E526: Amazon PPC – Everything You Need To Do for in 2024
Over the past 6 months, I've been diving back into the weeds of the business. So far, one of the biggest “weeds” would be optimizing my PPC spend and overhauling it to be as efficient as possible, without costing me a fortune.
And so, the research started. One of the biggest resources that I've learned from is Nomadz, and their Youtube Channel. To pay it forward, I've asked Lucas Kwiatkowski to come on the podcast and talk about everything you need to do for Amazon PPC in 2024 and beyond.
If you'd like to skip ahead to the juicy parts, here's some video timestamps:
- Introduction – 0:00
- How Nomadz Got Started – 1:40
- Improving Your Account – 3:35
- “How long until you see results from your ad campaigns?” – 6:47
- Best Keyword Quantity – 9:44
- Adjusting for Top of Search in Q4 – 10:05
- How to Use the Peel, Stick and Block Strategy – 16:46
- Dealing with Too Many Keywords – 18:45
- Where to Get Long Tail Keywords – 24:25
- Organic vs. PPC – 26:45
- Video Ads – 29:23
- PPC Training with Nomadz – 31:50
Lucas, thank you again for coming on the podcast to talk about all things PPC. We've definitely given the audience more than enough tips to learn about how to optimize their PPC strategies.
If you're interested in Lucas and Nomadz, check out Nomadz.
As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested.
Don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can.
Until next time, happy selling!
Full Audio Transcript
Mike Jackness (00:01.657)
Hey Lucas, welcome to the EcomCrew podcast.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (00:05.422)
Hey Mike, thanks a lot for having me.
Mike Jackness (00:06.977)
Yeah, it's good having you. We wanted to invite you on, because as a lot of people probably know that I've been listening, I've been doing a ton of stuff with PPC, just kind of revamping everything from the ground up on Amazon. I just felt like it was time to get back into the game.
I had set up these SOPs that our team was following, shoot, back in probably 2016 or 17, and things have changed so much since then. And since getting rid of a bunch of people on our team it was kind of like it was a perfect time was like okay I need to get back in there and go learn everything I can and part of that was just consuming stuff on YouTube I mean I feel like everything can be found on YouTube whether it's Amazon PPC or the other day I was trying to figure out how to fix our garage door because they had an error code and everything everything's over there.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (00:53.518)
Hehehe
Mike Jackness (00:57.433)
But what I found is that most of the YouTube content, quite frankly, is pretty crap. Like you just sit there, you feel like you've wasted your time, and it was getting pretty frustrating. But I found myself going back to your guys' videos over and over again. So I thought this would be a cool way to kind of repay you guys for all the stuff that I was able to consume there. I'll let you mention your YouTube channel and stuff here in just a second. But yeah, thanks for putting out some great content. And…
Yeah, be cool to chat maybe for 30 minutes here about Amazon PPC.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (01:29.134)
Yeah, more than happy to come on, especially this time of year. We know everyone is this time of year, they're educating themselves further. And that's kind of just how we got started. So right, Nomadz, we're a PPC only agency because it's always the biggest pain point for people. We all know that, but…
years ago is we were, we're a manual first agency. We, we certainly use software now, but everyone on the team is all raw data nerds. So we were all the ones diving into spreadsheets back when bulk operations was the only thing.
And from there, we just started to share a lot of our secrets. And if, for those of you who know our YouTube channel, or are going to go, is it's very transparent videos about what's working, what's not working.
Because I think in the Amazon space is we all know it's changing so fast. And it's our full-time job as PPC people and we're still learning stuff constantly. So we were really big into education right now. And we've seen a lot of good feedback from people that are looking to educate their internal teams with PPC.
Mike Jackness (02:41.729)
Yeah, absolutely.
