Josh Hadley 5:57

I appreciate those kind words, Michael. Now, Michael, I’m excited to dive into your story. You know, before we dive into all of the amazing, you know, case studies that we’ll dive into with how you’ve worked with clients there with Cartology. I’m interested to hear in your journey, what led you to, you know, gaining the experience you needed to in order to create Cartology, and to be able to say, like, yeah, we know the Amazon game. And we know how to help scale brands and help them grow and take things to the next level. So why don’t you give us a little bit of your journey and what got you to where you are today?

Michael Maher 6:31

Well, like you, Josh, I also ran into a lot of obstacles and learned stuff the hard way. And my story started back in 2010. I hated my job, man. I mean, it’s, it’s that simple. The job I was working at the time was just not fun. I was managing this. I was managing a coffee shop for Starbucks, and I had graduated school, I was like, I don’t know what I want to do. And so I just kind of worked my way up there. And after I’d been there for about a year, I was like, this sucks. I hate this. I had pressure from my boss, I had a supportive district manager before, but then she left and this new one came in and she was trying to either get you to be her puppet, or she was firing you. Um, so anytime I gave feedback, like, hey, this isn’t working. This isn’t good. It was like you’re being negative. I’m trying to improve something. I’m here doing the work I’m showing up. So just felt like I wasn’t appreciated. And The pay wasn’t that great if I’m honest, anyway. So I had experience selling music gear on eBay. I’m a musician and I would go and buy maybe like an old drum machine or synthesizer and would go to like a pawn shop. And there would be something there. I’m like, oh, but go look it up on eBay. They have no idea what this is before Reverb or anything like that. I had no idea what they were selling. They weren’t a lot of pawn shops selling on marketplaces like Reverb or eBay. But I would go and see, okay, I could sell this for way more look up completed items, had a buddy that I would do that with. And knowing that I had that skill set, I had another friend who had started. I mean, really just buying generic goods, reselling stuff on eBay, and then Amazon. And I was like, Dude, you gotta show me what you’re doing. I need to get out I need to do something. So he walked me through the business side of things. And much smarter guy, I think than he was an accountant. So really understood some of the financial stuff. He was like, trying to explain what a balance sheet was to me. And I was like, why would you put something over here and take it out over here, leave it in the business, like just just no clue. That was I didn’t go to school for business. That was not my, that was not my forté. So he walked me through that process. I took a couple grand to Vegas with me to talk about Vegas earlier. But I went to the ASD show, I invested a couple grand and some inventory. At the time, there was a research software called Terapeak. For eBay, I don’t even know if it’s still around, but I would go up walk the floor. And at that time, people did not want you selling their products on Amazon or online. They were avoiding that like the plague. They thought it was bad. And now from what I hear you go to their shows people are dying for you to say, Oh, please, you know, do this help us help us grow? Because they realize how many so many times have changed in the past 13 years. But I invested a couple of grand and some product and worked that for about a year, just eBay alone. And you know, had a conversation with a wife and was like, at what point do I leave my job when it when is it a good idea? And I was like okay, well, if you can prove enough income, and you can actually take a paycheck then and you know, replace what you’re doing then that would be a good place to start. And so after about a year, I was able to take a paycheck and I was like, Alright, I’m getting out of here. As soon as I left, I launched on Amazon. And man it was a quite a learning experience from the very beginning. I remember, you know, selling something and I didn’t ship it right away. And I’m pretty sure Amazon like almost immediately suspended me and I was like what’s going on and my buddy was like, Dude, you can’t mess around you have to be really on top of it. I was like, Okay, so, you know, learn grew up in that space started maybe before even private label was the thing starting a sort of like a private label business. Over time. Over the course of six years as I had that business, I eventually developed a brand was like a health and fitness brand. And we had this gym timer, it was like an interval timer, something that maybe like a CrossFit or an MMA or something like that gym would buy. And that was a really great seller for us just happened to find a good supplier and was able to, you know, sell it, mark it up, but had a really good even like extended warranty like, Hey, you have a problem in the next year, we’ll we’ll you know, we’ll refund you in full, or we’ll replace it for you just experienced a lot of stuff that. It wasn’t a ton of regulation on or a lot of notifications on. Like, there’s so many different sources now to say, hey, what happens when I lose the buy box? What does that mean? And there is not a lot of that information. So just kind of figuring out as you go running into a lot of the issues that people still experienced today, someone leaving a negative review. And it’s not accurate. Like I was selling iPhone 3 cases, and someone was like, this doesn’t fit my iPhone 4. And I was like, Yeah, of course it doesn’t. It’s the wrong kind of case. And so, you know, Amazon’s like we’re not going to take that down. Because we think it’s valid feedback. And I was like, Okay, well, that’s stupid. But you know, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that. So just a lot of hard knocks, but also had my friend that I can reach out to like, Hey, what are you seeing, he’s still a very successful seller continue to grow, and has expanded his product lines and business. And so I’ve been, you know, happy to see him grow. Back in 2015, though, Amazon opened up the marketplace to China. So they were right around that time, like 2015, 2016, a ton of Chinese manufacturers started selling direct to the consumer. And they came in and sold my product, basically at my cost. And I had a couple products that were really driving sales. There’s a lot of things in hindsight that I’m like, I wish I would have done this, I wish I would have done this, I wish I would have done this. But it when it came down to it, they came in, basically you served a ton of my sales. And I did not have a cash flow to support that to say, Okay, why can continue to either not pay myself? Or bleed money, it just was not an option. And there were a lot of financial mistakes that I made along the way that you know, I didn’t have like a savings. I didn’t have stuff that, you know, I think you really need to survive and thrive in those hard times. Because there absolutely will be those difficult times in business.

