended up negotiating payroll into that as well?

Dr. Travis Zigler 11:59

Payroll and consultancy? So, gotcha. I’m both because the direct consumer side, my agency actually takes care of that for them. And so the agency runs all the direct to consumer, Amazon selling specifically. And then on the payroll side, I’m this the president of the company instead of the CEO now.

Joe Valley 12:16

Gotcha. So let’s talk about the agency because you scaled to what was it 5 million in revenue, 4 million on Amazon a million on Shopify? And you didn’t do that by outsourcing. You did that internally. You built an agency along the way, right. Profitable Pineapple is and that’s a, an agency for PPC on Amazon, if I’m understanding correctly,

Dr. Travis Zigler 12:39

Amazon ads, so we do PPC, DSP, Google and Facebook attribution all day Amazon.

Joe Valley 12:46

What’s the Google of Facebook attribution running ads there that you end up going to a landing page on Amazon.

Dr. Travis Zigler 12:52

So you run Google ad to your Amazon page. And then Amazon has a new what’s called attribution link. So you can now track it. So we we’ve been doing it for since 2017. And about a year ago, Amazon finally allowed us to start tracking it, which we couldn’t really do before. And so now it’s a lot

Joe Valley 13:08

back in back in 17. When you did that, did you see a bump in organic rankings on Amazon because of it. And so we

Dr. Travis Zigler 13:18

we did figure out a way to track it. But it was just a little bit more complicated because we create a middle page, a landing page to warm up. Yeah. And then it would be an Amazon Associates link. And so instead of an attribution link direct, because with Google ads, you can’t put a Amazon Associates link in there, because it’s against their terms of service. So we had to make a bridge page and do it that way. Completely, in terms of service and everything, but it took a lot to track it and a lot to build it because you’re building blog posts and landing pages and

Joe Valley 13:46

everything. And you’re spending a million a month I got it wrong at the intro. I think I said okay, at a million a month. You know what I used to wish that I spent, I never got to that point, when I ran, I ran a radio media buying agency. And I maybe got to 450 500 a month. This is a lot of dough that you’re spending on a monthly basis.

Dr. Travis Zigler 14:09

This is all the clients accounts that we have together, right? Not just yours, right with Eye Love we’re at about 150,000 a month. Okay,

Joe Valley 14:17

so 850,000 a month for other clients. Now on Amazon, Google attribution, Facebook attribution. And what is the focus, I’m sorry, DSP display.

Dr. Travis Zigler 14:29

DSP has been around for a while. It’s it’s display ads, the demand side platform, Amazon DSP demand side platform. And it’s essentially the same as Google Display Network, which most people are familiar with. But what it is, is you can advertise to people on and off Amazon with display banners. And so if somebody is on your page, but doesn’t buy you can then retarget them just like you can’t on Facebook, or Google, but you do it with Amazon instead. And so that person’s now shopping over on or that person’s now getting ready to watch a movie. They’re on IMDb, IMDb, his own IMDb is owned by Amazon. And so you might see a display ad in Amazon, or an Amazon product, which is run by Amazon DSP. And it goes all over the internet on Yahoo on ESPN, CNN, Fox News, wherever you are on the internet. That’s where display ads will follow you how much and then also their display ads on Amazon too.

Joe Valley 15:22

How much revenue is someone losing if they’re spending money on Amazon PPC ads but not doing DSP,

Dr. Travis Zigler 15:29

and DSP, it’s the biggest opportunity to make it’s low hanging fruit. Because if you’re in consumables, then you can get people you can literally make an audience that they haven’t bought from you in the last 30 days, or whatever your time frame window is. But they haven’t bought from you in 30 days, but they bought from you previously. And so you’re just retargeting people to get you back them back to buy. That’s by far, the best converting ad you’ll ever run. Because they like your product, they’ve already bought it that you hope they like it. And then they’re just coming back to buy it again, they’re already comfortable with it. So those usually run it at like 10 to 20 rows, or you’re spending 1000 To make 10 to 20,000. And then the retargeting piece, you can actually retarget people that have been on your listing, and didn’t buy, but you can also retarget people that have bought your competitors products. And so it’s insane the amount of detail you can get with Amazon DSP. And so if you’re not doing it, I always recommend you should be doing about 50,000 a month in revenue before you start DSP ads. But it just it creates this brand lift that is just absurd how much it can do because the row as is so high on it. And then you can go all the way to the top of the funnel, people that are completely cold, you’re just interest targeting like you do on Facebook. Of course ROI as for those are usually under one. And so that’s part of the scale process to get there. But just those simple retargeting ones lifts your brand quite a

Joe Valley 16:54

bit. And you learned all of this by testing it out on Eye Love and learning through actually doing it.

