#359 – 3 Biggest Amazon PPC Mistakes Amazon Sellers Make with Mina Elias

In episode 359 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Mina discuss:

01:16 – Mina’s Backstory

03:12 – How Did Mina Got Started In The Supplement Space

06:38: – When Did He Start Making Money On Amazon?

07:59 – Cracking The Code In A Competitive Category

11:23 – How Is Mina’s Electrolyte Brand Doing Today?

11:56 – Focusing All His Energy In His PPC Agency

13:41 – Entrepreneurship Runs In The Family

16:43 – How His Engineering Degree Helped Him Succeed

19:30 – Retiring His Parents

20:27 – Why Did Mina Focus On PPC?

26:43 – Training Sellers On Amazon PPC

28:32 – Helping A Client To 8-Figures In Sales

31:14 – Building A Global Team

34:52 – Characteristics Of A Good PPC Manager In An Agency

36:23 – Mina’s PPC Manager Trainees Enter Extensive Bootcamps

40:13 – Trivium Group’s Systems And Processes

42:04 – 3 Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make In Amazon PPC

46:35 – What Is A Healthy Sponsored And Organic Sales Ratio?

47:49 – What Is An Ideal TACoS Value?

50:47 – How To Get In Touch With Mina Elias And Get A Free PPC Audit

Transcript

Kevin King:

Welcome to episode 359 of the AM/PM Podcast. This week I’m speaking with Mina Elias. We talk about his journey from Egypt to the United States, to launching a seven figure supplement brand to starting one of the bigger PPC agencies in the industry. It’s a great episode. I hope you enjoy it. What’s up, Mina? Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. How is it going?

Mina:

Amazing. I’m very excited to be here. I mean, it’s been a long time coming and I’ve seen you talk to you many times and like, when are we gonna do this podcast? So I’m very, very excited to be on,

Kevin King:

I’m happy to have you here too. I mean, you’re one of the top guys when it comes to PPC out there. We’ll talk about some of that and talk about what’s working and everything in the space now. But first I wanna gotta go back a little bit. Gimme a little bit about your background. What’s the story? What’s the story behind, behind you? Yeah,

Mina:

So the story is, I came to America 2011. I was born in Egypt and grew up in Dubai, and I came to America to get an education you know, get good grades and get a good job, that kind of stuff. I got my bachelor’s in, in chemical engineering and my master’s in industrial engineering. And I worked up the corporate ladder, and I was a very good engineer, I didn’t love what I was doing, but you know, loved engineering and, and you know, worked up the corporate ladder. And after five years of doing that, I realized that I was just sick and tired of being essentially like a modern day slave. You know, you kind of wake up, you have to show up to work, you have to do your job. I felt like I was in prison, but not really, you know what I mean?

Mina:

Like, I was so much in debt because of college, and I just was always like, not happy. Like, initially the first, like, month, 2, 3, 4 of a job. It was very like, awesome and, and exciting. And then after that I was just like, it’s the same thing day in and day out. And so at that time I was training MMA, so I graduated from college in 2014, but in 2013 I started MMA and started fighting and everything. You know it was a very competitive, and to this day, I still train. And in 2018 when I was kind of like in my, maybe like it was my final job, but it was like my third or fourth job as in engineering. I was like, why do I keep doing this?

Mina:

It’s like the, the quote, which is like, if you keep doing the same thing but expect a different outcome, that’s the definition of insanity. And I was like, do I expect that my next engineering job is actually gonna bring me happiness? And that’s when I decided like, maybe I should look into supplements, because I am a huge fan of supplements. So ever since I was like 10 or 12 years old, I’ve been obsessed with supplements, been obsessed with like looking big and strong and that kind of stuff. And just had like, some weird attraction to supplements. And I was on vacation with my parents in Egypt and my dad was asking me like, why don’t you start your own supplement brand? This kind of question stemmed from the fact that I’m always buying so many different supplements, mixing them at home to kind of supercharge my supplements.

Mina:

And he’s like, why don’t you start your own? And that was the question that, that got me into this whole thing. And it was like this perfect, like explosion, like, right, because it was a combination of me really, really like sick and tired of this corporate world and wanting to get out and then loving supplements and, and just the right time, right? And I’m like, yeah, like, let me look into it. And I looked into it and, and decided to start an electrolyte supplement because I needed electrolytes as an MMA fighter, like sweating, like crazy. So decided to create the supplement and failed miserably at getting it anywhere sold, right? Any stores, stores wouldn’t accept it. Gyms wouldn’t accept it ’cause they didn’t have a point of sale.

Mina:

And I’m like, why am I even trying when I buy all of my supplements on Amazon? And so Amazon was that next step. I’m like, lemme see if I can figure this thing out. I called Amazon Seller Central. I don’t even know how I got their number, but someone from Seller Central picked up or connected me or something. And then they sent me an email with instructions on how to get a seller central account. I got an account, forged my certificate of analysis and my invoice from my manufacturer. And then after like four rejections, they finally ungated me and allowed me to sell supplements. And that’s it. Then I’m like, all right, I’m gonna send my first batch in. I sent a hundred units in, and then the rest is history.

Kevin King:

That was 2018?

Mina:

2018, yeah, November of 2018.

Kevin King:

So you didn’t do any courses or anything, you didn’t like watch YouTube videos or take any course. You just somehow got in touch with Amazon. They said, here’s how you set up an account and you just set up an account and launched, basically. Not knowing, just doing it blindly.

