In this Throwback episode, Josh interviews Tyler Greg, founder of Ampd, about the game-changing strategy of driving Google Ads traffic directly to Amazon listings. Tyler explains how leveraging Google Ads—rather than sending traffic to standalone e-commerce sites—enables sellers to capitalize on Amazon’s superior conversion rates and boost keyword rankings. They discuss Amazon’s own traffic arbitrage, the benefits of Amazon-compliant (white hat) tactics, and how sellers can maximize ROI, reduce fees, and build defensible brands by combining external traffic with Amazon’s brand-building tools. Actionable tips for scaling to 8 figures and beyond are shared throughout.
Chapters:
Amazon’s Google Ads Arbitrage Explained (00:00:00)
How Amazon buys Google Ads cheaply, drives traffic to search result pages, and resells clicks at a higher price.
Introduction to Tyler and Ampd (00:00:40)
Josh introduces Tyler Greg and Ampd’s expertise in Google Ads to Amazon traffic.
Ampd’s Origin Story (00:01:12)
Tyler shares how Ampd started as a data science platform for Google Ads to DTC stores in 2015.
Transition to Automated Bidding (00:02:04)
Google’s shift to automated bidding forced Ampd to rethink their approach and product offering.
Early Focus on Shopify and BigCommerce (00:03:08)
Ampd built tools for Shopify/BigCommerce, but struggled with low conversion rates on DTC stores.
Switching Traffic to Amazon (00:04:23)
Ampd decided to send Google Ads traffic to Amazon for higher conversion rates and better results.
Amazon Affiliate Program Insights (00:05:18)
Using Amazon’s affiliate program, Ampd discovered 30% of Google Ads clicks resulted in Amazon purchases.
Conversion Rate Analysis (00:05:50)
Discussion on how often external traffic buys advertised vs. other products, and the impact on conversion rates.
Why Amazon Incentivizes External Traffic (00:07:18)
Explains Amazon’s motivation for encouraging sellers to drive external traffic due to high overall conversion.
Amazon’s Massive Google Ads Spend (00:08:18)
Tyler discusses Amazon’s huge annual spend on Google Ads and the two main ad types: Shopping and Search.
Difference Between Shopping and Search Ads (00:08:34)
Breakdown of how Amazon uses Shopping ads for direct listings and Search ads for broader traffic.
How Brands Can Compete with Amazon Ads (00:10:06)
Case studies on replacing Amazon’s ads with your own to get cheaper, more direct traffic to listings.
Building a Competitive Moat with External Traffic (00:10:39)
Josh explains how external Google Ads traffic can help brands dominate and protect their Amazon position.
Actionable Takeaways for Sellers (00:11:19)
Summary of strategies: boosting keyword rankings, using white hat tactics, and testing Google Ads to Amazon.
Three Key Focus Areas for Google Ads to Amazon (00:12:19)
Emphasizes keyword selection, ad copy, and optimizing landing/store pages for best results.
Shopify vs. Amazon for Google Ads Traffic (00:13:35)
Tyler compares benefits of sending Google Ads to Amazon vs. Shopify, including conversion rates and branding.
Brand Referral Bonus and Seller Fees (00:14:32)
Explains Amazon’s 10% brand referral bonus, making fees competitive with Shopify for Google Ads traffic.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts (00:15:09)
Wrap-up and final remarks on the value of sending Google Ads traffic to Amazon.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Websites
Ampd
Shopify
BigCommerce
Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon Attribution
Transcript:
Tyler 00:00:00 But what Amazon does with search ads is they buy it on Google often, you know, 30, 40, $0.50 per click. The average CPC on Google is about $0.60. They buy it first, call it $0.60, and they send it to a search result page. They do search, find, buy and you’re not allowed to do it. Amazon. Yeah, of course they sent it to a search result page where they then have that page covered in sponsored ads. Yeah, that all cost $1.30 per click. Yeah. And so Amazon buys it for 60. They resell that traffic for $1.30. And they take that difference there. Arbitrage again. It’s fascinating. Yeah it’s it’s genius. Genius.