Dr. Travis Zigler 17:01

I learned all of this from hiring five different agencies going through six different software’s with Eye Love and not finding anything that I really liked. I didn’t like how agencies were treating us. And agencies. It was it was a very touchy subject for me, because I don’t feel like a lot of agencies out there treat you like, like a like they’re your partner. And that’s what we wanted to do is treat you like a partner, and make you feel like I’m one of your team members. And so I was frustrated with that. And so one of my best friends, he taught English down in Mexico, he was a best friend from college. He you know, teaching English does not pay at all. And I said, Hey, I’ve got like four people asking me to run their ads for them. I’m way too busy to do it. Do you want to team up make an SOP, we’ll figure this out together. And we’ll we’ll do it. And those four people are still with us today. Which is pretty cool. Because that was about four years ago now. And he was like, Yeah, but he wouldn’t quit his job. And I was like, just quit your job, man. Trust me, I’ve got you, I’ve got you this is gonna be this is all gonna work out. Well, finally, he ended up quitting after about three months and seeing what an agency can bring in both financially, but how much we can help these people, because they’re just not getting the help they need. And we scaled those four companies, we took one of the companies from 100,000. And they’re doing close to 3 million now. And so in this is all with two products. So it’s been a pretty steady ascent. But it’s been pretty fun just manipulating with Amazon PPC and everything. And that’s kind of the how we started the agency is just, you know, to fill your own need, like any entrepreneur to do. And then we’re just learning along the way.

Joe Valley 18:43

Yeah, that’s just what you said there filling your own need, like most entrepreneurs do. That’s how most SAS businesses start an agency start you just satisfying your own need, because you weren’t satisfied with the services that were out there or products that were out there. You mentioned a few minutes ago that you don’t recommend DSP until somebody hits $50,000 in revenue or any revenue a

Dr. Travis Zigler 19:03

month revenue, I don’t know. Yeah, per month.

Joe Valley 19:05

How do you as an agency, say yes or no to clients? Do you have minimum sized clients revenue wise that you take on,

Dr. Travis Zigler 19:14

we always recommend you doing at least 25,000 a month to work with an agency period. And especially with ours, because it’s just, it’s an ROI thing. And so when you look at what you’re paying for us, versus how much we can really optimize your ads, when you’re a little smaller, it’s not going to be good from an ROI standpoint for you if you’re only doing 10,000 a month. Now, with that being said, we have helped brands launch but we get on a phone call with everybody before we enroll them in the agency. And we always want to make sure it’s a fit for both parties. Because we don’t want that every 10 applications that we get we probably offer to people to come on board with the agency and then you know it’s not we’re not going for scale. We actually just go because we believe in the brand We want brands that are on a mission, a mission to make the world a better place. Admission similar to my wife and I, we have companies, for we have a lot of doctors. So a lot of doctors that sell supplements and consumables, that’s kind of our been our biggest niche, because they saw what we did. And they want the same thing that we did. And so that’s been kind of a big space for us. But behind it, they all have a great mission. And so that’s what we’re really focused on is companies with great missions, because that’s more fun. And that gets my team riled up and ready to go to. And all of our agency managers that are in our team, they’re actually brand owners themselves to, they’re building a brand themselves, so they understand what it’s like to be the CEO of a brand. And then they’re kind of helping you run it while learning with their own brand, too, and how to run it. And then they have the mentorship from us, and from me and my two partners in the agency as well.