Mina:

Yeah, basically it was not until I got my Amazon account and it was ungated that then I said, okay, how does this work? Like, because I thought, I’m like, okay, you’re gonna open up on Amazon, there’s gonna be some sort of instructions. There was no instructions, and I couldn’t get ahold of anyone. So that’s when, so I got my account open approximately November, like 5th or 6th. And then I was live on Amazon, November 22nd. So between November 5th to November 22nd, I consumed every single YouTube video out there. I didn’t buy any course because I was too afraid to spend money. I mean, I only had like a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at the time I was living paycheck to paycheck, even on an engineering salary, like I was making 75,000 a year. But yeah, I was too afraid to spend $2000, $3,000 on a course and then realized that you know how it is. Like back then I didn’t really realize the power of like, paying for knowledge. So I had to figure everything out myself. And I did it all the hard way by making a lot of mistakes.

Kevin King:

So this is 2018. When did things start really taking off for you? Because you eventually grew that to seven figures in sales, right?

Mina:

Yeah, yeah. So 2018 November I got live on Amazon. And what I did was every single day I texted people that are friends. And I had a lot of friends in Connecticut, so I would text like three to five people and offer for them to buy the product for free. Like, I would Venmo them, they would buy it, and then I would ask them for a review because they’re my friend. Like, they wanted to support me. And so I did that. And then at the same time, I was spending like a hundred to $200 a day on PPC. But the good thing was I had a 1x RoAS, or 1.5x RoAS. So in my mind, I wasn’t losing any money. And by I think April, so, ’cause I remember end of April I got fired from my job.

Mina:

And at that time I was doing $20,000 a month in revenue and about $4,000 three or $4,000 a month in profit. And then I was fired and I was like, okay, I don’t have an income. I’m gonna go all in on my business, but my business income can’t support me. So I moved to Egypt for four months where I was living out with my grandma. And my parents lived there too, and I was living on $500 a month as bills and to reinvest everything back in the business.

Kevin King:

This is summer of 2019, basically?

Mina:

2019. So I remember, like, I had gone to Egypt and I was doing 20,000, and then I cracked like the code on getting reviews, basically by downloading the addresses of people their names and addresses, uploading them as a custom list to Facebook as an audience. And then sending like doing this like ad that says free bottle offer. And then ManyChat flow. And I would get, basically, they would respond to me and I would have my VA run them through, like, leave a review and we’ll send you a free bottle. And you know, basically I went from a four star to four and a half star, and my revenue went from like 23,000 to 35,000. And then that was around like August and or so.

Mina:

And then September, October rolls around, and by then I was maybe doing 40,000 with about eight to $10,000 a month in profits. And that’s when I moved, moved back to LA. And then when I moved to LA I started learning more and more because I was in a much, I think by then I was like more involved with like, people like you and, and other people. And I learned a lot. I watched Freedom Ticket, all the stuff around September and January of 2020 Covid hit or right before Covid I was doing $94,000 a month in revenue, and then Covid hit and my revenue went even higher. And that kind of sustained throughout Covid, and then I ran outta stock. And but that was around the time that things like really took off. And yeah, I mean, it was after a lot of like testing and understanding how PPC worked and you know, just consistently getting reviews over the course of what is it now? Like a year, and maybe some change.

Kevin King:

I mean, supplements are considered one of the hardest categories to compete in. So what you could attribute to your success? Was it the right time, right place? Is it the cheap price? Was it getting all your friends to get the reviews, to get the momentum? But how did you crack that to actually differentiating and start doing six figures a month?

Mina:

Yeah, so I had the lowest price, the highest number of servings. I kept getting consistent reviews. And then with my PPC I targeted long tail search terms. So instead of going, like, I was targeting the broad, but then when I realized, like, I started looking at the search term reports every single week, and noticing that I was converting better on the long tail search terms, I started launching way more like I would do Cerebro on all the supplements out there and find all of the lower search volume keywords. And I started targeting those. And then I started spending more, like more percent of my budget on those versus the, the like short tail, like electrolyte supplement, electrolyte powder, hydration powder. And that, I think was a, like, a huge part of it because all of my competitors then weren’t really targeting long tail keywords. ’cause I would go and look and open the search pages of those long tail keywords and maybe like the top three or four competitors were there, but that’s it. Everyone else was kind of like random and I was better than them. I had like a thousand reviews. So once I started doing that, maybe I got one sale from each of those keywords, but I added so many that it really accumulated.

Kevin King:

So are you still selling this product today?

Mina:

Yeah, still active. If you type in MMA nutrition it’s, I rebranded it to Hrdwrk, so H R D W R K electrolytes. But if you type it in, you’ll see it. I have an unflavored, Blue Razz and a mango pineapple.

Kevin King:

There’s just two SKUs in it basically

Mina:

Three SKUs.

Kevin King:

Three SKUs, and doing seven figures a year on three SKUs.

Mina:

Yeah, no, yeah, it was, now it’s down to probably like 70,000 a month in revenue.

Kevin King:

Is that just competitions come in? Or just because you’ve gotten busy with some other stuff and it’s not the only focus that you’re on focusing on right now.

Mina:

Yeah, I think competition is insane. Like competition in the electrolyte space has really, really, really become tough. So that’s a big part of it. The second part of it is after like putting a lot of energy into it, and then I had Trivium, which is my Amazon ads agency, and that really became like a huge success. I decided I was no longer because one of my biggest you know, kind of downfalls since I started entrepreneurship was I had like shiny object syndrome. And I started MMA nutrition, and then I started another women’s supplement brand that I sold. Didn’t sell it for that much, but it was a distraction. And then I started this and I started that and did neuro, which was a case study on coffee alternative.

