Josh Hadley  8:22

That’s awesome. Well, thanks for giving us kind of a rundown. There’s a lot to unpack there. I think it’s interesting that you guys started with those affiliate links, right? I’m curious with those affiliate links. So would the sellers that you were working with, would they sign up for their own affiliate account then? And then share that affiliate link with you? Or were you guys the ones generating the affiliate, you know, links and revenue? I mean, that you’re kind of double dip? And they’re both ways, right? Yeah,

Tyler Gregg  8:49

it was us, it was us doing it. Okay. And not, I don’t think it was like, technically against Terms of Service. But it’s definitely one of those, there’s got to be a better way to do this kind of mindset. And I eat obviously, with affiliates, it’s like two or 3% Commission, right. Whereas with attribution links, you get a 10% referral bonus. So Amazon didn’t like it. But they also provided kind of that carrot on the stick to have a switch over to attribution. Also, with the affiliates. It wasn’t super scalable. It was definitely in our alpha testing phase. So we’re just trying to figure out, okay, we know Amazon converts, we’re on Amazon traffic, but can’t convert for off Amazon traffic. So it was kind of just part of our alpha testing. And I don’t think we ever really thought long term we would be doing affiliates. We have to figure out some better way to do it. Yeah. But it was it was our first kind of foray into external traffic to Amazon.

Josh Hadley  9:46

Yeah, you gotta start somewhere and that that was the only place to really track external Yeah,

Tyler Gregg  9:51

get the TA Exactly. Exactly. The other. The other thing that we tried to do, I know a lot of brands have have tried this and I know a lot of brands still do it, but Sending the traffic to a squeeze page and then sending that traffic once it hits that landing page, then onto Amazon. Right? We did that as well. The issue with that is really twofold is one, you lack some of the keyword level conversion data that you get by just sending it directly to Amazon. But I know a lot of brands want, they want to qualify the traffic before they hit the product listing page. Because they’re so protective of conversion rates, we haven’t seen that be an issue because it’s tagged correctly. And Amazon knows external traffic’s gonna convert at a different rate than on Amazon traffic. So we don’t think lower conversion rates direct practicing actually impacts it. But what we saw instead, and I know you and I have talked about this is, instead of sending traffic to a middle, squeeze page, landing page, and then on to Amazon, where you lose a lot of traffic. And you also have to build out a landing page, you get to your Amazon storefront, which is pretty easy to build out a landing page, it’s in the Amazon experience when people are comfortable with it. And it’s your brand to versus a squeeze page. You know, unless you’re really good designer, it’s probably going to look a little bit janky it’s not going to have Amazon branding. And all of a sudden, you’re kind of losing that consumer trust.

Josh Hadley  11:16

Yeah, plus, it’s got to be an extra click into Amazon, right? And every after click, you’re gonna, you’re gonna start losing people.

Tyler Gregg  11:23

Yep, click friction, you got to avoid that at all costs.

Josh Hadley  11:26

So with that, so going back to when you were using like the affiliate links, I think what’s interesting about that is that you were able to see what other products people were purchasing, even though they came in from a different keyword, right? Or, you know, they might be shopping the ad was specific to brand XYZ, but then they ended up buying toothpaste or something else like that. Right. 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 Gregg  12:00

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 want to happen? Right? Um, this is a conversion rates were around 30%. So 30% of time someone clicked on our Google Ads, they would buy something from Amazon, 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 it. Do you bring external traffic? And 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, some are not as legit toothpaste. If someone asked you 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, like, right, 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 want one that was a sideways stand or whatever, right? So we didn’t look too much at okay, what was the commercial rate directly on that product versus on other products we just looked at generally like, oh, like 30% conversion rates. And we just been working with, you know, Shopify, where the conversion rates are like less than 1%. So we’re 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 why we’re hearing all these rumors that external traffic impacts ranking, because you bring it in, and they buy something from Amazon, and Amazon smart enough to say, Hey, you’re, you’re bringing us sales, like, keep doing what you’re doing kind of thing.

Josh Hadley  14:08

Yeah. Okay, that that makes sense. So let’s, let’s back it up further, right. So obviously, we can see why Amazon would be incentivized to have sellers bring external traffic, because if we’re bringing external traffic and 30% of the time it converts, regardless whether it’s our product or something else, Amazon doesn’t really care about the individual seller, all they care about is obviously their bottom line and generating more sales. So then why why would this be, you know, appealing to a regular Amazon seller if I’m gonna go pay for traffic, but then they’re gonna end up buying my competitors product or now they they’re looking for a calendar, and then they ended up purchasing toothpaste? Like, that’s not my intention of why I’m paying for Google Ads. Right. So what’s the appeal to an Amazon seller?

