How To Audit Amazon PPC Campaigns for Profitable Sales With Mina Elias, CEO of MMA Nutrition LLC

Mina Elias is a seven-figure Amazon Seller with expertise in supplements. He’s the CEO of MMA Nutrition LLC, a dietary supplements brand. With the expertise he gained from growing his supplement brand, Mina founded PPC University, where he is the Head Instructor to highly successful Amazon sellers.

He’s also the Founder of Trivium Group, an agency dedicated to helping brands scale profitably on Amazon. Mina holds a Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering and a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering, both from the University of New Haven in Connecticut.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:46] How Mina Elias became an Amazon seller
[7:38] The journey to becoming an Amazon PPC expert
[11:45] How Trivium Group was born
[15:40] Mina’s Amazon PPC audit process revealed

In this episode…

Ever wanted an Amazon PPC expert to audit your account and tell you what you’re doing right and where you can improve? You’re in luck — Amazon PPC expert and Founder of PPC University Mina Elias reveals his audit playbook in this episode.

Mina takes a deep dive into everything from impressions, PPC spend, click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per session, all the way through to return on ad spend (ROAS). Armed with Mina’s playbook, you can self-audit your Amazon account and optimize your campaigns for profitable sales. Ready to dive in?

In this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with the Founder of Trivium Group and CEO of MMA Nutrition LLC, Mina Elias. They discuss Mina’s journey to becoming an Amazon seller, how he became successful as an Amazon PPC expert, and every detail about how he audits an Amazon PPC account.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by the eCommerce Growth Hackers Facebook Group. If you own or operate a direct-to-consumer ecommerce business, you’re probably drowning in the sea of conflicting advice from people who have never been in your shoes.

So skip the noise and join the eCommerce Growth Hackers private Facebook group, learn from a curated group of ecommerce founders and operators and tap into the genius of featured specialists on ecommerce growth and marketing.

And the best part, it’s free — at least for now. So check out the group on Facebook.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast, where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce Industry and take an in depth look at the struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.

Joshua Chin 0:21

Hey guys, Josh Chin here, I’m the Host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, where we feature top experts and founders in the ecommerce Industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes in growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by the eCommerce Growth Hackers Facebook Group. If you own or operate a direct consumer ecommerce business, you’re probably drowning in the sea of conflicting advice from people who may not even have been in your shoes. So skip the noise and join the eCommerce Growth Hackers private Facebook group, learn from a curated group of ecommerce founders and operators and tap into the genius of featured specialists on ecommerce growth and marketing. And the best part, it’s free, at least for now. So check out the group on Facebook. That’s facebook.com/groups/ecommercegrowthhackerz with a Z at the end. The link is also in the description in this episode, and I’ll see you in an insight. Today’s guest is someone who’s super talented, super kind, and I’m super proud to have him on. He’s Mina Elias. He is a seven figure Amazon Seller with an expertise in supplements. He’s also a master’s degree holder in chemical engineering. And after hating a nine to five grind, he quit his job started a supplement brand and continue to launch three more brands and invest invest in tons of other brands. He’s an Amazon PPC expert. And he’s also the Founder of the PPC University, where he is a coach and consultant to a highly successful Amazon sellers. He’s also the Founder of Trivium Group, an agency dedicated to helping brands scale profitably on Amazon, and succeed. Mina, welcome to the show.

Mina Elias 2:07

What’s up, man, I’m so happy to be on the show, dude. When you hit me up about it, I was very excited. And thank you for having me.

Joshua Chin 2:15

Likewise, man, thanks for coming on. I am really, really impressed by your resume. First and foremost

Mina Elias 2:21

And it doesn’t compare to yours, man. Not yet. I’m catching up

Joshua Chin 2:23

Not not even not even close. I’m not even close, man. I’m nowhere close. But uh, but thank you, I love to dive into your story and how you ended up in the, your your entrepreneurship journey, starting from having a bachelor’s and taking a master’s degree in chemical engineering to ending up on Amazon of all things.

