Amazon is the world’s largest search engine and your ability to rank for important keywords will drive highly relevant organic traffic to your product page. But the competition has become intense for many high volume keywords, so it has become increasingly important for sellers to adopt advanced sales strategies to appeal to Amazon’s search algorithm and capture a meaningful share of the organic search traffic.
Remember, Amazon’s objective is always to make Amazon more money. So, keep this in mind when you follow our guide. When a customer performs a keyword search, Amazon search algorithm will not only consider relevancy but will also include many other very important factors. And, two of the most important factors are:
- Sales Volume
- Consistent Sales
Now that you know this, I can imagine that you are asking yourself the following question. How can you improve these important ranking factors? Well, one way is to increase your sales is by executing strategies around the use of the ART Deals Community from AMZ Tracker where you connect with shoppers who care about your products by offering them a discounted product.
If done properly, these product promotions campaigns will not only increase your sales volume but will also improve the consistency of your amazon sales, appealing to its search algorithm for keyword search ranking results.
But to get the most out of your promotions you should follow this 3 step process:
- Make sure you have the right backend search terms.
- Run promotions in the ART Deals Community with AMZ Tracker.
- Launch an Amazon Sponsored Product Campaign.
Now, get ready! And, hold on tight! We are about to explore these steps in great depths and give you a HUGE amount of practical value that you can quickly apply to improve your keyword search ranking and dominate your competition.
Search Terms
Although customers don’t see your backend, don’t neglect it because it is still extremely important to your keyword search optimization. And, while the backend of your Amazon Seller Central account has a variety of places where you can provide Amazon with additional information, the search terms boxes in the keyword section are the most important for keyword ranking.
In total, there are 5 search terms boxes and each box can hold up to 1,000 characters. So you should consider these search terms as a huge opportunity to tell Amazon what keywords are most important to your product.
Here are a few suggestions in order to optimize your keyword search terms:
- Use all the space that you are provided by Amazon. So that is 1,000 characters in each box.
- You only need to use each phrase once and target short and long tail keywords.
- Don’t use commas or quotations but use synonyms, plural and singular variations of a keyword.
- Find your highest converting keywords with Amazon Sponsored Product campaigns and include them in your search term box.
Although the keyword section and search term boxes are SUPER important to tell Amazon that your product is relevant for important keywords, remember that in order to fully optimize your backend, you should make sure that every field in the backend has been completed.
For an in-depth look into setting up your backend and search terms, check out this guide: “Optimize Your Amazon FBA Seller Central Backend”
Step 2: Running Promotions in the ART Deals Community with AMZ Tracker
Once you have optimized your product listing page and prepared a compelling storyline for your product; you are ready to move onto the next step. In the following section, we’ll show you how to increase your sales velocity and dominate your competition with the use of the Deals Community by AMZ Tracker.
And, even though you already know this, I’m going to repeat it. Two of the most important keyword ranking factors are sales volume and a consistent sales velocity. And, the powerful effects of running a promotion is that it will appeal to both factors.
A winning strategy to optimize your page and improve your keyword search ranking will be focused on doing the following:
- Matching your competitor’s sales velocity.
Track Your Performance
But, before you get started here you’ll need an AMZ Tracker membership. And don’t worry, if you are still on the fence, we offer a FREE 7-day trial which should give you plenty of time to run your first promotion and test it out.
Once you have activated your account, check out our Quick Start Guide and it will tell you everything you need to know to track your most important keywords and witness the effects of your promotions. Okay, now let’s get started with your first promotion and kick start your Amazon store sales.
Part 1: The Test
So your first promotion should be small so that you get the hang of things and get a feel for the time between the release of coupons and the purchase. For this promotion, we suggest that you use the drip strategy. Meaning that you run a promotion for 5 days and release 8 codes each day for a total of 40 products.
Although getting 40 sales won’t have a major impact on your keyword search ranking (because search ranking is relative to your competition), it will provide you a little bump to show you the potential gains with the keywords that you have chosen for your backend. If you noticed that there wasn’t much of an effect in your keyword tracking dashboard, these keywords may be too competitive, so you should consider some new ones.
Part 2: The Accelerator
Once you have become confident in your backend keywords and have also optimized your on-page product listing page. Give it a Hooah!
This next strategy is all about your competition and appeals to Amazon preference for products with a consistent sales velocity. So, what is sales velocity again? It’s just a cooler way to say average sales per day.
In the end, “The Accelerator” is designed to jumpstart your store sales and raise your daily sales average to match your competitor’s level.
And, don’t forget to turn on your keyword tracking in your AMZ Tracker dashboard. Since sales velocity is an extremely important ranking factor you’ll soon notice your keyword search ranking results improve.
Okay, at this point you might be asking, how long should I be running this promotion? I’m glad you asked. Remember, once your sales velocity decreases again, Amazon will notice it and your keyword search ranking will weaken. So, we suggest that you run a promotions strategy until you get enough organic sales to dominate your most important keywords.
So how do you do this? Well, you are essentially going to run a supercharged drip strategy. Here’s what you are going to need to speed up the feedback loop:
- Your organic daily sales.
- Daily sale results of the competitor you wish to catch.
To get all of this information is pretty easy. While you already have access to your sales information from your Amazon Seller Central account, you can get your competitor’s sales estimate from your AMZ Tracker sales ranking dashboard.