Josh Hadley 12:29

Before, sorry to interrupt you here, but I’m curious to hear like, what are those mistakes that you feel like in hindsight, you’re like, I wish I would have done this, I wish I would have done that. Because I feel like learning from the mistakes are some of the most valuable things that we can take away as listeners to your story.

Michael Maher 12:44

One of the biggest things was the product itself and consumer experience. So people will leave a negative review of something, and I would chalk it up to user error. Okay, well, it could be user error. But what are you doing to fix and solve that? Initially I didn’t, this is gonna sound crazy. But initially, I didn’t want to embrace FBA, because I felt like Amazon just wanted more money. Of course, everybody knows that the Prime members are the ones that are most active, they convert at the highest rate. So it’s really important to lean into that, you know, if it makes sense from a financial standpoint. So that was one thing, but also just the product experience. Like I said, someone leave a negative review, oh, well, you know, they, it was their bad they had a problem. And they just they were dumb, they didn’t know what they were doing. And that burned me because the reviews started to go south. And if someone’s coming with a cheaper product and your product is doesn’t have a good star rating, the biggest conversion rate drop I see is from a decrease in star rating, not or even increase, it’s not review number, per se. So that was a big mistake on my part. And one of the things that all these mistakes have helped me with with clients. So one of the things that we talked about clients now is, hey, we’re seeing a lot of this error, or this problem and negative reviews come up, this is something you’re gonna want to talk to your manufacturer about, we want to get ahead of this. Because if it starts to decline to certain point products, not going to have the conversion, it needs to you’re gonna have a much higher customer acquisition costs. So that was one of the biggest mistakes I made. I think the other thing was, I was really hungry to get sales. And so you know, I didn’t want to take a listing down, or I didn’t manage, you know, stock really well on certain things. And so having your eyes dotted and your T’s crossed in that sense. I mean, that’s kind of like a basic thing now, but there were just things that I was not as, not as as good at. And then I think the other thing is just relying too heavily on a couple of items for sales. That’s a really dangerous place to be in because listing gets suppressed. I mean, if you’re like a consumer goods company, and you’ve got one product in different flavors or scents, and that’s your product, I get that but if you don’t really have a ton of IP behind something And by IP, I don’t just mean product like your brand. But if you don’t have anything that’s backing that up, you need to eventually expand your product line. And I was predominantly a reseller, but I had some my own branded items. And I was really heavily reliant upon a couple of things. So now there’s a lot of differences and optimization, then it was like, try and get something as close to on a white background as possible, maybe edit it in a software, and then launch on Amazon, there was no, there was not lifestyle, there was not all this, you know, additional components. But I think those are the big ones like the consumer, I don’t think, you know, the customer’s always right. But if they’re having a negative experience, you have to address that, or else, you know, people will have a negative perception of your product. That was a really big one.

Josh Hadley 15:48

Yeah, I think one really important thing that you talked about there, think the game has changed on Amazon, everybody talked about, like, oh, the number of reviews are so, so important. I honestly think the number of reviews, frankly, don’t matter, I think you’ve crossed 20 reviews, and that you might as well have 5000 reviews, the customers are going to view them almost the same. But the big thing is, if you are at a 3.7, right, and you have that shows up as a 3.5 star rating, that’s a huge difference compared to go into 3.8, which gets you at least to a four star rating, buddy. So any of those like incremental adjustments to go from a four star to a four and a half star like that, you will see a huge like change in your conversion rate. And so I think that’s a super important thing to call out. I know I interrupted you and your flow. You were working up to you know how you got into Cartology, then right?