So just so people know what's NOMADZ, so it's Nomadz.com and you can look that up on YouTube as well. The stuff that I found to be, where I was basically, I was like, okay, I'm going to redo everything from the ground up and how should things be structured these days and what ads are important, what ads aren't. And I just thought you guys had some really great stuff about how to structure sponsored product ads and put things into portfolios and just kind of organize things because things can get just really fun.
really unruly very quickly, especially if you have a lot of skews. So maybe you're starting from ground zero. I mean, what are you seeing these days? If someone's got, you know, they're not in a position that I was in where they want to just trash their account and store it from ground zero because I was looking to experiment and have good content and all these other things and probably not recommended. What do you recommend in terms of auditing an account? Like if someone was to go in their account right now and see improvements.
what are like the top three things to go do?
Lucas Kwiatkowski (03:44.078)
Yeah. Yes. We have a saying that my partner, Stefano came up with. It's simple scale, fancy fail. So fancy with all of these new types of ads in Amazon. And you know what we're talking about? Sponsored display, VCPM campaigns, all of the sponsored brands. There's always seems to be a new type of ad that's coming out and they're fancy and they're complicated and all these people are setting these up.
Mike Jackness (03:50.781)
Hmm.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (04:11.086)
Sponsored products is simple, and that's what helps brands scale. So we always say that simple scale, fancy fail, because when we come into an account and everyone right where you can reach out to us, we're doing free audits always too. And our main goal is to see where is your spend going. So we audit an account, always thinking, and the first thing is think of it as a pie chart. And
A lot of times the brands that we see either their tacos is too high, right, and they're not scaling is their sponsored products is not at least 80% of their spend.
So if they have 30% into video, another 10% into sponsored display, that only leaves 60% for sponsored products. And it's still the core or the pillar of Amazon PPC. So first off, we want to make sure that the spend is going into the right place. And then from there…
is we just adopt a very simple keyword strategy. So where we say the end game of all PPC is exact match. And it's crazy to me that a lot of people will be running sponsored products and still be heavily into other types of ads and not focusing on that exact match. And the kicker on that is placement stats.
So if you are running exact match with a lot of you might be doing is when we run audits, we'll say, okay, but only 40% of that is at top of search. So if you're not at top of search for that exact keyword, then you're not getting enough data. You're not getting actionable insights for you to take those steps. And I would say the third thing that maybe it's actually, this is the first thing you should do, but it's the third big thing we look for is organization.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (06:01.646)
And you even, you touched on it, you said if you're redoing all of your PPC and building from the ground up, is our very first step is renaming all your campaigns, getting everything super organized so that when you're going in there, you know what's happening with each portfolio, each parent ASIN. We look at things on a parent ASIN level. So that's always our very first step. And then we can optimize and then think of more outside of the box strategies.
Mike Jackness (06:31.084)
So, you know, someone, you know, again, they're looking at their account, you're mentioning that you want.
sponsored products to be the bulk of everything and that you want to be kind of driving towards an exact match strategy. So the questions that I was struggling with that I think will be fun to talk about here because I went through the same stuff like watching your content and other content. How many keywords should be in each campaign and how much should you be adjusting for top of search if you do want to be a top of search and how long should you give it before it
You know you pull the plug on it because you're not going to necessarily see results overnight and I could keep on asking more questions I don't want to overload you so I'll start there
Lucas Kwiatkowski (07:14.67)
Yeah. Yeah. I think that the look back period is very important because we, so I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with Quartile. Quartile is one of the bigger software. And I think more of the automated software is that their downfall is they will make decisions too quickly, maybe off of, based off of one day of data. Oh, you know, your ACOS spiked for one day. So we're going to, we're going to cut that campaign.
But we always want to have that look back period of one week, two weeks, and run very careful tests. So I think this is what organization goes back to, is if you're just looking at your PPC as a whole, but whoever is running it…
is not organized and they're not telling you, hey, but we're running a super aggressive top of search campaign for this one keyword that's going to be outside our normal boundaries, then we kind of want that on its own. So it's, I think people need to realize that there's always different stages of PPC and you can't just expect that a best seller is going to be running the same as a new product.
