Jeff Campbell 5:36

The two quick reasons are diversification. And second is consumer behavior. And I read a study in late 2022, that really opened opened my eyes and it found it was from the Association of national advertisers found 56% of brands use more than five retail media networks or marketplaces, if you will, 16% of those use more than 10 and only 8%. And that study used one. So the peak of Amazon in 2021, probably won’t, well, while the size will grow, their share of the market is only declining because of consumer choice and behavior and Generation Z Gen Z is one of the big focus areas that’s up and coming. And the research shows those folks go to more more platforms buy through social commerce and websites and marketplaces and, and more than any generation before. So we need to think about that consumer behavior, we need to understand that consumer behavior doesn’t stick to just one channel, even when it might be two thirds of the market. For example, Amazon. And then diversification, right? We’ve all been there. And in the last many months years, we’ve seen Amazon, maybe take advantage of that position a little bit. You know, we’ve seen prices go up from shipping and storage to two team and CPC snap presses. So we look at some of the new data over the last year of Walmart, I mean, CPCs are much lower return row as is actually higher, because of those lower CPCs. And conversion rates are strong. So they’re on the heels of new Amazon. But there are over 40 retail media networks out there right now. And the majority of them are less than three years old. So it’s about testing and learning and diversification. And following that consumer behavior.

Josh Hadley 5:48

I love that makes a lot of sense in terms of you know, the Amazon PPC, you know, ad costs, and CPCs are just shooting through the roof, it’s getting more and more saturated in every niche, right. And to your point, what COVID did to Amazon is it exploded their growth. And they grew the you know, what they were projecting to do over the next five to 10 years in one year. Right. And so you’ve got all of this quick adoption to where there’s not a whole lot else that they’re going to be able to grow in terms of, you know, the overall market share. So I think that that is super important. And as I think about marketplace expansion, I also think that you know, the different customer behaviors. Some customers really love to shop, in store, right? Physical, I need to touch it and feel it before I purchase something. And you’ve got other people that don’t like Amazon, right? Right will do anything they can to not buy something on Amazon. So you’ve got that segment of customers. And then like you talked about, you’ve got an up and coming generation where they want to hear it and actually buy more from what their friends are saying it basically it’s word of mouth marketing, but on steroids, right, because of social media and tick tock and what that has done. So I love that now, Jeff, if I’m on board, and I want to, you know, get into extra marketplaces. And I primarily started on Amazon, what would be the next marketplaces that you would, you know, provide us maybe a strategic roadmap to say these are the ones I would tackle? and in which order?

Jeff Campbell 9:18

Yeah, there’s there’s two routes, let me first go with what might be an extension of the current and that’s a b2b focus. So if you’re on Amazon already, give a lot of consideration and a slight discount for bulk purchases, and go in Amazon b2b. That’s an easy kind of first step and it’s not exactly a new marketplace, but it is a new market, right. And if you’re finding that b2b works, this is a high growth area as well. You’ve got fair and tundra and many others, and then I think we’re segwaying more into the vertical specific marketplaces. So do your research. To your question, Walmart’s number two right targets out there as as a leader, so you know, I think you know, the the large ones, you know, Kroger and some grocery, but you’re gonna get vertical specific very, very quickly. So if you’re at all anywhere in grocery, you know, it’s a no brainer to go into to Walmart. And then some of the different places like Instacart if you’re in store as well. But you’ll also find building materials specific marketplaces like supply hog, just these random random places that you have to research a bed and, and I couldn’t see that as a pretty big trend. I mean, I love outdoors and sporting goods and like, I’d love to go to one place and just view a marketplace that is specific to outdoor and sporting goods, right. And it doesn’t exist yet. But I would say one, or one of these retailers, like a Dick’s Sporting Goods picks up on that and really blows it out as one of their their new models. So we’ll see. But I would right now follow the numbers, and then look at your vertical experience or expertise, and say, Are there specific vertical engines, and then third, b2b, that’s a that’s a big growth area, the procurement folks that are buying, they used to have those relationships with you used to go and visit their younger, right. And they’re used to marketplaces and seeing all sorts of prices online. And it’s much easier for them to and if you don’t like to talk to people and you want speed, do a sale, I’m much I have a much greater reach now to go to a b2b marketplace and buy via that versus some traditional channels, and go through some long negotiations and whatnot. So some interesting stuff out there to expand into. Yeah,

Josh Hadley 11:39

I love that. Now, if I’ve, if I’m on that train of Yeah, I’m ready to diversify, right, or I want to expand my channels, the challenge then becomes who’s going to own that, right? Because some sometimes, especially if you’re getting into wholesale or creating new relationships, it’s one thing to turn on b2b on Amazon. It’s a whole other thing to start saying, I’m going to ship products and and sell them wholesale to Kroger or a Dick’s Sporting Goods or something like that. It’s almost an entirely new business model. Where do you recommend, you know, a business owner kind of begins with their resources? Until they know like, hey, maybe there’s some legs underneath this channel?

