Throwback: The Best Strategy for Boosting Amazon Sales with Google Ads!

In this Throwback episode, Josh interviews Tyler Greg, founder of Ampd, about the game-changing strategy of driving Google Ads traffic directly to Amazon listings. Tyler explains how leveraging Google Ads—rather than sending traffic to standalone e-commerce sites—enables sellers to capitalize on Amazon’s superior conversion rates and boost keyword rankings. They discuss Amazon’s own traffic arbitrage, the benefits of Amazon-compliant (white hat) tactics, and how sellers can maximize ROI, reduce fees, and build defensible brands by combining external traffic with Amazon’s brand-building tools. Actionable tips for scaling to 8 figures and beyond are shared throughout.

Chapters:

Amazon’s Google Ads Arbitrage Explained (00:00:00)
How Amazon buys Google Ads cheaply, drives traffic to search result pages, and resells clicks at a higher price.

Introduction to Tyler and Ampd (00:00:40)
Josh introduces Tyler Greg and Ampd’s expertise in Google Ads to Amazon traffic.

Ampd’s Origin Story (00:01:12)
Tyler shares how Ampd started as a data science platform for Google Ads to DTC stores in 2015.

Transition to Automated Bidding (00:02:04)
Google’s shift to automated bidding forced Ampd to rethink their approach and product offering.

Early Focus on Shopify and BigCommerce (00:03:08)
Ampd built tools for Shopify/BigCommerce, but struggled with low conversion rates on DTC stores.

Switching Traffic to Amazon (00:04:23)
Ampd decided to send Google Ads traffic to Amazon for higher conversion rates and better results.

Amazon Affiliate Program Insights (00:05:18)
Using Amazon’s affiliate program, Ampd discovered 30% of Google Ads clicks resulted in Amazon purchases.

Conversion Rate Analysis (00:05:50)
Discussion on how often external traffic buys advertised vs. other products, and the impact on conversion rates.

Why Amazon Incentivizes External Traffic (00:07:18)
Explains Amazon’s motivation for encouraging sellers to drive external traffic due to high overall conversion.

Amazon’s Massive Google Ads Spend (00:08:18)
Tyler discusses Amazon’s huge annual spend on Google Ads and the two main ad types: Shopping and Search.

Difference Between Shopping and Search Ads (00:08:34)
Breakdown of how Amazon uses Shopping ads for direct listings and Search ads for broader traffic.

How Brands Can Compete with Amazon Ads (00:10:06)
Case studies on replacing Amazon’s ads with your own to get cheaper, more direct traffic to listings.

Building a Competitive Moat with External Traffic (00:10:39)
Josh explains how external Google Ads traffic can help brands dominate and protect their Amazon position.

Actionable Takeaways for Sellers (00:11:19)
Summary of strategies: boosting keyword rankings, using white hat tactics, and testing Google Ads to Amazon.

Three Key Focus Areas for Google Ads to Amazon (00:12:19)
Emphasizes keyword selection, ad copy, and optimizing landing/store pages for best results.

Shopify vs. Amazon for Google Ads Traffic (00:13:35)
Tyler compares benefits of sending Google Ads to Amazon vs. Shopify, including conversion rates and branding.

Brand Referral Bonus and Seller Fees (00:14:32)
Explains Amazon’s 10% brand referral bonus, making fees competitive with Shopify for Google Ads traffic.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts (00:15:09)
Wrap-up and final remarks on the value of sending Google Ads traffic to Amazon.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites 
Ampd 
Shopify 
BigCommerce 
Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon Attribution

Transcript:

Tyler 00:00:00  But what Amazon does with search ads is they buy it on Google often, you know, 30, 40, $0.50 per click. The average CPC on Google is about $0.60. They buy it first, call it $0.60, and they send it to a search result page. They do search, find, buy and you're not allowed to do it. Amazon. Yeah, of course they sent it to a search result page where they then have that page covered in sponsored ads. Yeah, that all cost $1.30 per click. Yeah. And so Amazon buys it for 60. They resell that traffic for $1.30. And they take that difference there. Arbitrage again. It's fascinating. Yeah it's it's genius. Genius.

Josh 00:00:40  I never thought of it that way. But now I'm like my mind is now open. And I'm like, okay, that that makes ten times more sense now. Today I'm excited to introduce you all to Tyler. Greg Tyler and his team at Ampd are big data analysts who have spent seven plus years building Google ad tech and now bring that technology and knowledge to the Amazon industry, allowing Amazon sellers to unlock Google ads.

Josh 00:01:03  Welcome to the podcast, Tyler.

Tyler 00:01:05  Hey Josh, thanks so much for having me today and excited to be here and talk a little bit about Google ads. But, you know, talk about e-commerce in general.

Josh 00:01:12  How did Ampd get started? What brought you to where you guys are today? And what I would argue to say is the kind of the name brand of bringing external Google ad traffic to Amazon.

Tyler 00:01:24  Yeah, definitely. And so kind of quick background on Ampd is we are Google ads to Amazon experts. That is all we do. I kind of joke about like that is all we know. I don't know anything else other than Google ads, to Amazon. but we know a little bit more. And, the background on our company is we started right around 2015, just like you guys. And we started as really a data science platform for Google Ads to DTC stores. And it was a great journey. We built out a really incredible data science engine that was able to analyze Google Ads data, and then we worked with a lot of agencies to help them drive efficiency.

Tyler 00:02:04  Find unproductive spin. Find areas to double down using data using our data science engine. And about two years ago, our engine was all focused on manual keyword adjustments. So hey, your bids at $0.15, if you up it to $0.32, you're going to unlock $10,000 of revenue. You should do that, right? But two years ago, Google started going to all of our agency partners saying, no more manual bidding. You need to do automated bidding. And Google is pushing all their automation, right? And we're saying they're going, If Google's not letting us do manual bids and they're incentivizing agencies to not do manual bids but do automated bids, where does that leave us? Right. Right. And so we're kind of looking around going, okay, what do we do now? Like we have all this Google Ads data. We have all this Google Ads expertise. What do we do? And so we started saying, okay, what if we started pointing that engine and helping, you know, SMS this was originally we were more focused on large enterprise companies.

Tyler 00:03:08  Okay, what if we started focusing on SMEs and we actually built a Shopify and BigCommerce app that allowed sellers to quickly and efficiently create Google Ads campaigns from scratch and send them into their Shopify store. And that basically tabled all of our data science, keyword modeling, probabilistic engine and all that stuff, and started earlier in a campaign, which was the campaign creation side. And we started sending all this traffic to a lot, mostly Shopify. And the conversion rates just weren't really there. So we would help thousands of brands, but it would bring in traffic to their website. But then we had to start getting into this world of, okay, well, you're getting good traffic. And we had to sta...