RYB 839: Using Facebook Ads To Grow Your Amazon Sales Without Losing Your Shirt with Chris Shaffer

00:01 - How do I maximize people and I just want them to click the ad and go to Amazon. Right. And that is absolutely hands down. The easiest thing to set up. It's also generally speaking a terrible idea way. Hey, Hey, what's up everyone. Welcome to the rock, your brand podcast. I'm your host, Scott. Bowker a serial entrepreneur on a mission to help you.

00:22 - This show is designed to teach you, to inspire you, to motivate you, to take massive action and build a future proof business. So whether you're just starting out or taking your existing business to the next level, this is your home. Now, if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's rock your brand.

00:45 - All right. Welcome to this episode, eight 39. Can't wait to dive into this topic because well, my good friend, Chris Schaffer is going to be diving into a really important topic for anyone that wants to use ads, hate ads, Facebook ads, and drive traffic to your products without losing your shirt. We don't want to lose our shirt, Chris, we need to, we need to figure out how do we do this? A big question. You get asked a lot. Uh, what's up, man? How are you doing? Pretty good. Uh, this is actually my first time, I think, on the rock, your brand podcast, which, uh, first time really? I think so, which is pretty cool. I'm not going to lie. I like it. Um, it might not be, I might be a liar, but it feels like it is. And if not, then I'm the first person to be on the rock, your brand podcast twice.

01:37 - Uh, right. Either way. I'll take it. If it's my first time, I'll take it. If, if it's my second time, I'll take that too. Um, I gotta tell you, man, I'm still going a little stir crazy. Um, as of, as of the time of recording this, you know, I'm finally getting to go outside a little bit, like explore the outside world. I'm not just locked in my apartment anymore, which is great, but it's still kinda, still kinda on the edge. So I'm getting some human interaction with other people, even if it's by a video like you and I are doing right now is not welcome. It's a welcome interruption to that. Um, but I'm doing good. How are you, man? I'm doing, I'm doing really good. Uh, it's actually a little cloudy out today. I wish it was sunny, but uh, there's always sunshine on the inside.

02:18 - You know what I'm saying, Chris, you just gotta bring the sunshine. It's going to bring the sunshine. You know what I mean? So, alright guys, we are going to, we're going to get to business here. Uh, I wanted to get you on. I know that you wrote a great post, uh, on, uh, the brand creators, uh, website and under the blog area. And it's a really well detailed. You also did a presentation for our good friend, Kevin Sanderson on a summit that he recently did all on paid traffic, which we can give Kevin A. Little shout out here, but I know that you presented, I know that you wrote the blog post, but we didn't do a podcast on it. And I'm like, you know what? We got to do a podcast on this because it's an important topic. A lot of people

03:00 - want to know about paid ads and especially those are, are those that are actually trying to sell products through Facebook ads, which is always kind of like a black hole, if you will. Like, it's like, Oh my gosh, like, you know, I think I figured this thing out or where do I start? And when should I do it? How to do it, all of these questions. So where do you want to start really this conversation? And I guess I should probably also say guys, if you do want to see the full detailed blog post, which is very detailed, Chris went through and detailed everything out. You can head over to brand creators.com forward slash eight 39. That is this episode. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you should see it on your screen. If you're listening, it's brand creators.com forward slash eight 39, and you can get all the show notes transcripts, but also you can get this link over to that blog post, which is pretty girthy by the way, a lot of great information.

03:57 - So Chris, where do you want to go with this? So I think the first thing we should probably do Scott is kind of clarify who this is for, right? So this is not like Facebook ads in general. This is Facebook ads to sell products in the context of the Amazon ecosystem. Right? Right. You have your own Shopify store, your own woo commerce websites, uh, Magento, you know, you have your own eCommerce platform. It's a lot easier to run ads and to track all of the data. Amazon really kind of handicaps a lot of the cool things about Facebook ads, because we can't take advantage of the Facebook pixel. So we have to take a different approach than we would if we were driving traffic to our own website. So that's kind of the first thing that I, that I wanted to throw out there. The second thing is, um, I would not suggest that people do this until they've maximized what Amazon already gives us.

04:47 - And the reason that I say that is, again, going back to, we don't get as much data coming through. We can't take advantage of all the cool things that Facebook allows us to do. Um, we're almost always going to get a better bang for our buck by taking advantage of the different types of advertising within Amazon. And there's a really obvious reason for that, that we talked about in the past, right? Yeah. When somebody is on Amazon, they're there to buy something. Yeah. They're not there to look at cat pictures when somebody is on Facebook, they're there to look at cat pictures. So we have to take somebody who's looking at cat pictures and get them to care about our cat litter enough to buy it right. Or our garlic press or our fishing rod. Right. We're taking people from doing one thing we're interrupting their day and then saying, buy our shiny thing, which isn't quite as easy as it is to say, Hey, I know you're looking for cat litter.

05:34 - What about this one? Right? Which is what Amazon allows us to do. So I would take all of that advertising budget before I look at anything like this and maximize what you can do inside of the Amazon ecosystem. Now, if you just can't make Amazon's pay-per-click platform work for you, then maybe you take a look at something like this, or you've gotten to the point where that we call the point of no return, right? People always ask us, how much should I spend? And the answer is you spend until stops working, right? So you keep ramping that budget up until you don't get the same return on investment, or until you can just spend more money and not make more sales. Right. So if you've kind of reached that point with your Amazon paper click where you're adding more money and it's not being spent, or you're adding more money and it's not leading to more sales, then you can take a look at some of the external traffic.