Jeff Campbell 12:24

Yeah, I think you mentioned the kind of a wholesaler model that needs to be one of your initial decisions is do you want to get into wholesaling? When you wholesale, you get a guaranteed Pio purchase order with, you know, some big numbers on it, and somebody’s buying it. But then when you sell it to them at that discount, you’ll lose a lot of control, right? You might see them popping up on some of the marketplaces and competing against you, right, they might have control or the ability to have a lower price, because they’re cool with thinner margins than what you or other partners are doing. So you get into channel conflict pretty quick. And we all know Amazon’s out there scraping all the other websites and you lose that buy box if a lower price is found. So the first decision or one of the first decisions is kind of that one P verse three P relationship and a lot of those target right now. And several others, you only have that wholesaler option. And I see that changing is every every other day, we’re seeing the three P marketplaces pop up and that one p is is is is somewhat decreasing. And we have a lot of clients, even with Amazon in the one P vendor central relationships where they want to take back control back and they’re actually moving to more of a three p control model and control their own destiny a little bit more. And Amazon is they’re tough negotiators, right? A lot of costs are going up in the world. And Amazon might not be having it or whoever your wholesale partners might not be having those price increases. So you might want to take that into your own in your own hands and control.

Josh Hadley 14:01

Yeah, yeah, that that makes a lot of sense that I think what you just shared with everybody is so important to consider that if you start you know, let’s say you’re interested in this wholesale model, and so you take your products, and you’re like, I’m gonna launch them on Faire. Now, there are just so everybody’s aware, there are business models that exist, that people acquire those products on Faire, and then they go and repost them on Amazon. Right. And that will undercut you because like you mentioned, they’re willing to have a lower margin, right? Maybe they don’t have as much overhead whatever it is, or their the name of their game is just mass quantity of products, right? And so they’re just making a little bit of margin on every single one. I think that’s super important to differentiate like, are you trying to go the one P route or the three P route? Are there any guidelines that you would give to our listeners?

Jeff Campbell 14:59

I mean, the The control and profitability I think, you know, volume versus profitability and control are probably the big considerations. I think fulfillment is another one. You know, if you lack the ability to fulfill directly to consumers, you know that that might make it tough on some marketplaces to do that, because if you’re relying solely on Amazon, you start on Amazon, like most ecommerce sellers, do, you know FBA Fulfilled by Amazon or using the Amazon warehouses is a pretty solid solution. Walmart, also very solid solution with Walmart fulfillment now, but beyond that, you might have some sort of drop ship, shipping, you might need a new three PL relationship, you know, you might have to ship some things out of your own garage. And those are those are another important, you know, consideration after after the one p three P that usually is the next catalyst. The next is, you know, probably the audience of of the different channels that we talked about a little bit earlier. And then your competitive advantage, right. If you’re not priced? Well, you don’t have strong differentiators, you might not have a brand people are aware of those are all considerations as well as who you might partner with and how much control you want to give them. So all all important things to think about. As you expand.

Josh Hadley 16:14

Yeah. So much that goes in to that decision. Now, Jeff, as you’ve worked with numerous brands, and you’ve worked with some very large ones as well, I think one of the key things in order to really scale a brand to not only eight figures, but even to nine figures and beyond is understanding your profitability metrics, and also just metrics in general, right, not just profitability, but metrics, and how these metrics will be your kind of mile markers, in terms of are you heading down the right path? Or not? And, Jeff, I think you have a framework, you know, that you could kind of wrap this all around. So why don’t you you know, kind of share those details with our listeners?