Joe Valley 20:48

So for the clients that are doing less than $25,000 a month and this is a problem, we have a Quiet Light. And you know we can we have to turn away clients as well, because they’re not as they’re not big enough. They’re not doing enough in revenue and profit. So we help them in other ways we educate them. That’s why we have a podcast. That’s why I wrote a book. That’s why Walker wrote a book. That’s why we have you know, a course that they can go through on understanding the value of your business and doing things to grow it. Do you offer similar things I class that you have on your website, we

Dr. Travis Zigler 21:21

have a free Amazon PPC masterclass, we have a book we have, we have a YouTube channel. So we have a Facebook group. So we have we’ve done exactly the same things. And whenever I get an inquiry about somebody that’s a little too small, I send them to my free course I send them to my free audience building course. So we have both Amazon PPC and how to build a brand.

Joe Valley 21:40

And I want to I want to talk about the audience thing as well. But on the course, are you covering all of the things you talked about DSP, Google and Facebook, attribution and sponsored ads,

Dr. Travis Zigler 21:53

we focus on Amazon PPC, because at the end of the day, Amazon PPC is the bread and butter with Amazon advertising. Once you get Amazon PPC figured out and locked in. It’s the 8020 for advertising in my mind for Amazon. Once you get that locked in, that’s when you can start to consider Google, Facebook, and DSP. So the audience building course actually go through Google a little bit and Google attribution. But Amazon PPC course is really teaches you how to focus on it. And it all just goes back to 8020. Most clients that we take over most people that are struggling with Amazon PPC, because they’re going after so much. And when you look at their account, 20% of their search terms are accounting for 80% of their revenue. Same thing with their products, 20% of their products are accounting for 80% of their revenue. And what you do is you just pull back, focus everything on that 20%, your profit goes up, your sales go up, and then you’ll have enough money in cash flow to then focus on those other products. So we have, I want to say close to 15 to 20 skews right now, for those skews now five, actually five of those skews our home run products. So at 20, it’s about 25% for us. But five of those are homerun products, they sell over 70 a day. And then the rest of them all sell maybe 10 a day. 20 a day, five a day, something like that.

Joe Valley 23:14

Okay, let’s talk briefly. And I still want to talk about building that audience because I know you’ve built an audience of 100,000 followers over the last five years. But let’s talk about the ads because and this is me being a little selfish, but also I know the audience is wondering the same thing. You know, when I launched the book, scribe media, went ahead and created some ads on Amazon, I think I spend 250 300 a month. I’ve, I’ve logged in twice in the last eight months, I’m sure it’s complete and total wasted money. It’s not much, but what’s the what’s the easiest and most effective ad that you can run

Dr. Travis Zigler 23:48

And you know, if you’re gonna only log in once a month, just run an auto campaign, that’s gonna be your best ad. Amazon auto campaigns with a lower bid don’t go too crazy with it. But the best ad are exact match campaigns and broad match campaigns around your brand. And so if you’re not going to pay attention at all, make sure you have a defensive ad campaign. Somebody is going on to Amazon searching EXITpreneurs Playbook searching Joe Valley searching Quiet Light. You want to make sure your book shows up for all that. If your book doesn’t show up in the sponsored section, it will organically but if it doesn’t show up in the sponsored somebody else is going to be there. Somebody else is going to steal your sale

Joe Valley 24:30

somebody else is going to steal the sale so that’s my thought if somebody is going on to buy the EXITpreneurs Playbook, they do that search and they don’t see it in sponsored ads. If they’re looking for searching for a specific product like my book, wouldn’t they just scroll down to organic or and I and I know that if I was selling supplements, I think it I feel like it’s the case with my book in this particular thing and absolutely not the case if I was selling supplements because there aren’t really any other books specific cific to exiting online businesses. Now granted, there are some books that talk about exits. And the way that they craft their ads may make the potential buyer think that it’s the right book for them, even though it’s not specific to online exit, so I guess they can tweak the ad and manipulate it to news sucker the buyer into spending their money. But if I was a supplement company, I’m with you all day long. I used to buy my competitors that keywords and, and they’d buy mine. So okay, I get it I just did a full circle on that did not get defensive

Dr. Travis Zigler 25:33

ads are the number one easiest one that you can put up quickly. And you don’t have to monitor it, because it’s usually pretty cheap.