06:15 - And I know there's a bunch of people screaming in their cars and their showers wherever they're listening to this right now saying, but it doesn't Amazon prefer external traffic. The answer is not really right. And the reason for that is because yes, you are driving traffic from an external resource, which Amazon likes, but it's also tending to convert at a much lower rate. So the traffic that you're driving can actually hurt you if you're not optimized in those other places. So I wanted to kind of set that foundation, right? We all know based on the conversations you and I have had in the past that conversion rate while it's not a direct ranking factor in Amazon, based on the stuff that you and I have looked at, it does play a role in how well you rank organically. So if we drive a whole bunch of traffic to that, and we're not optimized, we're actually going to lower our conversion rate, which means we might hurt our sales, not help ourselves. So make sure we've optimized everything. And then we can start to take a look at some of the external things like driving Facebook ads. Does that make sense so far? Yeah. It's so far. We're good.

07:10 - I'm glad that you set the stage there because yes. We want to try to leverage the internal marketing that Amazon is giving us. But, and I'm going to throw this out there, Chris, because I don't know what your take is on this. I think I know, but, and I've heard this right just from others. And it makes sense is that when you are advertising on Amazon and using all of their tools, your con, your competition basically is using the same set of tools, the same strategy, the same, whatever. And basically then you're on the same playing field. But when you start to add that external side and you become a master or a Ninja at that, and you can make that work, that would give you a leg up on your competition and drive more sales, which would then give you better rankings, better reviews, like all of that stuff. What's your thoughts on that?

08:06 - It's definitely an additive thing, right? So what, I don't think we actually disagree at all in the statement that you just made, but we have to make sure we have the foundation, right? I don't want to add something that no one else is doing, right. External traffic, if I haven't already taken advantage of all of the things that everyone else is already doing, right? Because that is the most qualified traffic, the most, the most qualified traffic in general, for somebody to buy your product already exists on Amazon. Right? So I want to make sure that I'm maximizing that first, before I pay for traffic, other places and the keyword there's got his pay, right? If I have an email list, there's no reason for me to not send an email to my list and tell them to go buy my thing on Amazon. It costs me $0 million, right.

08:49 - But before I start paying for traffic, other places, I want to make sure that I've maximized what Amazon gives me. So when I met at the very least on an even playing field from a conversion rate and potential sales standpoint as my competition, does that make sense? So, yep. Because if they're driving, even if they're not driving as many visits and you and I have talked in the past, based on some of the conversations we had with the Amazon pay-per-click team to wish years ago, at this point, I'm like the first thing that Amazon looks at in terms of a ranking factor is traffic. Right? If you don't have any traffic, you're at the bottom of the barrel, the second you get one visit you're ahead of, and I think the number of the time was like 200,000 listings, right on Amazon never had a single visit.

09:31 - Right. So you're automatically ahead of those 200,000 people, once you get one visit, but we need to make sure that we're taking advantage of as much of that highly qualified traffic as possible before we start paying to drive arguably less qualified traffic to Amazon. Right, right, right. Yeah. And you know, it is a harder game when you're externally driving traffic. Because again, usually on Facebook, you're not there looking to buy something. Although we have all seen something that, you know, got us interested or, you know, started us down that road, but it doesn't mean that we're ready to buy. And that's why we always say like, when you are driving traffic, it is best to either collect that email address and then sell something on the back or at least pixel them. So that way they're, you can do some retargeting and stuff. So, and I know that we're going to get into that, that stuff just ruined you just ruined the back half of the podcast where you're going to lead up to that guy.

10:28 - That's it, that's the scrap. I mean, you know, just make sure we're capturing the traffic. Right. Um, and to kind of dive into that, right. There's two, there's two ways that we can actually drive people from Facebook to Amazon, right. There is the easy way. And this is the way that I constantly see posts in the group. It's constantly, the question that I get asked is like, how do I maximize people? And I just want them to click the ad and go to Amazon. Right. And that is absolutely hands down. The easiest thing to set up. It's also generally speaking a terrible idea for a couple of reasons. One we're taking people who are looking at cat photos and driving them immediately to something that they have to hand over money for, which means they're not going to convert at the higher rate, they're going to convert at a much lower rate, which potentially is going to drag down our conversion rate and our organic ranking and all of that stuff.

11:15 - Right. But the biggest downside to that, Scott, let's just say they convert at exactly the same rate as Amazon customers. Right. Which is insane. They're there. They're not going to, I will tell you that I've heard at 20, 30%. Right. But even if they did, right. What about the other 70% of people? I now have zero chances to ever talk to those people ever again, unless I have to, unless I pay for it. Right. And I potentially may never see those people ever again. So we're talking about abandoned carts, right? So people who click on it and they're like, Oh crap. My cat just walked across my keyboard. My kid just built Cheerios all over the floor. I'll come back later and buy. Right. We don't have any way of getting in front of those people again, unless they happen to see the ad that they've already clicked on through the magic of Facebook.