Josh 00:00:40 I never thought of it that way. But now I’m like my mind is now open. And I’m like, okay, that that makes ten times more sense now. Today I’m excited to introduce you all to Tyler. Greg Tyler and his team at Ampd are big data analysts who have spent seven plus years building Google ad tech and now bring that technology and knowledge to the Amazon industry, allowing Amazon sellers to unlock Google ads.
Josh 00:01:03 Welcome to the podcast, Tyler.
Tyler 00:01:05 Hey Josh, thanks so much for having me today and excited to be here and talk a little bit about Google ads. But, you know, talk about e-commerce in general.
Josh 00:01:12 How did Ampd get started? What brought you to where you guys are today? And what I would argue to say is the kind of the name brand of bringing external Google ad traffic to Amazon.
Tyler 00:01:24 Yeah, definitely. And so kind of quick background on Ampd is we are Google ads to Amazon experts. That is all we do. I kind of joke about like that is all we know. I don’t know anything else other than Google ads, to Amazon. but we know a little bit more. And, the background on our company is we started right around 2015, just like you guys. And we started as really a data science platform for Google Ads to DTC stores. And it was a great journey. We built out a really incredible data science engine that was able to analyze Google Ads data, and then we worked with a lot of agencies to help them drive efficiency.
Tyler 00:02:04 Find unproductive spin. Find areas to double down using data using our data science engine. And about two years ago, our engine was all focused on manual keyword adjustments. So hey, your bids at $0.15, if you up it to $0.32, you’re going to unlock $10,000 of revenue. You should do that, right? But two years ago, Google started going to all of our agency partners saying, no more manual bidding. You need to do automated bidding. And Google is pushing all their automation, right? And we’re saying they’re going, If Google’s not letting us do manual bids and they’re incentivizing agencies to not do manual bids but do automated bids, where does that leave us? Right. Right. And so we’re kind of looking around going, okay, what do we do now? Like we have all this Google Ads data. We have all this Google Ads expertise. What do we do? And so we started saying, okay, what if we started pointing that engine and helping, you know, SMS this was originally we were more focused on large enterprise companies.
Tyler 00:03:08 Okay, what if we started focusing on SMEs and we actually built a Shopify and BigCommerce app that allowed sellers to quickly and efficiently create Google Ads campaigns from scratch and send them into their Shopify store. And that basically tabled all of our data science, keyword modeling, probabilistic engine and all that stuff, and started earlier in a campaign, which was the campaign creation side. And we started sending all this traffic to a lot, mostly Shopify. And the conversion rates just weren’t really there. So we would help thousands of brands, but it would bring in traffic to their website. But then we had to start getting into this world of, okay, well, you’re getting good traffic. And we had to start teaching them, how do you get that traffic to convert? How do you read the web analytics to improve your landing page experience and improve conversion rates? Because the traffic’s good websites just not converting? Yeah. And what we realized was it was less of that brand’s problem. It was a little bit more of a Shopify issue to where people don’t really look at a DTC store and, you know, say, I’ll give you my credit card or, hey, sure, I’ll pay $15 for shipping.
Tyler 00:04:23 So trained by Amazon for my credit card saved. This is going to show up in two days and I’m not going to pay for anything. I’m not going to pay for shipping fees. So we said, why don’t we send all this traffic to Amazon, the best converting website in the world. That’s going to solve all of our conversion rate issues, and we can focus on what we’re really good at, which is really good Google ad campaigns. So about a year and a half coming up on two years ago, we started saying, all right, let’s send it to Amazon. And we actually funny enough, we started by using the Amazon affiliate program. So we started kind of hacking it a little bit by using the affiliate codes. And we learned a lot from it, because what would happen is you would send traffic in and affiliate affiliate tracking would allow you to see all the products purchased on the Amazon Marketplace after the click, whereas Amazon Attribution only allows you to see your products purchased after the click.
Tyler 00:05:18 And so what we saw with the affiliates was it was about 30% of the time someone clicked on our ad, they would buy something from Amazon, right? I mean, that’s an incredible conversion rates. And it also speaks a little bit to why Amazon’s incentivizing external traffic. Because the Amazon knows you bring someone in. They’re buying something. They’re going to buy something right.
Josh 00:05:39 So tell me like what percentage of the time, you know, did you see people purchasing other products other than what people were advertising for?