Mike Jackness (08:22.745)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm purely thinking about this, for this conversation in terms of season products, obviously like new product launch strategy is a completely different animal.
And yeah, I mean, I'm still struggling with like, okay, how many keywords do I have in the campaign and what kind of modifiers do I make for top of search or what do I, what keywords do I break out for single keyword campaigns as I want to test those separately. But certainly one of the things that you mentioned there, you know, I think is unequivocal. So we can start with the easy one, which is, yeah, don't look at one day's worth of data for crying out loud. You know, variance is a huge thing in Amazon.
off on one day is just absolutely silly. You know I've really been twain with 30-day look back periods just to try to smooth out the curve because you know if you have a keyword that doesn't get
a lot of traffic or clicks, looking at short amounts of time, aka relatively few number of clicks, is going to give you false signals, whether it's over, you know, you think you need to raise the bid because it's performing really well, or you're lowering the bid because you think it's performing poorly, when that might not be the case at all.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (09:40.206)
Yeah, I think that's a good point. And going back to, I did want to touch on the number of keywords, right, is I think it's still that golden number of no more than 20 to 30. So I think anyone you talk to will probably stick to that number. And you can see this, you can go into any campaign, if you have more than 50, they're probably not gonna be getting clicks. So stick to the ones that are getting clicks as far as adjusting those bids and adjusting those type of search.
is we also see at this time of year, it's easy to get reactive, say, hey, we've got the window shoppers coming up for the holidays, and so we're going to jack up our bids, and then we're going to lower them down when they get too expensive. Instead is we're very big on doing incremental changes with those placement stats. So instead of going in and adjusting bids and it's…
That can be more complicated, right? If you have a software or a team, that's one thing. But this time of year, there's a lot of times we'll say to our team, hey, this is our best campaigns. These are our exact match. Let's go in every day, raise top of search by 10%. By 10% every day until we kind of see that incremental lift and we are getting those top of search placements.
And then we can kind of make a decision from there. So it's more of a slow ramp up that gets us kind of those better clicks and ensures that we are at top of search. As opposed to going in and tweaking a lot of the bids, we're much more active with those placement stats at this time of year.
Mike Jackness (11:13.293)
Yeah. And you gotta realize again, as you just mentioned, there's a lot of, you have to know your niche, right? And that's I think where, you know, there's, there's no one.
guaranteed format for everything. I mean, and so I would listen to this and then use your brain and modify for it. Cause like for us, like we don't really have that. Like for the brand that we have left, you don't know a lot about us Lucas, but we were running five brands and I sold four of them this year and they were all very, very different. And the one that we have left is ice wraps. It's a hot and cold therapy packs. This is not a giftable Christmas window shoppable item. Right, so we can just ignore that part of the conversation
I mean, I think that now sales decline into this time of the year. We actually have an interesting business that's left. We're spending all of our lives in this Q4 heavy world and now we're in this Q2 and Q3 heavy world, which I personally really like because it's a pain to wear around selling on Amazon in Q4. It's hard to get your inventory in. Storage is expensive. Cost per clicks go crazy high this time of year. So I'm kind of able to sit on the sidelines and laugh a little bit at everyone else and my former self.
and enjoy it while I can because I'm sure the next thing I get into
will be Q4 heavy. But again, Dave's got another brand that's similar to this with off-roading gear where the summer is his high time, but it is a giftable item. And so someone that's looking at a $300 truck tent, they're probably kicking the tires this time of year, and they might click on your product right now and be assembling a shopping list and deciding what they're going to do on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, et cetera. And so use your P's and Q's.