Mina:

So I did all of these things and I never really felt like I had great success in one of them. You know, some people are like, oh, wow, like seven figures is great success, but I, now that I am fully 100% all in on Trivium, I know like the potential of what great success I can have. And so that’s when I decided I’m gonna cut down all of my ads to like a very minimal amount of spend, not put any more energy into it, and then focus on just building trivium. And so when I did that the revenue dropped, but I mean, it’s very profitable now. There’s about like 20,000 a month in profit, and I keep that as cash. It’s very minimal time and energy invested. And I have a team that runs it and everything to get it to the next level really needs a lot of attention that I don’t want to give it. I want to stay focused on the agency and building that up and not on the brand.

Kevin King:

Were you an entrepreneur back in the UAE when you were growing up? Or this is something fairly new to you?

Mina:

Very new. I never was an entrepreneur. The most that I got in terms of entrepreneurship was once in like fifth or sixth grade, I bought Jawbreakers from Egypt and I sold them in Dubai for like five times the price. ’cause They didn’t have any jaw breakers in Dubai, but it was popular ’cause you would see them like on US and Canadian, like shows and cartoons. And then the second time I was exposed to entrepreneurship was when I was basically solving homeworks and exams for students, like take home tests and homeworks for students in college for engineering. And they would pay me like a hundred, $150 per homework or per exam to like, solve it. So they would send me the test, I would solve it, send it back to them, and they would get like you know, 95% out of a hundred.

Mina:

But you know, that’s the only thing that I did in terms of entrepreneurship. I don’t know if that’s considered entrepreneurship, but I always thought entrepreneurship was like not smart. It was you know, you’re kind of like doing random things and I never really understood like that it’s actually like building businesses. And I always thought that the right way was being like an engineer, doctor, lawyer. I was very like stuck in my ways, like very bad mindset. And so as I was an engineer, like, I had some friends do like some side stuff like online, like one of them like does print on demand and whatever. So he did some drop shipping too. And I’m like, dude, what are you doing with your life? Like, you should get a real job like, that was me. I was that guy.

Kevin King:

So in Dubai your dad, you said your dad actually recommended that you actually start this, the supplement brand, but you said that you always thought that entrepreneurship growing up was maybe not was too risky. Was your dad an entrepreneur or what was it?

Mina:

Yeah, I think my dad is the perfect example of a entrepreneur. And I think that’s the reason that I had my, that those thoughts. He basically had a really good job and was making very good income. And then he, his division, basically his branch shut down, and then he decided, like, instead of going back to another job you know, and working up the ladder, which, which by the way, before that we were very comfortable. And then after that he decided to start doing like, entrepreneurship stuff. And he would try and do deals and like do all of these like gigs that entrepreneurship stuff. And all of them failed. Nothing ever made money. And we struggled very much financially because of it. And so probably like deep down that was like, the reason that I never did it was because I probably had this like a subconscious kind of feeling of stable job means good income means happy and we’re comfortable financially, entrepreneurship is like risky, crazy doesn’t ever work. And that’s probably where I got my definition. And that’s why, so you

Kevin King:

Went to English language schools in Dubai or Arabic or what?

Mina:

English. I went to an international school it’s called Choueifat. It’s like they have them all over the world. And you know, it’s pretty good because I was able over there to do my SATs, SAT2, my AP tests. I also did like the British system, which was the all levels and A levels. So I took all the tests possible, and I qualified. Like I got amazing grades in everything. And I actually got accepted into a lot of top tier universities here, like Stanford, Princeton in Canada, McGill, Toronto and Australia, like some couple other ones. I chose to go to Canada because I thought like it was the kind of the third best chemical engineering program in the world in Toronto, University of Toronto. And a lot of friends were there, but my student visa got rejected.

Mina:

And so when I found that out, it was in August and schools were starting in August. I called all the Ivy League schools. They said, I’m sorry, you didn’t accept your offer. So as a result, like you can’t, you have to wait a year and reapply and maybe you’ll get in. And so I ended up like having to spend a semester back in Dubai in college. I thought my life was over. But then when I called the University in Connecticut, University of New Haven they said, yeah, we’ll take your transfer credits, whatever, all the other schools rejected me. They’re the only ones that accepted me. Or I mean, I didn’t try that hard, right? But I didn’t know much. I was like 18 and kind of like stupid, really. And so I was just very desperate.

Mina:

And I ended up you know, moving to Connecticut, New Haven, which I mean, thinking back, so two, two feelings about it, right? Thinking back, it was a horrible move. ’cause Connecticut sucks, boring not a great school, nothing about it was smart. Think about it was smart. But I think the, the massive amount of pain and struggle that I went through and suffered over there being alone, not having anyone constantly being cold you know, hating my jobs, all of this stuff, I think that was like the, the pressure that was required to kind of create a diamond, right? And it was, it helped me build a lot of like mental strength and, and grit. And it was really like if I worked at Helium 10 in, in Irvine, I probably, I would’ve never been an entrepreneur.

