Introduction

My name is Dr. Travis Zigler.

Am I a real doctor?  Yes!

I am a recovering optometrist turned ecommerce entrepreneur. I always told my financial advisers that I would retire from seeing patients by the age of 40 and they all laughed at me… 

I did it by age 33.

In the process, I fired over 10 financial advisers during my 8 years of being an optometrist until I found one that supported me. 

Along with my wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, I am the founder of Eye Love, https://eyelovethesun.com, whose mission is to heal 1,000,000 dry eye sufferers naturally. We use the profits from Eye Love to fund free clinics in Jamaica and the US through our charity, the Eye Love Cares Foundation, https://eyelovecares.org.  If you ever want to come on a mission trip with us, please reach out to me.  You don’t have to be in eye care or a doctor.  It will change your life.

Due to the success of Eye Love, others have asked me to help them grow their business online, and more specifically with Amazon, which led to the creation of the Profitable Pineapple Ads Agency (Why Pineapple… Why Not?).  We are on a mission to help 1,000 brands profitably scale to over $1 million on Amazon while spending LESS time in their business.

My goal with this book is to provide you a TON of value and give you the exact action items to help you scale your Amazon PPC in less time.  

What are we covering in this book

How I find the keywords needed to launch my product and when to launch. 

My way-too-easy Amazon PPC strategy.. 

One quick change you can apply to your Amazon PPC campaigns today that will increase your sales, profit and organic rank… while decreasing your ACoS.

“Sure-fire secret” to creating highly profitable Amazon PPC campaigns that sell like crazy.

How to avoid the #1 mistake Amazon sellers make which causes them to spend a TON on Amazon PPC.

I will be discussing the overall strategy for your Amazon PPC and business, but I am also giving you step-by-step instructions for everything I discuss.  I have accompanying videos as well (more on that later).

Who is this for?

This is for Amazon sellers who are feeling stuck and overwhelmed around Amazon advertising.

For those who are just getting started on Amazon, you’ll find out the next easy steps to take to solve your Amazon PPC problems and free yourself from this “confusing” platform.

For more experienced Amazon sellers, you’ll learn the steps to take your Amazon PPC to the next level so you can start to scale your Amazon PPC in less time while spending less money and gaining more profit. 

I will also be making you an offer for those that want to get results faster and want help along the way.   Throughout this book there are affiliate links (if reading on Kindle or PDF), so if you click on them, it helps support us.  I only recommend two softwares to use in this book.  I became an affiliate for these programs because they work and it is what we use.    

Here’s the deal… this book is incredibly valuable and will help you get further along than most $8,000 courses.  

Don’t think that because I am making an offer that it discounts what’s in this book.  You have everything you need here.  

With that said, let me get the offer out of the way so we can put that behind us and you can know that we are not hiding anything. 

First offer – 2019 FREE training

We have a free Amazon PPC Masterclass that has videos and tutorials that follow this book,  which you can check out at http://profitablepineapple.com/

This free course is for the do-it-yourselfers that have a low budget for Amazon ads. This is the exact system that we used in 2019 and the beginning of 2020. It offers tremendous scalability, but is more manual and takes about 5-15 hours per week depending on the size of your account. No additional software is needed. 

This is recommended if you are doing under $25,000 per month.

🔴 For this free course, we will be using a combination of all the tools Helium-10 offers. Get 10% off for life with my affiliate link by clicking here.

Second offer – Paid training and mastermind

We are no longer offering the paid training and mastermind due to the growth of the agency and clients.

🔴 We use Quartile in our agency and in our brand. Get a 55% discount on the first 2 months with this affiliate link

Third Offer – Done for you Amazon PPC (our agency)

Want the experts to handle it? 

We can take this off your plate. 

Go spend your new free time enjoying life. Spend more time with your family and friends while we use our Amazon PPC system to scale your company. 

This is recommended for those doing over $25,000 per month.

WARNING… You will probably stock out, so make sure your inventory systems are ready to go 🙂  In Eye Love, we are still struggling to stay in stock and we are on pace to do over $6 million in 2021.

🔴 Apply to work with us here

With that out of the way, let me take you back to my story and where it all began…

The year was 2017.

My wife and I are both optometrists and owned two optometry practices, while also running our online company, Eye Love. 

I was living the entrepreneurial dream. 

But I had one problem.    

I was working from sunup to sun down.  

Can you relate to that?

On top of this, we were also expecting our first child.  

I didn’t see how it was possible to run two optometry practices and my online business with a child.  