Mike Jackness (12:56.791)
and think about things as if how you think your shoppers are interacting with your products.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (13:04.174)
Yeah, and that's what it's a lot of times at this time of year, we kind of see us PPC managers as as therapists telling people to calm down and you know, just relax because CPCs are going up. ACOS is spiking right now. And that's right. Let's not even say it's Q4 and any any season, whether that's Prime Bay coming or back to school, any season, we all know the season that is the best seller for your brand. But
Mike Jackness (13:12.061)
Hmm, right.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (13:30.35)
People every single year they see that ramp up and they see those wonder shoppers and then they start to change stuff They start to launch new campaigns so
We're always telling people that go back to last year's numbers, right? See when that ACOS spike happened and then when it kind of went down and you can expect the same timeline for this year. And this isn't the time of year to go out and try crazy new things. Because if you have been watching that new keyword or a super high volume keyword and you think this is the time of year that I'm going to rank on it.
everyone else who already ranks on it has already jacked up their bids. And you're going to have to pay $10 sometimes for a top of the search for that. So stick to your evergreen keywords and just rely on that and don't get too overzealous with the numbers that you think you might see from Q4.
Mike Jackness (14:28.645)
Yeah, absolutely. So just wanna follow up on one of the things you were just mentioning before you were saying, basically stick to 30 to 50 keywords per campaign. I just wanna kind of do another personal experience share here. One of the things that the way that I set things up is just this kind of peel and stick methodology that we've all been using for a very long time, which is basically, you explore auto campaigns for whatever traffic they're getting, and then…
move those over as a broad phrased and exact or phrase and exact depending on how you want to set things up as somewhat of a discovery campaign. And so now you're taking your auto keywords that are generating sales, moving them over and bidding on them, having more granularity to it and control. But what I found is exactly what you said and I want to make sure that people maybe hit the rewind button and listen to this and go look at their accounts. What happens very quickly is you'll end up with way more than 30 to 50 keywords in these
other campaigns, right? And, you know, for us, we're somewhere between 150 and 200. And just a few days ago, I was looking through there. And again, because I've already created some roles in my software to adjust these keywords, because what's happening is, just as you said, the bulk of them get not even a single impression, right? And so from there, you have to do one of a couple of things. Either start taking…
groups of 30 to 50 of those keywords and make another campaign and bid on those separately if you wanna keep things a little bit more complicated or you can just trim the fat and go with fewer keywords. But the reality is if you have campaigns, you might not be looking at this, you might not be drilling in all the way down and looking at.
the individual keywords sorting by impressions or clicks and realizing that your efforts are being pretty wasted. You're moving stuff over and stuff's getting zero attention whatsoever. And so I think that that's a really big thing for people to go look at. I'm curious, you know, what has been your methodology to deal with this in the end? I mean, are you trimming the fat or are you making separate buckets to make sure that those things get attention?
Mike Jackness (16:43.491)
I've done is had this bid the thing up by a dime every seven days if it's getting no clicks just to get it to force it to get attention. But then again you still are in a campaign with tons of noise. So how are you handling all that?
Lucas Kwiatkowski (16:59.214)
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think going back to when we audit an account is someone sends us a search term report and we wanna see all the search terms in there. And it's crazy how a lot of times they have more sales coming from one order search terms than they do from search terms with more than five orders. So like a super simple example is someone will have maybe 50 search terms.
Mike Jackness (17:17.297)
Mm-hmm
Lucas Kwiatkowski (17:26.126)
getting a third of their sales. And they have 200 of them getting 50% of their sales. Because they're just letting those one order search terms sit in those autos and those broads, and they're not doing anything with them. But that's where it gets really tricky, because people will start extracting them and putting them all into one campaign. So what we do is with our naming convention for campaigns is we have
V1, V2, V3, and we will continually tier out keyword lists. So we're gonna start right with broad phrase and exact, and we'll have a V1 exact match, our best exact match keywords.
But then you can't sleep on autos and broads. We always want those running exactly to be finding those new search terms. When they do kind of hit that trigger of getting maybe two orders or three orders, then we'll move them into V2. So now we have a new campaign of V2 search terms, and maybe that's 20 to 30. And then we just keep that cycle going. So once keywords are in a campaign and they're doing well, we always get scared to move them.