Mina:

I mean, the, those guys have it really great, right? They’re chilling, you show up to an office, everyone’s nice, they you do all these fun things. There’s a great culture. If I was in a company like that, I probably would’ve just been happy and, and worked up the ladder and, and been satisfied and content. But it was because I hated my life so much in corporate that I like, I was like, corporate’s a scam. I hate corporate. Corporate’s the worst thing ever. And it really is what forced me to become an, like, realize that I was born to be an entrepreneur and eventually become an entrepreneur.

Kevin King:

You recently took your parents to Hawaii, I think I heard you say somewhere, or you told me it some event of something that you actually retired them as well.

Mina:

Yeah. So they’re fully retired. They, they make like an incredible salary. And I pay for them to have a country club membership and bought them a car. Like they never have to work another day in their life.

Kevin King:

This is in Egypt? They’re back in Egypt. In Cairo or where in Egypt?

Mina:

Yeah, they live in Cairo. And, and they came and they stayed with me in America for two months. So they, I put them in an apartment in Santa Monica, got them a gym membership took them to Hawaii for two weeks. Yeah. Like, it is great. I spoiled them. They got me to where I was, right? Like from 0 to 18. And so I’m like as a thank you, the, you get to like chill for the rest of your life.

Kevin King:

That’s cool. That’s cool. So how would you say that chemical engineering actually prepared you for what you’re doing now? I mean, because the thought processes of the mathematical and the figuring out systems and the science behind it, that’s a lot of what Amazon is. And a lot of people always say, what’s one of the keys to success on Amazon? And you gotta have a good product, you gotta have a differentiation. There’s all the standard answers that everybody get good reviews the standard answers that everybody always knows, but I think there’s actually another edge to it. And I think someone that comes from an engineering background has an advantage. Would you say that? Would you agree with that?

Mina:

Absolutely. I completely agree. I think being an engineer like gives me a very structured and, and systems way of thinking. I’m also a problem solver like a very good problem solver. That’s basically engineers are born to solve problems. I mean, on Amazon and this is something that I, I talk about all the time. Talked about it at probably any, like my Billion Dollar Seller Summit the virtual one, that presentation, talked about it at Seller Summit, Steven Chu’s presentation. But basically you have a few metrics that you’re tracking. You have sessions, which is the number of people coming into your listing, and that’s your traffic. And then you have your click-through rate, which is based on the number of people that see your ads, a certain percentage of them click on it and come into your listing, convert into a session.

Mina:

Then you have your conversion rate, which is a certain number of those people that come into your listing, convert into a sale. And being an engineer, being a chemist I’m taught to you test one thing at a time and you start understanding by that change that you made. What is the outcome? And a lot of times in, in engineering, you have the thing that you can control. You have the final outcome, and everything in between is kind of like it’s a Black Box. You don’t really know. So you, you start doing all of these tests, so you can start like uncovering what’s in, in the middle, and you’re like, okay, if I change the temperature of this solution, and then I add this thing, what happens? Let’s try it at a 20 degrees, 50 degrees, 70 degrees, a 100 degrees.

Mina:

Okay, let’s try it at you know, this pressure and that pressure, let’s try it in this thing and that thing. And you learn to never make any assumptions. You learn to always like stress test everything. Like, okay, you’re telling me like that you know, this thing is true. I’m like, how can I prove that it’s not true? What are all the things that I could do to prove that it’s not true? And if I try it all and it’s still true, then there’s a much higher chance that it’s true than if I just assume that it’s true. So all of these things that I learned now that I go into Amazon, I’m like, okay, what are all of the things that affect my traffic? You list them all out. I’m like, okay I’m gonna document my spend every day, my sessions, every day.

Mina:

I’m gonna test these different things. Maybe it’s launching campaigns, maybe it’s increasing bids, maybe it’s increasing budgets. Maybe it’s trying to have a campaign with a hundred keywords versus five keywords. Maybe it’s trying Google traffic. And then you know, it’s one test at a time. Everything is documented. I’m measuring based on the change, what the outcome is and the outcome to the metrics that matter that I can really feel, which is like revenue spend and revenue. Those are the only two metrics that I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt, doubt are true, right? Because spend is, is hitting your credit card, revenue is hitting your bank, and then sessions could be wrong. Your unit session percentage, you can’t really tell if your sessions or unit session percentage are accurate from Amazon or not. It could be all made up, right?

Mina:

Because sessions is like, they could tell you that you have a thousand sessions, maybe you only have 50 and your your conversion rate, could they say it’s 5%? It could be actually 25. You know, you don’t really know. Same with the click-through rate. They could say like, you have 1.2 million impressions and 1000 clicks. What if it’s actually 600,000 impressions and, and a hundred clicks? You can’t really test that, right? You can’t prove it. And so that’s where engineering comes in, is I, I start to like stress test everything and say, what can I control? What can I test? How can I not make any assumptions? And then I start to change one thing at a time and test the outcome. So with like click-through rate, I’m like, I’m gonna test the price and I’m gonna give it a week, and I’m gonna wait till I see some statistical significance on the con on the clickthrough rate data and make a decision.

Mina:

Then I’m like, okay, I’m gonna test the main image. I’m gonna do old main image versus new main image, and then I’m gonna test that new main image and see what’s the impact on my clickthrough rate and conversion rate you know, after a week, and is it statistically significant and does it reflect in the revenue and so on. And so that’s what the engineering you know, kind of taught me, taught me to be very resourceful you know, try and figure everything out myself and like stress test everything also taught me how to be very methodical. So I think one of my advantages over a lot of other people is, if you come in and look at my business, everything is super systemized. Everything is straight lines and everything is documented. Everything is a process. Everything is a flow. Everything has data and numbers and KPIs. And that organized way of thinking, I think really helped.