Tyler Gregg  14:56

Right? So the appeal is and we see it in what we We’ve always referred to as this halo effect, to where you bring in traffic brands report like, hey, like my rankings going up, my total sales have increased. And what we really try to teach our brands is think of it through a tacos lens of you know, if you have a 10% Tacos, you add Google Ads. And two months later, you still have a 10% Tacos, once you’ve added your Google Ads into it, and your sales have gone up, you’ve, you’ve officially added another channel. And so we’ve always said, like, hey, it’s this some weird halo effect a nine ranking algorithm saying, Hey, you’re bringing good traffic for us. Keep bringing it in. And so it’s rank rewards. Its total sales increases. Recently, Amazon like we’ve always we’ve worked with Amazon for a year and a half come up on two years now. And we’ve always been like, hey, like, are our brands keep reporting? This? Is something going on? And they never say anything. They’re always like, well, you know, that’d be really interesting. If it was and all that stuff. Yeah. But then just about four weeks ago, now. So it was end of August, early September of 2022, Amazon hosted a webinar for AMS, and they got on, and we didn’t even know they’re going to do this. But they just went through two case studies, like professional Amazon branded, legal signed off on it case studies that I’m sure took them months and months to get approved. But the case studies explicitly said that there’s this snowball effect from doing the brand referral bonus program and driving external traffic. So we call it the halo effect, they’re referring to it as the snowball effect. And then another one got even more specific, like the headline literally said, brand referral bonus program boost best seller ranking immediately. And we’re sitting there looking at my CTO going wait, did they just say that? Do we have that? Right? Like, they actually just say that, like, confirm what we’ve been saying we weren’t shocked from the case study, because we’ve seen those case studies, and we hear our brands said all the time, but it was pretty cool to see Amazon actually publicly confirm what all those rumors and murmurs. I mean, everyone talks about it that we talked about conferences is everyone comes up and say, Hey, I’ve heard that external traffic impacts ranking. Is it true? Or like, we think so we have a lot of case studies saying it is true, but we don’t know. And Amazon actually confirmed it. And then the trick that we’ve seen, I mean, it’s really hard to pinpoint it right? Is how do you actually there’s so many variables that go into ranking, your pricing, your inventory levels, seasonality, your competition’s pricing, like it’s really hard to pinpoint it. And then even if you do that, tacos, examples, I explained, you know, what happens if you’re like, you go into a busy season bill, right. But what we’ve tried to do on our side is we’re working towards it to try to actually use our data science to pinpoint it as much as we can control as many variables. But we’ve allowed an export feature. So brands can just as simply as they can, you know, export the Google data, put in their tacos equations, and you know, you’re still at a 10% Tacos, and you’re spending more, but overall efficiency stays the same. That, you know, that’s pretty good sign, right, that it’s working. And you’re getting that lift.

Josh Hadley  18:17

Yeah, I think that’s fascinating, especially since Amazon, you know, laid the hammer down about a year ago in regards to, you know, there were a lot of like search find by campaigns that people were running and, you know, putting in keywords into those search find by campaigns to increase their organic ranking right in their keyword ranking on Amazon. And then Amazon said, You can’t do anything to manipulate keyword rankings whatsoever. And if you get caught doing that, then you’ll be punished. Right? But then, you know, here we are nine months later, and then Amazon’s like, Well, you do want to increase your keyword rankings with external traffic? Here’s the way to do that, as is that basically, right?

Tyler Gregg  18:58

Pretty much right? I mean, it’s a way to, quote unquote, manipulate rank that’s TOS compliant, and manipulates, I guess not the right word, it’s a way to influence rank, right, is to brand external traffic. And, you know, Amazon is doing everything they can to encourage it with that brand referral bonus program, which is that 10% back this kind of weird rank rewards that just seems to be happening with their black box, a nine ranking algorithm, and the other side of it too, as a little bit separate. But Amazon is doing everything they can to encourage external traffic, right? And it rank rewards are free for them to giveaway so it’s obvious that they would win. Another recent thing that they did was they took off competitive widget on your product listing page when you bring in external traffic. So when you envision your listing page, at the top of that page, there’s that banner that shows you know One to three products that are like pretty darn similar to your products, just different, very different variations from your competition, different price points, different reviews and causes funnily get right. And about, again, in the summer of 2022, they actually removed that widget for all external traffic that’s tagged properly. So now when you click on like a Google ad, or a Facebook ad, or anything like that, that consumer clicks on that ad comes that product listing page, that widget is gone. And not only is it gone, they actually replaced it with a brand new widget. So it now shows instead of other people’s products that shows other products from your brand. So it’s kind of makes a mini storefront page, there’s still competition at the bottom of the page. It’s still Amazon. Like it gets rid of some of that some of those competitions, and we actually saw that impacting conversion rates pretty significantly. We saw was at the beginning of 2022, that widget didn’t exist in a mobile experience. But it did exist on desktop experience. Okay, and our team was looking at the data going mobile is converting a lot better than desktop. That doesn’t really make sense. I mean, yes, people buy on mobile, but same time, people are more comfortable pulling out their laptop and buying it right there. Right. And so we started diving into it, and our CTO actually found that competitive widget showed up on desktop, but not mobile. And he looked at me and goes, Hey, we’re gonna get Amazon to get rid of this widget. That’s not right, it’s hurting conversion rates, we’re gonna get, make them remove it, I’m sitting there going, don’t even waste your time, like Amazon’s not going to change the architecture on their product listing pages. Like that’s their moneymaker. Like they’re not going to, they’re not going to do that that’s not worth our time. Maybe five years from now, you’ll win that battle. Like we have bigger battles to fight. And he’s like, Tyler, it hurts conversion rates, we’re gonna make this app and I’m just like, Alright, man, go for it. And so he started talking to our partner team. And they actually were kind of interested in it. And we’re working with the ads team in the brand referral bonus team, who is incentivized obviously, to make external traffic efficient and make external traffic profitable. brands do more and more of it. And so they actually took it seriously. And after several rounds of testing, that our CTO was very heavily involved in Amazon, finally, so eight months for them to do it. But that’s still pretty I mean, to change the architecture on product listing page in eight, eight months is was pretty impressive timing by the Amazon team.