So I analyzed my 3 businesses and decided to go all in to the online business, Eye Love, and sell my two practices.  

I was scared and nervous around this decision as we were making over $240,000 in personal income per year from these practices.  

We had a few months until our first child came to figure out how to make a full-time income with Eye Love.  

The problem was that Amazon PPC costs were sky high and taking up a ton of my time. 

I had very minimal profit, and my company almost went bankrupt twice (I was saved by SBA loans).

So I set off on a journey to solve this financial burden that Amazon PPC had caused me, as well as reduce the time I spent on Amazon PPC.   

This way I could make enough money to quit my 9-to-5, while having more time for myself and more time to spend with my wife and child. 

Have you had that same dream?

I dove into a few courses by all the gurus in the Amazon PPC space and spent close to $10,000 learning from these experts.  

As I went through each course, I ended up feeling more confused as a result.

I also found that PPC was taking more time instead of less time, which was the opposite of what I was going for. 

After taking these courses, I decided to invest in Amazon PPC software.  

I tried 6 different softwares in order to try and reduce my time spent on Amazon PPC. 

The problem with the software is that they killed a few of my best selling listings and brought down their organic rank and sales.  

Finally, I worked with 3 different agencies who just spent a ton of money and didn’t give me a return on my investment with them, which left me more discouraged than I was when I started this journey. 

Nothing I was doing was making sense and I was starting to wonder if this business was even worth pursuing after all, but I knew that I wanted the location freedom, financial freedom, and the time freedom that this business brought, so I decided enough was enough.

I set off on a journey to solve this problem myself. 

The problem was, I had NO idea where to start.

I felt trapped. I felt like I would never figure out how to advertise successfully on Amazon.  

I also felt hopeless…like I was a failure to my wife and son because I couldn’t provide the lifestyle we all wanted and we would be stuck seeing patients and working the rest of our lives!

I knew there had to be a better way, but I felt like a failure as the SeeEO of my company and as a husband.

Then one day I was at another Amazon conference, watching another Amazon PPC presentation, hoping something would inspire me to turn things around.

And there it was… 

Simplicity!

The presenter, Cherie Yvette, provided this simple, laid out strategy for scaling Amazon PPC, and I could not contain my excitement. But when I looked around the room at the thousands of other people, no one else seemed even remotely excited…

Now, this was intriguing…I asked a few of those around me why they weren’t as excited as I was, and most of them said the strategy laid out on stage from this presenter was too simple!

I remember turning to Jenna and telling her that I knew this was it.  This was going to be a turning point for my Amazon PPC, increasing my profits, while allowing me to spend less time on it.

Have you ever had one of those heavens opening moments?

So I made a plan right then and there to figure this out, which we’ll talk about a bit later.

I continued down this journey for the next 6 months with amazing results.  I began to scale my ads to spending $30,000 to make just under $60,000 for a 50% ACoS, which brought great results for me as my goal is 62% ACoS, but it was still time consuming.  

So I decided to try one more small adjustment to simplify the process even more. 

It was pure terror to try something else new, when what I was doing was working so well, but I am glad I did it. 

Now Eye Love is doing close to $40,000 in spend to make about $110,000 for around a 36% ACoS, but in significantly less time than before.

I am now able to scale both Amazon PPC and scale my products without a lot more work and with a proven system!

And here we are today…

My wife and I are both retired from seeing patients after selling both practices, and we run a thriving multi-million dollar business online from anywhere in the world. 

I’m actually writing this from one of my favorite coffee shops in Austin, Texas – Elle’s. 

My Amazon ads ACoS has dropped significantly, adding a lot of profit to my bottom line and I do it in a fraction of the time it took before.  

I get to spend as much time as I want with my wife and son and we get to travel whenever we want. 

I am able to provide the lifestyle that I dreamed of for our family.  I’ve been able to work less than 25 hours per week.  And I’m now able to be with my son, and never miss any of the highlights of his life.  

But my real fulfillment comes from teaching others.  

I have always loved teaching others (former Ohio State Professor), so I knew I had to teach others this strategy.  

I now never worry about Amazon PPC eating away all my profits.

Before I embarked on this journey, I believed that you had to spend a lot of time on Amazon Ads.    

What I shortly realized was that I was wrong.  

You can spend less time on Amazon PPC and still profit more.  

Your ability to become wealthy is unlimited and can only be held down by you and your mindset.  