Kevin King:

What led to going from selling the electrolyte supplements to actually deciding you wanted to focus on PPC? Is it because that you just loved that numbers game and that the game of figuring out PPC or you had some good success, and did people come to you and say, Hey, can you help us out? Or what led you from going to selling the supplements as your primary focus to putting that on as the side hustle and making Trivium your main focus?

Mina:

Yeah. Great question. And so in around like August of 2019, I’d been selling from November, so it was like about nine months. And I was in like a bunch of Facebook groups and, and I was always asking questions, always asking like, how do you do this? How do you do that? So by then, like there was a new wave of sellers coming in, and they started asking like, simple questions about PPC. And PPC was the biggest thing that I focused on because I saw a very direct correlation. Every time I spent a dollar more, I made a dollar more. Every time I spent a dollar this, I made a dollar less. So I became obsessed with PPC because I felt like besides reviews, that was the other thing that really impacted my entire business in terms of revenue.

Mina:

And so when those people started coming in, I started answering their questions, and they started looking to me as like this guide and I only answered in terms of experience. I said, this is what I’ve tried, and this was the outcome. And you know, that’s that I just started sharing my experience. I then decided to make a video series. I said, guys, like, I see a lot of common questions that I’ve figured out, and I’ll explain everything. And then I, I think I did like a 15 part series on PPC. What’s an exact campaign? What’s broad? What’s phrased, what’s auto the different types of auto campaign budgets bids, all of these things. Bulk sheet optimization, search term report. And after that, people went crazy in the Facebook group. And then fast forward, Covid hits in 2020, Covid hits, I’m stuck in my apartment.

Mina:

And I’m like, you know what? Like, I’m just gonna start hopping on podcasts and sharing all of this knowledge that people love. And again, I didn’t have an agency, didn’t have anything. So I hopped on these podcasts and I started doing like one podcast a week, which back then, I mean, you’re in Covid, you have so much free time, right? So I started doing one podcast a week, and I got a really big personal brand in the space. And again, I, I was never being a guru or saying, I was just literally sharing my experience. I said, when I tried having 50 keywords in a campaign, I looked and I would sort by sales. And I noticed that only four of them are getting sales. So I tried pausing those ones, launching them three in each campaign.

Mina:

And I noticed that they started getting sales and, and just sharing things like that. And and I developed this really big personal brand. People kept hitting me up saying, can you please run my, my ads? And I said, no. Like, I mean, I have my business. I’m not gonna trade my time for money. That’s the whole reason I got into entrepreneurship for the freedom of it. And I didn’t have a team. I didn’t have anything. So I just kept turning people down. And then end of 2020, Tomer hits me up and you know, Tomer obviously, right? He hits me up and he is like I’m working with an aggregator. They need someone to train their PPC team. We’re looking at you as like a potential candidate.

Mina:

Would you like to interview? I said, sure. You know, this is like, kind of like a consulting gig. I said, sure, happy to do it. You know, happy to consult people. I interviewed with them, they love me. They said, write me a proposal. I give them this proposal, number of hours to train their team. They said, okay, but we need to test you on one of our brands to prove that you actually know what you’re doing. So they tested me on one of their brands, and four months later they’re like, here’s you and the six other agencies that we hired, and you outperformed all of them. You beat all these other agencies. We’re gonna hire you for this proposal. They hired me for the proposal, I started training their team. And then I was kind of like sitting there realizing they paid me to manage one other brands, and by then I had one employee, so it was feasible for me to manage one of their brands.

Mina:

They paid me the same or more money than what I was making out of MMA Nutrition. And MMA nutrition was a constant stress and struggle to keep inventory and all this stuff. And I wasn’t really that good at being a brand manager. I mean, I created a supplement brand. Some people say seven figures is great to me. I feel like eight figures is, is great. Seven figures is like, okay. And then it was the easiest money I added the most amount of value. And so I’m like, I have this massive personal brand. People keep asking me to run their stuff. I keep turning them down. I’m really good at this. Clearly I’m outperforming everyone. As a supplement, as an electrolyte supplement. Maybe I’m in the top 30, 40%, right?

Mina:

But in this PPC, clearly, like if this company raised $400 million and they found me out of everyone in the world, and they gave me the contract, it says something. And so I said, this is probably what I’m good at. So I decided to take a, a few clients on, took a few clients on. It went amazing. I mean, it really helped their business. One of the first clients I took, we took them from zero to, they do eight figures now, and they sell a credit card holder. And, and so I was like, maybe this is better. Maybe this is a better option. And I’m not married to a business. I’m not like I business is business. I’m giving value to people and in exchange they pay me money. And my goal has always been the same. It’s a freedom of time, a location you know, financially free. So it seemed like the right move. And I decided I was no longer gonna keep splitting my attention into all these different things. And I was gonna focus on being the best in the world at one thing. And that’s how I chose Trivium.

Kevin King:

Well, how many clients does Trivium have today?

Mina:

143.

Kevin King:

And how big is the team?

Mina:

73 employees

Kevin King:

All in the US or all spread out all over the world, or mostly Filipino or?

Mina:

Yeah, mostly mostly in Europe. Like I, I think we’re like 60% in Europe. Only a few people in the Philippines you know, few people in other places in the world. And about 10 or 12 people in the US.