Michael Maher 16:49

When things kind of crashed and burn and 2016 — and I think this is a super relatable story for any entrepreneur out there because there’s a lot of sexy, big, you know, big sales, like what you know, we’re talking about helping brands get from seven, eight figures. And that’s the sexy version of it. But in order to get there, there’s a lot of unsexy work. Work on operations work on a financial, there’s a lot of stuff that has to be done to get there. And so during that time period, I just had a lot of shame, because I felt like I had failed. And I’m gonna get I kind of had in a way, but it was a, there’s a very big shift in my story, meaning my life, and I just had this, you know, I talked about my friend who’s a successful seller still. And I had this vision that that’s what my life was going to be like. And it was in that year that I had a better understanding of where I was going to go, my faith was galvanized, I really felt like there was a different purpose for me, and God was saying, okay, like, we’re going to use this negative circumstance and turn it into something that’s eventually going to be positive. But you got to trust me during this time period. So in that time period, I had to unwind this product based business, I knew I had to get, you know, do something with this skill set. I also had to get a full time job because my wife and I are two-income family. I ended up during that time period, I went back and started managing a coffee shop because it was a very quick available job that I could get. And I actually had nightmares that I was, you know that I had failed. I was back working in a coffee shop. So lo and behold, I ended up doing that as I’m like, How do I unwind this business? And how do I utilize the skill set that I have acquired? I didn’t die though. So I was still alive. And it was in that time period that I realized, okay, I had a skill set, I’d done some couple of like, consulting or freelance type things, because people had requested like, Hey, can you help me like, you know, you’re a doer? And then people want to know, how do you do? And so that’s, you know, how the consulting itself starts. It was in that time period, I just started to pick up these additional projects. As I was working this full time job as I was unwinding this business. It was a super stressful time. But I really quickly realized one I loved the Amazon side of things because I was on multiple channels, eBay, Amazon. I did sell on Etsy for a little bit I had my own website, I sold on Sears marketplace for I think it’s still out there. But it was pretty, it’s pretty terrible. Definitely some interesting stories with that marketplace. But I very quickly realized I love the Amazon side of things. I love the strategy, but also execution and like advertising and optimizing things. I really enjoyed that. And so I you know, with that over the period of let’s say six months really started to lean into that. That’s actually when I met Nathan I started taking on freelance projects through FreeUp at the time, you know, which he had started with Connor that they eventually exited from and just started to build up this momentum. You know, only had to work that job for under a year so was thankful when I got to that other full time job so I was thankful when I got to leave that but had had built up this client base and was now able to take on products on my own outside of FreeUp, I was able to just kind of figure things out. And within even just that first couple of months, I was like, man, there’s such a demand for this work, I’m gonna have to hire additional people to help me. And I’d already been creating SOPs in my business, not to the extent that I have today. But I’d already created like, here’s how you ship something out. Here’s how you handle customer service like I did that for people that worked for me in my e-comm business. And so I just started doing that with people and taking on more products and work. And it’s slowly grown into what it is now. And really, cryptology. For the past three years. It kind of I see it as there’s really been a specific target that we’re going after we’ve gotten really clear on that really honed in on the team, what are the things that we do? Well, what are we staying away from? And even more recently, in the past year, really fine, fine tuning operations, I read the book Traction, and felt like implementing EOS was going to be a game changer. And it’s been super helpful, just because we’ve been very clear about like, what are things we what are issues that are plaguing us that we need to address that we need to fix it as we scale and grow, we can actually be successful. So the past three years have been super pivotal. But it took a couple of years to figure out what do I do best? Is it is it just this one specific thing is it full, you know, channel management, and all the things that I encountered like ton of Chinese competition, that I mean, I have very, I don’t think it’s often that you necessarily get a reference back to a specific issue that you face that you get to help someone with. But I had a client who met him at like an Amazon Meetup group. And he’s like, hey, you know, I’m struggling, my sales have dropped almost overnight. And in January, I think his sales were like $120,000. And by February, or by March, they were $25,000 for the month. So he’s a huge drop off, I came in and was like, saw a ton of Chinese competition that come in, all his sales were organic, this was in like 2017-2018, there was no advertising, we flip that on and optimize his listings. And if you look at what he spent in advertising, that’s essentially the revenue that he added on. So he would have been out of business. And we were able to basically have him be even from the previous year. So sales look like an increase by his cost, and advertise increase that same amount. But that was a huge win. And had I not experienced that I don’t know that I would have myself, I don’t know that I would have been able to necessarily diagnose it. So I mean, that was a huge win. And I was an example of, you know, one of those failures or learning experiences, mistakes, whatever you want to call it, that I was able to label later turn into something that helped someone else. So that was a cool feeling. And it may have made feel like going through that process a little bit. Like, oh, okay, I get it now. Like, I can see why, you know, that that’s tough circumstance was was in the road for me.

Josh Hadley 23:01

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that, you know, story about your journey, that it hasn’t just been sunshine and rainbows. That’s like, I started in 2010. And I just continued to crush it. I love that, you know, you know, God had different paths for you to go through in order to get to where you are today. And that you see all of that as, you know, building blocks to get you to kind of in your flow state where you are today. And even with Cartology, you’ve gone through iterations and honing in on like, who it is that you serve.

Michael Maher 23:36

I would love to try to be I just want to say I try to be honest about that. Because I think there’s a lot of people who do experience that and I know it, it could put me in a vulnerable place like oh, well, you know, you failed in this in this instance, doesn’t that, you know, are you worried about perception? And I’m like, No, I mean, I wish I told you initially was I felt a lot of shame. But as I worked through that, I was like, okay, like it was just a tough experience. Many entrepreneurs go through those tough experiences. And I think if we talk about that more, there’s hopefully a little bit more like you still have to get it right. You still have to, you know, get results. If you’re serving people, you just have to get results. You have to get results in your business. But yeah, I mean, I want to be honest upfront about that because there is a lot of the sexy talk about stuff and there’s just a lot of unsexy stuff that’s part of I think, actually, Nathan Hirsch has said he wants to be the unsexy entrepreneur. And I mean, that’s kind of the stuff that makes things that make things I think work really well makes the sexy stuff even sexier is, hey, I’ve got good operations. I’m coaching people on the team, like all this stuff that you need to do to be successful.

Josh Hadley 24:39

And I think that vulnerability is so crucial. Because all of us we all go through our own obstacles and challenges to get to where we are today. And also knowing that you know, you only fail when you quit and you just throw in the towel, because outside of that, it should be seen as a ops Like an obstacle that you had to overcome, but once you step up and over, overcome that obstacle, now you can look back from that mountain pink, and kind of see the vistas of wow, look at what I’ve been able to accomplish had I given up, I wouldn’t be able to see the view that I see now. So I think that’s super important. So Michael, I would love to dive into some of the specific strategies and action items. And case studies that we talked about before we hit the record button of brands that have come to you tell us about, you know, give us the examples and case studies for each of the brands, what were they struggling with? What were the strategies that you implemented with them? And what type of success did they see, once they were able to implement some of these things,

