The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Jason: I originally hated Facebook advertising because it’s interruption marketing. And it’s just not the place for it. Yes, there are people who can make it work. But it is at the heart and soul of it, and I’ve never liked it for that reason.
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[00:01:08] Jason: Let’s jump into it today. Somebody want to lead off with their most loved ad. Or just give us the one that you focus on the most. Kyle feel free to lead off with one. I know you’re always in Amazon. You want to talk about
[00:01:21] Kyle: for sure. The platform ad platform that I love the most is.
[00:01:27] Platform that makes me the most money just to clarify. I think when it comes to how you rank these and where you find them to be the most interesting, you have to lean into whatever platform you are having success in. For sure. I think Amazon’s come along with. In their advertising platform.
[00:01:44] And I think they’re going to continue to push into it. They’ve added as like a third major revenue stream advertising is highly profitable. They saw what Google and Facebook were doing and were like, Hey, we have a lot of traffic. We should make some money with this. And they have billions and billions or so they’ve continued to invest into capacity for, and I think too, just as a top level where she, you think about advertising platforms and where you should spend your time and really really depends on what you’re after in the market as well. So the nice thing about Amazon is that it is a you’re advertising for obviously for products, which are advertising people that are actively searching for those products, ready to potentially buy those products, which is a vastly different, advertising than say Tik TOK.
[00:02:33] Which would be not necessarily the people going on, Tik TOK, looking for things to buy, so you’re moving closer to the actual purchaser. And so for those reasons, I love Amazon as a platform and would encourage you if you have physical products and you’re selling on that platform to, to spend more time and energy, exploring all the new features and stuff that they do have.
[00:02:54] Jason: Yeah. Other thoughts on Amazon? It’s the 800 pound gorilla for e-commerce marketers. Chris or Michael, what are your thoughts? And I have a few ideas as well for Amazon.
[00:03:03] Michael: I’ve got a bit of feedback from the sort of frontline, if you like wrong phrase in this current time from one of my clients, quite a few of the guys I’m working with are finding the ad cost as a percentage of the sales really going up.
[00:03:13] So the TAC costs or total advertising sales, or advertising to sales ratio, whatever name you give it. And, it’s an interesting point that brings up a slightly more meta question, which is how do you compare. Not even just ad platforms, but Adam platform management, because one of the, two of the guys who are looking into outsourcing or have used outsourcing, so PPC agencies in the Amazon ad space, So I don’t want to go completely off topic.
[00:03:37] One of the questions is how do you assess the effectiveness of Amazon ads or Google ads or your agency or doing it yourself? And it’s really difficult because, year on year comparisons right now are really crazy. Cause the macroeconomic factors are so all over the place. So I wonder we’ve got a pandemic the next year.
[00:03:52] We’ve got a war effectively. Lots of different factors. So that’s one, it’s more racist, more questions and answers really, but I think one of the conclusions we came to this 10% advertising sales ratio that’s traditionally been seen as well. Run advertising might be 80, more towards 15% in Amazon.
[00:04:07] So almost leave that as a discussion point, but that’s what I’m seeing in the Amazon ad space. It’s quite tricky to know how to handle it, but it’s certainly edging up.
[00:04:16] Jason: Yeah, love it. Okay. Chris, what are your thoughts on Amazon? Decade long user or more. I don’t even know when you started AMS stuff, but what are your thoughts?
[00:04:25] Multi
[00:04:26] Chris: decades on Amazon? I’ve never been a big spender or really exploring, the Amazon, like the paid ad side. So either have Amazon or Facebook or any of the social media sites. And that’s where like commits, starting to break this down and write down all these notes about I feel a lot of people think ads are going to be magic.
[00:04:42] Like you’ve just had the right. I’m going to make a ton of money. And I’m like, maybe if you have a poor product page or depending on what your offer is like where they are in the buying cycle, if they’re on Amazon looking to buy, or if they’re on Facebook looking to escape, like it’s complicated, this is a huge topic.
[00:04:57] It depends what you want. It depends on what you’re trying to do with this ad. And it depends if you’re selling commodities in widgets, or if you’re selling something that you personally really love and have a lot of interest in and you’re looking to build a community around it and then maybe you’re gonna sell a product down the road.
[00:05:11] So it really depends what someone who’s like. Someone’s listening to this podcast. What do you want to do? Are you just trying to get more traffic to an Amazon page? Is that page optimized? Are they going to get there and they’d be like, no, this is what I want, where you’re spreading your ad, keywords so broad that you’re not getting the right customers were coming to your page and it’s complicated.
[00:05:27] So I think people need to step back first and be okay, what am I trying to do? And where am I trying to send this traffic that I’m basically gonna buy? And you’re where are they in the buying process? And it’s, there’s so much, we almost didn’t make a decision tree to help people with this.