Joe Valley 25:39

And from there, how do you then scale your, you know, if you’re going to go just defensive ads, how do you then scale it beyond that? What’s the next step or two,

Dr. Travis Zigler 25:47

after defensive ads, you’re gonna go after keyword targeting ads, so search ads. So there’s two different types of search. When you’re on Amazon PPC, there’s browse keywords, then there’s shopping keywords, so people that are just browsing around gifts for men, that’s a browse keyword, because they’re just searching for something for for a man. Or if they’re looking for vitamin D supplements. They’re not, they’re looking for a vitamin D supplement, but they don’t know what they want yet. And so browse keywords tend to be a lot more expensive, because they’re not quite as sure minded. Whereas in a shop keyword, let me go back to like a disease state blepharitis is eyelid inflammation. It’s what we target a lot. If you search blepharitis, that’s a browse keyword. If you search blepharitis treatment, that’s going to be more of a shop keyword. But then if you search eyelid wipes for blepharitis, that’s a really good shop keyword. And so you can see the different types of keywords. So what you do is you do keyword research. So I would start out with a tool like magnet from Helium 10, I’d put in blepharitis. Just because that’s I know my product, sure, you should know your product, at least a little bit like yours would be exit, entrepreneur exiting business, something like that. And then you see what all comes up and you go through those keywords, and you categorize them into shop and browse. And then what we do is we go after the shop keywords. First, the shop keywords that aren’t high volume, that are highly competitive, you go after the longer tail ones that have lower search volume, you go after, like 10 to 20 of those, and you put those in a broad campaign, and you push those because that will start spitting out more keywords for you. We call those discovery campaigns, Discovery campaigns are just helping you discover search terms that might pop and make your your your product take off. And so abroad is a discovery campaign and auto is a discovery campaign. Auto in Amazon PPC is just you literally you let Amazon do everything, which can be good and bad. They discover keywords, but it gets expensive over time. And then what you do is when you find search terms that are working, so we’re gonna come back a month later, look at the data and see search terms that are working, then we put those into exact. And so those are our scale campaigns, or some entrepreneurs get it wrong are Amazon sellers, they’ll then take that search term and make it a negative in the initial campaign. I don’t like doing that because they’re going to be different bids. And so the bids will go up and down according to how much you want to scale them or not. And so they’ll show up in different areas. So I never really negative match that that’s getting a little bit more in the weeds. But we go from defensive to auto and broad discovery to then exact scale. And so that’s kind of the the phase of the transition of the linear sequence of Amazon PPC, the

Joe Valley 28:36

search tool on Helium 10. To help with the keyword creation was called magnet. I once called magnet Yep, magnet I used to do it in you know Excel spreadsheets. And I there were other tools out there. Look, this is going back to I sold my last ecommerce business in 2010. And I never did any Amazon stuff. But everything that you talked about was inside of Google ads, right keyword broad, negative all that. And I had all of those different campaigns and ads set up for them. So those are the campaigns. Those are the different categories of campaigns. What about the ad itself, you know, any tips on the best converting ads,

Dr. Travis Zigler 29:18

so you can’t do it inside Amazon PPC, there’s not when we’re doing the search, search ads, there’s not a lot of customization you can do for it. It’s not like Google ads. And so the biggest thing you can do is make your offer appealing to buy. Because that’s going to increase your conversion rate which is going to increase your ranking which is going to increase your PPC conversion rate which is going to increase lift your whole entire product listing

Joe Valley 29:44

so and raise the value of your your your business by $100,000 or money back guarantee.

Dr. Travis Zigler 29:51

100%. So the best thing you can do on Amazon is a coupon, not a coupon code, but just a coupon that you can clip on the listing and you can do one word launching a product, we run a 50% off five, zero 50% off coupon until we get either to 100 sales or 1000 subscribers, we push the product so much. It’s either 100 sales a day 1000 subscribers or 1000 reviews, those are the three metrics that we look at. And we’ll push a 50% off coupon until we get to one of those three. And that gives us the sales velocity to get to the top of the rankings.

Joe Valley 30:25

And through your ad spend and cost of goods sold. Are you losing money at that? Still, at that point, are you breaking even along the way we

Dr. Travis Zigler 30:31

price ours, we I like premium products. So we price ours a little more premium, not as premium as I want to be. But we’re still higher price. And so with that 50% off coupon, we still have a little bit of wiggle room for profit, not much. But we still we are about breakeven after advertising. And so that’s what we want to do for a long time,

Joe Valley 30:50

from the very beginning within the first two or three weeks your breakeven.