Michael Maher 25:46

there was a brand that came to us, January of 2020. So it was a very interesting time, because we were managing them, right when, you know, the pandemic started. And there are, I think, some not all information about Amazon’s created equal, I think you probably know that Josh had been in the space for a while. So you’ve seen some people that are just selling their brand, or course whatever the case might be, and I think there’s, there’s validity in some of those things. But, you know, we don’t really know what success rate of people that have maybe done specific courses are and so it’s hard to know. And that could be, you know, someone implementing a rate as well, too. But not all information is created equal. And so we had someone that came to us, they were live on Amazon, they did, they had launched maybe six months ago, great, great brand, great brand story. And that’s really been where we’ve, you know, focus now, as an agency is focusing on brands that have a clear target audience, they’ve got a story they’ve got, when I talk about IPA, I don’t just mean, oh, we’ve got this specific unique flavor or design, but like, IP in your brand, who that is because that’s one of the emotional connections you can make with people. So I remember talking with them, and just, you know, kind of auditing their account. And one of the biggest things I saw was, there is just a ton of ad spent. And I’m a proponent for spending more on advertising, you have to know what you’re spending towards. And the goal should always be higher placement insert. Now, you may not be higher in the most generic term, like if you sell toothpaste, you may not be number one in the toothpaste spot. But maybe you’re on an organic toothpaste, or maybe you’re on an organic fluoride free toothpaste, like there are additional places that you can rank. But the reason I say top of search is because 70 plus percent of people don’t go past page one. And so if you’re not visible there, it’s really hard to get the sales that you need to keep your momentum going. And they were spending a ton on ads with a different service provider. And really, really low return, like spending six figures and ads and like, you know, point three return on ad spend. And the problem was, they were the previous company was treating this ad spend, like it was almost like it was display awareness. Like it’s like they were using the Search Console, but trying to spend it and manage it like it was DSP it was a very interesting, yeah, I was like just top of funnel keywords. That was it. And they were getting a low return. And they were not a well known brand. It was a competitive space and personal care. And so I was like, you know, and then just diving deeper into that ad spend, like they had pretty they had like good assets, there were some refining of some of those assets. They had very strict control over like creative and stuff. And so there was some stuff that we could do. But there was like Optimation optimization of like the SEO side of things. But the advertising pivot was a big one. And we were continuing to spend a large amount, but when the pandemic hit in March, they wanted to pull all ad spend. And I was pretty sure I remember what I said, but I actually went back recently and looked through emails, and was like, Okay, what did i What did I recommend to them, and we said, don’t pull your ad spend, everyone else is going to do that, you’re and you’re ultimately you’re going to lose momentum. So you need to keep spending, we want to continue to build on what we’ve gotten. And they pulled back a lot on ad spend. But we got them to to keep spending. And during that time period we initially saw an increase in CPC, because we were being very specific about targets that we’re going after. And there were some things we wanted to rank on. But the big I was the one that did the initial, like, you know, refiguring of the ad campaigns. It took me a good week of like almost full days to like revamp this thing because I wanted to preserve some of that past experience that that Amazon had or past, you know, history in those campaigns because some of the things had performance and I wanted to leverage that but there was some stuff that needed to be totally redone and transformed. And one of the other big issues that I saw was and I see this a lot Hot with any brand that I’m auditing, just stuffing a ton of targets into a campaign. And I get why people would want to do that. I think the logic is all these irrelevant keywords. So I want Amazon to spend on, you know, whatever keywords I put in here, the problem with that, I don’t think you have to get it down to single keyword isolation, I think there could be a use case for that. But when you step all those targets in there, you’re limited by your, your, your daily budget. And let’s say you’ve got 100 terms. I mean, I’ve seen way more than that. But, and don’t get me wrong, on average, when I first started using advertising in like 2015, when it was opened up to me as a seller, I go back, and I can look at some of those campaigns. And it’s like one word, broad match, I mean, just very, very basic stuff. The crazy part is though it worked, because it was not super competitive at the time. So I had a keyword, higher priced item, you know, really good ad costs on those campaigns. What’s interesting about back then is I saw my total sales increase. And I was like, that’s weird. I’m seeing this increase in sales. But it’s not being like advertising is not showing up like, just kind of like a weird thought. And over time, we’ve seen this development of metrics like tacos, you could say true as whatever the case might be, but your ad spend, there’s a correlation between that and your increase in total sales. Now, proving causation is a lot more difficult. But when we’ve analyzed data from our current clients, and clients we’ve worked with, we’ve seen a very strong correlation between ad spend, and just total sales increase. And it’s very statistically significant, like 94% of the time, when you spend ads, you’re gonna see an increase in total sales. And there’s other stuff to uncover there. But long story short, you know, when you spend on ads, you do see an increase in total sales, because it’s all going back to that same listing. So whether it’s an ad that gets the sale attributed to