I originally had goals to get out of the 9-to-5 and become financially free, which you all will probably set for yourselves as well, and I blew those out of the water. But what happened along the way is that I found out who I really was as a person.  

I have become obsessed with empowering and helping others believe that you too can achieve whatever you desire… whether it be a profitable business, more time with your kids and spouse, a better life, freedom to live a purposeful life, or freedom to travel.  

Anyone can do this.  

You all are probably thinking to yourselves, “That is great for you, but that won’t apply to my business because my business is ‘special’.”

Trust me when I say, I used to have that special business (I am in the dry eyes space) as well that nothing would apply to, but once I got out of my own head and started trying what was being taught, everything changed and my business wasn’t so special after all.  

I simply used the data that I already had to simplify Amazon PPC and scale my ads. 

I will get into all that in this book, but I am getting way ahead of myself…

Chapter 1 – My Way-Too-Easy Amazon PPC Strategy

Let’s go back to the beginning of 2019… 

This was before I attended that conference and learned that simplicity is the key to Amazon PPC, which I will discuss more in this chapter. 

I had just bought a course from one of the leading Amazon PPC Gurus that cost me close to $8,000 (not my first expensive course on Amazon PPC, but I was hoping it was my last). 

I was all excited and ready to go with this new course. 

I logged into the member’s area and stopped dead in my tracks… 

15 MODULES and over 25 hours of videos to watch… 

All of which was hosted on a platform that couldn’t speed up videos. A huge pet peeve of mine!  

I had to watch 25 hours of videos on 1x speed… 

I was horrified… 

The problem was, this was THE GUY in Amazon PPC. 

Before buying this course, I had tried a few cheaper courses as well, but nothing was clicking as they all followed very different strategies. 

I always watched all the free content on Amazon PPC that was on YouTube.  

I would hear of something on a podcast and try that for a few weeks. 

But nothing was sticking. 

So I decided to turn off my phone, let my wife know I was going on “vacation” for a few weeks, and I watched the 25 hour,15 module course on Amazon PPC. 

I made the time to commit to this strategy, but again I came across a problem halfway through.  

This guy was speaking in another language that I had trouble understanding. 

Again, this is the problem with most Amazon PPC gurus.  They not only speak over your head, but they give away just enough information to give you some success but they don’t give away their biggest secrets.

After taking this Amazon PPC course, I was even MORE confused and realized I need to do this FULL TIME or I need to hire someone that can handle it, which is not what I wanted to do.  

Then I was at that Amazon conference that I talked about earlier…

The presenter provided this simple, laid out strategy for scaling Amazon PPC.

I just knew this was the answer I’d been looking for.

So I went back to my hotel room right after that presentation, called my business partner, Adam Pixler (COO of Profitable Pineapple Ads), and I implemented this over the next 8 hours on not only my ad account, but across the entire agency.  

With the right Amazon ads strategy and system in place, you can prevent your business from going under and start saving a significant emergency fund.  That is what I will be walking you through in this book while at the same time giving you a step-by-step guide with pictures.  You can also get the accompanying videos on our website, profitablepineapple.com. 

#1 Mistake I See Clients Make

Amazon PPC can be as difficult or as simple as you want to make it.  What I commonly see when I work with clients is that they’ve been implementing too many different strategies and are now confused as to what to do next.  Their ACoS (advertising cost of sale) is way too high (but they aren’t sure what their ACoS should be), they don’t know what keywords to pause, or they don’t know how to expand their campaigns to scale them. If any of this feels like you, YOU ARE COMPLETELY NORMAL. It was me before I discovered my strategy.    

This simple strategy will help you make more sales and increase your organic rank on Amazon, while decreasing your ad spend inside Amazon PPC. This is the step that your competition is NOT doing.  I would say less than 5% of Amazon sellers are doing this.  

So what is my exact strategy?

It is simply mining and then isolating the 20% of search terms in your account that are driving 80% of your results.  

I will be walking you through a simple strategy to help scale your campaigns and isolate these search terms.  

Doing this assumes that you have been running Amazon PPC for at least 30 days and have made sales from it.   

If you are just getting started, don’t worry, chapters 3 and 4 are all about if you are starting from scratch.  I will discuss how to find the search terms to go after when you are launching a brand new product. This can also be used for existing products to find more keywords and to create a great negative list. 

Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule

Pareto’s Principle also applies to Amazon PPC.  Pareto’s Principle states that most things in life are not distributed evenly, but rather 20% of the input creates 80% of the results.  Put in other ways…

20% of your employees produce 80% of your results

20% of your customers create 80% of your revenue

20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue

And 20% of customer search terms on Amazon drive 80% of your sales!