Kevin King:

What’s that like going from just you doing everything to, now you got 73 people. Did you hire someone to help hire all those people? Or were you involved in putting all those people into place?

Mina:

Yeah. No, no, I hired a recruiter, in-house, so as when I was starting to hire people I got my first person kind of luckily by, like, through an introduction built him up. He brought two of his, he brought a friend who brought a friend then I used multiply me to bring like one person in. And so it was a very, like, not structured way of like growing the team. And then we really started feeling a lot of pain when I needed one more PPC you know, manager. And none of us had any referrals. I couldn’t find anyone and you know, we had like 20 clients that wanna work with us, but I’m like, I can’t. We we’re at capacity.

Mina:

And so that’s when I decided to bring an in-house recruiter. We tested her and we said show proof to us that you can hire someone. She did a phenomenal job. Her communication was amazing. She got the job done, and so we hired her and full-time. And then her job was literally like she would post job ads everywhere that was relevant to the country that we’re hiring in. And then she would collect all the resumes, she would filter through them, anyone who passed, she would send them a test which was like, basically tested them on like a few things. If they passed the test, then they would be promoted to like do an initial interview. She would check culture fit, whatever. We used to skip and just go straight to a final interview. But I realized that after they made it to the final interview I started testing them and say, open up your Excel you know, spray, or here’s an Excel sheet, show me how you would do this.

Mina:

And then they would blank. And so we realized that some people were cheating on the test. So we started putting them through a live test Excel test, and aptitude test. And then they would do the final interview on hiring them. And so that was the process that we used. And now it’s this process, but like on steroids, like we run ads everywhere. We post everywhere, all pointing to a jot form. People fill out that form. Anyone that gets qualified gets put into like a shortlist. They then again, automatically get sent the test. They fill out the test that comes back, the test’s reviewed. If they pass the test, then they’re moved to an initial HR interview. And then they go through the process until, and the final interview is no longer with me, it’s now with the head of the division.

Kevin King:

What are some key characteristics that as an agency that you’re looking for when you hire someone to run PPC? Because I always say that people always come to me and they say, Kevin I don’t wanna mess with this. P P c. Who do you recommend? What’s a good agency? Should I use one? There’s a laundry list of ’em out there and a lot of the, the top people in the space, and you could bounce from one to the other. And it’s, to me, it’s not about the company, it’s about the person that you get in that company that can make a difference. Because someone may say, X, Y, and Z company is great because they had a great person in the company, but someone else can go to that same company and have a totally different experience. That’s not as good. So what do you do? What is it that it takes to actually be a good PPC manager on the agency level?

Mina:

Yeah. so I’m gonna answer this question in two parts, right? Because I think what you said is about like, the person that you get is only true for small businesses. And I’ll explain why. So who am I looking for? I’m looking for someone who is very, very strong in Excel. Someone who’s very calm, under pressure someone who can process a lot of data and information quickly. Someone who can recognize patterns and trends. Someone who has very high attention to detail. Someone who’s resourceful and a critical thinker. Someone who’s really good with numbers. And that’s mainly kind of what I’m looking for. So we usually find you know, engineers perform really, really well in that role. We don’t typically require anyone to have you know, experience as a PPC manager. They come in fresh, they have all the right qualities. We put them through a very extensive training. And that training is basically they learn everything there is to know about the Amazon platform including not only PPC, but like the factors that affect click through rate, conversion rate, inventory management, supply chain, finances of the business. They learn everything, start to finish.

Kevin King:

Who created the training?

Mina:

Me, I created the training.

Kevin King:

So it’s actually like sit down and go through 20 hours of course. Like an internal course or something. It’s

Mina:

An internal course, and it’s like more than 20 hours, right? It’s like at least I think 45 hours of, of just video. And then and in every step they have to report to their manager, and they get tested and they have to answer questions to make sure that they understood what what they learned. And then by the time they finish the, that information part, they then move to the, the middle part, which I call it the bootcamp. And it’s basically taking action at like so many times that it becomes muscle memory or, or call it intentional practice or whatever. But basically like, let’s say a bulk sheet optimization. They get a bulk sheet. And in the guidelines it says, we need you to optimize you know, in, in these criteria.

Mina:

And so they do it and they they do it and they submit it, and then they do that for eight hours a day. So imagine spending eight hours a day doing both sheet optimizations. The next day you spend eight hours a day launching new campaigns you know, building like the structure and everything with the right campaign nomenclature with the right setup and everything. Then you move to like negatives, then placements. So by the end of the bootcamp, they know how to do everything that they need to know in terms of actions. Like they’ve memorized it, they can close their eyes and they can do it. Then they move to the final piece, which is the of training which is basically like live on campaign manager. You get sent like, or live on like seller central. You get sent like these tasks and you have to like do them and submit them.

Mina:

And it’s like go and look at like their analytics and tell me their sessions and their conversion rate, and then download the box you do. And then they learn how to navigate everything on Amazon. Then from there, they get promoted to becoming an assistant to an existing PPC manager. So let’s say an existing PPC manager is managing an account their job is to basically communicate with a client and then go and look at the data, interpret the data, make, make decisions, and then take action. So the PPC manager will go do everything, but then instead of taking action, they’ll delegate the action taking to the person and they’ll say, Hey you know, I looked at the analytics based on that. Our spend went up, our revenue went up slightly. I think it’s time that we optimize.