Josh Hadley  22:36

Yeah, I was gonna say that that’s, that’s a big ship to turn around. And to get Amazon to do anything is that’s a pretty big way. Yeah. Because it’s their it’s their marketplace, right? Seriously?

Tyler Gregg  22:48

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seemed like a lifetime for us, you know, as a small, small kind of startup, but free was on that was a very quick turnaround.

Josh Hadley  22:56

I love that. Now, I want to get into a few of the case studies as well, for what you’ve seen working with other brands. But I also have another question. You know, we’ll call it a selfish, selfish question for myself, we have over 1300 different skews. So my question is this Tyler, if I’m sending external traffic to one of my products? Isn’t, am I going to get a natural lift on all 1300 SKUs and my products? Or is Amazon taking a look at? Okay, you sent in? Number one, they’re not seeing the keyword that people search for from Google? Correct? Correct. Yeah. Okay. So really, they just see, okay, this is traffic coming from Google. That’s all the Amazon knows, right? There’s no keywords? No, no, nothing. But then I, obviously Amazon sees the page they land on. Right. Right. So is it the products that they’re landing on typically have this halo effect around them? Or is Amazon just saying like, we love this brand now, and we’re giving everything in your shop? More Love? Yeah.

Tyler Gregg  24:02

It’s a little bit unclear from our data. And what we’ve seen and heard from our brands is, it’s much more product specific versus brand specific. There’s two ways to think about it. If you send traffic straight to the product listing, it’s a little bit more clear cut of like, that’s the product that is getting focused on, that’s the product that’s probably gonna see the lift. Um, and then, you know, it’s all the micro conversions, right? It’s like, did they spend time on the listing page? Did they look at your pictures did they watch your video that they added to cart and then obviously, the conversions that the big metric or the big one that drives the biggest left of course, but those micro conversions add up quite a bit. Now, if you sent to a storefront, what we’ve seen is store for Amazon storefront pages, like category pages, like I know that you have some of those running out there. It’s we haven’t seen anything on storefronts to where it lists all the products on that page. that’s much more of okay, you’re improving conversion rates because there’s no competition on your storefront. And then now as you’re getting those add to carts on those products and those conversions on those products, hopefully, that’s when the lifts are much more clear. Because we’re the listing page, right, like Amazon knows it’s a listing page, a storefront page, it’s a little bit ambiguous to where a lot of products there and whatnot. But obviously add to carts and conversions still impact ranking. And Amazon can see that, hey, that’s a external traffic Add to Cart. That’s an external traffic conversion. So we have a lot more like rank, Halo impact, snowball effect, whatever you want to call it, case studies and stories straight to product listing pages. I’ve been we’ve also seen a lot of it on storefront. It’s a little bit I mean, if you have, if you have a single product, Amazon storefront, that’s a little bit more clear cut, right? You’re saying the traffic there, the focus is that product you’re sending is a category pages, think like a product grid, where you have four or five products in each row, then 10 rows of it, you’ve got 40 products, and they’re really, it’s just so much more complex this pinpoint a halo effect on that one. So we haven’t heard as many stories on that snowball effect for like, a larger category page on an Amazon storefront.

Josh Hadley  26:15

Yeah, that makes sense. Would you recommend one way or another? What would be a best practice? Then if if somebody is experimenting with the with ads, right, category page, just the your brand page itself or detail page? What are some best practices?

Tyler Gregg  26:32

Yeah, it depends on it depends on your goals, right? It just depends on what the brand’s goal is. And for us, since we’re just Google Ads, experts, like we don’t really know the Amazon side of things that well. So we try to stay out of some of this kind of meddling in what’s best for your brand. But if you’re strictly going, Hey, I want to see a hill. In fact, that’s all I care about, I’m focused on the halo impact. That’s what I care about, we really kind of pushing more towards a product listing page, just because it’s so much more clear cut and dry. If you’re saying hey, you know, I care a little bit, I care a lot more about conversion rates, and what the direct a cost is, on Google Ads, then we’re saying, Hey, you’re probably more of a price listing, because sorry, probably more of an Amazon storefront strategy, because Amazon storefronts usually convert better, because there’s no competition, you can customize the landing page to improve the experience. So kind of you have to kind of choose like, what’s your focus, you know, if you’re gonna go to a product listing page, and then you’re gonna say, hey, I need to see a 20% A cos, or I need to see a 10% A cos or whatever, I’m gonna say, hey, like, that’s all you care about, go to a storefront and improve your conversion rates. So you just kind of have to decide like, what do you care about? What are the metrics that are going to determine success for you? And then we’ll kind of guide you into one of those two directions.

Josh Hadley  27:55

Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. You always have to start with the end in mind. Right? Let’s write your why. Then from there, you know, break down the strategy. So

Tyler Gregg  28:05

what’s the point of this?

Josh Hadley  28:06

What are we trying to do here? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Tyler, I’m sure you have some case studies with partners that you’ve worked with that have seen good results from Google Ads. So tell me share it, why don’t you share with our audience some of those case studies? And, again, why? Why should people get on this external traffic? Google Ad train with you all?