Jeff Campbell 16:59

Sure, we have a five step process, which, you know, hopefully isn’t rocket science. But again, putting it in perspective, in more of a process helps a lot of people think through this as they expand. And the first I had just talked about is really around market intelligence, right? What is your positioning, what’s your competition look like? We all remember the the P’s of marketing, product, place, price, etc. Those are those are what you need to look at first to make sure there is an opportunity. Second is to do the profitability analysis. And this entails looking at your your cost of goods sold, as well as any returns and shipping costs, packing damaged goods, etc. and understanding what your contribution margin is. So you take your and I would extremely recommend this at the product level if you have a variance of products and ao V average average order values. So if you’ve got one $40 product, you know, what’s it take to deliver to the consumer all in advertising, or let’s say everything pre advertising costs, so maybe there’s $20 of variable costs, the shipping the cogs, you know, Amazon fees, or whatever commission of the marketplace. So let’s say that it costs $20. And you’ve got $20, then left to spend or pocket to make that $40 sale. So from there, we all know the row as return on adspend costs or sales divided by cost, right? So we’ll take that $40 sale divided by $20 a cost and it’s basically a two to one, breakeven ROI. So that’s an easy math. Also a quick shout out to a costs, average cost of sale. If you are speaking at a cost, it is not a red flag, but a flag that you’re Amazon specific, right? You’ve only done Amazon and some partners might, you know, and again, that’s just the inverse of row as its cost divided by sales. And it’s displayed as a percent, where ROAS is the how many dots, you know, for every dollar spent, how many dollars of revenue do you get, so I can convert everything as you’re thinking beyond Amazon to row as that’s the industry standard, you’re going to mainly see that in any type of interfaces and platforms and technology that you use. But getting to that breakeven row as number or if you want to still use a breakeven a costs knowing what that is. Because so many of these and we’ve all learned from Amazon, you’re not going to be an overnight millionaire, right? Amazon is is notorious for making you prove a good customer experience to see ratings and reviews to see high velocity of sales before they start giving you love and organic and even giving you a little discount on your CPC is because it is a good customer experience. The other platforms are going to work the same way it is going to take an investment so knowing that breakeven at the product level is going to help you whether you’re doing it manually or using some third party technology. We use technology and we set that row as goal and say, Hey, maximize my rank. And my spend, as long as I’m above a $2 row as or whatever it might be for that product. And that the EOV for that product we were talking about was $40. But I might have one that’s $140. Right? I might have maybe the same 50% variable costs, but I’ve now got a lot more money to play with, for advertising or for profitability. And so I’m probably going to have a different goal for for that product that a higher AOV than something that’s lower AOV. So all considerations and you probably, again, when some sort of technology to manage all the keywords, all the products, to these, you know, bidding rules to say, if I’m at or above a certain row, as you know, to the moon with volume, let’s make sure we get there. But you want to make sure you have that efficiency floor in there. And then you want to uncap volume. But again, it’s going to take several several months, at times to kind of prove yourself and get the get the velocity you’re looking for. And we always say it’s a marathon, not a sprint, just like Amazon. So back back to the process. So you know, step two, so step one, market intelligence, step two, profitability analysis. Step three is content optimization. For the most part, as you expand, you can use what’s worked on Amazon. If you’ve got your product images, and your videos and some of your your keywords, that’s really easy to kind of pour it over where if you have a product feed poured over into these other channels, what you’re still going to need to test and learn around, you know, different titles and descriptions and keyword targets and adjust to what competition is doing as well.

Josh Hadley 21:38

On that note, yeah, real quick. I’m curious, like, is it a one to one kind of ratio, like whatever I’m doing on Amazon, and I just copy and paste it over to Walmart? Or to Etsy or to whatever channel I want to be selling on? Or are you finding that, you know, hey, you’ve got to create Amazon specific, you know, content and copy because the keywords and the way they work is different than it is on on Walmart. And what image might work on Amazon is not working on Walmart, vice versa. What are you seeing from that perspective?

Jeff Campbell 22:14

Yes, start with the lift and shift, right. So take take what you’ve proven on Amazon, and that’s your starting point, customize from there. One area I think we really find interesting is his price. Amazon is no doubt notorious for just being kind of the low the low cost shopping list, hey, I need something it’s it’s more of a commodity, I’m just going to look for the lower price on some of these other marketplaces, maybe test a higher price of the same thing. So it’s cheaper on Amazon. Sure. But maybe it’s more expensive on Walmart or whatever. And that that might help, you might find a consumer base. And you might even get some lessons that funnel back to Amazon that you can then test and learn with. But for the most part it is it is a lift and shift and then starting to work. You know, they all have kind of some special ad types and some special content areas that you can work to tweak. But largely Yes. What you’ve worked hard with Amazon is going to translate largely over to other marketplaces.