Dr. Travis Zigler 30:53

Yes, because we premium price 50% off coupon, even with no reviews, people buy you because you have a 50% off coupon, you have to make it more appealing. And that’s how we build up reviews. Because reviews come from sales velocity, sales velocity comes from making the the offer really appealing, and then having good PVC behind it.

Joe Valley 31:12

So interesting. You know, I saw a book, I forget who it was, it might have been Gino Wickman. Where the cost of the book just surprised me. Right? So yeah, the problem is, I think that people get too close to their own products, and they don’t see the value sometimes, well, every other book is 1599 Nine shouldn’t be too. Whereas I see, you know the value of you know, somebody that actually buys the book, and then actually reads it will add 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars to their business and actually get up and be excited about operating it again, because they they know when exits in mind. It’s invaluable. And I think I could sell it for $1,000 a pop, and people would still be very satisfied with it if they bought it and read it. But how do you? How do you measure yourself against, you know, premium pricing and make sure you know going outside that premium pricing? Because you’ve probably looked at that gone. Alright, so I can’t triple the price of my competitors. But how do you figure that out in your world.

Dr. Travis Zigler 32:18

It’s all about testing. So you got to split test your price. And I’ll give you a quick example. So we started out one product at $15. And we had a 50% off coupon. So very, very little room, we were breakeven at best on that product. And we built it up pretty fast to about 75 to 100 sales per day. And so after that we started running out of stock. So we couldn’t keep in stock. So we raised the price to $20. Sales didn’t slow down. So we raised the price to $25. Sales didn’t slow down. We’re now at $30. We started at 15 with no coupon because again, stock is an issue because we have a global, worldwide shortage of one of our ingredients. And so we’re now at $30, our best selling competitor 997. So we are $20. We are triple the price of them. And it’s all about testing.

Joe Valley 33:06

And you’re still haven’t gone down even though you’ve tripled the price or doubled the price in this case that we

Dr. Travis Zigler 33:11

have an ingredient shortage. So we don’t plan on going down anytime soon. Because we have over 75,000 on order, but we just can’t get it in because of that ingredient shortage. So we actually reformulate it. And we’re now getting it made without that ingredient, which actually didn’t have an effect on safety, efficacy or anything.

Joe Valley 33:28

Would that have happened without the deal that you just made with the buyer of your business? Was it one of those 100 100,000 manufacturers they shared with you, or whether or not

Dr. Travis Zigler 33:36

it’s actually this is a manufacturer we brought to them. So this is one of our major accessories that we had. Yeah, so it’s a global shortage. So it’s not just them, we have it with another manufacturer, we’re having trouble with that same ingredient. And we’re actually just removing it from all our products, because it’s it’s so it’s not really needed,

Joe Valley 33:52

did your click through rate go down your conversion rate go down your cost to acquire a new customer go down any of that change.

Dr. Travis Zigler 33:59

It’s funny because our conversion rate after we took off the coupon was still at 50% on Amazon. And so it’s absurdly high conversion rate and Amazon in that product just continues to perform for us. And that’s not an exception to the rule. We we have other products that go in low in stock. So we raise the price $5. And sellers have seen this over and over again, actually increases your sales, because you don’t want to get like caught in a sea of same price items where you’re all fighting for the bottom. And then all of a sudden there’s one that pops up at the top. Yeah, why is that one so much more.

Joe Valley 34:33

Yeah, I sold a business almost almost 16 months ago now. There was a similar situation. There was a just a product shortage in a category she was in and she raised her prices by $4 a unit just to offset and slow down sales a little bit it actually accelerated sales and conversions went up and she didn’t drop the prices. She just left on there. And so we actually had to do an adjustment in the ad back schedule for an increase in cost in profit by $4. A unit for the I think it was six months prior. And and people this is where you lose money when you sell directly to an aggregator is you don’t do this kind of math. So the increase in profit went up by $4 a unit and she used to sell three 4000 units a month. And so for the six months prior, in the trailing 12 months, where she didn’t have that we did an adjustment in the addback schedule, total number of units sold per month, times $4, because that increase was carrying forward to the new owner of the business. But we had multiple offers it closed in record time. And this is not like $100,000 businesses was like two and a half million dollars. And an aggregator bought it. Okay. That’s the type of situation where you need to, okay, save the broker fee, I don’t think so. Make sure you do the math and get the true value of your business. The aggregators will pay the true value with lots of proper math and logic oriented add backs. I’m ranting Travis, sorry. Let’s jump to let’s jump to you know, the raving fans, right, cuz, uh, Pat Flynn wrote a book called Raving Fans, I have it somewhere around here. Hmm. super fans, super fans, you know exactly what it is listen to you. I just read it. Good. I have it. I haven’t read it yet. Is it a great read?