Tyler Gregg  28:27

Yeah, so several case studies, kind of the two obvious ones are, you know, product launch case studies are established products, once we hear a lot of stories where people are launching a product. And you know, when you’re launching a product, you’re in that honeymoon period, you’re going, Hey, I need eyeballs on this product. And Amazon’s taking a serious look at where this product fits in their marketplace. Where does it rank? What do people like about all that good stuff. So we hear a lot of great case studies to where people set up kind of passive Google campaigns, you know, 10 $15 a day, and you just kind of consistently and steadily send external traffic to a product launch product that’s normally say product listing, or going to a product listing page on that point. And as you’re doing all your things on Amazon to drive ranking, external traffic is an awesome area to really prop that ranking up. And specifically, Google Ads is an awesome area, not just all external traffic, because with Google, people are searching for it. Right? If you’re launching a broomstick, I mean, people are searching Google for broomsticks. Right? Like it’s high intense search. Whereas, you know, social or tick tock or Facebook, great for awareness, but you’re pushing a product in front of people who are looking at pictures of their friends and families right or dancing videos or whatever people do on Tik Tok. I don’t I don’t know myself. I swear I’d run on tic tac toe on Tyler. Yeah, exactly. And so product launches work really, really well. I’m not Direct to a cost, like, it’s definitely not an A cost metric of success. It’s definitely a drive external traffic, make sure it’s good quality, product specific keywords. So if you’re selling like a six, a six foot wooden broom, like your keywords are six foot wooden broom, right? And when people are specifically asking you for that specific product, send to your page, because that’s gonna be good traffic for you. Other case studies are, you know, ones to where you have an established product, and, you know, couple 1000 reviews or whatever, and you’re kind of tapping out Amazon ads, and you’re saying, Okay, I need to keep growing, you know, how do I find more customers, and Google Ads is an awesome area for that, again, tapping into buying intent on Google, to where when people are specifically looking for your product, make sure you’re showing up. One of my favorite case studies is Amazon. So Amazon arbitrage is Google Ads. And what I mean by that is Amazon spends I’ve always said they spent $6 billion a year on Google Ads Amazon themselves, I was talking to someone who said it was like 14 billion koji. So regardless, it’s a big, a lot of money. 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 a specific product, and they go straight to a specific product listing page. So if your products 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 app does, because only the domain owner can do shopping ads. Okay, so as a brand, Hadley Hadley designs, you guys can’t do shopping ads, you can only do search ads. But what Amazon does with short search ads, is they buy it on Google, often, you know, 3040 50 cents per click, the average CPC on Google is about 60 cents. They buy it first called 60 cents, and they send it to a search result page. They do search find buy, you’re not allowed to do or 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 costs $1.30 per click. And so Amazon buys over 60, they resell that traffic for $1.30. And they take that difference or arbitraging. So fascinating. Yeah, it’s, it’s genius. Genius.

Josh Hadley  32:34

I never thought of it that way. But now I might like my mind is now open them like, okay, that makes 10 times more sense now. Yeah,

Tyler Gregg  32:42

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. 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 and send it 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 buying at a premium go by that the less expensive price.

Josh Hadley  33:15

Yeah, and by where it’s a more optimized to your brand and your products as well. So

Tyler Gregg  33:21

Exactly. And that’s why when, as an Amazon brand us Ampd our ads actually say amazon.com. Look, if you search something on Google and you see an Amazon ad, you have like, you have no idea who’s buying that ad, it could be Amazon, it could be the individual brand, you have no idea. And so as a brand owner, all of a sudden, like you can do these kinds of things like best broomstick on Amazon, right? It looks like an Amazon ad, it looks to a consumer like Amazon saying, Hey, we’ve got a bunch of broomsticks. But this is our best one. And then it goes straight to your listing page. So there’s these cool tricks and that tricks. I mean, it’s not illegal. It’s not like you’re not tricking anyone, but kind of strategies that you can deploy, to kind of cut through some of that research phase and piggyback off of Amazon’s authority. Right.

Josh Hadley  34:14

Yeah. Well, I think that’s that’s a genius strategy, though. Because on Amazon, we know that if you’re trying to run like a headline, search ad or a video ad, you can’t make any outrageous claims of this is the best broomstick or, you know, customers favorite broomstick, or am any words like that five star product or you can’t do that. But I love the fact that like on Google, you can and then it appears as though Amazon is the one who’s running that ad and saying this is our best broomstick, by the end of the day. It’s could be myself running that ad. Right?

Tyler Gregg  34:51

Exactly. We don’t recommend it in all situations. So don’t be listening. Don’t just immediately go put best in front of it. I mean If you’re selling, like, I don’t know, like cough drops or something and you say best cough drops, it’s like, doesn’t really make sense. But we’re like commodity type products, where it’s super competitive. And using bass works really, really well.

Josh Hadley  35:14

So let’s, let’s dive into a little bit more of that, Tyler. Let’s share some additional Best Practices then maybe start from the beginning. And I think maybe we do this in parallel with if somebody wants to get started on Google Ads, right? What does that look like? Obviously, you have Ampd as a service. But let’s talk about if I just want to go open up a Google Ads account today, what what is the steps I need to walk through, and then let’s share some best practices throughout that process.