Josh Hadley 23:12

Awesome. Good. All right. Sorry to interrupt. Let’s go to Step four,

Jeff Campbell 23:16

You’re good. Step four is really around advertising. Right? And to that question. Similarly, they all have a, you know, every every marketplace has a different advertising, you know, methodology, ad types, etc. So some usually start or more nascent marketplaces are on like an auto campaign, like we know from Amazon, hopefully everybody is evolved in the manual campaigns on Amazon. And it’s very similar, we’re seeing more and more control over the time, come out for the Walmarts and the targets and more, but they still do heavily rely on auto auto campaigns, but you are in a one, some sort as I was mentioning some sort of AI or ml, to understand where to put your money, where to focus. And then, you know, on an hourly basis, or whatever, you know, take advantage, different trends. And you know, hopefully, again, something everybody’s already doing on Amazon, when your competitors run out of stock or their ad stop, you’re gonna see changes in your CPCs and your conversion rates. And I really hope somebody’s got some AI in there, beating you up and taking advantage of that and making sure you get the first place while the getting’s good, or they’ve run out of budget after 8pm and the CPC is lower, but conversion rates are are flat. So that AI that advertising is again something to think about. And a lot of people who have agencies to you know, I would guess down the road, you don’t want it specific Amazon only agency or even marketplace agency, you need to and this is kind of getting to step five, which is holistic management, and measurement. You need to look across all these channels and understand that Like, I need to move some budget over here, because it’s working really well. And if you have all these little fiefdoms internally or externally, with agencies and partners, that’s, that’s a lot harder to do. Because everybody’s got to protect their budgets, right? That’s their power. I’ve got big budgets here. But if it’s not working, you need a system and to think through a system of how you can shift and be agile based on performance, because, like I say, it can change hourly, and we need to be be smart about that. And that goes all the way through to like thinking through, you know, inventory, agility, you got a whole bunch it, you know, at Amazon, but you needed a Walmart, What’s plan B? Right? Do you have some sort of, like, Merchant Fulfilled system that you can move into? If you know, the FB W fulfilled by Walmart, inventory runs out? Or what what does it cost is shipped over from Amazon, which has fees as well, but holistic measurement making sure that’s in place, and making sure you’re focused on the right metrics. You know, you mentioned some of the brands I’ve worked with, you know, the apples, the Mercedes Benz big, big brands and to them it’s it’s extremely different what they’re looking at for metrics, compared to a lot of the smaller upstarts new businesses, new products, and, and row, as is always the go to right return on adspend, or a cost familiar with that one? You know, I guess I’d urge listeners to think about customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, especially if you’re in you know, food or in any sort of category where there’s repeat purchases, to look at row as and that single sale profitability is a little short sighted, right, probably want to build a brand. And if you’ve got a good product, and I’ll use the food example, that people are going to come back for, look more of the cost of that first first sale. I was an affiliate for Amazon back in the day, and they used to pay 50 and $100. CPA is cost per acquisition when I got a sale for them, which was like averaging $25. And I’m like, Amazon, how can you afford to pay me 50 bucks for every $25 sale, they’re like, Oh, we’ve got a 10 year model. And this was over 10 years ago. And they’ve definitely made more money for me. And I think most users that they’ve acquired, because it’s a good thing, and people are going to come back into it more. So, you know, to think like Amazon a little bit is, is you’re thinking about marketplaces and ecommerce. And of course, we all hope they come back to the website, right? You don’t have to pay all these commissions and fees. But to look at that as a customer acquisition costs, or look at lifetime value. And understand those repeat purchases is part of that measurement process. You need to think through and go beyond row as which you’re not wrong. That’s what the majority are doing. But those brand builders are thinking about customer acquisition costs instead of a single sale profit.

Josh Hadley 27:49

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And ultimately, you want to not just acquire the front end customer, you want to have somebody that becomes a repeat purchaser, right. And I think so many people, especially if you start on Amazon, you’re just driving for those front end sales. It’s only as good as who’s gonna buy my product today. Instead of the focus of who bought my product last month, what else can I offer them? What is there anything that you’ve done with your agency or with previous experience to really start turning a business that the average order for I guess, the average number of orders per customer, instead of it being one, you start increasing it to two to three, because that’s where you start to get this flywheel of, alright, I can spend, I can even spend more to acquire this customer, that it’s not even breakeven, I’m losing money on the front end, but I make it up in the long in the long run. So are there any strategies or advice you would share to our listeners, in order to help get those second, third, fourth sales and repeat purchases?