Dr. Travis Zigler 36:27

It’s it’s exactly what we did. Okay,

Joe Valley 36:29

I had it for about a year. So exactly. What did you do to get 100,000 followers over the last five years or so,

Dr. Travis Zigler 36:37

the key thing is you’re not serving a customer, you’re serving a person. And that’s the first thing you have to know is whoever you’re serving is somebody on the other side of that screen, or is somebody on the other side of that phone? Or is somebody I mean, they’re their mom, their dad, their brother, their sister, their son, their daughter, there’s somebody and the more you realize that and treat people like people, the more raving fans you’re going to have. And so that’s kind of the first thing to ever know is that there’s a person and we dealt with dry. So dry suffers, it’s debilitating. People can’t even open their eyes, they’ve tried everything, they’ve gone to multiple doctors, and they’ve just had trouble. Because the prescription drugs suck, they just don’t work. And that’s why we started a holistic based approach to dry. And so we taught people functional medicine around it. And it was a breath of fresh air because it was completely different than everything their doctor had ever told them. But here’s the thing is it got results. And so number one, if you want to create raving fans, you got to make results for somebody, either get them out of hell, or get them to heaven. And so you’re in the heaven business, you’re trying to get somebody financially free and exit, it’s getting them to that ideal of when I sell, I’m going to have all this money, and therefore I’m going to be financially free for the rest of my life. And so you’re trying to get them to a heaven, but I was trying to get them out of hell. They’re dry suffer, they couldn’t do their job. They couldn’t even watch TV, they couldn’t read a book. Wow. And so once you realize that kind of mentality of where you are, and how to position yourself and who you’re serving, then everything else comes pretty easy.

Joe Valley 38:16

How did you do that for the Amazon customers, because you don’t have direct contact with them. I’m assuming this was done mostly through the Shopify channel.

Dr. Travis Zigler 38:25

It was mostly done through Facebook, mostly done through Facebook, on Facebook, we came out with a group called the dry eye syndrome support community, it’s still there for now might be taken down soon. It’s unfortunate because it’s helped so many people, we have about 17,000 in there right now. And these are people that are searching for dry help on Facebook. And they were the first to pop up. So if you go to Facebook type in dry, you’ll see us it wasn’t always like that we were like number 20 on that page. But what we did is we decided to dedicate one one hour of every single week to answering questions or just talking about dry, or just talking about drinking more water or eating one hour. How did

Joe Valley 39:04

you know our week because this is the reason why Quiet Light doesn’t have, you know, a Facebook q&a page, because we figure it’s going to take a heck of a lot more time than one hour a week.

