How to Optimize Amazon PPC with Mike Zagare

The one tip—or let’s call it a habit—that isn't stressed enough by FBA coaches and mentors is to never stop learning. 

That’s precisely why sellers and guides that stay successful in the long run are the ones who keep learning and adapting to changes in both policies and programs. One such person is Mike Zagare—physical therapist, founder of PPC Entourage, and someone with an unquenchable thirst for all things Amazon. 

Mike is a PPC aficionado and the brains behind the popular seller tool that enables sellers to optimize multiple aspects of their Amazon business.  We contacted Mike for a brief lesson on how to conduct keyword research and optimize PPC campaigns using ZonGuru’s Listing Optimizer tool. 

So just sit back, relax, and find out Mike's thoughts on how even small-time sellers can bring in big-time traffic.

What We’re Going to Cover In this Video

1. Mike introduces Keywords on Fire
2. How to create a KWOF campaign
3. Discussing customizability and filter usage
4. How to narrow down search to highly relevant keywords
5. Downloading reports and creating Excel sheets
6. How to determine and calculate PPC budget
7. Discussing PPC campaign creation strategies

Keywords on Fire FREE Trial Available

Ready to put Mike’s insight into action? Then use our Keywords on Fire tool to start optimizing your listing now.

Right now, we’re offering a 7-day free trial for this and 15 other powerful seller tools.

Plus, you’ll get a plethora of free content and insight right at your fingertips. With ZonGuru by your side, prepare to start growing a global product brand today!

Raw Video Transcript Below

Mike (00:00):

Hey, everyone. Mike here with a quick video on how to use ZonGuru for your keyword research when setting up your PPC campaigns. And the reason why I like this is because it's so simple, and I think you could do most of your keyword research in a really thorough way in less than 20 minutes. So check this out. I'm going to go over here to Listing Optimization and then go to Keywords on Fire. And what you're going to do is click on add products by phrases and then type in your main seed keyword. So for example here, I'm going to type in cat litter mat, and then click on search in the USA. Now, what's going to happen is all of our competitors are going to show up, and also my product is going to show up as well. And I want to select the very best 25 to start.

Mike (00:48):

So, very simple and straightforward, select the products that are doing really well, that have really good amount of reviews, that are the most like your product, and then click on add products. Now, since I've already done that, I've done a search, I'm going to use this search over here, where I selected 19 products. You don't have to select all 25, you can select as many that makes sense to you, but try to choose as many as possible that are like your product. So let me click on view this here. And when you do that, you're going to see that ZonGuru picks a maximum amount of 300 of the top keywords. So, I like that because it doesn't spit out 15,000 keywords that I now have to sort through. It gives me a reasonable list when setting up my advertising campaigns, this is a great way to get the best keywords that are going to be the most relevant.

Mike (01:41):

All right. Now, what I did down here, is I went over to the table settings and I got rid of a lot of things. There's a lot of great information here, but for the sake of this video, you can show the keyword, the search volume, the top 25 competitors, the launch, and also the competitor positions. Now once again, we will use all of this later on, but for this video here, just select this information and you're going to see some really great, relevant information shows up over here. Now, what I like about this is you can see the search volume, and then what I want to search for is keywords that can... Let's see. Search volume that is greater than 300, which means I'm going to go down now to 190 entries of 300. So I'm starting to get the most relevant high search keywords so I can start to build out from there.

Mike (02:44):

So keywords that contain search volume greater than 300. Now, the next thing I want to do, is I want to go after the keywords where most of my competitors are targeting that keyword. It means that it's a highly relevant keyword. So what's cool about this is, I have 19 competitors that I'm tracking. And all of the positioning for that keyword, how the competitors are ranked, is showing up on the right hand side. So at a glance, I can see where my product is at compared to my competitors. More importantly, I can see of those 19 competitors, how many are ranking for this given keyword, which basically tells me one, how relevant that keyword is, and two, how much competition is highly ranked for that keyword. So this is really, really important information. And what I want to do with this, is I want to now filter top 25 is greater than or equal to five.

Mike (03:42):

Now what that tells me, it tells me all of the keywords... Now we have 63 that show up, where there are five of those 19 top competitors showing up in the top 25 spot. So essentially this means it is highly relevant. All right? And now I'm going to go down this list, I'm left with the most relevant keywords. And what I can do, is I can look for brand names and I can eliminate brand names. As you can see here, there's one brand name, two brand names, three brand names. I want to get rid of that because if I'm doing a rank campaign or launch, I want to go after the most relevant keywords. Now I'm left with some really great keywords, cat litter mat, cat litter mat trapping, litter box mat, litter mat, kitty litter mat. And these are highly relevant. What I'm going to do is I'm then going to go... You can add this to the keyword tracker, you can download this. And when I download this, you're going to get a nice list. And let me go over here. Here is the list.

Mike (04:46):

Now, I uploaded it to this sheet over here. And you can see, these are all the main keywords that came up with the search volume and also the top 25 competitors rank. This is how many units per day you have to move. I made a little spreadsheet over here too, I made a little calculation. The number of units you'd have to... This is actually how much you'd have to spend making some assumptions. The click to order ratio is seven, and the average cost per click is 1.5, which would mean $10 per sale. So this is going to be different depending on the product that you're selling. But basically what I did was I took the average amount of clicks that it takes to get a sale and the average cost per click, and I made a little calculation here.

Mike (05:32):

So if you multiply that by this number here, you're going to get the amount that you'd have to spend on PPC if you were just making sales through PPC to get to that ZG Launch number. I actually think this math is a little off. But anyways. Okay. The other thing I want to show you over here, is the BA, stands for Brand Analytics. Okay? So I wanted to do is I wanted to cross check this against Brand Analytics to see if any other Brand Analytics keywords showed up, or just to make sure that ZonGuru got all of the most important keywords. And what you can see here, is the ones that have a check, it means that it showed up as well in Brand Analytics. So, ZonGuru found some great keywords that Brand Analytics did not. All right? I really like that. There's a bunch of them over here with high search volume. Once again, I'm going to get rid of this one here, but over 300 search volume is super important.

Mike (06:32):

So what we could do with this, is we could do single keyword rank campaigns. Now based on the search volume, if it has a lot of search volume, you want to give it a lot of attention. So this could be in its own campaign. These top five keywords could be in their own campaign. And then as we get to the lower search volume keywords, you could start to group maybe five or 10 of these together because they have lower search volume. And then maybe as you get further down the page, you can put 10 to 15 max keywords in a campaign. Now, if we're going for rank, we want to go for top of search, probably going to do exact match, but it really depends on your strategy.

Mike (07:10):

The point is you want to find the most relevant keywords really quickly. This is an easy way to do it. It makes a lot of sense. And then you can combine this strategy with different match types to get maximum reach. All right? So, that is a quick tutorial on how to use ZonGuru to find your top keywords. Once again, this only takes 20 minutes maximum and you can get some really good information to find opportunities that are right for you. Take care.