[00:05:40] It’s complicated because the worst thing you want to do, and this is what keeps me away a little bit from spending money on ads is what if you’re spending money and it’s not working and you’re just literally throwing money away. And if you don’t have a big ad budget, you’re like, oh my gosh, what am I doing here?
[00:05:54] Not on purpose, but kind by accident. When I kinda got into this game, I didn’t really coined this term, but I call it education marketing. And that’s what I did with FBA power and scan power in merchant, by Amazon, all these things, outbreak communities now join other communities. Now we’ll just talk about and share information, about the business of.
[00:06:13] And then if they want to get into FBA power and skin power, that was one thing, that took time instead of money. Now I can just throw money at it and try to, run ads and get people to come to a site and download a product. And, it’s two different models. I think the model that I was doing well, it took more time.
[00:06:25] Definitely worked better in terms of building brand and all of those things. So it’s a complicated topic. I’m not the one to really ask about like how to set up perfect ads and, optimize your ad spend and all of that stuff. So I’m glad you guys are here for that. But the Kindle ad promotions, I’m really close, just taking a whole chunk of money and sitting down heads down for a week and saying, I’m going to figure this out because being able to create Kendall products and print on demand books, where now I can run ads at an ASEN level and ACE.
[00:06:53] Level I can advertise on one single AC if I want to through KDP. Yes. That’s a great way to launch my book in a very specific niche, right? Yeah. It’s all sitting right there and yeah, I got to spend some time with it because I want to look at myself and then teach it to anybody else who’s interested.
[00:07:08] Jason: Yeah. So I’m surprised you don’t do you don’t do Kindle ads. I don’t.
[00:07:14] Chris: And also I’m like the number one destination, first of the market, lot of my books. I get a lot of that first mover advantage, but I would definitely, benefit from learning some of the stuff that I’m sure
[00:07:23] Jason: you can do.
[00:07:25] Yeah, no, I love, I love the, I always call it AMS, but Amazon’s advertising platform for Kindle books and paperback books. It is a, it is a very simple, path to, additional incremental sales. And it’s so easy to look, to see, are your keywords performing? Is it, operating successfully for you?
[00:07:44] Test it out, clip them off if they’re not working, but then double down on the stuff that is. And honestly, I’ve been doing that for a decade. Now. I’m shocked that you don’t do that, dude. You that’s so much more incremental sales. Let’s collaborate on that because I’m passionate about it. In fact, I was doing a DIY job on it for awhile and just recently.
[00:08:04] VA in essence, to manage it for me. And they’re now also managing all of the free book promotional activities, you can do countdown deals, you can do your, free days on Kindle books. All of those things, if you’re an author and you don’t take advantage of it’s free marketing strategy.
[00:08:20] That Amazon’s baked into the system. They aren’t just paid ads. They’re more, promotional nature. And, those are frequently not used. And I’m doubling down this year on using all those and making sure every slot for every book is always used. And so it’s a unique wrinkle for authors on the Amazon system, but it’s a fantastic.
[00:08:39] And, I owe a lot of my success, I think, on my book projects to, to the Amazon ad platform. Yeah. Okay. Let’s keep going. Top of mind for me after Amazon is Google, Google ads. I’ve, Loved Google ads for our charity and for our business for a long time, I’ll lead off on this one. I have just a weird wrinkle, most people don’t, which is, for our charity that we.
[00:09:01] 2010, we applied for and got a Google ad grant from the Google foundation. And so started spending, the initial grant level was $10,000 a month of free ads. And now we’re on the $40,000 a month level, which is a crazy town. In terms of the amount of money to spend, but they give it to us for free.
[00:09:22] There you go. That’s one aspect of it and I’ve just always loved the simple text ads. And, Kyle, to your point earlier where you said, on Tik TOK or on Instagram people, aren’t looking to buy something, but on Amazon, on Google, they frequently are as well. And the ads can be super targeted straight to, fulfilling the need of someone who’s searching for a specific product, or interest.
[00:09:41] That’s why I love Google text ads. I’ve never had much success with the display ads on Google. So interested in anybody’s thoughts or ideas on those, but, I’ll open it up to the group. Anybody else passionate about Google ad platform and loving it, for your business?
[00:09:55] Kyle: I love Google. I think Google has just gotten better and better, over time.
[00:10:00] And, one of the things that’s super interesting about Google is that in the past, they, it was very keyword focused, right? You punch up your list of keywords and you stick that in the algorithm and then it optimizes it and you make sales off those. What they’ve done over the last few years is their algorithms started to optimize more for, out for audiences.
