How to use PPC Advertising on Amazon




I want to join 'Ollie's Ecommerce Q&A Group'





Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. So there are two big roadblocks that most Amazon sellers encounter when they begin their journey building an Amazon business. The first one is when they're trying to find the perfect product to start with, which private label product should they source? How do they find the perfect niche? How'd you get that confidence to send real cash, cold, hard cash to a supplier in the hope that your product will sell? That's the first roadblock.


The second roadblock is when you've got all of this stock and you've made that leap of faith and you've got the products into the Amazon warehouse and you're sitting there and you're waiting for it to sell. This is the second roadblock most Amazon sellers encounter. And it can be even more scary than when you're looking for your product. Because now things get real, right? Are the products even going to sell or it's just going to sit there and you will have wasted some money?


Today we have a question from a member of Ollie's e-Commerce Q&A Group called Lorna and Lorna is at the second roadblock in her Amazon business journey. She has imported a product, which, you know, props to her. That's incredible that you've taken the leap of faith. You've done it and you've got this far, that stuff's amazing.


Most people don't. They think about building an Amazon business, they look forward to it, they think about all the benefits, but they never take action. So it's incredible that you've done this. It's a massive congrats.


She's got some products in the warehouse and now she's struggling to get sales. She's trying to navigate the tricky world of pay-per-click advertising and she wants some help. So let me read to you what she said.


Can anyone recommend anyone who can help me get sales and advice on PPC (pay-per-click advertising) so I can sell what I have to raise money to join this program.


So Lorna wants to get some coaching. She wants to get some more help and she wants to raise some cash by selling her stock.


I've got 17 reviews. I've got 230 to sell and had a few sales in Germany.


First of all, the fact that you've got 17 reviews so far is incredible. Actually getting reviews on Amazon is like pulling teeth. Customers don't really get that. They're meant to review products. So what this results in usually is one to 5% of customers leave reviews and it's usually closer to 1%. So you have to sell a lot of stock to get a decent amount of reviews.


Now there's some things that can help you, such as the Amazon Reviewer program, which is great. It can be very useful, and you can also get friends and family to review your products, which, to a certain extent, can help as long as you're not making it really obvious that it's family - cause Amazon just won't approve the reviews.


But the fact that you got 17 views is a great start. So, onto the problem. She says she's got 230 units to sell, had a few sales in Germany, but it seems like to me that the sales have slowed down. So I asked Lorna for a bit more detail and I said, how much PPC have you done so far? Give me some more details and I'll answer your question on tomorrow's video, which I'm doing today. Lorna says,


When you say how much, what do you mean? My ACoS was really high, but found some low-priced keywords and got it down, but only had 19 sales this month. I just don't know what I'm doing and I'm leaking money. I launched end of October with a bundle but I think I was badly advised and I felt a bit lost and desperate to be honest and would really like to recoup some money to join you somehow. I need help somehow.


Okay, cool. So first of all, the fact that you've sold 19 units means that people want to buy the product, which is great. That's awesome. That's one thing I would say. Another thing I would say is, if this was your first import of this product, if it was me, I would've probably advised you to go in with smaller amount of stock. So rather than 250 units, 50. Because there's always a chance that the thing that you import might not perform in the way that you think it will perform, right?


So if you take an amazing niche and you find all the problems of the product within that niche, and you see all these customer reviews and stuff and it looks like you know how to add value to the marketplace, even if you do everything right, sometimes for whatever reason, customers just don't connect with your product and they just, for some reason, it just doesn't work and no amount of knowledge will prevent that.


You could be the most experienced seller on the planet and you will have dead products. Every Amazon seller tries products and you know, a certain percentage of them won't work. So we don't want to risk that. You do your first import, you spend a load of money on products and then it fails.


Now I don't think this is happening because you've had 19 sales, so it's a good start. I would just suggest that next time when you import a product, maybe start with less units before diving in. But hey, look, we live and learn and the fact that you've taken action is incredible. And you're gonna get better. So let's have a look and see what we can do to solve this problem.


