Recently, Amazon PPC prices saw a spike, due to increased competition for keywords, which has caused some CPC prices to increase more than 50% and even up to 100%.
Are you Making the Most out of the Promotions Tool? In this post, we explain how you can use the Promotions Tool correctly, in order to help increase your BSR without spending a fortune!
Now, you’re already aware that Amazon’s search algorithm works differently to someone like Google. Amazon wants to make money and therefore wants the consumer to buy as much as possible. This means your number one goal, is Sales!
Ok, so you know that shifting a ton of inventory through deal sites is a great way of increasing your sales velocity right? We even wrote a detailed post about it here along with the strategies you can use.
But How Do I Boost My Keyword and Sales Ranking?
‘The purpose of the Promotions Tool is to start optimizing and improving your listings”.
The goal is to improve your rankings for your keywords, which will bring in more traffic and sales to your listings
The higher you rank, the more you sell’
- You can use the keyword research tool to add a large list of keywords to your products and competitor products
- When you have added the keywords to competitor products, you can analyze their listing using the on–page analyzer tool to look out for keywords they may be optimizing for
- Give the keyword tool a couple of days and then delete any keywords not in the top 300, i.e. >300 and replace those keywords with new keyword suggestions to find ones that your product and competitor’s products are ranking for.
- You may find that you are ranked >300 for these but your competitors are ranking and optimizing for these, so instead of deleting these, you can continue to track them, as you’ll want to improve your ranking in these areas.
- You can then analyze your listing for the keywords, where you are falling and get ideas of where you can improve your listing by using our on-page analyzer tool again.
- After analyzing your listing using this tool, we have a great guide to help you optimize your listing
- And then you can start to find the long tail keywords (those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy) or keywords you didn’t know you were ranking for, you can check search volume and optimize for these as they have a low competition.
- Run a Promotion – This will help give you a spike in consistent sales (remember each promo sale still counts towards your sales rank in Amazon)
- It will also help increase your ranking for these keywords that you’re optimizing for and lead to organic sales on those keywords (the organic sales should help you cover the cost of your promotion as well as sustain your ranking position)
- Then you can go after more competitive keywords as the rankings on your longtail keywords increase (repeat this process)
Ok, so you’ve been running your promotion, a few days pass and you’re not seeing any requests. Or the requests you do come across, aren’t being redeemed through Amazon.
So where have you gone wrong? Let’s take a look…
Have you Fully Optimized Your Listing?
When a buyer visits the ART site (AMZ Tracker’s Shopper community), they will be searching for certain keywords (make sure you have included targeted keywords in your listing).
What are the specifics that stand out to buyers?
Image – We will pull through the main product image from your Amazon listing, so make sure you’re choosing high quality images
Price – Be generous with your discount to entice buyers
Amazon Page Listing – Are you clicking on the ‘show in Amazon’ box? When creating your promotion listing in AMZ Tracker, make sure you allow buyers to see your product in Amazon. Otherwise you’re already turning away traffic that could lead to a sale. Your buyers want to see the product page listing in Amazon to decide whether they want to buy or not. And this is why your page should be fully optimized to increase that click through rate.
Title – Optimize your title to attract buyers
How compelling is your title? Entice Buyers with Your Title!
When you’re browsing Amazon and ART, you may notice some very poor titles, sometimes it’s not even clear what the product is because both the title and image haven’t done a great job at describing it.
We recommend you browse the ART site, as a buyer and notice what stands out to you, as someone who is looking to buy. You can even click through to their Amazon page listing to have a better idea of their title optimization. How does your product compare?
Let’s use an example:
- iPhone 7 case. Black. Shock Absorption
- iPhone 7 Case, [Rugged Armor], Shock Absorption, Resilient [Black] Ultimate protection from drops and impact for iPhone 7 (2016)
Do you notice the difference? One includes all the major targeted keywords as well as the benefits whereas the other one isn’t enticing you to buy.
To fully optimize your product, check out our guide
Are you being generous with your Discounts?
Did you know Sellers in ART, who giveaway products at higher discounts (80% and above) see the most sales, leading to a quicker boost in their BSR.
You can check out the ART site and have a look at which deals stand out to you – which promotion would you you click ‘Request Deal’ for?
Using the Promotions Tool is a Very Effective Advertising Strategy.
The reason you’re requested to giveaway products at a minimum discount of 50%, is because you’re using a marketing strategy that works. If you could giveaway products at 20% discounts, ART shoppers wouldn’t be tempted to request or buy your product, which is why we encourage you to set generous discounts. Your product on ART is supposed to stand out from the sea of sellers that are selling a similar product in Amazon at full price. Let your buyers see, purchase and test your product at a great discount and tell their friends about it. When you give away a product at a big discount, you’ll get more requests faster and see a quicker boost in rankings.
Consistent Spike in Sales
Amazon keeps track of your historical sales performance. And as we mentioned earlier, the more consistent your sales are, the better chance you have at appealing to Amazon’s Search Algorithm for keyword search rank results. Now, if you’re giving away 5-10 products over a few days in one month at a 50% discount, your strategy isn’t aggressive enough. Compare that to your competitor who is doing 10 giveaways every day for a month, each month, at a discount of 90%.