12:01 - Right. Which isn't super likely, right. Maybe they see it twice in the entire time that it's there. Um, but when we drive traffic straight to Amazon, we lose that capability. Now that only really applies both of those downsides only really apply. Uh, well, I guess, sorry, there's a third one. The third downside is we have no idea the sales we're getting where they're coming from. Right. So while we can look at correlation, if we're driving straight to, and the caveat I'll place on this is directly to the product listing, right. We can't contact those people again. If they didn't buy, we're potentially lowering the conversion rate and I can drive all of the traffic in the world that I want. And I have no idea what my cost per sale is. I have no idea how many of those people actually converted. We can look at it from a correlation standpoint and say, yes.

12:53 - Um, I spent a hundred dollars on Facebook ads and I got 10 extra sales today. So that means my cost per sale is $10. Right. Maybe right. Because maybe if I turn those off, maybe those sales actually came organically from Amazon. I don't have any way of knowing. Um, the, the step up from that would be, if you have access to the Amazon storefront feature, Amazon does actually allow you to create what's called a UTM variable in your URL. It's basically a tracking URL and there's a, there's a walkthrough on how to do this inside of the blog post. That's linked up in the show notes over@briancreators.com forward slash eight 39. But did that, Chris, I just added that to the bottom on video. You guys can see that now, if you're not, you can, but that's fine. We're getting too fancy. Um, so if you have access to F storefront, you can create specific URLs and drive people to your storefront.

13:43 - That does two of those three things and for you, right. Which means I can now track how many people actually bought via Facebook ads by looking at the storefront reporting. And because I'm driving to a storefront and not to the product listing, it doesn't have a negative effect on my conversion rate, potentially. It also wouldn't have the uplift effect of a better conversion rate if that were to happen highly unlikely. But I wanted to throw that out there, right? So if you're going to drive traffic straight to Amazon from Facebook, make sure you're taking advantage of the storefront feature so that you can actually track conversion rate and work backwards. You're still not going to see all those numbers inside of Facebook ads like you would, if you were driving sales to your own website, but you can at least pull up Facebook and pull up storefront and say, okay, I got eight sales linked to the Facebook link.

14:28 - I know for a fact that those people came from Facebook because the only way they could go to that link were would be, if they clicked on the ad, I spent 80 bucks. That means my cost per sale is $10. Right? We can then at least close that gap. Again. We can't reach the people who didn't convert and we can't ever talk to those people again. So if you're, if you're the opinion that that's what you want to do, please do the storefront model. My suggestion to you would be to not do either of those two things and do what Scott just blew the blew the lid off of a few minutes ago, create your own landing page, right? And you can use any software to do this. You could use something if you're using convert kit, um, they have a great landing pages feature.

15:13 - Now that allows you to do this. If you have giveaway boost and you want to do a giveaway for like a promotional code, you can do that. And that's, that's built in directly. So you could run a Facebook ad for 10% off of your product and drive them to a giveaway boost page. They give you their name and email. They get the 10% off promo code. We can then track if that was redeemed and we have their email address and we have on Facebook pixel. So if they don't go by, or I just want to make sure to put a different ad in front of them, there, then a targetable audience inside of Facebook, right? Normally, generally speaking, Scott, you and I have always said, make it as easy as possible for people to do the thing that you want them to do. Right? And we're kind of saying the opposite in this case, we're putting a barrier to entry in front of people.

16:01 - And it sounds counterintuitive based on what you and I have talked about in the past, but it's really not. When you start to think about it, we're able, when we create the landing page to take advantage of all of the cool features inside of Facebook ads like conversion optimization, right? Which is really the secret sauce behind most successful Facebook ads, campaigns, by telling Facebook, Hey, I want to optimize for email addresses, right? Facebook then goes out and they say, alright, I'm going to get you as many of these as I possibly can, based on the audience that you've told me to look at, right? We can't do that. If we're driving even directly to an Amazon storefront, much less. If we're driving to the Amazon listing, because there's no Facebook pixel on there to say, Hey, Facebook, this person did what we wanted them to do.

16:44 - The other side of that is we then have email addresses, which we can use forever. So even if our cost per sale is a little bit higher, which it generally hasn't been in all of the testing that I've done, it's been about the same. We now have more assets for that little bit more money, even if it was 50% higher spot, right? So instead of $10 per sale, we're paying 15. I then have the potential to talk to that person again for free forever via their email address. And so go ahead. I was just going to say though, and you're the way that you're, you're, I'm explaining this as perfect, but I also just wanted to kind of cut in there because if you're listening to this right now and Chris, I want to know your thoughts on it. I know what your thoughts are probably, but I'm kind of setting it up for this. Um, you know, that's kinda how I roll. Uh, but you know, if you're, if you're thinking to yourself that you want to sell your $25 widget and you don't have other things to sell them, you need to be very, very aware of that because Chris

17:50 - paid ads, they're a beast, right, right. In order to make them work, you are, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, you're generally going to lose money or hopefully break even to get data. And then it's a lot of finessing and a lot of playing to get it to where it's profitable. And when it is profitable, you're really, sometimes you're waiting before you make your next sale in order for it to be profitable. That's why you always hear them say on shark tank or even the profit, like, what is your cost per customer acquisition? What's your cost to acquire a customer. They want to know that because if you're going to spend $25 to acquire that customer, that's fine. And you, you had the product, you got to pay for the product you got to pay for, you know, the fees and all that stuff. So you technically made it last 1250. But if you know that you have maybe a refill or you have additional products that would lend themselves to that, then that's fine, but paid traffic a whole nother animal. If you're just trying to sell your $25 widget. So can we just speak to that real quick?