it, or it’s organic, it’s all you know, building on the power, I guess you could say, of that, that listing, so this client that we had a pullback adspend, and we did see an increase in CPC, which I kind of expect, because we’re like, okay, we’re going after these targets, we’re going to put more spin on it, we’re gonna bid a little bit higher, because we want to win the impressions. But we’re confident that we’re gonna get the conversions. But we have to get impressions and clicks first. So we saw an increase in CPC, then after a couple months, we actually saw a decrease in CPC, as we continue to improve performance. And so that was a big help for them. They came to us at maybe doing like 60, 70,000 a month in sales. And after a year, they wanted to take it in-house, which I understood. I mean, I wanted to keep working with them, but they wanted to take an house. And they left us doing like about 215,000 a month. So they had very aggressive goals. But we actually spent less initially and by the time they left, we were spending like half of what they were spending, you know, prior to coming on with us, and they had grown significantly. So I think one of the biggest takeaways for me from that is you have to spend on advertising. But it’s got to be intentional. And you have to stay the course. So many people want to pull out from ads, because they’re worried about the number or they’re worried about the current return. And there’s someone I saw recently who there’s a devotional app that I read, and I but I know this guy who like does notes, and he talks about, he was talking about first order negative second order positive thinking, it’s like, okay, you know, what does that mean? And it’s making a choice that might negatively impact you right now. But that’s going to breed better results in the long term. And so a lot of people are first order positive second or negative, like, I’m gonna buy this really cool sports car because I have $100,000. But that’s, and that’s positive now. But the second order negative is, oh, I don’t have money for groceries or for my rent. So I’m not really thinking this all the way through. And the case with advertising spend a lot of times is, I’m not seeing a good return. So I want to pull back right away. If you’re confident in your product. And you know that you have nailed the market in that sense. I mean, you won’t really truly know until you spend and you start seeing sales come in, you have to spend even in the face of a low row as or a high a cost, however, you want to look at it because you have to build velocity. And you have to prove yourself, not just with the consumer, but even with Amazon’s advertising algorithm. So you have to start winning stuff, you have to start pushing forward. And that seems very counterintuitive. But when we started to spend more, we started to get the velocity that we needed, and we started to earn sales. Why would Amazon want to show your product and advertising in the first place? They want your money? For sure. But where do they make the most money? It’s not advertising. It’s when your product sells. It’s the actual marketplace itself. So Amazon and they want to be the most customer centric company in the world. What’s more customer centric than putting the right product in front of the right person at the right time. Keeping you know you taxing their infrastructure from a site level down low. They get you on a site you purchase quickly, that frees you up so that next time you go back, like Oh, I was able to find this thing really quickly, I had a great experience, and you keep coming back and hence the power of Primus is born. So really, really focusing on, you know, where you want to direct spend, I talked about, you know, having 100 targets inside of a campaign. And I didn’t finish that thought. But when you have 100 targets inside of a campaign, let’s say you have $1 CPC, you could be lucky these days to have $1 CPC. But let’s say you did, let’s say your budget was even $100 a day, you’re now let’s just say if it actually spends across each keyword, you’re not limiting yourself to one click a keyword, there’s no way that you’re going to amount the accumulate the amount of volume and mass that you need to push yourself forward to get to page one by doing that. So if you would take five to 10 keywords, at $1, click, you’re going to start getting 20 clicks a day on these five keywords, and you’re gonna get a lot more momentum going there. So I think that’s like people want to hit all the targets, be all things to all people, you can’t do that. That’s not possible. So I’d say focus on what you really want to target, but really push the volume that you need to in there. And as long as you’re we talked about this before, but you know, before we started recording, but what are the tertiary? Or what are the secondary metrics that you can look at to tell you my row has not increased, but I know I’m making progress. Tracking placement in search is one of those things is my BSR in my subcategory even in my, my higher category are those things is my ranking changing, if you’re seeing that stuff change, and maybe you’re even seeing some of your total sales start to increase. If you’re tracking those additional things, then that’s a good sign that you’re making progress, and you need to keep spending, but the people that can put their foot on the gas and stay committed, those are the ones that long term, they actually can pay less, because one, they’re already high in search. So they have to spend as much in ads to get there, it’s kind of an initial thing. But when they are there, they will have bid back on some of those terms. I mean, the the market is going to limit it to a certain point, but you can bid back and say, okay, you know, I’ve spent two bucks on this keyword for the past six months, I only want to spend $1.75, and you’re gonna eventually hit a limit, but you’re going to be able to, you know, get a little bit more bang for your buck. And that, that circumstance. So I mean, that was one person who was already on Amazon, and they needed to make some major tweaks. But once he made those tweaks, they saw a lot better performance and acceleration of stuff. But you had to get through the oh, this kind of hurts right now. We were not, you know, we’re not seeing an increase in efficiency yet. But you gotta hold on.