Mina:

So go and find the keywords with one to 20%, or sorry greater than 80% ACoS. Add them as a negative lower the bids on keywords, anything that’s exact and, and whatever. And they delegate that work. They do the work, they come back, they say, here you go. Everything is good. They upload it to Amazon. And so they spend time basically assisting brand PPC manager and learning on the job. And then by the end of it, they get like one account where they’re in charge and so on. So that’s our process. Very, very, very intensive. But you know, by the end of it, you’re really, really qualified turnout, the reason that I don’t look at for people with, with the experience is because I don’t know what their prior experience is.

Mina:

I dunno who they worked for. I don’t know. You know, like I know who they work for. Let’s say they came from any of the other agencies. I don’t know what their training is, like, I don’t know how good it is or how bad it is. So I’d rather build them up myself, especially ’cause Amazon’s a relatively like new industry and things are changing all the time, and then I can control it. Now, the second part of that, which is like, it depends on who you get. It only depends on who you get if you don’t have enough QC controls in place. And so I don’t think in the bigger companies like the billion dollar corporations, it depends on who you get because they have so many checks in place that if you get person number one or person number 10, you’re gonna get the same result because they’ve gone through so much QC that you’ll never get like an output or a deliverable from them without them all going through the same checks and balances.

Mina:

And so with our team, what we’ve implemented is, okay how can we ensure that everyone is doing everything, right? Right. So it’s like an internal checklist where the pod leader who sits on top of the strategist reviews every single day, what they’re doing have, do they communicate effectively? Did they ask the client, do you have any questions? Is anything unclear? Did they send an update that was clear? Did they answer every single question? And then when it comes to like you know, the work that they do the work is basically like, okay, they go, they interpret the data, they say we’ve scaled whatever. So then we have like an internal analytics tracking of how is the performance of any of the brands, anything that’s going up consistently, we’re like, okay, great.

Mina:

Anything that’s flat or going down immediately. We have senior people that come in and they start looking and seeing is this actually a strategist problem? Like the person, the PPC manager on the account, are they doing something you know, wrong, or do they need help with the strategy or is it seasonality and the, or the conversion rate of the client went down or they increased the price and that didn’t work, or something like that. And so because of those levels of QC, that’s how you know you can have this guy or that guy, and it doesn’t really matter because as long as anytime there’s any sort of trigger in like a, a performance drop, you get this, the best people in the company to come, come and take a look at it. And if, obviously if we notice like 30% of the clients are like declining in performance, then it’s like an alarm. Like, Hey, stop all sales, we’re gonna focus on fixing whatever the problem is. And and then once we fix the problem, we can start sales back up again. So that’s kind of my process.

Kevin King:

When new clients come to you, what are the three biggest things that you see them just goofing up that you’re like, oh my God, here we go again. What are three things that people listening when it comes to PPC, they need to really be doing that they’re not doing?

Mina:

Yeah, so first of all their campaign structure is hurting them. They have too many keywords in a campaign. Their budgets are too low, things like that. They have multiple ad groups. All of these things are very simple fixes because basically when you have a low budget, what I’ve seen is all you need to do is increase your budget, keep the bids the same, your performance goes up, and you’ll still won’t spend your entire daily budget. It just, Amazon sees that there’s more breathing room and it allows you to perform. I don’t know. But that’s what we see. That’s number one. You know, having too many keywords in an ad group again, I notice you’ll have 50 keywords in an ad group, 35, 40 of them are get zero spend sales impressions. I pause all that, launch them in their own campaigns, immediately we start getting more sales. And then multiple ads.

Kevin King:

Each one in its own single word campaigns, or putting like two or three together or what?

Mina:

I would say no more than five anywhere between one to five. You know, obviously you don’t wanna do one too many times, especially for very low search volume keywords ’cause they’re not getting that much traction anyway. So you don’t wanna mess up, like get it very messy in your campaign manager for keywords that are maybe gonna make one sale a month or one sale every two months. And then multiple ad groups, I start seeing that the ad spend starts splitting weird between the two. It’s not consistent. And sometimes I have keywords that are more profitable, getting less ad spend than other ones that are less profitable. So keeping, so campaign structure is the, is the first thing. The second thing is, is that no clear structure in, so in two ways, number one, like are you cleaning up keywords that are spending money and not making sales?

Mina:

That’s like a big thing, right off the bat. So why don’t we clean that up? Like every single week or every three days, depending on how much your spend is, go look at keywords that are spending money, not making sales, or go look at keywords that made one sale in the last 30 days, but have a very high ACoS. All of these can be cleaned up. And then the final thing is there’s really no game plan. You know, so it’s like you look at their ad spend and it’s just all over the place, up and down, up and down, up and down. And I’m like, what was the plan here? And so our plan is very simple. You’re either scaling your ads, so you’re launching campaigns, increasing bids, increasing budgets, increasing bid by placements doing, taking all the action that you want to increase your spend and increase your revenue by getting more people into the listing or you’re optimizing for profit.

Mina:

So you’re lowering your bids, lowering your budget, not lowering budgets. So you’re lowering your bids, adding negatives lowering your bid by placement. Anything that didn’t work during the scaling phase, eliminating that. So you’re left with everything that’s better, and everything that’s profitable. So we work in one of those two phases, and because we do that, it’s very clear and we end up scaling, getting more revenue, killing the stuff that didn’t work, you end up with more profits, scaling again, getting more revenue and so on. Then the final thing is, I think people come to us and they’re like we expect you to do this and that with PPC. And they don’t realize that their conversion rate you know, their reviews and their images mainly they are like basically attached to PPC.