18:50 - Yeah. And that, that's kind of the thing that's interesting because there's, there's some different methodology that I would suggest for people based on what they have. Right? If you have a refillable product, you have a reorder product. This whole process makes a lot more sense, right? Because if I'm break, even I don't care, right? Let's say we're paying $10 to acquire that customer right after our cost of goods and all of that stuff. It's probably the full 25 bucks. We're probably not making any money on that transaction, which if we're selling in the Amazon ecosystem, you and I have talked about this before. There's arguable benefits to that. Regardless one I'm breaking, I'm not losing my shirt, right. So I don't really care. And extra sales helps boost organic rank. Not to mention, even if that wasn't the case, it means I can order more the next time, which is going to bring down my cost of goods.

19:39 - You know? So there's a lot of those things that can factor into that. But if you have a real horrible product, this makes a lot more sense or you have two or three products, it makes even more sense because you can then email them about the other things or put an ad in front of them and say, if you bought this, you probably like this, that type of an ad by the way, works really well for eCommerce businesses. Um, there's a reason that Amazon sends you emails with stuff that you might like based on the things that you've bought in the past. Like they do that for a very specific reason. It works really well. But if you have a rewardable product, even if I lose money on the initial transaction, I'm okay with that. Because then the next time they buy from me, they're not going to buy via an ad. Most likely they're going to buy via the email, or they're just going to reorder based on the website that's on the bottle or whatever. And that then is a zero cost second sale or third sale or fourth or fifth. Right.

20:26 - So let's, let's pretend here for a minute that there's someone listening right now and they have a $25 product and that's all that they have. And right now that is, and they are like, you know what? I just want to get more sales on Amazon right now. Like I just want to get more sales. Um, I started to do some paper, but

20:48 - I'm really kind of just winging it. I'm not really sure if you know, where are you guiding them? What is the, what is the thing for them to do? So based on that scenario, I would say, you need to figure out Amazon pay-per-click right before you figure out any of this stuff. And the reason that I'm saying that is, cause you said, you know, I'm kind of dabbling in it. I forget the exact verbiage that you just used, but you were like, eh, I haven't really figured that out yet that we need to figure out first. And if for some reason that's not going to work for us, which is possible, it's unlikely to not work at any level, but it is possible. Or it's just not something that's available in your category for some reason. Um, then take a look at this, but we need to figure that out.

21:32 - First one, there's generally going to be a lower taco, right? Total, total advertising cost of sale to reference our friend ed from seller labs. Um, and it's a much easier conversion because there's already somebody there looking for something to buy, right? The best part of that is there's a lot fewer moving parts, right? With Amazon. Pay-per-click we say, I want to advertise this one and I'm willing to spend this much money. And then you can either manually type in some keywords or you can use auto target, right? Like there's, you don't get control over the ad to most, you know, in most of the advertising on Amazon, you don't really have to pick a bunch of targeting and like, try to figure that out. You have, what product do you want to advertise? When do you want it to show up? And how much are you willing to spend to make that happen?

22:19 - Right. That's a lot less complex than the Facebook or the ad words ecosystem. So if you can master that, then I would say, maybe start to work on some of the other stuff. If you've already mastered that, or it's not available to you for whatever reason, then, then start looking at some of the other stuff. Yeah. I also want to just throw this out there, you know, if you got into, uh, this, uh, I guess I'm speaking to people that may be listening that got into selling on Amazon, uh, exclusively, because you wanted to build a business, selling physical products. If you, if you did not, I guess if you didn't say to yourself, or if you weren't told that part of this game is getting sales and, and basically getting sales means that learning not just how to throw a product up. Uh, and, uh, and then from there sell it, right?

23:14 - Like you, you have to basically, uh, you know, you basically have to figure out how to market it. You know, you got marketing, I'm telling you right now guys, like, that's the skill set that you want to learn, right? You want to learn the marketing side of things, uh, because I don't care what you have, what type of business you have. If you can't get eyeballs on it or you start to get eyeballs, and then there's a whole bunch of competition and they're starting to get the eyeballs. You gotta figure out that way. That's why we talk a lot about building an email list. We talk a lot about creating, we talk all

23:46 - about that stuff, because if you can master that and not even master it, if you can get good at it, right. Or at least better than your competition you're going to do. Okay. Right. But I just wanted to throw that out there, Chris, because a lot of people, um, when they get started in this thing, they're just always thinking about, and I hear it all the time. I want to get my product. Right. But the product needs to get eyeballs. It needs to get attention. It needs to get traffic. So a paid is great because it's fast. Right. We can get, we can get traffic there. I mean, we can turn on paper, click a campaign. And man, within an hour, we can start seeing some impressions. Right? We can, we can do that. Facebook ads. We can start that once it gets approved, boom.