The second strategy is consistent and aggressive. The 90% discount is huge, yes, but it also has a higher chance of attracting buyers in ART, especially if the listing in Amazon is fully optimized as well.
How Long is Your Promotion Running for?
Let’s say you’re giving away 10 codes for a product promotion and you’re running it over a period of 4 weeks.
Now let’s compare this with a product promotion that has 50 promo codes, running for one week.
Which one sounds like the more effective option?
The second one right? Why?
Listing your product for a longer time period won’t necessarily give you more traffic. In fact, you’re probably going to get requests at a faster rate, if you run it over a shorter time period (depending on how many codes you’re giving away). Customers have a range of options, when sorting their products. However, when someone searches for a product, we list the ‘expiring first’ products at the top. Think about this when choosing your expiry dates and don’t just pick the ‘promo end date’ at random.
Are You Being Generous with Voucher Sends?
Following Amazon’s PPC cost spike, we decided to lift our voucher send limits to help you out (if you’re on the legacy account, your account won’t be affected, you will keep your unlimited voucher sends)
$50- 100 sends
$100- 300 sends,
$200- 1200 sends
$400 – unlimited
Now you can give away more voucher sends to help give you more sales!
See the following strategy, taken from our Sales Velocity Post
For example, let’s say you estimate that the competitor you want to catch or aim for, 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 a minimum of 168 coupons to offer a 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.
This is the absolute minimum number of vouchers you want to giveaway for this product since you’re not guaranteed that every single voucher will get you a sale. And this isn’t because buyers aren’t seeing your code (we’ll discuss this later).
You could prepare 200-250 codes and once you start running your campaign, you’ll need to collect applicants and come back daily to release around 7-10 codes per day.
Selecting a random number of codes to give away isn’t a strategy. Are you setting yourself goals and thinking about the following questions:
How many sales do you want each week/month?
How many sales are you currently getting and how many units can you afford to give away at a discount to reach your goal?
Have you looked at your competitor’s sales to get an idea of the volume of units they’re selling and could you use that as a benchmark?
Putting your strategy together does involve some trial and error, which could take a few weeks or maybe even months – you’ll need to do the work to find out and tweak as you go along but we’ll provide you with the tools to help!
You will know as well as anyone that Amazon Selling is not a ‘get rich quick’ strategy, it’s a business that requires a lot of work from your part. We’ve seen sellers do really well from using our tools because they use them correctly, work at it, test their strategies. And they continue to tweak and test them until they figure out what works versus what doesn’t.
How Valuable is Your Product and Promotion?
1) Product: Hair straighteners
Retail Price: $100
ART Price: $5
2) Product: Makeup Brush
Retail Price: $12
ART Price: $5
Which would you perceive as high value?
*I’m guessing you went for option 1, where you get a $100 product at $5 (It’s just too good to miss out on, right?) That’s the sort of message you want to put inside your buyer’s mind.
I can tell you that option 1 has no problem getting traffic and sales to their product from ART. They’re able to draw in a TON of requests (the buyer who is interested in this product will request it because it’s perceived as high value item).
*Please note this is just an example to show you what is popular with our ART shoppers. We understand that Amazon takes a commission based on your list price, which means you would pay a higher commission with option 1.
It’s your job to convince your buyers that they’re getting a great deal. To get a better idea of this, have a look at what sort of discounts competitors in your niche are offering. You mustn’t assume now that you have posted a promotion on the site, people will come running to request your code.
Why should they request a code? Is it too good an offer to miss out on?
What are you offering that other competitors aren’t?
Remember, these buyers are still paying something, especially if it’s not free.
And if it is free, then is your shipping cost turning them away?
Are Your Shipping Charges Turning Buyers Away?
You would be surprised at how quickly buyers are turned off a product, once they see the shipping charges.
It’s this basic buyer behaviour that we have seen amongst our ART shoppers. Shoppers get turned off by high shipping costs and if you’re not clear about the costs from the start, unfortunately, your codes will not be redeemed.
Think about listing a promotion at $4 with shipping charges at $5.
The buyer thinks ‘Why am I paying shipping charges that are basically more than the value of the product!’
Yes, we realise this isn’t exactly true, seeing as you’re giving the product away at a massive discount. However, the buyer isn’t thinking that way. Your goal is to make it so easy for the buyer to want to purchase your product
We highly recommend our buyers to become prime members (most of them are). However, if you don’t even have the prime option or your delivery costs are higher than your final discounted price, this may be causing you problems.
Amazon Wants More Sales…
As you already know, Amazon’s goal is to make more money, so the importance of your sales volume and sales consistency cannot be emphasised enough, to help boost your rankings.
Remember, your goal should be, to find the most effective keywords for your product and then add them to your Seller backend as well as your page listing. We’ve explained how you can do this, above and now with Deepwords, you can go even further.
Making your sales through a specific search term can help your product’s organic ranking for that term. And getting a consistent flow of high volume sales is something that can be achieved from the Promotions Tool to help you increase your sales rank.