[00:10:23] And so those algorithms starting to optimize for audiences. So if you’re not utilizing the audiences that are in the backend of Google’s platform, you’re actually missing out on a lot of the optimization and yeah, you gotta set it up and there’s some work involved with it. But once you start getting data through.
[00:10:40] It really begins to optimize your campaigns more effectively than has before. So it’s interesting because that’s where Facebook made their, their claim and their money was the sort around audience targeting. And Google took all that data. And it’s not, as I would say, it’s not as built out as Facebook has been, but they layered in there nicely with the keyword data.
[00:11:01] And they’ve really done a good job of maintaining their market dominance as the ad type. Choice.
[00:11:06] Jason: Yeah, totally agree. Guys. Other thoughts? Google ad-words Chris. Michael, any thoughts? No, Chris is out on that one. It goes right over
[00:11:13] Chris: my head. I’ve done. I’ve run. They sent me the a hundred dollars coupon in the mail kind of thing. And I’m like, oh, I’ll figure this out. And I never figured out in.
[00:11:21] Yeah, I can’t do everything kind of thing, but it’s yeah, there are opportunities. What I’m thinking is there’s opportunities everywhere. There’s too many. There is which I don’t want you to be overwhelmed with. Like I got to do Facebook ads and I gotta learn Tik TOK. And I heard about Google and Casa, this and Jason said, this, am I going to do this?
[00:11:35] Jason: Stop overwhelm
[00:11:36] Chris: now, where are your customers? Where are the majority of your customers? What’s the one platform that makes the most sense. Start there as you feel comfortable expand from there. Cause we tried to all of them, you’re going to.
[00:11:47] Kyle: I wouldn’t say this. I want to circle back to what you had asked, or made a comment about earlier, which was, how do you define?
[00:11:53] What’s a good, campaign. What is profitability? And I would say this, back in school, when you were like, math, I hate math and what is, how am I ever gonna use this? You’re going to use it. When it comes to defining what your, how great campaigns are going to look like for your business.
[00:12:08] And what I mean by that is it all starts at the math of the product and the funnel level that you’re working on. Like you have to have good foundational product level, metrics, meaning you have profitability and you have margin and you have average order value where people are spending more, buying your products either on Amazon or on your website.
[00:12:30] With through a funnel than what you are paying to acquire them. That is the essence of the math that you need to understand. And if you can get, if you understand what those numbers are, you can pretty quickly understand whether or not that your campaigns are working or not, because you attach real numbers and you begin to know.
[00:12:46] And, but let me say this, sometimes that doing that is not that.
[00:12:50] Jason: Okay. Kyle’s now in full teach mode, which is awesome.
[00:12:54] Kyle: I want to talk about it now. We will
[00:12:55] Jason: break down. We will break down the method. Maths for ads. No. Okay. Let’s keep going on the platforms because to your point, we could do a whole podcast episode on a first math behind, ads.
[00:13:06] And whether they work from. Michael. What are your thoughts on Google?
[00:13:09] Michael: So just to echo what Kyle was saying, I was going to say this earlier. I said, I’m glad he’s voiced my thoughts, Kyle. Really, the more complex these platforms get to Chris’s point, you need to pick your fights or decide not to enter that arena.
[00:13:20] So you built a, some very significant seven figure brands with a, more of a community building focus than ads. The interesting thing is when you try to compare something like, say SEO, With ads and the attribution of the money and effort you spend and how to value your own time is another thing again.
[00:13:38] But even if you’re paying for it, it’s hard to figure that out. Whereas ads at least have the advantage of being more obvious to deal with. And I have this discussion the other day with a, a client of mine. Who’s doing very well with Google shopping ads as his primary driver of traffic. As he’s getting better at SEO, he’s getting more SEO, but they’re going for very high level traffic into a site.
[00:13:56] And then we’re having to spit it out into. Basically do lead capture at a fairly high level of the funnel. Like they’re looking for what is X product? What is this thing? Very generic sort of queries. And then gradually take them through an email marketing process. So that’s. A more complex business than ads where it’s more direct and it’s working for him.
[00:14:15] But to your point, Kyle is working for him because the economics of his business, such that the Aboriginal devalues about 300 or $400, that’s not typical in e-commerce. So that’s helped him a lot. So that was a decision he made that I think was a very smart one because it’s enabled him in a lot of ways to simplify as business model.
[00:14:31] The other thing I would say is. Really, I’ve seen somebody recently worked with somebody who had outsourced that advertising to an agency. And this is a guy who’s doing 2 million bucks a year America guy with a spread of about 1720 skews or something. So not a beginner. And they ran his ads at a bit of a loss.
[00:14:47] And I talked to him about, he came to talk through with me, what was going on and how to fix it. And I said, basically, Your job. And I think to your point, Kyle is to really manage the economics of it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing it or an agency is doing it. It, the maths must make sense.