Josh Hadley 37:39

Yeah, I think with the advertising aspect. I mean, there’s been so much, you know, learnings I think that everybody’s gone through over the last few years. If you go back in the day back in, like 2017 2018, when all of these PPC courses came out, everybody was like, hey, light up your auto campaigns, light up all these broad campaigns, and then use these to kind of pan for gold, right, and then take the good keywords and filter them over into exact campaigns. Going back to what you talked about, the biggest change that we have seen in terms of better success with our advertising is we actually roll out single keyword campaigns. And the reason why we do this is because we now have granular, you know, ability to be able to actually pull certain levers. So if we notice we’re losing ranking on a specific keyword, I can bump up the bids and that campaign budget for that specific keyword. In addition to that Amazon provides you a relevancy or an overall performance score for each of your campaigns. So if you have a low performing keyword, you just turn off that entire campaign. And it’s not damaging all the other campaigns as well. So I think to your extent, I mean, we could have a whole conversation on PPC in and of itself. But I am curious to move into your next case study that you have here with another brand that came to you. They wanted to scale their business on Amazon, what were some of the strategies that you implemented with this other case study to help them grow.

Michael Maher 39:16

So this brand was in like industrial medical supply area. And they were not on Amazon, they wanted to be and we really had to, they had products, but they didn’t have a strong brand, or really much of a bring it. And so we started with a design of the brand. I mean, like creation of a logo or an iteration on a logo, a design aesthetic, looked at the we said, you know, hey, they’ve got hundreds of products. Like let’s focus on 10. We don’t need to do we don’t need to do more than that we want to build from these 10 eventually, but we wanted to build a base and we knew that advertising funds weren’t unlimited and And if you’ve just like we talked about, you know, limiting from a keyword perspective, if you’re trying to spend, you know, 10,000 bucks a month on 100 items, gonna get a lot less momentum than you would across 10. So built out the brand brand story who we’re going after, like, you know, it could be consumer, it could be professionals. So we thought about, who are we really wanting to target here, got a conclusion there, and just really started building out high quality, creative. And the creative has changed a lot over the past, even this past couple years. And the reason there’s been so many changes, I think it’s just because of how consumers interact with Amazon. They’re making such quick purchase decisions. They’re not spending, I mean, it’s going to depend upon the category thing, everything in Amazon is category dependent. I have a buddy, he and I, he’s in the space, and we go back and forth with voice notes. And he was mentioning something to me recently. And I was like, Yeah, but it’s gonna depend upon the category like, that’s always what we do in beauty is going to be different than apparel at different than arts and crafts different than office supply. And we have to take that in consideration. But we just started developing really good quality assets, because people were making quick purchase decisions 50% of people purchase in 15 minutes or less on Amazon 28% purchase in three minutes or less. So you have to show product usage. I mean, you have to have, you know, Amazon standard first product photo, but you have to show on a white background, you have to show the product in use, and you have to give some good text overlay. Because I don’t think people are even reading bullet points anymore, they still matter from an SEO perspective. But if you’re making a purchase decision in three minutes or less, if 70 to 80% of people are purchasing on mobile phones, the biggest section that’s popping up are the media assets. I think title reviews, and price point are all important as well. But the medi assets are what are really selling that product. If someone can easily flip through multiple pictures that tell them why they should purchase. So if you have, you know, if you if you’re selling ibuprofen, you don’t just say 500 milligrams of ibuprofen or what you know, whatever the main ingredient is, I think that’s what it would be. But you don’t just say that, it’s what is the end result like, you know, cures your you can’t say this on Amazon, but gets rid of your headache in an hour. Okay, now I know that I don’t just get rid of my headache, but I get rid of it fast. Now you’ve overcome my objections. And now I want to, I want to press add to cart and press by now. So it’s giving people the reasons really quickly ahead of time, so that they know and they’re clear. And I think if someone doesn’t want to purchase your product, you’re getting to that yes, or that no quicker, I mean, that’s a sales thing, get to yes, quickly get to know quickly get to maybe quickly, like get to the point, but get to it as quickly as possible. And so if someone doesn’t want to purchase, they go back out and purchase something else. And that’s probably a better user experience, I think from Amazon perspective, but ultimately, tell people why they should purchase your product. And what we created good quality imagery there. And then we talked about advertising, we said, it’s not going to be a good return right away, or not expecting that we wanted to, there’s always going to be bad stuff that happens with Amazon. So we want to brace people to be braced for that we have a very hopeful outlook, but we want to be realistic in our perspective. So we said, Okay, we’re gonna launch, we’re gonna, you know, put for, like, let’s say 5000 bucks on ad spend. But we’re gonna stay consistent there, no matter what the results, whatever the initial results are. And so we both have these 10 product pages, we got, you know, campaigns started the just in the first couple months, first three months, they spent five grand on ads, their return was about point seven, six, and total sales was a little under five grand. So if you just took that first month, you think this was a huge failure. Okay, second month, we spent, we spent five grand again, we saw an increase in rise by about like 2 like 1.1, and total sales double went up to about like eight plus, previously, it had been like maybe four or something so little under five, but double. So we knew we were making progress, the third month, sales doubled. Again, the row has jumped to like two, three to two to three, or somewhere between two to five, and spend about five, six grand on advertising. So if you and this that I think is a really easy launch, it could be significantly harder. If you’re in like beauty, I would intentionally run a really low row as on those campaigns. I mean, if I had unlimited budget, I could probably get away with you know, having a higher row as but you have to get those initial impressions, get those clicks, that you can start getting the conversions. If you’re not even in the conversation, you’re not going to — you’re not going to be there at all. So you have to be willing to spend but as you accumulate you can also start to refine and say hey, we don’t want to spend on this anymore because that’s not going to work. So we stayed consistent there. saw great growth. They unfortunately ran into some supply issues and so that cut them off a little bit but we’ve continued to to grow them. Still spending about the same amount on advertising. And I mean, that’s why I think you, when you hire someone, you bring someone on who really leaning into that advice is important. Because if you bring someone I mean, I’ve worked with clients in the past where we said, we needed to do this, like, Oh, we don’t want to do that. I’m like, Well, then why did you? Why did you hire us? I mean, you’re, you’re paying us money. And when people talk a lot about adding value, when you hire an agency, you’re not adding value to your business. Here’s what I think an agency does. If they’re good at what they do when you hire someone like cryptology, or even when you hire yourself, you are helping those people uncover the value that’s already inherent in their business, and helping them turn it into revenue. They’re actually going out of pocket a lot of times to pay for services. But we’re they’re doing it because we can help you turn that pile of rocks and rubble, we can polish it up and turn it into diamonds, or turn it into gold for you. But you have to be willing to take that advice. And it’s not. It’s not an easy process, and not everyone’s ready to bite the bullet there. Yeah,