Jeff Campbell 28:57

Yeah, I can’t stress enough how important first party data is, specifically email addresses. So if you can get them to your website to somehow register a product or an you know, there’s some rules with Amazon, you know, how you can get information, what you can stick in the box, etc. But figure that out, because I think that first party data is going to be so crucial for brand owners in the future for targeting is privacy laws will hopefully come out soon and and, and the data sharing of of the platforms are probably going to stay heavily with the platform. So here now, rant over about one PII data, you know, Amazon and most of these platforms have some sort of retargeting, right? So if you know that you’re hogging air filters and they go out every three months and you need a replacement. Use your email database if you have it. Use some of the first party data of your platforms be it you know, Amazon or Walmart. A lot of that does take some DSP work which comes with a higher price tag, but retargeting One strong, strong way to to remind people about the previous purchase and time to to repurchase. I think that’s probably the big one, again, the email relationship, and again, having first party data to be able to do that. And then from there creating look alike models, right. So understanding the behaviors of those folks and starting to target people to make maybe their first purchase, because they look a lot a lot alike, or they act and behave like past purchasers of yours to works really well for that initial and then you can retarget them as well.

Josh Hadley 30:32

Yeah, makes great sense. I love that. Now, Jeff, I would love to dive in further into these profitability, or just overall metrics that people should be tracking that become those mile markers that lead to scale. And let’s dive deep into what each of those, you know, metrics mean, and how, you know, let’s say, take an Amazon e-commerce seller today, how they should be tracking them now, and maybe some of the tools they should be using to make sure that they’re setting up the correct foundation.

Jeff Campbell 31:03

Sure, sure. So, you know, I really look at making sure that you are tracking the standard, you know, impressions, clicks, click through rate, you know, costs, CPC, etc. We always want to look at that variability as CPC. And it’s really important. Some, some of the other ones, the new to brand metrics, where you can get them the cost per orders, and kind of go into that customer acquisition cost and LTV. So CPO cost per order is important. And then as we as we know, especially with Amazon and some of the other marketplaces are starting to do this, the reliance in relationship between paid and organic, the more you pay to get some keyword wins, the more you’re going to see yourself organic. So you have to compile some of those sales from both paid and organic channels against the cost of the advertising, because there is a relationship there. So looking at that total ROAS for that total ad costs are TACoS, as the hunger people like to say, is important as well. Yeah, so I think those are the main ones in terms of technology, there’s nothing wrong with good old Excel, right? Get your Pivot Table skills rocking, be able to download and import, you can get fancy with some API’s and automations. and some real cool reports and some BI dashboards. But don’t be ashamed of just using Excel or Google Sheets, right, I still do almost on a daily basis, have some great macros that I can download it, It customizes and beautifies some of that data immediately, but you need to be looking a lot of that data, you know, daily, but then really, the insights and actions need to come monthly and quarterly. So make sure that timeframe, you’re looking at the cuts of data and looking at it, you know, year over year and week over week or quarter over quarter year, whatever it might be, are all there because I think those long term mixed with short term trends are all important. I’ve seen way too many people overreact on a short view of that data, where many times that competitive strategy could be as I’m going to, I’m going to come big spend a ton of money lose it, but I’m going to basically buy out my competitors, because I know they can’t withstand, you know, pain this for a month, right? And they’re gone. And then month two is extremely profitable. And by month three, they’ve made up all that money. So again, to kind of look at some of those longer term trends as well. And we are I think seeing more traditional larger offline advertisers come into the space. And I know Amazon and other platforms are making it really easy for you know, the auto or insurers and banks to come in and advertise here too, because there are eyeballs of some of those consumers and there are some behaviors you can target against. That’s relevant even though they’re not really in the E commerce game. So competition is gonna get fierce and to your point. That’s why we’re making sure we’re watching those, those KPIs very closely. One, one other point I’ll also make, and I see it as a common mistake. So you heard earlier, the majority of of brands don’t know their breakeven, which is somewhat mind blowing. Why do you want a $6 ROAS well, because it was five and we want better? Well, okay, like that volume and efficiency relationship is kind of the second thing that a lot of people miss. And you always need to have a counterbalance, right. So if your focus is efficiency, then you have volume, which might be sales and row as is your efficiency as a counterbalance because there are so many metrics, we can track that so many times when a my click through rates are down, does it does that matter? Right? Like, well, you know, we’re using a little more display a little less search, that’s kind of happen, but it’s relevant customer, it’s a relevant keyword, you know, CPCs around, okay, that might matter. But, again, figure out what’s your main volume and your main efficiency and then kind of the relationship between the two, do you want efficiency first and then volume? Do you want volume first than efficiency? That some, you know, analysis paralysis. And some people say there’s just too many metrics out there, boil it down into the two most important is another another key takeaway.