Tyler 00:05:50 Yeah, it’s it was fascinating looking at that data to see, okay. Once they enter the kind of the portal into Amazon, it’s like, oh my God, you guys are just spending a ton of money now, right? You asked Google for, you know, toothpaste and now you’re buying a kitchen table. Like what do you weigh? How do you happen? Right. so the conversion rates were around 30%. So 30% of the time someone clicked on our Google Ads, they would buy something from Amazon.
Tyler 00:06:18 in terms of how often they deviated from the exact product. I don’t remember the stats on that. It wasn’t something we were super focused on because we were just looking strictly at if you bring external traffic in, do they buy something? it was it wasn’t too astronomical, but it definitely did happen. and it happened for different products too. So there’s a lot of variables that went into it, which is why we didn’t really focus on that data too much. You know, if you bring in toothpaste, right, someone or not, it’s not just toothpaste. if someone asks Google for like an, an iPhone stand for like, your desk or something and they lands on your product listing, but then they scroll down and they see a similar product for $10 less. Like, we can’t really control that, right?
Josh 00:07:07 Like, right.
Tyler 00:07:08 So we didn’t really look at it too much or, you know, a personal decision like that. Maybe they wanted one that had the cord going through the bottom, or maybe they wanted one that was a sideways stand or whatever.
Tyler 00:07:18 Right? So we didn’t look too much at, okay, what was the conversion rate directly on that product versus on other products? We just looked at generally like, oh, like 30% conversion rates. And we’ve just been working with, you know, Shopify where the conversion rates were like less than 1%. So we were pretty excited to just see conversion rates in general at that scale. And we knew from there it’s like, okay, you know, it’s not going to work for every product, but it makes sense of why we’re hearing all these rumors that external traffic impacts ranking, because you bring it in and they buy something from Amazon. And it wasn’t smart enough to say, hey, you’re you’re bringing us sales. Like, keep doing what you’re doing kind of thing.
Josh 00:07:58 Yeah, obviously we can see why Amazon would be incentivized to have sellers bring external traffic, because if we’re bringing external traffic in 30% of the time, it converts regardless whether it’s our product or something else. Amazon doesn’t really care about the individual seller.
Josh 00:08:14 What they care about is obviously their bottom line and generating more sales.
Tyler 00:08:18 Amazon. So. Amazon. Arbitrage. Google ads. And what I mean by that is Amazon spends. I’ve always said they spend $6 billion a year on Google Ads Amazon themselves. I was talking to someone who said it was like 14 billion. Oh, geez. So regardless, it’s a.
Josh 00:08:33 Big spend a lot of money.
Tyler 00:08:34 They spent a lot of money. And what they do, there’s two types of Google Ads. There’s Google Shopping ads, which are those picture based ones. And there’s there’s text ads which are called search ads, which are text based. Right. And what happens with the shopping ones is Amazon buys those and they feature specific product and they go straight to a specific product listing page. So if your product showing up there that’s awesome. Amazon’s paying for your advertising. It’s going straight to your listing page. text ads is another really valuable area of real estate. And that’s where what Ampd does because only the domain owner can do shopping ads.
Josh 00:09:12 Okay.
Tyler 00:09:13 So as a brand, I A Hadley Hadley designs. You guys can’t do shopping ads. You can only do search ads. But what Amazon does with search ads is they buy it on Google often, you know, 30, 40, $0.50 per click. The average CPC on Google is about $0.60. They buy it first, call it $0.60, and they send it to a search result page. They do search, find, buy and you’re not allowed to do it. Amazon.
Josh 00:09:37 Yeah, of course.
Tyler 00:09:38 They sent it to a search result page where they then have that page covered in sponsored ads. Yeah that all cost $1.30 per click. Yeah. And so Amazon buys it for 60. They resell that traffic for $1.30. And they take that difference there. Arbitrage it.
Josh 00:09:54 So fascinating.
Tyler 00:09:55 Yeah it’s it’s genius.
Josh 00:09:58 Genius I never thought of it that way. But now I’m like my mind is now open. I’m like okay that that makes ten times more sense now. Yeah.
Tyler 00:10:06 Exactly. And the case studies that I always love is when we see those examples, you can replace that Amazon ad with an ad for your product.