[00:15:02] The advertising to sales ratio is the sake of percentage. Whereas if you’ve got to say a 40% margin on your product pre ads, you mustn’t spend more than 10, 15, whatever, maximum 20%. If you want to get, say 20% out of the, at the other end of it. Those are those my experiences. I wouldn’t claim to be an advertising expert myself, but I do think that the economic management of advertising is critical.
[00:15:23] Whoever you have running it yourself or somebody else. Yeah,
[00:15:26] Kyle: for sure. Good
[00:15:27] Jason: points. Okay. Let’s move on to Facebook. Anybody like Facebook for advertising? Is that the one
[00:15:33] Kyle: who would love to hate? I hate it at the moment.
[00:15:36] Jason: Yeah. Love to hate it. Honestly hate it. Yeah. Why do you love to hate it? And then I’ll share why I love it.
[00:15:41] Kyle: There are a number of reasons why I love to hate it at the moment. One of it being is they have moved in, moved hardcore into, like algorithms that are monitoring their compliance. And they’re awful. So meaning here’s an example. You have an ad, you throw it up there, you start running, it starts making a few sales and they actually will disable your entire ad account.
[00:16:07] Automatically through an algorithm. And then you have to go through a manual review process that takes 24 to 48 hours. And that it happens again and again on the exact same account. And so since COVID, this has really been a problem for them. And since they haven’t had as many people available for them to do all their review and compliance process, so they’ve tried to use an algorithm to do it and it’s executed horribly.
[00:16:30] So that’s one reason. The other reason is that just. They’ve lost a significant access to data. When iOS did their privacy updates on apple device. They took a hit in terms of the clarity of attribution to their data, even admittingly. So saying in their earnings report saying this is probably gonna cost us like $10 billion in ad sales, over time.
[00:16:52] So the lack of data, and then actually pulling more, targeting off the platform because of the scrutiny that they’re under. And then also just their weird compliance issues that they have going on right now. Just makes it a bear to try to do anything.
[00:17:05] Jason: Yeah, totally agree. But those aren’t even the reasons I originally hated Facebook advertising.
[00:17:10] I originally hated Facebook advertising because it’s interruption marketing. People are there to say happy birthday to their nephew or to wish their spouse, a happy anniversary. And then you’ve got an advertisement for your stupid product. And it’s just not the place. for it Interruption marketing and yes, there are people who can make it work.
[00:17:30] And yes, there are the shiny object sellers who say their course will teach you how to do it. But it is at the heart and soul of it, interruption marketing, and I’ve never liked it for that reason. I’d much rather be on Amazon where somebody’s looking for. A rice cooker and there you are, you’ve got an ad for your rice cooker, right?
[00:17:49] Or on Google, where somebody is typing, how do you fix this or fix that. And there you are with your product or your information. So to me, those were the original, concerns with Facebook. And it’s only gotten, exacerbated by the stuff that you’ve mentioned, which is just the platform is honestly, it’s in a, it’s in the downhill slide.
[00:18:08] A bad legacy. In my view, I wrote an article for McGraw-Hill blog about two years ago that said is Facebook the yellow pages of 20 years. And that was true two years ago. And it’s even more true now. It is just a remnant, a legacy issue in our society at this point that we’ll continue to work like yellow pages ads did for 20 years after it was, reaching its Zenith.
[00:18:30] But, yeah, not a fan. And it seems like there’s better places to spend money at the same time, full disclosure. I’ve got a boosted ad campaign on Facebook going right now. I love to hate it, but I still use it. And, that’s just reality of it. So other thoughts,
[00:18:48] Chris: and then there’s part of Facebook that they are leaving on the table.
[00:18:52] In my opinion, I probably been waiting. What year is it? 22, almost 10 years for them to allow this type of advertising. Like we’re, I’m not just me. I know tons of people are waiting to give Facebook money. If they would just let us advertise two groups, let me pick up. And run my ads to people in that group.
[00:19:10] I don’t know why they’re holding out on that so much. I think one of the reasons Facebook groups got so popular is because there really weren’t any ads in the group newsfeed. So people spend a lot of time in groups and Facebook has got to know that and they gotta be like, do we should put some ads in here?
[00:19:23] And I’m like, yeah, puts them as, let me advertise to this group of people that are specifically interested in this topic, because that’s what my product. And it’s not there. That’d be waiting. And I keep hearing that little incident, it never comes. I’m like, please just show up. I don’t want to advertise to everybody who likes Russell Brunson.
[00:19:40] It’s too broad. I don’t wanna advertise to everybody who likes this political figure. It’s too broad. So learning how to narrow it down. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong and all that stuff, but I would pay so much money if I could pick a group and say, oh, you guys are in the 69. Perfect because I have products that support and are for people who have 69 Camaro’s it will be so easy.