Mike Jackness (18:39.947)
Hmm.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (18:40.302)
because I don't know if anyone's seen that. Like if you, a keyword's performing very well in a campaign and then sometimes you move it to a new campaign, it can take maybe a week to get going and it doesn't do what you expect it. So we keep them in there, but just keep launching new baskets of search terms and continually, we're continually researching.
Mike Jackness (19:02.029)
Yeah, very interesting. I hadn't actually looked at that data of what happens when you move a keyword over to another campaign. I've been leaving them in the old campaigns. I actually was talking to Ritu recently who is a pretty good PPC expert and she's the one that convinced me to stop this nonsense of adding it to negative. You want you move it to another campaign for this exact reason. So tip of the hat to her.
that from and I'm like that seems crazy but what ends up happening is that the keyword that was performing well that you've identified that you're now looking at moving to this next layer of performance you know I guess in her mind and what you're saying as well is that you negative it out on the other one or remove it from the other one or hell if you're handling it and moving into this new campaign because you have this shiny new keyword that's super performing and you know and I guess what can happen is you're hitting the
Mike Jackness (20:02.246)
Maybe it never gains traction again. And the way that I would look at this is in the same way as products on Amazon. You know, it's like you think about, you know, I've been doing this since 2015, you know, some things do well for
no rhyme or reason. Sometimes when something goes out of stock, you get it back in stock, it kills it for no rhyme or reason. You can relaunch the same product and then it's successful the second time. You know, there's a lot of things that just don't necessarily make a lot of sense sometimes other than, you know, it's being at the right place at the right time. And it could be that same thing. You know, Amazon's got all this history with this keyword in this campaign.
And however they're handling that, we don't necessarily know all the stuff behind the curtain at the Wizard of Oz, but certainly when you move things like that and just completely disregard what was performing, it can have an adverse effect.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (20:54.798)
Yeah, we stood to the age-old saying, if it's not broke, don't fix it.
Mike Jackness (20:58.619)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (20:59.022)
And so there's plenty of brands that come to us and say, hey, I had this campaign running since 2017 and it was crushing it and it was doing great and I didn't have to touch it at all. And then some software came in and paused it and started from scratch. And now I've lost all ranking on that keyword because I had six years of data, of ranking data. And there's also a thing, there's a campaign score that every campaign in Amazon,
Mike Jackness (21:08.967)
Hmm.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (21:28.976)
There's a secret sauce to it. We don't know what the campaign score is, but every campaign is given a campaign score based on history, conversion, click-through rate. The longer you build that up, the more preferable treatment that you can get for those keywords. Starting from scratch on something that already has all of this years of data is really going to hurt you. And
Mike Jackness (21:52.437)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely
Lucas Kwiatkowski (21:54.574)
I wanted to go back to one thing since I said we're always, we are kind of always are testing and we touched on this, this search term, um, kind of question is we're, like I said, we're always trying new things and exact matches is always the King, but just recently, one of my team members, actually a couple of them said they had gone in and we're always knowing that Amazon's getting smarter and better and their auto campaigns are getting more efficient, but
If we can do one level above that, kind of a forced auto campaign, and all we did on a couple of our accounts was take the most common keyword. So if you're selling coffee accessories, coffee cups, coffee mugs, travel coffee, cup, whatever, take the word coffee, put it in broad match, and bid on it.
Mike Jackness (22:43.718)
Hmm.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (22:44.462)
And this has worked for us in the past. It actually was one of my most popular YouTube videos was taking every single keyword from a listing and bidding on it with five, 10 cent bids. And it worked and then it went away. And now, but now we've been seeing a lot of success from that is it's more of a keyword harvesting campaign.
So if you're all scared of autos and broads aren't performing, it's something that's worth trying is to kind of gold pan for keywords that you know have that one seed keyword in there. And you can start with the super low bid and just hopefully that's where you can get a lot of your long tail search terms from.