Josh Hadley 35:14

And those two most important would be your breakeven ROAS correct? And then what else,

Jeff Campbell 35:20

Sales volume. So that’s, that’s what the majority of folks are out there working with. But again, that’s, that’s not looking at customer acquisition and lifetime value and repeat purchases. So again, the majority of people are performance channel, I need a sale and I need a profitable sale. It’s row as and revenue.

Josh Hadley 35:42

Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Now, Jeff, I love that you mentioned as you’re tracking these metrics, even if it’s just an Excel, that you’re not, you don’t pigeonhole yourself to where you’re only looking at, oh, well, this happened yesterday. So I’m completely changing directions and doing this, you’re looking at things over a monthly or quarterly trend. I’m curious, do any case studies or examples come to mind, just to give our listeners some perspective of, hey, in this brand, and we don’t share brand names, but in this particular brand, we saw that our you know, CPCs, were shooting through the roof for whatever reason. And so we had to this was our strategy that we implemented, or we were losing impressions. And these are some of the actions that we took.

Jeff Campbell 36:27

Yeah. And so you’re asking about, like, what type of actions are just scenarios? Yeah, just maybe some

Josh Hadley 36:33

scenarios and maybe case studies, I don’t know, like practical examples that you’ve seen that if you’re not looking at data, right, and you’re not looking at these KPIs, you’re kind of missing the mark, in terms of what you should be working on in your business.

Jeff Campbell 36:48

Right, right. Yeah, with, uh, with a food brand. Right now, we’re struggling a little bit because I think we’re over focused on row as right now. And, again, if it’s good food, and people would make a repeat purchase, you know, maybe we need to look a little beyond row as but as we look at the keywords of the that directly describe what they’re selling. They’re not they’re not affordable for the AO V and the conversion rate that we’re getting. So let me back up. This is another important point for listeners is it’s an age old retail formula, it works offline and started offline and kind of most people have brought it online, but it’s, you know, the sales revenue formula is revenue equals traffic times ao V times conversion rate. So you know, online, I can control traffic, ao V, and conversion. And so we know from conversion rate, there’s ways from, you know, improving the price to, you know, better reviews, better titles, description, that’s all going to help from an AO V, we can bundle we can increase our price, etc. And from traffic, we have all sorts of keywords and displays and targeting, and even different channels and, and whatnot, that we can we can work with. So when you back up, those are the three things that we really need to think about. And so back to the example of the food brand, those CPCs are two, high three and $4. And the EOB was only $10. So we had to have almost a 50% conversion rate to make it work. So you know, our choice, if we can improve a Ovie or conversion rate, we need to find cheaper traffic sources. And that’s one example where Walmart was was a Savior, and it came in there was about a third of the price and CPCs. And you added that traffic into that equation. With everything else being constant, we were able to make it work, right. So again, going back to like know, your most important KPIs and keep keep an idea of those three levers traffic POV and conversion rate as what you are going to control the most to have the outcome of better revenue revenue.

Josh Hadley 38:52

I love that I think that is such a good example that you just shared there of you know, taking a look and saying, Hey, my CPCs are getting high my ROAS, it’s not efficient, what do I do? Right? And then that led to the conversation, how do I drive cheaper traffic? Right? Are there any other case studies or examples that come to your mind like that? Um,

Jeff Campbell 39:14

I’m trying to think through some other optimizations. You know, I mentioned I mentioned earlier, the new data that Amazon provides. And again, something that Google and others have provided for many years is, is understanding your conversion rates and your CPCs by hour of the day, right? And use day part. Again, unfortunately for Amazon, it doesn’t let you day part, the native platforms and Facebook or meta and Google, they’ll let you depart now so I can now understand that at night when I didn’t think people were shopping around the weekends or Fridays before weekend, is when the getting’s good, right? Conversion rates are highest. I can realize that CPCs actually drop off later in the day, because again, Amazon’s a great example. They don’t spread your budget across the day very well. So people run out by noon or by 8pm and I got less competition at night conversion rates hold. I’m still pretty good. So those are a few other uses of data and technology. We certainly employ with a lot of our brands and partners that we work with that help returns quite a bit efficiency quite a bit.

Josh Hadley 40:15

Yeah. Make makes a lot of sense. Jeff, this has been super valuable. Are there? Is there anything else on the top of your mind that we haven’t yet shared with the audience that you think would be important for them to hear to help them grow to those that eight figures and beyond to really help them in scaling?