[00:19:57] One click it’d be as simple as Amazon nets. But no, Amazon Facebook’s no, we’re not clicking. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. But I would hop back to Facebook in a. I don’t run ads to groups. I would spend so much money. It’d be so perfect. And the ads will be targeted. And the people who see the ads to be like, Hey, this is great.
[00:20:14] I actually love this thing. I actually have a 69 Camaro. This was amazing. So easy, but it’s not there. Maybe today’s the day for all we know.
[00:20:21] Jason: Maybe they’ll drop it. Yeah. The metaverse groups. Michael, what are your thoughts? Ideas on Facebook.
[00:20:28] Michael: Yeah, just to echo what Kyle was saying. And yet some kind of counter examples.
[00:20:33] I’m in Kyle, you’re not wrong about the speed of suspension. I don’t personally really run Facebook ads. It’s not a thing that I’m comfortable with to your point, Jason, the whole concept of interruption marketing is bit alien to me. And like you, Chris, in a heartbeat, I would, I’m very comfortable with Facebook groups.
[00:20:47] I’ve run number, I’m a member of a number and it’s a valuable resource. So I would definitely spend money on that. But that aside. Never personally done it, but I have lots of friends who when Facebook has, and they’re constantly moaning about, getting their accounts shut down, for almost, tiny compliance things, almost nothing.
[00:21:03] It’s compared to Amazon even, which is pretty scary. They are incredibly trigger happy. The other counter example is though that I’ve had people in the mastermind group who basically one guy ran an agency for one company effectively for a couple of years where they basically ran. And collected email addresses and they made out like absolutely crazy people.
[00:21:20] That was more effective before the iOS update. I think it continued to work post iOS update just to less effectively. I don’t know all the ins and outs, but it was certainly extremely effective. So I don’t think it’s dead as a platform yet, but it’s certainly not something I’m personally comfortable with.
[00:21:33] Kyle: Let me elaborate on that too, because I think this is a critical error that we all make when we start to think about advertising and that is we try to force. Our desired outcome on a platform when it’s not optimized to produce that desired outcome. And what I mean by that is we say, I have a product widget and I’m going to sell this widget on Facebook and I’m going to run direct response ads.
[00:21:59] It’s going to have the picture of the product. It’s going to go to my sales page and people are going to buy it. And I’m just going to make it happen. That’s not really the best place. To run your campaign, a campaign like that. And so part of it is if you want to be on a platform, you have to make the fine tune adjustments to your strategy for those platforms.
[00:22:17] And for Facebook moving up a layer of abstraction, going up to the lead level to Michael’s point is a much smarter play to going up to awareness with the using video content and just building your brand awareness on the. It’s a much smarter play because if you use video and just traffic as a whole to a landing page to your website will then now, if you are using Google as well, you can start to remarket and retarget them.
[00:22:44] You might get their attention on Facebook, but you might actually close the deal on Google. And so understanding where stuff slots in, I think is really important.
[00:22:53] Jason: Yeah. You mentioned video based work, so let’s have a bonus round here and talk about other ad platforms. Obviously YouTube video ads.
[00:22:59] Driven from the Google ad platform, but, we want to mention those and then, other ad platforms that we actually like, and we’ll talk about or hate and want to mention as well. So any thoughts on YouTube ads, anybody a big into YouTube ads? Pre-roll whatever thoughts.
[00:23:18] Chris: Not personally, but I know some people that, that are having really good success with them.
[00:23:21] Cause you can be so targeted. I don’t know if you can target all the way down, like just, I won’t advertise on this channel or this I’m guessing you can, because then if you can find a channel, you’re like, this is exactly what I need and just pay for it. Of course. The better. More expensive. The ads are going to be, but if you have the right
[00:23:35] Jason: product in the 69 Camaro videos, yeah.
[00:23:38] There you go to your events. Yeah. You can
[00:23:40] Chris: do anything you want, but I just want to add one thing to what Kyle was saying is there is a difference. I think a lot of people forget this between advertising and what. They are very different. I see a lot of people trying to just throw money at and say, I’m just gonna shove ads down your throat until you buy this how much money we got.
[00:23:55] We’ve got $8 margin on that product. I spent 8 cents spend 7 99 on ads, this person. And until they either buy it or
[00:24:01] Jason: we wasted $7 and 99 cents and they ended up spending.
[00:24:05] Kyle: Yeah,
[00:24:05] Chris: instead of marketing and saying, Hey, look, you might not be in the market for this, but this is like pretty amazing. And you got a birthday coming up, you come to our website, they can get our free guide, but like actually putting some time and effort into it instead of just like the throw money at it until we get some sales, I see too many people doing that instead of doing the longterm, the harder, the more complex marketing.