Tyler Gregg  35:43

Sure. So if you want to start a Google Ad Account, definitely recommend doing it through the Ampd system, because when you open up a new Google Ad Account through Ampd, you get up to a $500 google ad credit. So definitely a good way to kind of ease into the waters and have some subsidies as you kind of try to figure out a new channel, figuring out a new channel is by no means easy. And like we always try to like, this isn’t a silver bullet, you got to learn and all that stuff. So that $500 subsidy definitely helps. But if you did want to just go have Ampd aside, go build an ad. That’s what I love about where we fit into this is when we teach and we train our brands and our customers. We’re not teaching and training about Ampd we’re teaching and training about Google Ads. And Ampd is really just kind of a vehicle to support that journey. And to give you the data that you need to understand what’s working, because the very high level amps is kind of a middleman. It’s an ads platform that sits between Google and Amazon gives you all the data, Google and Amazon can’t talk to each other. So they can’t share data. But with apt, you have your Amazon data perfectly stitch together with your Google data, keyword level conversions. And basically it’s creates, it makes Google Ads, the same dataset as Amazon ads. So add to carts, CPCs, clicks, impressions, conversions, a cost, all that ad, keyword level and everything. So what we teach with Google Ads is there’s three main components to a really strong Google ad campaign, its keywords, its ad copy, and its landing page experience. If you nail those three things, you have a really good chance of finding success on Google. Now, again, you have a good chance, it’s not guaranteed, it depends on your product. And depends on how people are searching for your product on Google, if you’re selling, like, like gift baskets is one that I always kind of explain is like to make it really hard to get gift baskets to work on Google because the economics and the conversion rates just are going to be hard to support it. If Josh, if you search gift baskets on Google, and I searched gift baskets on Google, we’re probably thinking something totally different, right? So it’s gonna be hard to make a product like that work. But if you nail those three things, keywords, ad copy, landing page experience, that stacking the deck in your favor, to have a really good campaign and to drive really good quality traffic into Amazon. So starting at keywords, it’s product specific. And this is something where it it, it kind of drives me a little bit crazy, because we see some other folks that try to do Google as Amazon. And it’s Amazon tools, right? They’re going at it from an Amazon angle. And they say, Hey, like take your Amazon ads and put them onto Google Ads. And we’re sitting there going, Oh, don’t do that is a horrible, horrible idea. Because people search Google and Amazon so differently. A great example, right is on Amazon, you can get away with keywords like gift ideas, Father’s Day, gifts, right holiday season, gifts, those kinds of things. Because on Amazon, there’s all those visuals that go with it. I can just kind of search like gift ideas for dad. And then you scroll through and you’re like, oh, yeah, my dad could totally use a new baseball glove or something like that. Yeah, yep. Whereas Google, I mean, if you search gift ideas, New Year’s, click on every link and tell you’re reading blogs, like you’re reading for different ideas. So you’re

Josh Hadley  39:17

higher up in the funnel to write because if you’re searching on Google, you’re more kind of like this experiential. Like, I have no idea. Maybe I’m gonna buy something today. Or maybe I’m waiting a month. I’m starting my search early where I think the difference on Amazon is like, I am looking for a birthday gift for my dad because I actually need it tomorrow. Right?

Tyler Gregg  39:37

Exactly. It’s funnels, right. It’s where are you at in the funnel. So on Google Ads, birthday gift, or gift for dad or whatever? top of the funnel? However, whiskey crystal whiskey drinking glass, that is a birthday gift, right? You’re not wrong, but that’s got the buying intent. That is someone who said hey, I’ve done my research. I’ve already searched gift ideas. I’ve decided this is What I want. And then now if you show the right ad at that time, and you’ve got a good product at a good price, and it’s gonna show up in two days for free, I mean, you got a pretty good chance of getting conversion rates on that.

Josh Hadley  40:12

Well, in addition to that, I’ve also heard this, I think we talked about it as well is, even if you just throw the word Amazon, before or after some of those keyword phrases, do you see success with that as well?

Tyler Gregg  40:24

Definitely it, you can’t just throw the keyword onto it, because you want to, you need to understand the search volume. So are people searching crystal whiskey drinking glass, Amazon, if there’s search volume for it, 100%, you want to grab that every single time because that’s an Amazon customer that are going to buy, and you have an awesome opportunity to convert them. And what’s cool about it, too, is, as you said earlier, and I confirm everything, all the data we see is Amazon doesn’t know what keywords are being clicked or searched on Google, there’s a big black wall between Google and Amazon. Yep. So you can you can grab traffic that’s already gonna go to Amazon, but you can funnel it through your product, and you can take credit for it. So that’s definitely a really good way to drive rank, it does depend on search volume. And when you see that, too, you want those Amazon keywords in a separate campaign that has its own budget. So you can force budget into them. Yeah.

Josh Hadley  41:25

Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about the ad copy, then.