Jeff Campbell 40:33

Yeah, I love the quote, profit is vanity. And I’m sorry, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. So no offense to your listeners, but, you know, seven, eight figures cool, what’s your profit? Right. And that’s, that’s, that’s, I think one of the more important approaches is being able to grow profitably versus just grow. And again, it takes a lot of the data numbers to do that. So that’s one one quote that certainly rings in my ear. I’ve got written in front of me, and I use it quite a bit. So that’s an important one.

Josh Hadley 41:05

Yeah, I think I love that quote, as well. We talked about that offline as well. I aligned with that wholeheartedly.

Jeff Campbell 41:13

The the third part, which I leave out conveniently is cash is king. So revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is king, but we’ll just call it the first two thirds.

Josh Hadley 41:23

I like that. Now, one final question, before we start to wrap things up here for you. What do you envision, you know, over the next five to 10 years? How do you think, you know, e-commerce in general, is going to change and evolve? So that we could start you know, trying to skate to where the puck is going? Yeah.

Jeff Campbell 41:42

I, I guess it’s more of a question. But a certainly a trend I’m seeing is like, how is this world gonna come together of people buying on websites, which seems to be declining a bit marketplaces, which is growing quite a bit. And then social commerce, which I think is kind of the new, the new person in the stage, people don’t want to leave tick tock or Instagram and they want to fully purchase there and not share their email address or credit card with yet another website or, or marketplace. So you’ve kind of got this, you know, three way grouping of where where ecommerce is, is being sold right now, our products are being sold right now? And is there going to be a winner? Is there going to be a fourth player? So it’s interesting, but as a brand, it’s a real conundrum, right? Because you want them to go to your website, but that’s kind of the declining group of the three. And you’re, you know, you’ve got like, alright, well, how do I, how do I bring all that content in somebody else’s platform? How do I capture and build that relationship data, you know, in somebody else’s platform. So that’s, that’s a real struggle, but I think is, is something important for all brands to start thinking about, and understand their portfolio. You know, I’m trying to make, you know, we talked a little about the data and first party data, I think that’s going to be a big, big key to future success is owning that relationship and finding a way to get the data. What else? You know, I think those are the big ones off the top of my head, you know, might not have been covered in covered in depth yet.

Josh Hadley 43:13

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I do see the game changing quite a bit that over the next decade or so, I think the brands that are going to win are going to be the brands that have audiences. And the people that can drive traffic or have that influence are going to be the ones that survive, I think, you know, it’s going to be an ancient business model of just coming up with a product and throwing it up on on some platform and that spray and pray approach, because it’s getting more saturated, it’s getting more difficult. The cats out the bag, everybody knows about Amazon now. It’s a no hidden secret. And so brand and audience when at the end of the day, and building a brand, right?

Jeff Campbell 43:55

That is going to matter more than price, and it isn’t an investment to do it. But if you’re in a commodity space, and you look at the cost of your goods sold, or maybe where they’re being manufactured, and if that’s not here, and there’s cheaper ways to do it, you’ve got some competition, right? I think 70, 77% of new sellers on Amazon, where China based. In China, it’s I think almost 60% of their sales are online, where we’re only 20% in the US, they’re darn good at this. So again, if you have a brand that stands for something, it gets people to your website, it builds that relationship that repeat nature. I get it. It’s not easy in my name and be an option for many people. But again, if you’re if you’re playing in the bottom funnel, only, you’re thinking about ROAS you know, you might want to change up how you think because some of those waters are bloody and that goes back to our initial point. Maybe there’s other marketplaces, maybe it’s social commerce, maybe it’s b2b, where there is some blue ocean and people can see still win with maybe not having the strongest differentiators or brand.

Josh Hadley 45:03

Fantastic summary. And I think brand is so important. Now, Jeff, I love to leave our audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode, here are the three that I noted. But let me know if you think I’m missing something. action item number one, I’m going to say is, know your numbers. If you’re not tracking your numbers right now, even if it’s as simple as Excel right now, and I know Amazon has their business reports, but you’ve got to interpret those business reports and actually create some KPIs that are going to mean something to you in your business that you can make decisions around. So first and foremost would be understand your numbers. That’s a whole podcast conversation in and of itself, of how to do that pivot tables. But there’s a lot of resources available out there. Action item, number two, would be implementing a quarterly or monthly review of these numbers that you’re tracking. Because just because you’re tracking these things, and you might be taking a glance at them every day. And you know, I think here’s the thing that I hear the most about Amazon sellers, is they’ve got their seller app on their phone, and they love refreshing, they love refreshing and just saying, oh, today’s a good day. Today’s a good day. That’s not important. What you need to do is at the end of the month, what how do I measure my data against my KPIs? And then like the example that you shared with the food in the grocery space, you need to be able to interpret, hey, our CPCs are too high. All we need to do with this equation is like can we find a cheaper channel, and then that’s going to shift your entire business strategy. And it could lead to better decisions, instead of constantly being on this hamster wheel of trying to push a rock uphill, and it keeps coming back down? Because you’re not working on the things that are actually driving the biggest results? Correct? Yep. Beautiful. Oh, yeah, good, good. Action item number three, I think is once you’ve established those, you know, financial, your metrics, tracking, and then implementing those monthly quarterly reviews. Then last but not least, then implementing this outward approach of now how do I expand maybe my channels, and my distribution? Because if you don’t understand the basics, and the ROI of your ads, and all of that good stuff to begin with, you’re just making the problem more complicated as soon as you expand on different channels. So those are my three action items for our listeners. Jeff, is there anything else you would add to that?