Dr. Travis Zigler 39:13

They will eventually at the beginning, that’s all we committed to so what we do is we would you know, we looked up dry and we went to answer the public comm or data worker, whatever it is, and spits out a ton of questions for you. So like what is dry, wet or dry symptoms? What are dry treatments? What are this? What is that? And so all we did is each week we’d go live on Facebook, don’t want to go live you can record it if you don’t even want to go on video you can just type it up. But we the answer the question that’s most relevant around their problem that they’re having. We went live because we’re doctors and it was just a lot easier to go live. And my first video was terrible. I have a professional camera. Now. If you guys are watching this on YouTube, you see the professional camera. It’s HD. I have a professional microphone, my first video was my laptop looking at my nose with my laptop microphone. And I’m like, we’re gonna talk about Vitamin E today. And it was just so bland story, but we reading a script to Yes, I was I was reading the script, so, but we just kept going live and we got better and better at it, we got better and better every single week. And what happened was we invited all our family and friends. So we had a total of 50 people there at the beginning, and nobody showed up to our lives. But the the algorithm shifted, saw that there was engagement in our community, because we were going live all the time, people started joining it, people started interacting with it, and that snowball just starts. So effect, it’s the same thing in business, you know, you start to push the flywheel, and eventually the flywheel just starts, starts to roll on its own. And now we actually aren’t allowed to post in that group anymore because of the new corporate environment that we’re in. And with the FDA regulations and everything, they don’t want us doing anything with the group anymore, which is unfortunate, but it’s at 17,000 People now, it’s got a life of its own. People recommend our products now, without us having to be in there doing it. When we started this group, we didn’t have any products around dry, we were just out there to serve a person serve a dry sufferer and make their life better. It happened because we had Western medicine fail us in our lives with infertility. We explored Eastern medicine and we got pregnant in three months. So that shifted our whole concept of like, if this works for infertility, why can’t this work for dry. And so that’s when we started teaching people and serving them how to heal, they’re dry, using natural methods, like I said earlier, drinking more water, green smoothies, eating healthier, stressing less sleeping better, like those five things can make a huge difference in disease states. And so serving that person, we just went live every day on every every week on Facebook, we did q&a sessions. But here’s the key part. When you start getting engagement, comment back, send a message, just say Is there anything else I can help you with? Let them know that you’re there for them. That’s how you create your first 100 raving fans. And then they take over the rest. They help you build that whole audience because they’ll start sharing it with everybody else. And we did the same thing with the agency. It’s no different.

Joe Valley 42:16

And this can be done with with grilling aprons or supplements or dry sufferers, whatever the product category might be a thick. Yeah.

Dr. Travis Zigler 42:26

So if you’re grilling apron, your that’s your that’s what you’re selling. Who are you serving, you’re not selling a grilling apron and you’re serving the mom, or you’re serving the grill master. So you’re serving somebody. So that’s what you got to figure out. And you got to figure out what their pain point is, or what their pleasure point is, and figure out how to get in there.

Joe Valley 42:43

I’ll tell you what one of the best folks or brands at doing that is live bearded. Neither of I mean, I’ve got stubble it’s not really a beard, but live bearded. This is this is a situation where they have raving fans as well. But it’s a bunch of dudes, a bunch of burly dudes with beards, that are raving fans that are telling their friends and their family about this brand. Because they do that so well. And obviously you’ve done it well, incredibly well as well. So we’re running out of time here a little bit. But folks, if you didn’t catch it earlier, we’re talking about this latter half about you know, Profitable Pineapple, profitablepineapple.com. Your sponsored ads PPC agency, where you’re spending How much was it a million a month in ad spend for clients? You name them on your on your favorite categories, or niches that you work with? Is does it matter? That was it just anybody mostly right brain

Dr. Travis Zigler 43:40

that serves great people just have to have a brand that serves people. We don’t want to sell plastic widgets on China just to sell more plastic widgets on China.

Joe Valley 43:46

Yeah, I hear Yeah. Okay. All right. Any any thoughts on how people can connect with you and reach out to you?

Dr. Travis Zigler 43:52

What’s the beneficiary let me do this. Facebook, we have a group called the Amazon PPC Pros, but I just described we go live once every two weeks because I my time is limited right now. But we usually release a video once every two weeks in there, but Amazon PPC pros on Facebook. Our channel on YouTube is called PPC Pros by Profitable Pineapple. Talk about consonants. If you remember that from English class, we’ve got all the peas in there, and our website’s profitablepineapple.com, and you can apply to work with us there. But the easiest way to get a hold of me is through Facebook. So joining Amazon PPC Pros and joining that group, you’ll find me in there. I’m one of the admins and I posts a lot so um, don’t be afraid to tag me reach out Direct Message me whatever you need to do. That’s fantastic.

Joe Valley 44:37

Thanks for all the good tips and advice. I’ve got some work to do. I’m actually going to go through your masterclass myself, and hopefully other lots of other folks will as well. Thanks for time today Travis. Appreciate it.

Outro 44:49

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at podcast asked at quietlightbrokerage.com Be sure to follow us on YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts thanks for listening we’ll see you next week