24:26 - We start to get the look at the data. You know, content creation takes a little bit longer. It's good, but it takes a little bit longer. Um, so I just wanted to throw that out there. Cause I think it's really important for people to understand. It's why we always preach on this whole, like getting attention in your market. And this is just one side of it. So today's conversation is about Facebook ads because there is some of you out there that are wondering how do I do this effectively? And should I do this because I'm struggling. I want to get more sales, but I don't want to spend a ton of money and try, you know, trying to get sales and then losing my shirt as the title says in this episode,

24:59 - which honestly is really easy to do because you can drive a lot of traffic very fast and you're like, yeah, it's working. And then you look back and you're like, I just spent five grand and I don't know anything that happened. Um, and I think, I think the other place you were going with that example, Scott of somebody that only has the one product that isn't really reliable is okay, is there a way that they could do this? So my first suggestion to them would be focused on Amazon for now maximize the traffic. You're getting out of that. And then look at something like this. Um, I still would suggest going with the landing page route over driving traffic straight to Amazon. And there's a very specific reason for that. And it's extremely important for the people who only have one product, right? Once we've gotten that attention, we've secured that attention.

25:44 - I can then ask them what they want to see next. Right? Which is really, really important for new products that are coming out. I can drive them to affiliate offers like you and I have talked about it in the past. Now, if we're building our business around a product and not a market, this is harder to do, but if we've done it the right way, the way that we talk about here on the rock, your brand podcast, and it brand creators.com, we're building it around the market so we can go out and we can say, okay, what are some other things? These people might be interested in? They bought my headphones now, what are they interested in? Right. What are some other things that people who buy my headphones might be interested? What is the market that I'm serving? Right. They bought my fishing pole.

26:20 - Maybe they, maybe they want to kayak. So I can go to Academy sports and outdoors, which I think is the example we use the last time that you and I were on, uh, to their affiliate programs, sign up, be it become an affiliate for them and start talking to them about the importance of buying a right kayak. And then I can make some money back that way as well. I don't have to have a second or third product. I just have to have another place to direct those eyeballs. Right. And so that's, that's kind of the key to making this work over the longterm. It's fairly easy to look at something and say, a lot of people are clicking on it, but how do we make it work over the long term? Right. And you, you led to something a couple of minutes ago where you said, you know, most people aren't looking to make money on their first sale.

27:01 - Um, I think everybody is trying to do that. It's just really hard to do so it's how do we recoup our investment over time? And if we can break even on the first sale, that's fantastic. Right? Cause then everything else is gravy. If not, how do we get it close enough so that we're not waiting six months or a year or two years to recoup that money and start to make those people profitable. Um, but you still can do this. Even if you don't have a reorder bubble product, you just have to think a little further down the line about the other things that those people are going to need, the things that will actually benefit them. And that comes into you. And I have talked about pace in the past that comes under the cultivation portion of that, of that, right? We've we've gotten the intention.

27:37 - Now we need to cultivate the relationship with them and maximize benefit for them by giving them the things that they need. And for us by, you know, being the middleman and taking, taking a little bit of money out of that transaction of value. Right. Well, you know, and I think it also goes really well with like, if you are going to drive Facebook ads, let's say right, you're driving the Facebook ads. And it's funny. Cause I had the same question actually on one of the morning coffee talks was like on Pinterest. Like how do I take Pinterest, not paid, but how do I take Pinterest and drive them to a product? It kind of goes the same route for us. Like we want to drive them to a place that we can either capture the email or pixel like that is like so important. I don't care if it's driving Facebook ads or Facebook, traffic or Instagram or whatever.

28:26 - We want to drive them to a piece of property that we can control. Like that is it. So if you're driving traffic to sell a product on Amazon, you better put something there that they can land on. Giveaway boost is a, is a perfect example, even though it's our plugin. Yes, we love it. Yes. It's one we created, but it gives exactly the formula. It's like you have a page that you're able to control with the offer, the offers a 30% off coupon in order to get it, put your name and email address. It makes sense. Right. I got to get my email so I can go ahead and get the coupon. Everyone's kind of conditioned for that. Boom. They go on to the next page. It's a thank you page. Thank you. Here's your code? Boom done. Now they can go. Right? That seems so simple.

29:07 - Now we can retarget them. Uh, we can build a, you know, an invisible list. If you will, on the back end of that, through, through like a custom audience, we can also build our email list. We can communicate. The other thing is we can direct them over to our blog posts that we wrote a week ago on the five tips to catch more bass and we're selling fishing lures and they just happened to be in that post too. So all of that stuff goes well with this whole process. So Chris, I know your post goes through a lot of these different scenarios and even some of the setup and stuff like that. Is there, is there something we should talk about now about like even just the actual below, I guess from Facebook ad? Cause there's a lot of components there, right? Like it's like targeting and then it's like the, the ad copy and then it's the image or the video or whatever we create.

29:56 - Is there anything you want it to kind of walk people through Ray here? Um, so we can kind of demonstrate a little bit more. Yeah. So I guess the first thing, and it's, it's really a three step process, right? So it's picking how we want to run the ads. We can either run traffic direct to Amazon, which I kind of pooped all over a couple minutes ago or we can drive it to our own landing page. Right. So we have to pick our target first. Then we have to set up who we want to see the ad, right. And then we have to create the ad itself. So if we're going direct to Amazon, that first stage is kind of taken care of. We're just getting the link to the page. If we're driving it to our own page, we have kind of a, like a one B if you will, where we have to figure out what we want that offer to be yup.