Jeff Campbell 47:46

I was there. Those are great. You nailed it. Thanks, Josh.

Josh Hadley 47:48

Awesome. All right, Jeff, let’s ask you the three questions I like to ask each guests. So question number one is what has been the most influential book that you’ve read? And why?

Jeff Campbell 47:58

Yeah, I mean, Good to Great. Jim Collins is early in my startup days was a big one, some themes, like get on and off the bus and find the seats later. And you know, that one’s a little cliche. So I’m currently listening to one now called Never Split the Difference on negotiation. And for those that are ever thinking about one P wholesaler relationships, or just just general business, negotiating salaries or pricing with some vendors, manufacturers, etc, Never Split the Difference is so far a very good book. And I’ve taken a lot from a FBI negotiator and applying it to business in some real situation. So that’s my book.

Josh Hadley 48:41

I have. I’ve got that one on Audible as well. Highly. Yeah. And as well,

Jeff Campbell 48:46

Then we must the algorithms were in some lookalike audience,

Josh Hadley 48:49

we must. Next question, what is a your favorite productivity tool, or maybe a new software tool that you’ve recently discovered that you think is a game changer?

Jeff Campbell 49:00

So, I’m a little biased because in in my role now, and trying to keep track of a lot of conversations with a lot of different businesses is some CRM software. So I talked about the importance of first party data, HubSpot is has been awesome that we’ve we’ve been brought that on in the last few months. And it’s been pretty amazing what it can do what it can track and helping me with project management, follow up, etc. So that’s, that’s a big one. From a kind of marketplaces standpoint. You know, I’m really looking for a good competitive intelligence tool. And I think there’s a there’s a few out there. Some are very pricey. So I guess that’s a extra wishlist item for me that I’m looking into and hopefully next time we’ll we talk I’ll be able to name drop a few favorites.

Josh Hadley 49:49

So one that we found I don’t know if you’re familiar with this one. Have you heard of DataHawk? Yeah, so we’ve recently implemented data hawk and that’s been pretty insightful to like, understand, like broader categories and what’s moving they’re so kind of a unique tool that doesn’t get a whole lot of love in the Amazon space too much, or it’s not spoken of a whole lot, but it’s got a very unique approach.

Jeff Campbell 50:11

Yeah, yeah. I like what I saw. We did a demo. It looks awesome.

Josh Hadley 50:15

Very cool. Awesome. All right. Last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space? And why?

Jeff Campbell 50:23

You know, I really think it’s, it’s, it’s the folks that are putting it on the line and testing and learning, right? I mean, it, it takes one person, I heard a quote, where, you know, you know, 99% of people have an idea only 1% execute on it. so props to, to those folks that have have started and struggled have done the ups and downs and are still aggressively testing and learning. Those are my favorite people to work with, you know, moving beyond the row as and getting into, you know, LTV and incrementality and some of those new areas that are that are hard. It’s tough, and I admire those those folks.

Josh Hadley 51:04

Awesome. I love it. You dodged the question, but also provide some good value there. I like it. You must have been a lawyer in in some other world, right? Yeah,

Jeff Campbell 51:13

I guess so.

Josh Hadley 51:14

I guess so. Well, Jeff, this has been a fantastic conversation. People want to learn more they want to reach out to you want to see what aiCommerce is all about and maybe utilize your guys’s services to expand their marketplaces. Where can people find you?

Jeff Campbell 51:29

Yeah, you can hit me up directly jeff@aicommerce.com Or hit our website at aicommerce.com, and let them know Josh sent you.

Josh Hadley 51:37

Awesome. Jeff, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your knowledge with us. I love it.

Jeff Campbell 51:42

Happy to educate anytime. Take care, Josh.

Outro 51:46

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