Mike Jackness (23:28.961)
Yeah. And that's probably a spot where negative
terms make sense because if maybe you put the word beans in there if you're not selling beans as a negative and get rid of the bulk of the things that will just be noise but then get all these other golden keywords that you might not have thought of or maybe the campaign just performs well over there where it hasn't in other places again maybe a little bit unexplainably but you know it does you don't have to know why you just need to have the success right so yeah all right
Lucas Kwiatkowski (23:37.838)
Right.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (23:58.126)
Exactly. Yeah. And especially this time of year, there's always new keywords coming in. So that's what we always say. If people are, there's so much more traffic this time of year, so you don't even know some of the coffee search terms that might pop up this time of year. So it can be good to be looking for them. Yep.
Mike Jackness (24:04.167)
Yep.
Mike Jackness (24:12.633)
That's right. It could be presence or giftable or whatever it might be. So I wanna switch gears and ask one more fun thing and then I wanna leave some time to talk a little bit more about you and Nomadz. But there's like this.
crazy debate out there about PPC and the relationship to organic rankings. And I'm, I'd love to get your guys opinion on this. I've been doing tons of tests. I can't seem to come up with something that's like unequivocal in terms of like, I do this and it drives organic in this way. The common thread out there is like, go find your best keywords, break those out into single keyword campaigns, go crazy on top of search and bid higher.
Mike Jackness (25:01.439)
conversion rate and both to your campaigns overall, you can look at SQP data and see that you're outperforming the market and those are the things you should be bidding heavily on and by doing so over a few months, organic rankings are going to go up. Again, I haven't personally seen this or any other relationships. I'm curious what you've seen and what you can say definitively is happening out there with this.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (25:26.99)
Yeah, I think that's the question we all want to know, is what is the ranking pie chart, right? What matters to it? So I think you hit the nail on the head, and a lot of people weirdly still don't understand that, that sponsored product exact match is what you want and it's based off of conversion rate.
Mike Jackness (25:29.51)
Hmm
Lucas Kwiatkowski (25:47.79)
So a lot of people can tell us they're like, Hey, you know, we're, we've been doing very well on this keyword, but we're not improving. And I'm like, Oh, because you're not, you're not converting on it, right? Because you're getting loads and loads of clicks in the wrong spot. So conversion rate is the most important thing for that. But then I think something people often forget is, and I know, I think there are some case studies done a year ago when this change or something is
off-site traffic is now baked into their ranking algorithm. So we've seen that people that are driving off-site traffic from Google or Facebook or DSP ads to their Amazon listing, they are getting a ranking bump because, you know, feed the beast, Amazon wants you to be driving traffic there. So I think it's just not a one size fits all, but that's the other thing that people forget.
Mike Jackness (26:20.432)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (26:43.342)
And then I think the other part that we see is we can't sleep on video ads because I think video ads are always converting the best and they don't play a huge part in it. But again, I think we see when people are doing multiple things for a keyword from different directions, that's when their ranking is going to improve.
Mike Jackness (27:05.601)
Interesting. Okay.
Just another personal share on this. I mean, one of the things that we've really spent a lot of time and effort on over the last three months is the video ad stuff. And you'll be mad at us, because it's 25% of our sales now. So we're inherently already over the 80%. We do still do quite a bit of work with sponsored products. I haven't ignored that. But the video ads have been working so well for us. And I do think it's industry specific or product specific. I think a lot of it is that we don't necessarily
Lucas Kwiatkowski (27:24.238)
Thanks for watching!
Mike Jackness (27:38.567)
there on a lot of the keywords of other people running video ads and so they've been I think outperforming. We've also put together some really great creatives and been testing creatives to a point where video ads have just become a really important part for us so don't sleep on video ads I think is the moral of the story there.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (27:58.702)
Yeah, I think you want to get something out there. And that's what people will say is, hey, should we get more ads up for this keyword or more sponsored product ads? And then I go, I open my phone and I scroll through and I'm like, who's got the video ad? Because that's what's catching people's attention right now. So I think video ads, they can be seen as maybe slightly more top of funnel because you can use that to educate your audience.