30:42 - To put in front of the audience before we actually go through some of the ad set up. So that's really the only difference in the setup between the two. And then obviously in that one beat, we have to create a landing page, right. So we have to pick the offer and then maybe one, see if you want to call it a slightly different step would be to actually create the landing page with the offer on it before we start to build our audience and, and build the ad. Does that make sense? Yep. Yep. It makes total sense. And the other thing I want to throw out there, here's another thing that we've tried and we still do it, uh, uh, quite often to be honest with you is where you will maybe lead the Facebook ad, not with your product, but with something that lends itself to that product that is informational.

31:26 - So it could be a free checklist, a free download, a free PDF, a free guide, whatever. And I'm a backend of that. Okay. You on your thank you page, you would have a discount to your product and then you're actually giving someone something of value before you ever ask for a sale. And then on the next page, it would just say, thanks so much for grabbing the five tips to catch more bass guide. And uh, if you're interested, we're going to give a 20% off to anyone that downloads the guide in guess what you get that offer as well. Here it is. And then you have a chance for them to buy it. Now they might not buy it. And that's okay because now guess what, they're on your email list. You gave them something of value and now you can communicate through them with that.

32:08 - Or you can follow up with a Facebook ad maybe two days later with that offer now, but you've already gotten them to raise their hand. What do you want to elaborate on that a little bit, Chris? Yeah. And so that's, that's kind of that step one be right. Of what did we want to offer? And everybody immediately jumps to, I want to do a coupon. That's okay. It's a little on the nose, right. It's okay. And to me, which offer is going to work better here is going to depend a lot on step two, which is the targeting, right? So let's, let's kind of dive into that for a second. Um, if, if you are able to target existing customers, right. Which you can do, and I give you a guide on how to do that on the blog post, um, you can download your customer list basically from Amazon and there is kind of a roundabout way to target them with Facebook ads.

32:51 - You can target them or a look alike audience of them, then doing something like a coupon and being on the nose is kind of okay. Right. Because you know that they look a lot like the people who are already buying from you or they are the people who are already buying from you. So if you have, you know, let's say you're selling vitamin C and you're like, Hey, it's been 28 days since you bought your vitamin C on Amazon click here to get 20% off your next order. Right. That's okay. But the further out that we get from that, right? If we're not using either our existing customers or a look alike of our existing customers, and I would argue that there's some gray area there in terms of what's gonna work better for those people. Because if they don't know who you are, then even if they look a lot like it, right, it's got, you can know all about the benefits of taking vitamin C.

33:32 - You can subscribe to a bunch of different doctors who talk about all about vitamin C, but you know, nothing about my brand to be putting 30% off in front of you might not be the thing that gets you to tip the fence, but it's at least worth a try. Right? Cause it's kind of the easiest one to set up and it directly relates to sales, which is kind of what everybody wants to see anyway. Um, if we get outside of those two audiences and we go into a more broad targeting, meaning we're targeting based off of what people like on Facebook or their activities, right? We're not, we don't have a direct tie back to the customer. Then it makes a lot more sense to use the informational angle or even like the giveaway. Like we've talked about it in the past, right? Where they're signing up to get a giveaway and then we'll give them the promotion, the promotional code on the back end of that, right.

34:15 - We're giving them something of value, a chance to win a giant package or information. And then we're going to make the sale on the backend. Once we've started to build that relationship. Once we started to cultivate that relationship with the customer. So for me, which, which works best, the answer always is tested, right. But if we are directly tied back to our customers, it's easier for us to make that leap because they know who we are. The further away we get from somebody who's actually bought from us. The more likely it is that we're going to want to use the informational angle or the I'll just call it the value angle, right. Because it's information giveaway, something like that, um, that doesn't require them to put up money immediately. Now it does lead to a longer time to sale, but we're going to get a much lower cost per lead, which gives us more opportunity for the same ad dollar to sell our products.

35:03 - Yeah, no, I think again, kind of going back to what we had said in the beginning, you know, if you don't have a business yet that has multiple revenue streams in the, or multiple chances to make sales, uh, it's going to be hard to make ads work in my opinion. Uh, and so that's why let's say you're listening to this and you're like, well, I don't have those additional products. Well then my advice would be like, okay, I'm not saying you got to go out there and get three more products. What you do need to do. Number one, you can offer of more than one

35:38 - of what you offer maybe, right? So maybe you have one product, but you're like, Hey, buy two, get one free. Like you could do something like that. You can always maybe add a second or a third as like an additional sale to kind of bring that cost or that sale up. So it makes sense. So you can make a little bit more to make it, uh, make it work. Um, but there's other ways if you go down the road, if you have not gone down the road yet, which we've been talking about as far as building out your content, building out your website, getting traffic, maybe using an ad network like media vine Zohak ad thrive. One of those or turning on some affiliate offers. Those are going to allow you to go from where you might be able to make it work to real.

36:18 - You're really get to make it work. Right. And you don't have to have all of these other products in place in order to make it work. You've just got to have more opportunities and more ways to monetize the traffic, not just off of the one product or the one sale. So I just want to really just highlight that because that is the reason why we've been preaching about this for so long, because so many people, they have that one product or they have two products and they're just wondering, how am I going to build this thing? And it's so hard because you're, you're strapped you, you can't, you can't do anything else other than try to make money through those two products. Right. It's going to be harder. You got to have more ways

36:56 - to make money. And I think, I think the thing, um, Scott and you, and I have kind of hinted at this, but I wanted to, I wanted to try to crystallize this for everybody. If I can, is Amazon really has spoiled us right. In the fact that it's so easy, it still is in 2020. It is 2020, right? Yeah. 2020, uh, we're halfway through it. Who knew, um, I know to put our product on Amazon and to start to make money that we assume that everything else is like that. Right? And so one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make all the time is they're like, Facebook must be like that. Right? Everybody says, every marketer says, Facebook is where you should be running ads. Just like every body in eCommerce says, Amazon is where you should be selling products. Right. If you're not on Amazon, you're crazy.