Mina Elias 2:46

Yeah. Okay. So I’ll give you the story, the quick story. But I came to America because you know, like any Middle Eastern family, you can either be an engineer or a doctor or lawyer. So I picked engineer, but I’m also lucky, my brain was designed to be an engineer. So I, you know, decided to do chemical engineering. The Truth to be told is, people kind of said that you make the most money doing chemical engineering. So that’s kind of why I chose it. I knew I was very good. As an engineer, I just didn’t know what major so I picked chemical engineering, came to America in 2011, I got my bachelor’s, I got graduated top of my class, with honors, all that kind of stuff. Magna cum laude. And after that, I went on, like, started working the nine to five, I was in new product development for a $30 billion dollar medical devices company. Then I moved into chemical safety hazard consulting, then I became I worked in like, radiant heating and cooling ceilings, at the same time was getting my masters kinda like, follow that, that path all the way to the top. So I got to my last job. And I was working for directly for the owner of the company. And in the owner of the company, I was managing $12 million worth of project. And I was their youngest manager ever. And I was 26 at the time. And they were just like blown away by how good and I’m a super competitive. So I’m also an MMA fighter. I started fighting in 2013. And I’m a super competitive like I bring the heat everywhere. So I would show up to work and I’m like, How can I make everyone else look bad by outperforming everyone was like, very if I tried to make anything, anyone look bad, I just wanted to always push the base and outperform and be better. That’s just what I wanted to do. And the boss walks me into work one day, and she’s like, Hey, I really can see you in the next five to 10 years taking over the entire company. Is that something that you’d be interested in? And I said, I said, Wow, yeah, for sure. And but I was driving home dude. And I felt like my soul was dying. I was waking up at 430 in the morning, going to the gym commuting. 45 minutes to work in the middle of nowhere, working nine hours commuting back. You’re doing MMA and then going to sleep. And I literally felt that my life was just my soul was being sucked my life was being sucked away from me. So eventually, I decided to start a supplement company. I’m super passionate about supplements, I was training really hard. I wanted an endurance supplement, something that had like high sodium high potassium helped me while I was training, and there was nothing on the market, I went on Amazon, I said, there was nothing back then there was good on the market. And so I said, I’m going to start my own. And I started like selling it door to door gym to gym, I would go to like the supplement stores, I would offer them one or two. And it was like horrible, very painful. I did not see any path to scaling. And I was at this MMA event, I got a booth for free, because my friend ran the event. And people asked me like, Where can I buy your product? And I didn’t have a good answer. It was I felt so bad. So I lied. And I said, I’m gonna get it on Amazon pretty soon. This is just the soft launch. And I went home. And I’m like, if I told everyone that I am getting it on Amazon, I have to get it on Amazon. So I went home and I you know, you know that deep dive, you know, you know this better than anyone, Joshua, you do the deep dive, I read every single article in the world on Amazon, I watched every single video just did everything. And finally, like, I’m like, Dude, no one knows what they’re talking about. So I picked up the phone and I called Amazon Seller Central. And I said, How do I sell my supplements on your on your platform, they said, we’ll send you an onboarding email. And they sent me an email with all the steps. So I got on Amazon, and and I just started just making all the mistakes possible. I didn’t know how to be any a business owner whatsoever. I didn’t understand finances and understand accounting, I didn’t understand product, nothing. You know, I was really good in big manufacturing stuff. But I was horrible when it came to like anything direct to consumer. So I failed a lot. But I was I was very hungry. So I would go to all these meetups and events and conferences. And I would like literally suck the knowledge out of people’s brains. I like you saw in geek out dude, when you met me in geek out, I was going I would go to gyms out there. Who’s the best person to learn this from? And I would go and I would just ask question, question question. And people love talking. You know, people love talking and people love sharing. And if you’re if you’re a successful person, you have an abundance mindset, you’ll share your stuff, you know, there’s money, enough money in the world to go around 10 times over. So I got all this advice from people. And I got better and better and better. And I scaled the supplement brands. And along the way, I said I have to give back to the community as well. So I was in a bunch of Facebook groups. And my like, what my skill set just happened to align with Amazon PPC. And maybe it’s because it’s like very like engineering technical