And whereas more sponsored products, as people are used to them, they're clicking on that ad because they are ready to buy, they're maybe clicking on the video ad because they want to watch the video and learn about the product.
So I think it's a slightly different approach, but video is king. So yeah, you can't sleep on that right now because even a very simple video ad, use the free video builder in Amazon ads, right? If you don't want to go out and spend thousands of dollars, you can put together something if none of your competitors have one, just to get that extra real estate on the page.
Mike Jackness (29:01.877)
Yeah, absolutely. And they're really hard to miss, right? As you're scrolling down, I mean, like it is like hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer. I mean, no matter what I'm looking for on Amazon, if there's a video ad, like I stop and look at it, like whether I want to or not, it's, uh, it's, it's pretty catchy.
So, uh, definitely something I think you want to be doing. And we have some tips and tricks we'll be sharing, uh, actually in different episodes I won't talk about now, but on how to get some of those videos made pretty cheaply, um, cause we've been getting them done for under a hundred bucks. Uh,
Lucas Kwiatkowski (29:04.942)
Yes.
Mike Jackness (29:32.151)
and seeing some pretty good results. All right, listen, I can sit here and talk to you about this stuff literally for hours. I wanna be respectful of your time. I wish I had the opportunity to talk to you for hours. Maybe next time you're in Las Vegas, we can have some coffee or something and.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (29:34.862)
Awesome.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (29:38.67)
Yeah.
Mike Jackness (29:48.453)
I love to chat with you more. But again, being respectful of your time, I wanna take a few minutes and give you a moment to kinda talk a little bit about some of the things that you're doing. And I'll start on your behalf, advocating for you. Because again, I've spent quite a bit of time looking through your content. It's some of the stuff that we've implemented in our business. We'll probably be paying it forward to people in our community in other ways. Highly recommend going over to YouTube, checking out over there. The channel is…
Nomadz PPC, I believe, is that correct?
Lucas Kwiatkowski (30:21.358)
Yeah, so it's Nomadz with a Z, or anyone. You can type in my name and you'll see that there as well. And yeah, so sorry. Go ahead.
Mike Jackness (30:34.509)
Yeah, no worries. I mean, and again, Nomadz.com. Uh, the other thing, and the reason why I really wanted to have you come on, um, you know, normally I, I stay away from like any agencies or people coming. It happens or sometimes where we were friendly with people and they, and they come on and do it. But overall, and I just got myself in trouble at a conference talking about this. I I'm pretty anti agency and a lot of agencies come to the conferences. And so I felt a little bit stupid. I wasn't really trying to disparage them in any way, but, um,
I don't know, like it just, what ends up happening is with the best of intentions, these agencies like do a really great job to start with because it's the owner that's doing it, right? And then they, as they do a really great job, everyone tells everyone else about them. And so then they get this in rush of clients. And so then they got to expand. They got to hire someone to do that job. Now you're going to pass off to someone else who isn't.
the inherent expert, they're now reading off a procedure or they're being trained. And these agencies end up with a half-life. And the thing that you guys are doing, and the main reason I wanted to have you come on and talk about this, and this is not a paid episode or anything, and I don't have any kickback here of any kind. We always disclose all that stuff if we do. But you guys will do the opposite. You train a company like us.
the PPC expert in-house, whether that's the CEO or a person that's in marketing or whoever, and then you leave. You're not looking to get a percentage of revenue for eternity or end up putting people in that position of degraded performance over time because they have a hard time scaling themselves.
And I don't know, like I feel like there are certain things in this game that you should not sub out to an agency. And I think that like PPC is just one of these things. SEO was another one of those things. If you're off Amazon, I think that using an SEO agency is very dangerous because if something goes really wrong by some of their gray or black hat tactics, they just move on to the next person and you're the one stuck with holding the box of rocks.