Mina:

And so if you try and increase this without this, nothing will happen. You’ll just, it won’t work. You know, and they focus too much on PPC without giving the exact same attention and energy. I’m like, I have people on your account every single day working on PPC. Do you have people on your account every single day working on getting more reviews and improving your listing conversion rate through images or whatever answer’s? Usually no. If you put an equal amount of energy into that, as you do in your PPC, your revenue will scale very, very fast. If you don’t, all I’m doing is bringing more people to your listing. And you know, more and more people don’t want to convert. Because when I was bringing a hundred, if your conversion rate’s 10%, I was bringing a hundred people to your listing, 90 people don’t want to convert. Now I’m bringing 500 people to your listing, 400 people, 450 people don’t want to convert. So it’s like, it just multiplies, it’s an amplifier. Basically what PPC is.

Kevin King:

What’s a healthy ratio of sales generated from PPC to sales generated organically, in your opinion?

Mina:

Okay, this is controversial. I don’t think those numbers are accurate. I think the numbers that you see on Amazon are, don’t tell the truth. And, and I’ve tested this many times, so I can put like let’s say I have $500 in ad spend, a thousand dollars in sales organically, a thousand dollars in sales. In PPC, I cut down my ad spend, let’s say from 500 to a hundred. You expect the PPC sales to fall. However, your PPC sales will go from a thousand to 200. Your organic sales will go from a thousand to 200. What’s the explanation? It can’t be organic rank, because that does not tank that quickly. It doesn’t tank in one day. So the only other explanation that I can think of is that the attribution is off, that we don’t know what’s actually PPC and what’s actually organic. So as a result, I recommend you look at your spend and your total sales, and you don’t worry about organic or not organic, because it’s the numbers that you’re gonna get just aren’t accurate.

Kevin King:

Just bake it in. Just bake it in as TACoS. That’s what I do. So what’s an ideal TACoS in your opinion? Not I know when you launch, it’s gonna be totally different, but once you’ve stabilized a product, what’s a an ideal TACoS to be shooting for?

Mina:

Yeah, so I think, I think the, the way that we look at an ideal tacos is there is a curve, right? And think of this curve, like you know, it’s a bell curve, so it goes up, peaks and goes down, and then the peak is the highest profit that you can get. And then on the X axis, you have from 0% tacos to a 100% TACoS. So as your tacos goes from zero, let’s say to 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, at some point it’s gonna hit a peak in profit. And then beyond that, it goes to 17, 18, whatever, 25, 30% TACoS, the profit starts going down again. Now that peak of profit, we don’t know the exact number, right? So you have to test. So usually we see it fall between anywhere between five and 25% TACoS, right?

Mina:

Which 25% might seem high for some people, but certain products, 25% TACoS is generating more profit, dollar amount in profit, then 15% TACoS because of the increase in sales velocity. So again, going from a 10% TACoS to a 20% TACoS, you spend 10% more for the sale. But what happens if you get 10 more sales and 10 more sales is 10 times, let’s say $10 in profit per unit. So you basically spent an additional dollar to get an $10 more in profit per unit. And so it’s obviously you’re gonna be more be beneficial. So that’s the best way to look at it, is it’s a bell curve. And if you want, you can graph it out. You can go look, if you use a software that shows profit, like we use my real profit and it shows your ad spend, your TACoS and your dollar amount in profit every single day, and you can map out a bell curve or you can map out a curve.

Mina:

And if you feel like you don’t have a bell curve, then you should probably test by increasing the spend in different TACoS over time. And once you see that bell curve, you’ll notice at what TACoS you hit, the highest amount in profit. And it’s different for every product, different for everyone. That’s why I’m always a fan of just testing. You know, lower TACoS doesn’t always mean better because sometimes a little bit higher tacos could mean more sales velocity and every additional sale is whatever anywhere between five to $10 more in profit per unit. So that’s where you have to find like that perfect balance.

Kevin King:

Awesome. Well, Mina, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing we’ve been going almost an hour here. So that’s I know we could keep on talking more and more and diving into it, but we’ll have to have you on the Helium 10 Elite again or maybe even on a future Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You just never know if people want to reach out to you and find out more or get in touch with your agency or just have questions, how would they best go about that?

Mina:

Yeah, so the website is triviumco.com, triviumco.com. We offer free audit, so it’s a 35-40 minute long video audit where we go through everything in your account and help you show you exactly what to do, give you resources, whatever. Feel free to use that. It’s free. You can reach out to me, my email is mina@triviumco.com. And then or Instagram is also the easiest way to get ahold of me. It’s @theminaelias. You can DM me, I can answer LinkedIn, Mina Elias as well. I’m on there. So that’s Mina Elias.

Kevin King:

Awesome. Thanks, Mina. Appreciate it, man. Thank

Mina:

You for having me, Kevin. This is great. And, and can’t wait to talk more PPC.

Kevin King:

I think one of the important things you can learn from my talk with mean is to just followed your passion. You know, he started out as a MMA fighter. He still does that, but that led to him beginning a supplement brand of electrolytes, and then that led him down the PPC path, and now he’s got a very successful agency in doing really well for himself. So if you follow your passion and just keep your head down and keep working, good things are gonna happen, as Mina is a perfect example of. We’ll be back again next week with another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. And till then, I gotta leave you with some words of wisdom. Always try to make an impact, not just an impression. Always try to make an impact, not just an impression. See you next week.

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