37:37 - If you're not running Facebook ads, you're crazy. Except for the fact that it doesn't really work the same way. Right? Yes. Facebook gives you a lot of really cool features. They give you a lot of really cool things that you can take advantage of, but it's not easy to, to turn that back into dollars. And that's kind of what you and I have been talking about. We we've gotten spoiled by Amazon, by the, the Amazon slot machine, right. Of opening the seller central app on our phone and going money, money that everything else kind of in the business world seems like it should work like that. That is an aberration. There's a good word for you. That's an anomaly, right? That's not how business generally works. It's actually generally the exact opposite of that. So we need to plan for the worst and work towards the best versus planning for the best.

38:20 - And then watching as our shirt disappears, um, by playing Facebook ads, roulette and going a hundred dollars cost per sale, uh, I'll just let it run a little bit longer and see what happens. $200 customers say, okay, that's not working. You get the opposite, right? You get to watch money, go out time. You refresh versus money coming in. Every time you refresh. So the biggest, the biggest lesson here is at least for me maximize what we can do on the Amazon side of stuff. And then start to worry about this other stuff. We need to have a real business over the longterm to make Facebook ads work. It's not just something that we can turn on and expect to be a shot in the arm, to our Amazon sales. We need to have the other stuff in place. And it doesn't take a ton of time and effort to do that.

39:03 - You don't have to be creating content to build an email list. I would suggest you are, but you don't have to. Right. Even if you just created that email list, Scott, based on using the second method, right. Driving them to a landing page, giving them something of value, right. Whether it's a giveaway or you're giving them a guide, right. We can then just use other people's content to keep that list warm and start to build that relationship. Sure. Yeah. I would suggest creating your own stuff because it's going to lead to organic traffic over time, which means we're getting people for free, which makes our cost per sale even lower. But that's, that's neither here nor there.

39:34 - Oh, sorry. Side note, side note. Hold on. Let me just throw that in there. Side note, uh, we have a brand that we're building a brand creatives Academy and depending on when you're listening to this, well, we're probably gonna hit 30,000 people or I'm sorry, page views, which I think is going to be like 22,000 people that have visited that site on free traffic by the way, this month. Yeah. This month. I don't know about you, Chris, but I like having a, you know, 25 ish thousand people coming to a website for free. That's pretty nice. I like, I like the phrase 25 ish. Um, I'd have to look at the organic numbers, the new user number, but I look at page views cause you get paid by page views and we're going to hit over 30,000 and I believe 4,000 of those are from Pinterest, which we're kind of loving these days. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there cause right.

40:20 - But that's like, so think about that. Right. And what it really comes down to is we need to be doing real business stuff and you and I have been preaching this for years now. Right. We have to, we have to build out a business. We can't just be selling a product, especially in 2020. Um, especially if we want to do something like Facebook ads, we need to have the other business stuff in place so that we can actually make that as a channel work for us. Right. We have to work to work. And it's just one of those things where if we have an additional 30,000 people that we can put the same offer in front of there's the potential that yes, I'm still breaking even on the paid side. And the organic side is just making that work for me. And that's okay because I'm bringing in new blood.

40:58 - Right. So next month instead of 30,000, the 5,000 people that I paid for are now part of that organic. Right? So it makes it a lot easier to scale things like this. And that's kind of the other issue that people run into, especially with Facebook ads. Scott is that you can drive as much traffic. Do you want as Amazon, as long as you're willing to pay for it, but how do you then scale that in a profitable way? And the only way to scale it any profitable way is either to have a bunch of other stuff to put in front of them or to get them to a place where they're paying you back. Right? Whether it's through ad impressions, your website because you're sending them content or because they're buying other

41:36 - products from you. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And it's a good time for me to do a little shameless plug for the playbook. So I don't care right now, if you are, uh, saying to yourself, I just want to learn paid ads. And I just want to sell my products on Amazon. If you are, I'm going to encourage you to consider building out a site that has content that drives traffic organically over time. And you can do that by going through the playbook, which is a very in depth. Uh, and in that process, you will learn how to really identify your market. Even if you think, you know your market, you're gonna identify it actually, as far as the traffic side, you know, an audience attention side and then also monetization, uh, you know, different opportunities that you might not even be considering. So I would definitely recommend grabbing a copy of that heading over to brand creators, book.com. If you're on YouTube, you'll be able to see that link. If you're listening, it's brand creators, book.com, it'll cost you a whole $4 and 99 cents. And it will buy me a cup of coffee and Chris can have some water cheap. I mean, Bulletproof isn't cheap, I mean $4 and 99 cents. Right? I mean, I gotta have, I gotta put the butter in the coffee, Chris.