[00:24:23] And then if you’ve got an audience, then go back and run ads to them, I would say, yeah, People forget that they’re very different things. They sound the same. Yeah.
[00:24:34] Jason: Totally yeah. Yeah. I want to mention Etsy. I love Etsy ad platform. Etsy’s a killer ad platform. It’s simple, it’s straightforward.
[00:24:41] It’s a proper specific advertising and it just a machine you can turn on and let run. So if you’re an advert, if you’re a seller on Etsy or have products that could be on Etsy, just know there’s an ad platform there that will work effectively. Once you invest time to say. And it’s real straightforward.
[00:24:58] And, it’s, I think one of the best parts of Etsy, as a marketplace, any other platforms you guys want to mention that you love, or I would
[00:25:05] Kyle: like to just
[00:25:05] Michael: mention Pinterest ads is not something that I personally know about from experience. And obviously Jason, it’s hypocritical for me to mention it in your presence, cause you’re such a big Pinterest user and success.
[00:25:14] But I would say I interviewed a chap the other day. He specializes in Pinterest and he’s really bullish on Pinterest ads. I’m gonna guess it’s his specialist area, but he thinks they’re doing some very smart things to clean up some. The things that made it not work. And that’s about as much as I can remember in specific.
[00:25:30] So do check out the interview with a guy called Craig Lewis from pin and grow happy to give them a sort of shout out. Cause I was very impressed with his very focused approach, just Pinterest for e-commerce nothing else. And it seemed like an underused platform and a well-structured ad platform. So I think it’s worth at least checking it out.
[00:25:47] Jason: It is totally agree when it came out. Documented my whole series of tests on a Pinterest ad platform on my blog marketing on pinterest.com, which is so old and dated. I don’t want people to really go look at it, but, it was associated with my book, but when it came out over a decade ago, I guess now, Pinterest power.
[00:26:04] So the Pinterest ad platform is underutilized. I think it’s not. Top of mind for people it’s relegated for some reason in marketers minds. And, I haven’t actually looked back into it. After my initial sets bottom line, I couldn’t make the math work for our set of products through, the Pinterest ad plus.
[00:26:23] But, maybe it’s time to revisit it and, cause it is under utilized, I think, in the marketing suite of ad platforms. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:30] Kyle: One other thing I want to mention is there’s always opportunities and usually those opportunities involve a, an interplay between platforms and here’s what I mean by this.
[00:26:42] Amazon has ruled out for brand registered sellers, their brand referral bonus, which is essentially them saying, Hey, what we’re going to do is if you send external traffic to your Amazon listing pages or to your storefront, and then a sale is made, we’re actually going to reduce the referrals. That you have to pay on those products, which is cool because typically on a standard referral fee for an Amazon sellers, you’re paying them 15% and that Amazon takes it off the top, but they’re willing to lower that if you’re driving external traffic. So if you can optimize it, for example, a Google campaign. For your product, going to your in Amazon, what that can potentially generate for you is a reduced referral fee on that sale with, to help underwrite essentially your advertising costs, but then also that’s producing, the network effect on Amazon.
[00:27:31] You get more conversions, you get more sales, therefore you get a little bit more organic love and plus you get positive, good traffic from Google, which Amazon loves as well to your listing pages. It’s a net benefit. So there’s ways you could do that. It’d be interesting to try that with Pinterest and you, it doesn’t have to be Google.
[00:27:46] You could do that with Pinterest. You can do that with YouTube ads. You could start to mix that around, to try to generate a halo effect, to improve your organic reach on Amazon and start to drive more organic sales that way. So there’s ways that you piece these things together and you have to look for opportunities in order to do that.
[00:28:02] Is that new it’s brand new?
[00:28:04] Jason: Oh, that is interesting because you’re right. You could totally just arbitrage it out on Google text ads, for example, would like pennies on long-tail keywords, just drive it all to your Amazon account, take the lower, fee on the Amazon side and build a spider web of really interesting, traffic.
[00:28:22] That’s very interesting.
[00:28:24] Kyle: I think there’s going to be more competitive in that space moving forward as well, because Walmart does the same thing except one. And this is brilliant from them. Walmart actually gives you a hundred percent of the referral fee if you drive external traffic to your listing. So it’s not Amazon, but then there’s a whole other layer on top of that as well, because the same technology that Amazon uses for that referral bonus component is the same thing that they use for their affiliates.
[00:28:51] So all the tags are exactly the same. So meaning what could end up happening in the future? I’m not saying this is the case, but this is, this, the foundation exists for it is that you send external traffic as an Amazon brand owner to your products and it makes sales, but then Amazon could potentially give you credit for any other sales that occur on the platform as well, because it’s all tied in already.