Mike Jackness (32:39.457)
Um, but you know, Amazon PPC is a huge part of our spend. You know, when I look at our PNL, it is a gigantic number. And I want to make sure that I have full breath and understanding of where that's coming from and control over it. And I don't want to be just waiting to get a call from an agency once a month or once a week or something, a report and not fully understand like how they're spending that money. And even more dangerous, I think, are agencies that take a percentage of ad
completely disaligned with yours, right? They get paid more the more they spend, not the better they perform. So maybe just take a minute and talk a little bit about the kind of, I don't know if it's an academy or the way what you call it, I'll use that word, where you come in and train somebody in house and then and then you go away.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (33:26.606)
Yeah.
So we came up with this and I can't throw my company completely under the bus. We are an agency, but we saw what was happening in the industry is that all of the bigger brands that were leaving us were bringing it in house. And then they would ask us, hey, can you bring one of your expert advanced team members to work with my team month over month? I'm like, oh, sorry, we can't make that work right now.
that question. Hey, we're going to bring in house, but we're not super confident in our PPC person. So recently, if we've started this training and that's exactly it, it's kind of like the why we started the YouTube videos. Everyone is questioning us. Hey, why are you doing this? Why are you giving away your secrets?
because I think it's a gap in the market. So what we wanna do is be completely transparent. And we say this, we have a three month training program. We have multiple team members that work with your existing team. So whether that's one CEO, or if that's an aggregate, we work with aggregators. So whether that's a full team of PPC people. And we're training them as though they were coming onto our team.
So we're walking through SOPs, we use Scale Insights as our software. So we are first addressing the problem. And it's not just a step-by-step training. It's not like, Hey, you know, every single brand is going to, is going to go through this. We really want to dive in and address what the problem is and the goals. And then we have very hands on question and answer and calls to say, what have you been struggling with? And then.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (35:14.288)
all of those team members on our team go back and try to solve that problem and kind of work through it with you. So the goal is not just to write like you said pass off your PPC to someone else and you don't really know what's going on then you'll hire another agency and so don't know what's going on.
Mike Jackness (35:28.76)
Mm-hmm.
It's like agency roulette a lot of times for people, right? Or like, they just, yeah.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (35:33.742)
Exactly. And that's right. We know it very well. We get past brands from other agencies, other softwares. It's constant reorganization. So this is really to more build your PPC intuition, your skills, and to get both the owner and the team thinking long term so that when problems do arise in your account, we have given you the tools to address them yourself.
Mike Jackness (36:02.897)
Yeah, love it. Absolutely love it. People want to find out more about that or anything else. You know, we already mentioned them edge.com, but like, what's the best place to go find out about getting your PPC guy trained and, uh, or, or your agency.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (36:16.046)
Yeah, just reach out to us. It's still very, there's not a lot out there yet about this training because it's, we launched it a couple of months ago, but it's taking off like crazy. So just email us directly. So you can email me, lucas at Nomadz to, or you can put in a form on our site. So if you go to Nomadz.com, it's a super 10 to 12 questions, right? What are your sales? What are your spend? What have you, what is your PPC done in the past? And from there,
We'll go through that audit for you and then we will address those initial issues and try to come up with that custom training plan for your brand.
Mike Jackness (36:54.797)
Yeah, awesome. And I know a couple of people personally who have been working with you and they rave about it. So another reason why I just want to have you on the podcast and really appreciate everything you've been doing. Thank you so much for coming on and doing this again. We're already over time, so I apologize for keeping it longer than we should have. But I've just been enjoying the conversation and best luck with everything this Q4 and into 2024.
Lucas Kwiatkowski (37:17.71)
Yeah, thanks a lot, Mike. I really appreciate it. And thanks, everyone.
Mike Jackness (37:23.147)
All righty.