So after Lorna said that, I replied and said, okay, cool. What's your price point? How much have you spent on advertising in total? And have you done any other marketing? And Lorna said,


I'll get the total cost together. I haven't done any other advertising at all. I have a discount voucher, which funnily no one ever used. I reduced the price to 9.99 to get some sales, then increased to 12.99, then down again to 9.99, but not making anything. Had some sales in Germany, 16.99, which is what I need. I'm in panic mode I guess I need to increase price and get some sales advice, which I'm happy to pay for.


All right, so I'm happy to give you some advice today for free, and hopefully this will help you sell out some of your stock and hopefully this will help out a load of other people who might be in the group in a similar situation, who also, want to sell some of their stock.


So this is my strategy for getting a product to sell consistently. First of all, this assumes that you've got a great product and a great niche, and the customers like the product, okay? All of those things have to happen for this to work. But as you've made quite a few sales, I would assume that those things are in check.


So first of all, what I do is I make the listing look incredible. I make the listing incredible. We want it to be better than any other listing of any of the competing products. So have a look at your competitors, have a look at their listings, have a look at the photos, their titles, their bullets, their description. They're the four things we want to examine.


How can you make your products stand out? I recently helped a client import a product and he actually did have a big differentiation point between him and his competitors. He was bundling his product with something else. And no one else was really doing that in his niche. But if you look at the main photo that he put on his listing, you would never know.


This has happened with so many clients I've helped. Though they'll import an incredible bundle of stock, but the customer doesn't know that it's a bundle. They have to do research, in depth research, into the listing to even find out that you get the main product and you get another product for free with it.


So here's what you have to understand about customers. Customers aren't idiots. They're very smart people, but when they're looking at your listing and your marketing, they act like idiots. Why is that? That's because when someone's looking at marketing or advertising, deciding to buy something, they don't put in 100% of their brain power into that decision.


If you imagine - when we are buying stuff on Amazon, what's happening? Well usually, me, I've got my laptop on the kitchen table and my girlfriend's cooking and I'm probably irritating her while she's trying to get things done. There's a million other things happening around me while I'm deciding whether to buy a product. And you know, I've got one eye on the product and another eye on the other side of my house and I'm glancing for a couple of seconds at the listing before I decide to buy on it.


So if something isn't blatantly obvious jumping off the page at me about a product, then I'm not gonna notice it, right? I'm only going to notice maybe 5% of the stuff on the listing that they've written about, and I'm only going to notice the stuff I care about. So we want to throw all of the best stuff about your product in the customer's face. All right?


There's no chance even with the 5% of brain power they use, they could miss it. So this all starts with your main product photo. Make sure it's blatantly obvious that you have your main product and your bundled products. What I like to do is have a main product and then Photoshop in like, a red plus symbol next to it.


So the main product photo, plus symbol, and then your free product photo next to it, so they can see you get this, plus this, as if you're speaking to a chimpanzee. It's like, you get this thing, plus this thing. Then they can't miss it. That's the photos done. And then the rest of the photos, illustrate to the customer how is the product going to be really useful in their life.


So I like to do things like detailed product photos where there's a photo, arrows pointing to all the core things in the product, and then a bit of text writing about them as well. I like to do lifestyle photos, so Photoshop in your product into a situation. So if it's a bottle, have somebody working out holding the bottle or have the bottle inside a rucksack or whatever it is. Something that illustrates how your product will fit into their life, right?


The photos are a big, big, big deal. Then the title - make sure it's really clear in the title that you get your products plus free whatever it is that you're bundling with it. Again, act as if you're talking to a chimpanzee. And you're going to get their attention.

Bullet points. Make sure you've used up every single character on every single one of the bullet points. You don't just want to use up the half of the character space. Use up all of the characters space, put capital letters in the headline in the start of every single bullet so it grabs people's attention and they read on. They won't read all your bullets, but they might see something that they care about the product has, or that they want the product to have, in one of the headlines of your bullets. And then they'll read the whole bullet cause that's something they care about. All right?