[00:29:12] So if they really wanted to get competitive with Walmart and fight that battle for additional external traffic, the groundwork is. Have
[00:29:19] Jason: you guys ever used Amazon associates info and look, and done it and looked at what people buy when they follow your link, you advertise something. Then they can see what they buy.
[00:29:29] It’s like what in the world it’s amazing to watch. Dude, that’s really interesting to me. All I hear is Amazon competing with Walmart, giving us as sellers, more goodies, benefits and rewards for creative marketing, because they have to they’re in a blood feud with a Walmart. That’s awesome. Yeah.
[00:29:49] Kyle: Talking
[00:29:50] Michael: with halo effect. I just wanted to one final mention for the broader picture of this stuff. The, the guy who had in the mastermind who was, used to be Australia, Amazon account manager, by the way, which is at the end up morphing into different things. The Facebook ads they were spending about 50,000 bucks a day.
[00:30:06] It was pretty serious going into email ads was converting and making a great profit for the direct to consumer site in and of itself. But as a sort of side effect, as I understand it, the Amazon account grief and 1 million in revenue a month to two months. More or less as a result of that. And I wonder if what was happening, there was a sort of halo effect because Amazon loves the external traffic.
[00:30:26] People were looking for the brand that were probably Googling it ending up on Amazon because Amazon is a great place to end up at the top of the Google results. So seeing how these network effects happen, quite complex engineering.
[00:30:39] Kyle: For sure. It’s important to keep in mind as well that understand the consumer behavior with that, right?
[00:30:45] Is it, I think it’s just north of 50%. It could be a little bit higher than that now of product related searches. Start on Amazon, not Google. And so people see products on Facebook and Tik talk and even might even see it on Google. Before they buy it, they’re going to go look for it on Amazon.
[00:31:03] So you having a strong presence for your brand on Amazon is a defensive position. Even if you don’t really want to maximize it from a monetary position, people are searching for your product, searching for products on Amazon. And so you. Halo effect. And it goes both ways, as well as your brand grows on Amazon.
[00:31:23] If you have a Shopify store, you’re going to get spillover branch, organic traffic to your Shopify store as
[00:31:28] Jason: well. Yeah, totally. One of the reasons that happens is because, the echo chamber of, publishing online, if you advertise a lot and if you get beat, rank, but just visibility, there’s a whole blogosphere on.
[00:31:41] That’ll do listicles. Hey, this is the top 10 products, for this category, that category, all of that saturates your backlinks and your traffic generation into your products. And it’s a ricochet or a halo effect. Phrase Michael of advertising. Yeah.
[00:31:59] Kyle: And it’s built on that affiliate, oddly enough, all of those blogs and big sites, guess what?
[00:32:04] It’s those top ranked products that are the ones that are always the ones that they pick, because those are the ones that they know have high sales volume, and they’re going to make money on the average, on the, on the advertising side and the affiliate side. So
[00:32:16] Jason: yeah, Amazon’s not done with the affiliate program, even Oprah’s favorite things now runs through.
[00:32:21] Just, it’s an Amazon affiliate store. What in the world?
[00:32:25] Kyle: It’s interesting, it’s not an advertising platform per se, but it is an advertising methodology on Amazon. They have the editorials now, right? Where you have them, this is selected by and it’s really people that are in Amazon influencer program.
[00:32:38] And they’re just pulling data feeds from their blog and website and Amazon then post it and you have products. Picked by thing.
[00:32:46] Jason: And they’ve done that for authors forever. Authors have always had their RSS feeds available to their author pages. And now they’re extending it to influencers and extending live videos to influencers and brand owners, too, which isn’t to your point, paid advertising, it’s earned advertising on the Amazon network, which is really a whole different podcast.
[00:33:07] That’s a whole different topic, but you basically, sweaty. Your way into advertising on Amazon with those, resources and efforts. Yeah. Wow guys, what a conversation we haven’t talked about. Tik TOK advertising. I don’t know that we need to today. Maybe we’ll circle back sometime when somebody has a passion for that one, but appreciate the chance to pick your brain on ad platforms and understanding how best to go after these sounds like we have some mutual respect and appreciation for, Amazon at least Google as well.
[00:33:39] We didn’t talk about advertising on Walmart, which we have some clients that are crushing it on a Walmart with advertising. And so there’s so many opportunities, final thoughts around the table, then we’ll wrap it up.
[00:33:54] The
[00:33:54] Chris: one thing we didn’t talk about now, and if it’s a great topic for next week, Influencer marketing in the sense of, I look at that Facebook group that I can’t advertise to, and I’m like, I’m gonna find a way to do it. So I’m gonna find that admin, I’m going to say, Hey, what can we do? Can I straight up pay you?