42:53 - I mean, well, that's the thing nobody's going to Starbucks right now in the U S right. Cause they're all in a quarantine. So just the money that you would, that you would spend on that today, if you haven't gone through the process, it's well more than worth it. And that's one of the reasons Scott that you and I talked about at the end of last year, we want to put out a lot more written content, right? Because in that format, it allows you to follow through step by step, which is the reason we put the book together, right? Like all of the information that's in the book is on the podcast, but it's not organized in the same way. And so if you're one of those people who learns better by being able to follow a step by step process, it's well more than worth the $4 and 99 cents to get the brand creators book. And yes, that is a shameless plug. But if, if it's something you're interested in, if it's something you're not doing, that's why that resource is there for you,

43:34 - right? Yep. Yep. No, and it's, it's what we give all of our, our Academy members inside of brand creators Academy. So it's, it's our playbook. It's literally our playbook, what we follow, what we go by. Uh, and, uh, you know, I definitely recommended if you are not there, if you're just starting and you're listening to this, uh, definitely like this is the, your foundation. Like to me, this is the foundation. It's the, it's the process that we have followed now in, well, you could count the, the so-called new brand, which is about three years old, but that one, there was kind of done by accident in some areas, but now we've kind of made it our system and our process. So it's something that we follow to a T and it's exactly what we teach. So definitely check it out if you haven't yet. Uh, I think it will do, uh, do very well as far as, uh, you know, giving you the right information. So Chris, how do we want to wrap this up? What do you want to give people to leave with, from driving Facebook ads to sell more products on Amazon, without losing their shirt? Number

44:31 - one, if this is something you're interested in, make sure to go to the show notes, it's brand creators.com forward slash eat three nine. Um, and that will have a link over to the blog post. You can also just go to [inaudible] dot com click on the blog section. Um, if you're listening to this as of the time that we're recording it, it'll be close to the top. It'll be one of the more recent articles. Um, and it's titled exactly the same way as the podcast. It's how to, how to run Facebook ads to Amazon without losing your shirt, something like that. Um, once you've done that and you start to understand the process, really, if this is something that you're trying to do, it is as simple as the three step process. I laid out a few minutes ago. We need to pick where we want to drive the ad, right?

45:07 - Whether that's directly to Amazon, probably not, uh, we're using Facebook. Um, if that's what you want to do, go for it, make sure, please, please, please promise me, promise God promised your family, promise your dogs, that you're going to use the storefront link. So you can at least have some idea what your actual cost per sale is. So we have some idea if the ads are working or not, or you can go to the landing page route. If we do that, then we just have to figure out what the best offer is to put in front of people. Is that a discount or is that some sort of information? And again, remember that comes back to discount is probably better if it's direct to somebody we know as a customer or it's a lookalike of those people, um, which I show you how to create both of those as targetable audiences inside of Facebook, assuming you already have sales on Amazon.

45:49 - If you don't, don't even look at this process yet, right? Step two then is picking that target. Who are we going to actually advertise to, are going to advertise to our existing customers look alike or an interest, right? So if we're selling kayaks, maybe it's kayak, right. Or fishing or something like that, right. That would be an example of an interest. And then we actually have to just go create the ad. And the ad is three simple pieces. It's a piece of media, whether that's a photo or a video, a little bit of copy, right? And this is kind of where a lot of people get caught up, which is you don't have to write paragraphs. You don't have to be the world's best copywriter. In fact, a lot of times, worst copy, right? Or typoed copy performance better than the best thing, because it's raw.

46:28 - It's real, it's honest. Um, and then the third thing you would need is the link either to your landing page or to your, I'm not even going to say your product detail page to your Amazon storefront listing. Right. Um, and if you have those three things, you can do this process, but if you're not maximizing what you're doing on Amazon or you're new, and Scott, you just mentioned this a minute ago, you're new. Don't even listen to any of this podcast, go to brain craters, book.com, get that, um, and, and start there. If you're not maximizing what you're doing on Amazon shelf, this episode for now shelf, the blog post for now maximize your pay-per-click inside of the Amazon ecosystem, maximize your conversion rate and then start to worry about this kind of stuff. Yeah, no, I love it. Well, this was great. And that's why I wanted to kind of bring this to the surface because it's on the blog. And if I don't tell you about it, you might not go to the blog. So go there. Uh, the shownotes brand creators.com forward slash eight 39. And, uh, yes, this is a, I believe this is the first episode that Chris has been on as rock your podcast.

47:30 - And, uh, we should probably do another episode at some time, or at some point, Chris, we should go over the whole rebrand and what that looked like behind the scenes, that'd be a fun episode. So a it's finally all connecting and, uh, everything is starting to flow as normal, but it's a little bit of a process, but, uh, all right, guys, that is going to wrap up this episode. I did want to remind you one more time. Brand creators.com forward slash eight 39, all the show notes, the transcripts, also some updated show notes. We've got some pretty killer shownotes coming, coming your way. Uh, and we have this, uh, this really, this Epic blog post for you, it's more or less like a guide for you to be able to go through this process. So again, go there, check it out, Chris. Thanks a lot, brother.

48:12 - You want to wrap this up with me? We're going to do it officially here together. Let's do it. Let's do it. Alright guys. Remember I'm here for you. I believe in you and I am rooting for you, but you have to, you have to come up. Say it with me. Say it loud. Say it. Proud Chris is going to say it on the count of three, one, two, three. Take take action. Action. That was delayed. All right, guys. Have an awesome day. I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now go get 'em both.