The description, you should have a paragraph that paints a picture in the customer's mind of how your product is going to make their life better. If you can get a customer emotional at any point, do it. We buy things on emotion and we justify our purchases with logic. All right? We don't buy things logically. We make the decision emotionally and then we think, I really, really want this thing. And then after that we try and find logical reasons why we shouldn't spend the money.


And if you have all of the details about why your product is so great on the listing after they've got emotional and, they're like, oh I want this, then they'll justify their emotions that they feel to wanting to press the buy button with all the detail. That's how that's how sales works.


Make sure there's a call to action on your description as well. The way I like to do this is.. add this amazing product, whatever it is, add this water bottle to your car, and instantly make your workouts better! Or, make your workouts much more fun by adding this water ball to your cart today! So we are associating a benefit with adding the product to cart.


Again, making it more emotional, letting the customer see how the product will benefit their life. So that's the listing - we want to get the listing perfect. Otherwise, you're throwing money down the drain when you advertise the product 'cause most customers aren't going to get why your product is so good.


When that's sorted, then we just want to pour as much cash as we possibly can into your product to get it to page one. Okay? That is it. So we don't want to make a profit. We're not looking to make a profit in the beginning we're just looking to get your product ranked. Okay? So that's when, when you've got your listing perfect, you can throw a ton of money into pay-per-click advertising, ignore the ACoS, just get it ranked, okay?


Obviously you can improve the ACoS and you can take out negative keywords and you can test different campaigns. But we're not trying to make a profit right now. We're just trying to get the product lifted up the search results. Okay? Then once you've done this, you can also throw in some promotions into the mix. You can use Amazon's own promotions service. Or you can use a service like AMZ Tracker where you just give products away for free to their vibe point audience, a bunch of people who just want cheap stuff.


They will email that audience and say, hey, here's a coupon code for this. And they'll go get it for free. And what this does is this, this actually helps your product get even more ranked. The more sales that happen on your listing, the higher up the search results Amazon will place your product. Because to them it seems like, wow, we've really got a product here that people want.


So do everything you can. Spend a lot of money on pay-per-click, give away some of your products as promotions, and get your product to page one. When it's on page one, now you're in the promise land and you start to see sales that don't cost you any money. Sales that come from organic search results. So if you're selling a water bottle, someone types in water bottle, your product comes up on page one, they'll search, they'll click, they'll buy.


It won't cost you any marketing money. So what you can do then is see how many organic sales you're getting and you might be able to turn off the pay-per-click for some amount of time. This is when you start to get profit, okay? Because you're not spending any money to get sales, you're getting sales for free essentially, and you get to keep all the margin.


So all the loss that you've made getting your product to the page one will start to get recouped. Now with 230, or was it 220 units, in the warehouse, by the time you get to page one, you might not have too many units left. So let's say you have, I don't know, a hundred units left or something. You might just make a little bit of money with this stock. You might break even or you might make quite a bit of profit, but then you've got to think about restocking and getting some more units sent into the warehouse.


Now every niche is different and it depends on the product. It depends on how competitive niches and things like that, which is why we want to test a bit smaller first. However, you should be able to get rid of all your stock. If you've made 19 sales in a month, then it's very, very promising.


So try these steps, Lorna. What I would love for you to do is take action on this and then post in the group and let us know how you get on. Hopefully we can report with some good news and do an update so people can see the effect this had on your business.


So hope today's video was enlightening for you. Hope you got some useful takeaways from today's session and got a little bit clearer on how to get stuff to sell, which, like I said, is the second biggest roadblock for Amazon sellers.


It has been fun outlining all this stuff. So if you've watched this video outside of my Facebook group, the reason Lorna got this video made for her is 'cause she asked a question in the group. So if you want to join, click the link above or below the video. You can ask questions in there and I'm answering them on daily videos so you can get help and advice about your business.


So thanks so much for watching this video, and I'll catch you very soon.


Oliver Denyer About Ollie

Ollie is an ecommerce and lifestyle business enthusiast.

100 Pall Mall
phone: +44 020 3286 0548