Tyler Gregg  41:29

Yeah. So there’s another common mistake. And a week we do everything we can to teach our brands on how to do this right. Ad copy is marketing, right? Yeah. But the mistake that a lot of folks make, especially when they’re new to Google, is they make it marketing, they put super marketing ad copy things like like best price, you’re gonna love this by now. Money Back Guarantee. Yep. And what you want to do with ad copy on Google Ads is you don’t want to use it to sell you want to use it makes you qualified. Okay? You want to use the landing page to sell. So when someone gets to your landing page, now, they, they, it’s clearly clicked on your ad they picked you could cost you money. Now you’re selling them on the landing page been the ad copy. You don’t want people just clicking because there’s a money back guarantee. You don’t want people clicking because you told them it’s the best price but then they land on Amazon, it’s actually not the best price. Right? The ad copy needs to be super descriptive. Going back to the broomstick, right? Like, if you sell a six foot long brown broomstick, your ad needs to very clearly say this is a six foot long brown broomstick, right? But if you’re looking for a 12 foot one, don’t click on my ad, because I’m not going to be able to give you what you’re asking for. So you have to make sure it’s very, very specific to your product. Avoid click Beatty terms, because the goal isn’t to get them to click on your ad. And this is a very common mistake. People ask us about all the times like, hey, like, like we have a pro service, which is a done for you. And we actually try to have a click through rate really kind of low. Because the goal isn’t again to click, the goal is to convert. And so if you have an ad, I mean, I can build an ad that has 100% click through rate. I mean, the ads just gonna say like, free money. Everyone’s gonna get on it, right? Yeah, that does nothing, because they’re not going to buy my product, they’re not qualified. So click through rate is not the metric to really care about. A traditional Google marketing person would probably say last not true. Click through rate doesn’t matter. Right. It matters to a point. But of course, like you need clicks, but you just want to make sure that you’re qualifying that traffic with the ad copy. There’s no images to go with your ad. Right. So you have to you have to be descriptive and visualize the product through your ad copy.

Josh Hadley  43:51

Yeah, thanks a lot of sense. Do you have any good, you know, ad copy templates or, you know, phrases that you typically are able to use? And would you be able to share some of those?

Tyler Gregg  44:01

Yeah, um, so I mentioned best broomstick before, that works a lot of the time. But it depends on what keywords you have, like if you have very product specific keywords, and you do have a good quality product that that works. Well, that does kind of walk that line of a little bit click Beatty, but the way we think about that is it’s less click Beatty, and it’s much more cutting through some research right? They’ve already told you they want that broomsticks now cutting through some of the research phase, we recommend showing your your reviews, you know, if you have any, if you have 70 reviews, and a consumer and you put that in your ad copy and a consumer, I mean, I know people that don’t buy products that don’t have 1000 reviews, right? So if they see 70 reviews, and they’re not going to buy a product with only 70 reviews, maybe you’ve qualified them out, right so that’s kind of a good way to do it. But then it does come down to like what the product is. So it’s a little bit it’s really hard to templatized ad copy be because you have to describe the product, right? Like, does your product is does that room stick come in blue, pink and red? If so, but blue, pink and red in the ad copy. So consumer knows that those are their options before they click and cost you money. So not a ton of like just templates the handout, it’s just kind of reiterating. Like I can tell you more of what not to avoid. Having don’t put things like best price, or free gift with your item. Stop describing anything, right?

Josh Hadley  45:31

Yep. So the more descriptive you can be, the better you’re qualifying the traffic, you got to think creatively, ultimately, is what you’re saying and utilize it. The nice part is you’re able to utilize some of the things you probably wouldn’t be able to do in an Amazon ad such as leveraging the reviews, right? Such as saying best or most beautiful, or whatever that might be. So that template like oh, yeah, this is what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a beautiful, whatever, right? Yep, exactly. Exactly. Cool. All right. So let’s talk about this third and final thing here optimizing the landing page, obviously, you know, in the DDC world on Shopify, everything revolves around that landing page and always making improvements, do I change that to cart button to green to purple, or, you know, those are the little 1% tweaks you can be making all the time. But on Amazon, we genuinely don’t have much control at all over our listing experience, or the product detail page on Amazon, other than the fact that you can direct them to a storefront, build a landing page on the storefront, they do have some templates, you can use there. But in terms of the standard detail page, you don’t have any control. So what are your what’s your recommendations there? And I think we’ve talked about this previously, it goes back to I think your What’s your why, right, and where you’re kind of trying to send the traffic. But what else would you add to that landing page experience?

Tyler Gregg  47:00

Yeah, so I would start with a product listing landing page is a good landing page. It’s a good page, right? Whenever I started talking about storefronts, I’ll get a lot of people saying wait should not send it to my product listing. Product Listing works, right? Like we see it in our data. That’s what we default to. Okay. And the reason it works is because it’s transactional, the Add to Cart button is right there, the product is cleanly displayed. And it’s Amazon, right? What I really recommend is, if you’re going for direct conversions, replicate your product listing page on your Amazon storefront and remove the competition. So think about a product listing page, right, it’s the product shot your pictures, your you can click through and look at the videos etc. You’ve got the ad copy and the headlines and all that stuff. Then right below it, you have the Add to Cart button. Right below it, you have 1000s of competitors that are trying to steal your traffic. And then below that, you have your A plus content on an Amazon storefront, you can create you can replicate the page except no competition. So you can Oh, it’s called product section is the the name of the section in your Amazon Storefront Settings. Okay, you want that to be at the very top of the page. What that does, it pulls in your product listing and the images the product that headlines, the bullet points, and the Add to Cart button. And that’s the most important part you have the Add to Cart button pulled in,