Tyler 00:10:16 And then when someone searches broomstick instead of Google, Amazon buying it, and then you fighting for it on a search result page, you can replace Amazon ad sent straight to your product listing, bypass that competition and get that same exact traffic, but for half the price. So I love those case studies because you’re already buying Google traffic, but you’re just buying at a premium. Go buy it at the less expensive price.
Josh 00:10:39 I think we would all be foolish if we didn’t think that Amazon is constantly testing. Where do we put this add to cart button? Because for them, even a 0.1% change in conversion rates is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars for them, right? Right. So replicating best practices on Amazon, I think that’s that’s a great idea. And imagine if you’re already succeeding on Amazon and you want to continue to dominate the competition. Adding in this external traffic is only going to continue to add to this halo effect for you. And then you implement some of these other strategies with your store landing pages, and you will effectively create this huge moat around your business.
Josh 00:11:19 That will be really hard for any new competitor that enters the market to even scratch the surface, so to speak. Well, as we wrap things up here today, Tyler, I’m going to break down some of the actionable takeaways that our guests can move forward with. Number one, I would say if you are looking to kind of boost your keyword rankings or have this halo effect going on on your Amazon listings, where Amazon’s going to give you a little bit of extra love and be 100% toes compliant. Doing everything with white hat strategies, driving external traffic. Google ads is something I would definitely recommend that people get started and and just start testing out in your business. And Tyler talked about that. Sometimes you gotta just test it out for three months and then keep refining. I think for everybody, you know, that started on Amazon was month one. We launched on Amazon and we had it all figured out. No, of course not. Like we all learned, we all grew on to this platform.
Josh 00:12:19 Form. And so likewise this is a new channel. This is a new opportunity. And I think those that get started early, I’d say these are the early days for the Google ads going to Amazon. If you can get started early and just keep reiterating, time and time again, I think it will reap dividends in your business. And then we broke down really three things to focus on. If you are driving external, you know, Google add traffic to Amazon. That’s number one focusing on your keywords. They’re definitely not going to be the exact same keywords that you’re bidding on for PPC campaigns. Keep that in mind. Number two is focused on the ad copy. Qualify that potential lead so to speak, to make sure that, you know, that’s that’s something they would be interested in using the words best or most beautiful in that product copy. And then finally focusing on that or optimizing that landing page experience. You can go straight to the detail page. But taking it up a notch, you could create your own store landing page where you replicate that detail page on Amazon, but remove all the competitors because they’re at your store page.
Josh 00:13:27 So I think those are the overall, you know, takeaways from today’s call. Do you feel like I’ve missed anything, Tyler, that you want to add?
Tyler 00:13:35 No. You absolutely nailed it. I the only two things I would add is the toes compliant side. I know that Amazon brands are always kind of pushing the boundaries and looking for that competitive edge. And Ampd in Google Ads is completely TLS compliant. One of the things I kind of liken it to is we get asked all the time from brands, should I send my traffic to my Shopify store or should I send it to Amazon? And obviously there’s side benefits of saying to Shopify, but when you send it to Amazon, you get the Amazon conversion rates. And when you send it to an Amazon storefront, you get the brand building experience. So you can basically replicate what your Shopify page looks like, but within the Amazon ecosystem. So you get all the conversion rates, you get the brand awareness, you get the brand building, and then you can also, you know, try to get people to hit that follow button, which allows you to, you know, remarket to them and send them those templated emails and whatnot.
Tyler 00:14:32 So those side benefits beyond just the direct conversion rates that are really cool. And then also with the 10% brand referral bonus program, I think like Shopify is like 3% seller fees or something like that. Amazon your 15. Well, with that 10% discount now you’re at 5%. So all of a sudden yeah this question of do I send Google traffic to Shopify or to Amazon. Amazon’s making a pretty compelling pitch with their conversion rates, the seller fee discounts, and the ability to brand on Amazon. Now to to send it to Amazon.
Josh 00:15:09 Yeah I think that’s fantastic. We didn’t talk enough about Shopify, but that was a great, great use case of why you should consider pinpointing that over to Amazon for all of those reasons. Well, Tyler, this has been such a great conversation.
Tyler 00:15:23 Awesome. Thanks for having me, Josh.