Josh Hadley 46:04

I love those examples, Michael, I think those case studies are so tangible. And I think the listeners can pick apart, you know, points where they’re weak, and whether it’d be the creative, whether it be in advertising, whether it be, you know, staying the study course, and I think your wealth of knowledge. You know, I think we’re all better for it. As we begin to wrap up here, Michael, I like to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are the three takeaways that I’ve noted as actionable strategies that people can implement. But Michael, I would love to hear if you think I’m missing something. So number one, one of the things that you talked about the beginning was product reviews, and caring about the customers experience. That was one of the mistakes that you had made earlier on in your journey. And we talked about how significant going from a 3.5 star rating to a four star from a four star to a 4.5 star rating can have on your product. And so my recommendation and advice for everybody is to actually dive in and dissect the product reviews that you are getting. And although some people can, you know, give outlandish reasons as to why your product didn’t work. Listen to the customer. And I think one of the most important things is that if you see something going in the wrong direction, you know, make sure that you get in touch with your manufacturer, you correct those things as soon as possible. If that even means you’ve got to ship out all of that inventory that just went in, that will be more important than trying to sell through 1000 units that are defective, sure, you can make your money back, but is not going to benefit your business in the long term. If you now move from a 4.5 star down to a four star, it will have a long, a more negative, long-term impact on your business than that cash flow would have had for you.

Michael Maher 48:03

And don’t take the reviews personally.

Josh Hadley 48:06

Yes.

Michael Maher 48:09

Remove the emotion component like how can I make this better so that people can actually enjoy more, and then you’re going to feel better about that. But if you take it personally, it’s going to be really hard to be open to that feedback.

Josh Hadley 48:20

Yeah. 100% agree. Action Item number two here is going with the creative content that you talked about. People aren’t reading the bullets. People aren’t reading your description, either. The only thing people may read is maybe the beginning of your product title. Okay, so what are people doing? They’re glancing real quickly through all of your photos. And so here’s the key part. It’s not just about creating a bunch of lifestyle images, although that is important. It’s being able to convey the solution and the ideal state that that customer is trying to achieve by purchasing the product, right? So if they’re purchasing a yoga mat, right, is it you know, is it because they don’t want to sit on a hard floor? It’s more than that, right? It’s probably more like they’re now getting into this yoga lifestyle. That’s like, increase your flexibility, right? And it’s like, okay, the mat may not be giving you that increased flexibility, but it’s providing that foundation for you, right? So you’re appealing to their higher senses, and appealing to what it is that they’re actually trying to solve. You talked about the ibuprofen example. It’s not just ibuprofen that they want. What they really want is to remove their migraine or their headache that they’re having right now. Right?

Michael Maher 49:42

It is the gap between their current and future state. You need to assess what that is, and you need to show them with a future state looks like.

Josh Hadley 49:49

you said it perfectly right there. So show them visually in lifestyle images, and then add those specific captions on there. Another quick hack. This has been something that was I’m brought on by another seller. But Amazon is actually reading, they’ve got artificial intelligence and computer intelligence that’s reading the text that goes on those images. So if you really want to up your game, include keywords into those that the text that you’re displaying on your images, because Amazon is crawling that, and it can help index you and increase your organic ranking. So factor in those keywords, not only into your bullets and description, but your images as well. Action item number three is focusing on what is going to move the needle the most in your business. You talked about this is kind of one of the mistakes. But you also kind of alluded to this with some of the case studies that you shared here. One of the biggest things in order to continue to grow and succeed on Amazon is continuing to bring new products to the marketplace, being less dependent on one or two, that are everything in your business, because you may face a suspension of one of those ASINs, or they just get de indexed or whatever issues that happen. And if you’re too reliant on one or two ASINs, that puts you in a very vulnerable spot. And so as you mentioned, with the previous case study, you know, instead of bringing all all, you know, 1000s of their skews, you brought on their top 10 first, and then you continue to grow from there. And so my action item for people here is obviously start and continue to double down on those ASINs that are winning, but don’t neglect to continue to bring on additional skews to continue to grow and support your business, bringing new products to the market is the lifeline for any Amazon seller. So those are my action items. Michael, do you think I’m missing anything here? I

Michael Maher 51:50

think that’s good, I have added something to each one, I think the thing I would add to the last one is just get rid of this. If something’s not working, get rid of it. Again, less emotional attachment, it could be, especially if you’re not necessarily tied to a specific product. Like I said, if you’re a consumer goods brand, and this is your product, sometimes you have less flexibility there, maybe you need to iterate on the recipe, if it’s food, whatever the case might be, but be willing to let stuff go because sometimes that dead weight frees up mental energy, it frees up cash, even if you’re potentially you already have a sunk cost and you’re you’re losing a little bit, you’re freeing up that cash to go into something else. And we all know space is limited in Amazon. So don’t hold on to stuff that that even if it’s like, Hey, I sell a good amount of this, but the review are like the rating is like a three, seven. And I’ve just noticed it’s declined over time. I’m spending more on advertising on this. I don’t know, I think it’s something that I’m just going to cut loose. And Amazon is is honestly a ton of experimentation. I mean, it’s controlled experimentation. But when we launch a campaign with someone, I’m pretty confident of what I think I’m gonna see, but there’s no way of knowing until we let it loose. So it is an experiment in a way. But you have to, you have to keep a grip science, not just let things go and fly by the seat of your pants. But sometimes it’s hey, let’s test this grouping, because we don’t know what’s going to happen. But let’s divert significant budget to it to see if that’s going to work. So yeah, that experimentation piece is important. And maybe service writers don’t want people to know that there’s some experimentation that’s involved. But I think you just embrace that and are honest with people. And I think they’ll they’ll trust you a little bit more.