you want that at the top action, then is what you’re saying

thank product section. That’s the that is what Amazon refers to as the section in your settings when you’re building an Amazon storefront page. And you want that at the top of the page. In traditional DTC we call that above the fold. So when someone lands on the page, they see the product, they see the call to action, which is the Add to Cart button, and they don’t have to scroll down the page to find it. That’s the most important part, then you can basically just put all your A plus content right below it using different sections, image sections, text sections, and you can build out this page have a nice clean design. And then when you look at it, product listing compared to your new page, it’s kind of the exact same thing except the competition’s been removed. And that what that does is it helps with your conversion rates because there’s less of those leeches trying to steal your customers, right. And we see that that can impact diversion rates two to 3%, or two to 3x. Conversion rates are one of our case studies. I didn’t mention it earlier. But we did pretty significant AV testing when we first learned about Amazon storefront and wonder that they can be transactional. But a lot of Amazon brands don’t know that they can be transactional. It’s unbelievable how often I get on the calls with 10 figure sellers people than selling on Amazon for a decade. And I show them the templates and they’re like wait, how do you get the add to cart buy them they’re like, what’s that you don’t know this? But it to be fair, the reason they do Don’t know it is Amazon’s given brands the storefronts to build, but they haven’t really given them a way to get traffic there. So why build a page if you can’t send traffic to it, and external traffic, you can send it anywhere. So storefronts are a great opportunity. It kind of opens the door to build those storefronts we worked with, storefronts are hard to get designed sometimes just because brands are uncomfortable with them. Yeah, one of my favorite case studies is when we work with brands, we get excited to get the traffic going to them. So we just say your product listings ready. Let’s go there. Here’s your instructions to build storefronts that transact. We’re working with one of the larger aggregators, actually, and they are a little bit more methodical in getting started. And we’re okay, just go to the product listing page. I’ll just get started there. Yeah. And they’re like, Well, you know, like, we’ve got to get some approvals on this. So it’s going to take some time. So we said is like, okay, like, what’s fine, because they’re a big aggregator. I get it. In the meantime, why don’t we work on your Amazon storefront, and their iOS, that’s a good idea. And so they gave us 10 products that they wanted to, that they wanted to send traffic to. And we worked with them to build custom individual landing pages for each of those 10 products, and quite a bit of back and forth to like design it to make sure it’s really well laid out to make sure it’s educational, your products, front and center, highlighting features and benefits, overcoming objections, and all that stuff. And we got those 10 pages ready with them, they got them published right around the same time, they got approval for AD AD budget for Google. So we just sent traffic straight there. And it was the fastest, I’ve seen a cos get to be comparable to Amazon and a cos that I’ve seen in over 20,000 campaigns. Because they did the landing page so perfectly, it was so set up for success. It featured the product, it’s sold the product, right? Like it actually sold the product, overcoming all the objections that they knew. And normally we teach to three month process month one, you click data, month two, you’re you’re reading the data month three, you understand what a cost you can get from Google Ads, these guys, they, they had 20% A costs in the first two weeks, right out of the gates, they just totally nailed it. And it was, it was I don’t know if it was better than their Amazon ads a cost. It’s never an expectation, we like to set dollar day Amazon dollar to goes to Google. But because they had just spent so much time on that landing page experience, they’re able to just shoot out of the gates with really solid conversion rates.

Josh Hadley  52:41

That’s amazing. What a what a fantastic case study. And I mean, what I just had a mindset shift myself with, you know, being able to replicate your product detail page on your storefront. And then customize all of that to basically remove your competitors from that right, and still sell the product, right, you could still have and you could even move up a q&a section, right? If you know a lot of people ask questions about your product before buying, move that up right, so it sits right below the fold. As they scroll down, they see it similar to that aggregator it sounds like where you’ve optimized this landing page experience to, you know, overcome the objections, really sell the product, and then you saw conversions take off. So that that’s one of my biggest takeaways is like replicating the detail page. Because Amazon? You know, 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 point 1% change in conversion rates is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars for them. Right. So revenue best practices on Amazon. I think that’s that’s a great idea. Yeah.

Tyler Gregg  53:51

Another case study that we have with storefront is we had a brand that was struggling with returns to where they sold. It wasn’t an iPhone case, but just let’s use as an example, sure, they sold an iPhone case, and people would buy it, and then return it and say, Hey, like I just bought the wrong size. Like I wasn’t thinking I bought it for the wrong phone. I need an iPhone case, like he just replace it. Those are costs for the brand, obviously. Right. And what they do with their Amazon storefront is right at the top. They said pick the correct size. And so then what happened was that traffic came in, they immediately see pick the correct size, and then they go, Oh, okay, what size is my phone? Okay, I need an iPhone 11 seven inch case and they hit the drop down and pick the right size. And it was able to improve their or lower their return rates because they were able to educate the customer before purchase and contrast that experience with a product listing page. Where are you going to tell a customer to pick the right size? Right like Yeah, yeah, those are Your headlines, your bullets are all stuffed for SEO reasons, not for educational reasons, right?

Josh Hadley  55:05

Yep. Well, I love that what a great case study. And again, I think the overall takeaway from that is like, we got to be more creative and think through the way we set up these store pages. And I think a lot of people maybe shy away from them to begin with it, yes, it is an extra thing to do. But if you can figure it out and put some resources towards it, I mean, we’ve heard case study after case study today of people finding success with that. 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 that will be really hard for any new competitor that enters the market to even scratch the surface, so to speak. So Tyler, I know, this has been a fantastic conversation, I think you have a few goodies, for our listeners. But before we get into that, I always like to ask, you know, what is it one of your favorite books that’s been the most impactful for you in your life?

Tyler Gregg  56:17

Yeah. It should be on my desk somewhere here. I’m the one that I love. It’s called essentialism. And have you heard of it?