Alternatively, you can use our Chrome Extension tool, Unicorn Smasher for a sales estimate, as a complimentary tool. However, there is some discrepancy between Unicorn Smasher and AMZ Tracker results. Unicorn Smasher provides an estimate of monthly sales (based on BSR) while AMZ Tracker will actually provide real daily sales and inventory data.
While Unicorn Smasher provides an estimate of monthly sales (based on BSR) on any product on Amazon, AMZ Tracker will actually provide, on a more limited amount of products, the real daily sales and inventory data of your competition.
And, if at any moment, you need help to set up your sales tracking function and spy on your competitors, check out this “How-To” video here.
Breaking It Down
For example, let’s say you estimate that the competitor you want to catch has 20 product sales per day while your organic sales average 14 per day. This would mean that there’s a difference of 6 sales per day. Therefore, in order to properly compete with your competition, you need your sales velocity to increase by at least 6.
Within this scenario, if you run a promotion for 4 weeks, you’ll need to create and release 168 coupons to offer heavily discounted product.
6 sales per day * 7 days = 42 sales per week
42 sales per week * 4 weeks = 168 sales in one month
Since you need 1 voucher per sale, you will need to prepare 168 vouchers for this promotion.
So once you start running your campaign, you’ll need to collect applicants and come back daily to release 6 codes per day.
To make sure you have a competitive deals community price, we suggest that you visit ART (this is where the entire spectrum of promotions are organized) to take a look at the pricing of competing promotions.
Meanwhile, watch your organic sales results, because as your keyword ranking performance improves it should help to generate sales, lowering the gap between your organic sales and your competitors.
If you see this happening, you could choose to reduce your promotion size, since you’ll be much closer to your competitor’s daily sales. Or just test it to see what impact the increased sales velocity has on your keyword ranking results.
Remember, in your AMZ Tracker dashboard, you can track your keyword search result performance during these promotions.
Step 3: Launch an Amazon Sponsored Product Campaign
Let’s quickly recap, the objective of this guide is to optimize your off-page product listing and increase your sales volume and sales velocity in order to improve your keyword search ranking. Now that’s a long sentence! But, that’s how you win the game!
So, you need to use effective sales strategies to match or better your competitor’s sales velocity!
Consistent Sales
Again, Amazon wants to make money and it will send you lots of organic traffic in your directions if you can show its search algorithm that you are committed to maintaining a consistent sales velocity.
By monitoring your Amazon Seller Central account you’ll be able to figure out which days are slower than others.
- So how do you increase sales on your slower days?
- What’s the secret to improving your sales velocity?
Well, now that you have optimized your off-page product listing, the final step in our guide is to improve the consistency of your sales, by running Amazon Sponsored Product campaigns.
Amazon Sponsored Product campaign
Amazon Sponsored Products is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) system, meaning that you only be charged if the customer clicks on your advertisement. Here are some important details to consider:
- Get started by creating a campaign.
- When you run a campaign your ad will appear on the first page of search results and detail page.
- Amazon uses an auction process for keywords and will decide who wins based on relevancy and your bid price.
Getting your product seen by people searching for your important keywords can be extremely powerful and should provide you with the traffic you need to consistently generate sales and dominate your competition.
Start with An Automatic Campaign
Okay, so there are two types of Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns:
- Automatic Targeting
- Manual Targeting
The manual campaign gives you complete control on selecting your keywords and it can be an extremely powerful tool to deploy a laser-like focus on your highest converting keywords.
But, in the beginning, you might not know which one are your highest converting keywords. So, we suggest that you start with an automatic campaign. With this option, you’ll give Amazon the ability to select the keywords for you. All you need to do is set the start date and end date.
From here, you will be able to access the Amazon Sponsored Product campaign manager interface and review your search terms report to find out what keywords Amazon selected for you and which ones performed the best.
Also, take notice of the terms that Amazon selected for you. This is a good opportunity to see if you properly set up your keyword search terms in backend. If you get many random and unrelated keywords, then this would suggest that Amazon search algorithm does not understand what your product is about. So, you’ve probably got your backend search terms and listings copywriting wrong.
Financial Performance
Moving on to evaluating the financial performance of your campaign. The metric that Amazon provides is called ACoS, which is an acronym for Advertising Cost of Sale. ACoS is the percent of attributed sales you spent on advertising.
How is ACoS calculated?
- Let’s go with $20 in advertising expenses
- And, suppose this results in attributed sales of $50
- Your ACoS will then be 20/50 = 40%
This might be higher than your profit margin. But at first, running Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns is not about short term profits. It’s also about showing Amazon that you are serious about maintaining a consistent sales velocity, that matches or is higher than your competitor, to improve your search ranking for your most important keywords.
And, it is also about finding your highest converting keywords.
Finding your Highest Converting Keywords
After several weeks of running automatic campaigns, you might have found some real gems with a very low ACoS. So, it might be worthwhile to start running a manual campaign to target these keywords and improve your conversion rates and sales velocity.
Meanwhile, you might have noticed that your product is ranking really well for other keywords and a manual Amazon Sponsored Products campaign is a great way to test your their potential. But after doing these exercises, you realize what you will have done? You will have now come full circle!
Coming Full Circle
Take the highest converting keywords that you have found in Automatic and Manual Amazon Sponsored Products campaign and carefully incorporate them into your title and backend search terms. This will once again help you optimize your product listing for higher converting keywords and improve your organic search ranking. So juice up your sales strategy with the Deals Community and increase your sales velocity to consistently improve your organic sales and build a sustainable business that dominates your competition.