We want to find and SCALE those customer search terms and apply it to the products that are producing the results for you. 

You can find these search terms in your Amazon PPC reports.  

When I implemented this, ignored all the other PPC strategies I had learned, and stopped chasing shiny objects, my ability to profitably advertise really took off.

20% of your products are producing 80% of your results

Before I get into what to do with the 20% of search terms that are driving 80% of your sales, lets first discuss your products.  Every business I have run and every business we have managed is the exact same.  20% of your products are producing 80% of your revenue.  

The problem I see with most sellers is they are splitting their budget between all their products and not focusing it on those products that are producing the results for them.  This may sound a little crazy and might scare you a little, but I want you to stop advertising for the products that are not producing for you and move all that budget, time, energy, and mindspace to the 20% of your products that are producing 80% of your results. 

In Eye Love, we have close to 70 SKUs.  

Can you guess how many of these SKUs we focus our advertising efforts on?  Can you guess how many of these SKUs we focus our time and energy on?  

14.  

20% of 70 is 14.  14 of our products produce 80% of our revenue.  

When you take the 80/20 rule and apply it a few more times (the 80/20 of the 80/20 of the 80/20), then you will see that 1% of your efforts, energy, budget, products, etc.. produce 50% of your results.  

Think about that for a second.  1% of what you are doing on a weekly basis is producing 50% of all your results.  

What if you just focused on even that 1%?

For us, our hero product produces exactly 50% of our revenue.  

I’m not telling you to dig that deep with your advertising, but instead to focus ONLY on the top 20% of your products. 

What to do with the 20% of search terms driving 80% of your sales

I will show you how to find these search terms later, but I first want to explain what to do with them.  We want to isolate these search terms into their own Amazon PPC campaign so we can better customize our strategy for increasing our sales and organic rank on Amazon, while bringing down the ad spend for this search term. 

Once we have pinpointed the 20% of the search terms that are driving 80% of your results (it is fewer words than you think), I want you to put EACH SEARCH TERM into a SEPARATE campaign.  

Worth repeating for clarification… One search term PER Amazon PPC campaign.  

Why do we want to do this? 

This will allow us to customize every single part of that campaign to that search term alone.  You can customize quite a few features of the campaign including budget, campaign bidding strategy, and adjust bids by placements.  

A few quick recommendations to get started with this are an unlimited budget, because it is a highly profitable search term for you that is driving most of your sales, dynamic bids – down only bidding strategy, and adjusting top of search (first page) by 20%.  

If you have a limited budget, then make sure to only make an exact match campaign with this search term.  

With more budget, you can expand these search terms into broad campaigns.  You can even start your auto campaigns as well.  Make sure you create and upload a phrase negative keyword list to all auto and broad campaigns (more on that later). 

In the example above, this is my most profitable search term and this one campaign with this one search term is driving four sales per day.  The product itself sells about 150-200 per day on average for us and we have about 40 of these single search term campaigns that are each driving one to four sales per day. We only use dynamic bids – down only bidding strategy.  You can see our top of search is 100% and our product pages are 1%.

Action Items for Chapter 1

1. Read this chapter again and again so you can really grasp the 80/20 strategy. 

2. If you have campaigns running already, read chapter two to learn how we track Amazon PPC and how we calculate ACoS targets, then skip to chapter 5 to start scaling your existing campaigns.

3. If you are new or you are launching a new product, continue reading this book in the exact chapter order it is presented and take action! 

Also don’t forget to sign up for our free training and get the videos that accompany this book at profitablepineapple.com

FREE Amazon PPC Course from 2019

For the do-it-yourselfers that have a low budget for Amazon ads. This is our exact system that we used in 2019 and the beginning of 2020. It offers tremendous scalability, but is more manual and takes about 5-15 hours per week depending on the size of your account. No additional software is needed. 

This is recommended if you are doing under $25,000 per month in revenue.

🔴 For this free course, we will be using a combination of all the tools Helium-10 offers. Get 10% off for life with my affiliate link by clicking here.

DONE FOR YOU Amazon PPC

Want the experts to handle it? We can take this off your plate. Go spend your new free time enjoying life. Spend more time with your family and friends while we use our Amazon PPC system to scale your company. 

This is recommended when you are doing over $25,000 per month in revenue.

WARNING… You will probably stock out, so make sure your inventory systems are ready to go 🙂

🔴 Apply to work with us here