stuff. It’s iteration and things like that. People would ask questions I would answer. And very quickly, I just became the PPC guy in all the groups. And people would ask a PPC question and then tag me. And I’m like, okay, like, this is good. I started getting consultations, I started this and that and said, You know what, I need to make a bigger impact. That seems like this is a very big pain point. So I started speaking about PPC everywhere, you know, podcasts, whatever. And, you know, a friend hits me up one day, and I told her as I help you with PPC. She’s like, No, no, no, I got an agency and all this stuff. And she comes one day to me, she’s broken down. She’s like, I’m about to lose my mind. I am like my PPC guy vanished and my sales are tanking. I said, worry about it. i Dude, it’s got to be the craziest feeling in the world. Because PPC is almost like a different language. And if you don’t know what to do, and if someone’s been working on your account, and they vanish, you feel like helpless. So I said, don’t worry, we got this. I put my employees on it very quickly. We turn it around and start moving up. And she comes to me, she’s like, I can’t believe this. Like I owe you like everything I said, don’t worry about it. This is very simple. didn’t take any of my time. I just did a quick audit my team executed. And then the same thing happened with another friend. And right around that same time, an aggregator an Amazon aggregator hit me up, and they were buying Amazon businesses and rolling them up. And they said we need someone who can build an in house Amazon team, Amazon PPC team. I said, Sure. That’s my bread and butter. I can do it. You know, if you pay for my time, more than happy to do it. She said, but first we got to test you. I said, okay, cool, fair enough, right can build the whole system, and then it performs horribly. So they tested me. And then they said, We’re testing you against six other agencies and software. So I think for agencies to software, so I said fine. If I’m not the best, then you should go hire the best. And I outperformed everyone. And these people had money. There is a couple 100 million so they have money, good pay the best agencies and when I learned that I outperformed everyone. I said, Man, you know, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe this is like what I, you know, I’m doing people a disservice by not offering this because there’s out there people less qualified charging more money and doing a worse job. So, you know, let me it was a perfect fit. And so Trivium Group was born, I started the agency, and I went started going on stages. And speaking about Amazon PPC, and I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t make it hard to understand. I make it easier to understand. And I share everything on all of my knowledge and practice and experience because I like I’m not trying to trick you and say, like, there’s some mystical stuff behind this PPC, I’m like, here’s everything, do it if you have the time, but you can teach me everything about email marketing, dude, I’m not gonna do email marketing, like, I’m gonna hire you, because you’re gonna be you’re better than me. Like, if I spent 10 years dedicating my life to email marketing, you’re better than me, because you’re gonna have 10 plus all of your previous experience. So what’s the point, right, and now and I read the book, who, not how, and it changed the game for me, because I was always trying to figure out how, but then I realized, like, if I just find who is the best in the world at this, and if I find that, you know, Joshua Chin for email, and x, x person for Facebook, and xx person for Google, and I have an all star team, then, you know, my business is gonna grow. And I never have to figure out how I just have to keep these people accountable. And they have dedicated their lives to figuring out how so it’s kind of my story.

Joshua Chin 11:28

I love that dude. Amazing. So your PPC agency, for Amazon Trivium Group, tell me about how you came up with that name. Because we were chatting about this a little bit back, I told you that treatment is actually the name of a band as well that I listened to event, metal Vania

Mina Elias 11:45

Trivium group, the Trivium. The word Trivium means the intersection of three paths. And, and those three paths to me are something that you love, and you’re passionate about something you can be the best in the world that and something that you can monetize. And when you have those three, I don’t remember what book. But when you have those three, like this is your zone of like flow and genius, because you’re loving what you do. And I love doing this. I love going to conferences, speaking to people talking to people, like it doesn’t feel like we’re texting about it doesn’t feel like we’re calling people about it doesn’t feel like work. And then I know that like after everything that has happened. I know I have the skill set to be the best in the world at it. And probably very soon will be and and you know, and then it makes money so I can live a happy life.

Joshua Chin 12:37

Dude I love that. I think

Mina Elias 12:38

We don’t need money but money makes life fun.

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