Josh Hadley  56:26

I have we actually read that as a team. We do like a quarterly book club for our team that was on his previous book. And so I’m a big fan. Awesome. Well, maybe

Tyler Gregg  56:35

I have to recommend a different book now. But no, I love that book. I tried to read it once a year. And basically the concept is like deciding what’s essential, and what’s not essential. And if things are not essential, don’t do all right. Yeah. And I think it applies, it applies so much to life, but also applies so much to you know, building a business. I mean, I know a lot of Amazon brands are entrepreneurs, right? You have a million things that you can do. But if you can start bucketing things into what’s essential and what’s not essential. You know, is that meeting really essential? Probably not right, take that 30 minutes back and actually do put that time into something that’s essential. It’s going to give you so much time back in that you can either reinvest into your business reinvest into your personal life. And one of the things that that I put into perspective for me is like, I think there’s a section in there about priority prioritization, right? Like the word priority is singular, right? So you don’t have three priorities, you have one priority. And there’s other two things are not a priority, right? And when you can start thinking like that, it just puts so much into perspective. And it’s funny, the three or four weeks after I read the book, oh, my life so much better. And then I started slipping back into old habits, I probably need to start reading at once every two months or something.

Josh Hadley  57:57

There you go. That’s one of your quarterly books you should be reading. Right? Yeah. Like that’s, that’s great advice. Also, another question, I like to ask what’s a favorite productivity tool that you use?

Tyler Gregg  58:09

Yeah, there’s a lot of different ones out there. I use Zen flowchart, which is flowcharts. And mind maps. Cool. Yeah. And I mean, there’s a million different versions of them. But this is one of the I just kind of stumbled across and super easy to use. It just helps so much with just kind of mapping out thoughts. And especially my role in operations is like, hey, how do you do things efficiently? And when you can actually visualize it, and actually, you know, start moving things around quickly and get it out of your head and get it onto the paper. It helps so much for for at least my specific role.

Josh Hadley  58:48

Ya know that that is a great tool. And I have, you know, processes are one of the big things that I work with, even on my team, even if it’s not the operations manager, project manager, I want every team member mapping out their process, like how do we go from A to Z? Right. And I love that idea. Have that Zen flowchart? Right. Zen flow. chart.com, or?

Tyler Gregg  59:09

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think Zen flow chart.com I mean, I just Google it them. Yeah, just I’m partial to it. I just because I found it, and that’s the one that I use. But I mean, a flowchart tool is a flowchart tool, so you can find it a lot, right.

Josh Hadley  59:26

I love it. No, great, great advice. Well, as we wrap things up here today, Tyler, I’m gonna break down some of the actionable takeaways that our guests can move forward with. Number one, I would say, if you’re looking to kind of boost your keyword rankings, or have this halo effect going on on your Amazon listings, where Amazon’s gonna give you a little bit of extra love, and be 100%, TOS compliant, doing everything with white hat strategies, driving external traffic, Google Ads is something I would definitely recommend that people We’ll get started and, and just start testing out in your business. And Tyler talked about that sometimes you got to 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 onto this platform. 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 go into 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 ad 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. 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 Gregg  1:01:37

No, you absolutely nailed it, I the only two things I would add is the TOS 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 TOS compliant. Our company has actually partnered directly with Amazon ads, they host webinars for us every few months, where they actually they host it, I think it’s kind of annoying, because then I have to like tell them exactly what I’m gonna say it has to go through legal and all that stuff. So it’s a little bit scripted, I can put on it’s TLS compliant, right. And that’s such an important component about Google Ads is its competitive edge, but no gray area. The second thing is just kind of doubling down on what you said about Amazon storefront. 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 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 send them this templated emails or whatnot. So the 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 shocked by is like 3%, seller fees or something like that. And it was on 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 decide to Amazon.

Josh Hadley  1:03:42

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. You have a gift for our listeners. What is that? Yeah, definitely.

Tyler Gregg  1:04:00

So anyone that wants to test out Google Ads, and have the experts here at AFX. To help you out. We have a program called Ampd Pro, which is a done for you program to where you get access to our data strategists, one of our data strategists that’s in a Seattle office. We have a team of them in Seattle, their Google Ads experts, and they’ve run 1000s of campaigns from Google and Amazon so they know what to do and they know what to avoid what mistakes to not apply to accounts like yours. And so if you want us to help you out, sign up for AMS bro, and we have a coupon for you today. You can use join Ampd 30 all one word, no spaces and use capitals, join Ampd 30 And again 30% off your first month of Ampd Pro are done for you service, we’re month to month two. So if you want to have our expert team set you up for your first few months, kind of find establishment find some hopefully find some success help you navigate your way first few months of testing a new channel, which is definitely the difficult months, right? We’re here to help. At any point, if you want to move to self serve and start running the campaign, just yourself, you can do that as well. So we always try to make it as easy as possible for Amazon brands to test out Google Ads and join Ampd30 is a great way to help you guys start, I love it.

Josh Hadley  1:05:22

Thanks for sharing that with our listeners, Tyler. And again, we are a client of Ampd. We got started with them as well in their pro program just a few weeks ago. And so we’ll I’ll be excited to share some of those results with everybody here on the podcast. But Tyler, thanks again for your time. It was a pleasure hearing about Ampd. Learning all the cool tactics that we could use to move traffic from Google over to Amazon. Thanks for your time.

Tyler Gregg  1:05:50

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Josh.

Outro  1:05:52

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