[00:34:08] Can we do some kind of affiliate relationship? Same thing on Facebook, in the newsfeed where you’re talking about it’s interruption marketing, and like no one wants to be interrupted while I can find an influencer who, whether they’re going to promote your product or reference or mention your product instead of just promote and push it through an ad.
[00:34:23] You gotta get a little creative. Sometimes we can do a whole show. Creative influencer marketing. I don’t know if you guys want to think about that as a kind of an offshoot of just straight, regular advertising, which may or not be working.
[00:34:34] Jason: Yeah. And
[00:34:35] Kyle: then you can lay, you can layer it together. Like one thing I’m testing right now on Tik TOK is influencers creating content and then layering to cock ads on top of it to drive traffic to.
[00:34:46] So I’m testing it right now. So I’ll be able to give you a case study about how effective it will be, here, hopefully in the next month or so. And, it’s layering stuff
[00:34:55] Jason: together. Awesome. It’s interesting to hear that. I think all of us have some Tik TOK strategies, percolating, and I think we’re probably all working to figure out how to best approach it, conversationally and educationally, but, there’s really interesting stuff happening there for sure.
[00:35:10] Michael final site or Kyle final thoughts?
[00:35:14] Michael: Yeah, just a simple one, which is just not overlooking the boring, old thing of as much as Kyle was saying not to lose that, know your numbers. I think in the end, paid advertising is more of a direct match game. Or math as you call it over that side of the pond that I think all businesses obviously, but with advertising, the upside is it’s more easily attribute.
[00:35:32] There’s not an easy game, but it’s easier to attribute your sales to particular advertising. And you can see the money in money out equation more easily, and more clearly with paid ads and other forms of marketing. To your point, Chris, there is a different to marketing and advertising that said it will go out the gate much faster if you don’t know what you’re doing.
[00:35:50] So I think you owe it to yourself to really know your numbers. And don’t obsess so much about the details of an ad platform that you lose sight of whether it’s making you a return or a loss, which is somehow weirdly easily.
[00:36:02] Jason: Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. Kyle, go ahead. Go ahead. my
[00:36:05] Kyle: final thought is advertising it as an accelerant.
[00:36:09] It’s either it’s going to accelerate your bad outcome, or it’s going to accelerate the good foundation of stuff that you have. Meaning if you have bad math product, that only it doesn’t have enough margin or your funnel isn’t cooked, or your product page is sloppy and you spend money on it, you’re going to lose money on it because it’s going to accelerate what’s there.
[00:36:30] Conversely, if you have all that stuff dialed in, you have a good product market fit. Your messaging is on point. The product is something that, that your target audience. You yeah. You add advertising to it. You’re going to accelerate to a point of growth. And so just making sure the fundamentals are there in your business before you really push hard into advertising, I would say is key.
[00:36:53] And I also think you have to be curious with when, if you’re going to be an advertising, you’re going to have to be testing and you have to be okay with testing new things, but willing to pivot quickly because these platforms change. And, and then lean into the stuff that’s working. It’s I started off saying my favorite ad platform is the one that’s making me money and they’re not going to consistently be the same over time.
[00:37:16] Like Facebook could, a couple of years ago Facebook was crushing it well, not so much anymore. So now who’s going to take the lead in your business and you have to be able to make those decisions effectively.
[00:37:27] Jason: Yeah, I totally agree. My final thought is, I think you guys have spoken into this throughout the conversation, but, my final thought is if you’re going to get into advertising, treat yourself to a serious and meaningful.
[00:37:41] Stoppage of any ad spend about every three to six months for a week or so. And just see what happens test at the meta level at the high level is your ad system really serving you incredibly well because it is one of the largest line item expenses, in any business and making sure that. Halt and see if it’s responding is one of the best suggestions I can give to people.
[00:38:06] We did this in our business once and we looked back and realized that we had spent about $90,000 the prior year that honestly didn’t do us any good. And it didn’t hurt us when we stopped, except for the fact that we had $90,000 that we didn’t spend in advertising. And you want to think through these things and, and approach it like that, and then really build a system.
[00:38:28] Adapts itself to all platforms or to multiple platforms and never get cooked into just one, platform scaling on one, like a one legged stool is a very scary place to be. It’s not safe. And so you just don’t want to do that. You want to think through how do I use mobile? Ad platforms if we’re going to do it and get success that way.
[00:38:48] Okay. I’m going to wrap it there guys, as always it’s an honor. This was a great conversation and appreciate your wisdom and insight in the show. If you’re watching this on the call an app with us right now. Thank you so much. If you’re checking it out on the e-commerce leader, then we’d love to have you, like that on Spotify.
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