Josh Hadley 53:32

I love that. All right, Michael, want to dive into my final three questions that I love to ask every guest. Number one is what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why? Well,

Michael Maher 53:43

I have one that’s like more personal life. But I also have one that I’ve read recently that has been really helpful for my business. So if I look at those two books, I’m kind of I’m kind of obfuscating the question here, but there is a devotional that I read every day called My Utmost for His Highest. And it challenges me and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is like, I need to find people, coaches, whatever the case might be that challenge me. And maybe I am solidified in what I’m doing an instance, right. But maybe something helps me to change my perspective in my mind. And that’s something that challenges me every day, and I get something from it every day. And it helps me to kind of stay centered and in the right mindset in the right frame of mind. The other book that I will say and I’ve got a couple books here on my on my desk, but it’s this book right here Gap Selling by a guy named Keenan. And it has really changed. I’ve done a lot of work on sales process, but it’s really changed how I approach that as an agency. And it’s, I can’t I cannot recommend it enough. They’ve got additional content. They’ve got a trainer if you want to work with a trainer, I went ahead and did that. And I’ve just seen a huge improvement in my ability to like assess problems. See, can I you know Can I fix this or help, you know, with this business problem? And then actually, you know, win business from it.

Josh Hadley 55:06

I love that. Great recommendations. Question number two here is, what is a productivity or software tool that you’ve recently been using that you feel like is a game changer? Well,

Michael Maher 55:17

Well, I would say most recently, I have started, I’ve always use Zapier in some capacity, but I’ve been leveraging the connections because we all got multiple software’s nutshell is my CRM. And I’ve been attaching that to click up, which is another productivity software. But connecting those two things, when I create a lead inside of nutshell, and now automatically creates a card, excuse me out automatically creates a card or a task inside of clickup. So that he can move through azimuth of the sales process, it will automatically do that. So that’s been super helpful. And I’m now I was actually, before we even got on this I was like, Okay, how do I create a folder inside of Google Drive when this is up? And like how are these different things putting together when I for my podcast, as soon as someone’s scheduled on Calendly, Zapier automatically puts a new session in squad cast and schedules a new calendar and right for them that used to be something my sis and have to do. So that’s been a huge game changer. It takes time to figure it out. And I’m not necessarily the most adept at it. But when you can figure something out, it feels like a huge win and it saves you. It’s that first order negative second order positive. I’m going to spend three hours trying to figure out how to set this up. I’m going to save myself a ton of time in the long run. Yeah, yeah, I

Josh Hadley 56:33

Yeah, I completely agree. Zapier is awesome. We’ve recently started using make.com. And that’s it. Another version of Zapier but it actually creates like entire flows. It’s a little more complicated to get set up. But once you get it set up, you can actually walk through an entire like SOP and visually see it.

Alright, final question, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following? And why?

Michael Maher 57:07

I mean, I was gonna jokingly say, can I say myself, but that would have sounded so, so pompous, totally kidding. Someone that I really look up to and and have gotten really close with is a buddy of mine, his name’s Brett Bohannan. And he’s been in the Amazon space for a while, he started as a seller as well, and has done work for a lot of brands agencies been, I think, behind the scenes and a lot of stuff that people maybe wouldn’t know about, but maybe not necessarily know him. And he has a, this really cool cohort of learning called Amazon with Brett. And he’s recently started calling himself the Amazon cowboy. Let’s see if he’s still doing that when this podcast comes out. But he and I do an AMA, once a month on on Twitter, and it goes live on like LinkedIn, and YouTube, but it’s like, ask ss anything about Amazon. He’s super knowledgeable. He’s got a lot of great practical experience, like dealing with flat files and stuff in his Amazon with Brett Amazon wordpress.com. He doesn’t just put together course information, but it is a live learning cohort. So I’ve had people on my team, go and be in this learning cohort to talk about what problems we’re facing all this kind of stuff. And I think that is a real, not just taking a course and being in a power group. But talking with real people actually facing problems. And I know I’ve seen brands, I’ve seen people that work at agencies, anyone can get something from this. And he’s just a good dude. He’s funny, too. So yeah, Brett, for sure. Awesome.

Josh Hadley 58:40

Awesome. Very fun. Well, thank you for sharing all of your wisdom with us today. Michael, if people want to learn more about you and your agency want to consider working with you. Where’s the best people that people that where’s the best place that people can reach out to you at? You

Speaker 3 58:55

Man, you can email me directly if you want. Michael@thinkcartologyy.com. If you need help with Amazon. Cartology dot com is not available, unfortunately. I’ve tried to acquire it, but you can email me directly. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter at Michael J. Maher, Instagram, Michael Joseph Maher. But any of those places are good, feel free to reach out and we’re just go to our website thinkcartology.com and find out more there.

Josh Hadley 59:27

Awesome. And we’ll link everything in the show notes as well to make it easy for people. Michael, thank you so much for your time and sharing your wisdom with us. I know I’m much better for it.

Michael Maher 59:38

Oh, thanks, man. Thanks for listening and thanks for doing such a good job of introducing me and summarizing things I told you I need to hire you just to bring me around on call so you can do good intros. But yeah, thanks for having me, man. It was a lot of fun. It was it’s good to talk this stuff out with someone else that’s knowledgeable.

Josh Hadley 59:56

Awesome. Thanks again, Michael.

Outro 59:58

Thank you for listening. Visit eCommBreakthrough.com for more information. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review. See you again next time.