Ever wondered how to be successful listing on Amazon? Amazon isn’t getting any easier for sellers. The days are gone where throwing up a listing, getting a handful of reviews, starting an ad campaign, and sitting back to watch revenues jump month over month. In fact, as Amazon routinely updates their algorithm and becomes better at weeding out the gray or black hat tactics that were at the forefront of organic rankings over the last few years, more and more sellers are finding themselves scratching their heads at why revenues aren’t increasing or even dropping.
Here’s the answer, their focusing on the wrong things. In 8 years of selling on Amazon, we’ve gone through countless campaigns, identifying what works, what doesn’t and what sometimes works. For any seller that hopes to remain in the game for a long time, it boils down to 4 main components: Organic Keyword Rankings, Sku Sessions, Traffic Campaigns, and Conversion Rates. Each of these four areas can tell us 95% of the story about how well our campaign is or isn’t performing. Sales are down; well are we getting traffic? Is that traffic converting? Did we drop in keyword rankings? If we focus on each area correctly and routinely, the chances of our campaigns ongoing success jump dramatically.
Organic keyword rankings are the backbone of any good Amazon Campaign. First question I ask a new client or an Amazon seller is, “What keywords are you targeting and where do you rank?” Most don’t have an answer.
Here’s how to breakdown your organic keyword strategy:
Everyone wants to rank for the main, traffic driving terms, in their space. But the reality is, those are highly competitive and take time. Focus on the long tail, low traffic, high converting terms in the beginning. Build your campaign to get traffic first through ranking in a top 3-5 position for low competition terms. This will get you revenue faster, which gives you time to rank for the more difficult terms later.
There are two main components within the Amazon A10 algorithm that lead to organic rankings: Traffic and Conversions. Amazon is all about putting the most relevant and quality product in front of its customers and If you are driving relevant traffic and that traffic is buying your product at a high enough rate, Amazon is going to want to put you in front of more traffic by increasing your organic rankings.
Step 2 is probably the easiest step out of all the steps. All you do is have to track it. Track your sku sessions on a month over month basis. If they are going up, great! If they are going down, then we have a red flag and we can start to figure out why.
Say sessions are down. What’s the response? Here’s a checklist:
Ad Campaigns are the foundation to our offensive playbook. With proper Ad campaigns, we can quickly affect 3 of the 4 KPI’s; Keyword rankings, Sessions, and Unit Session %. Ad campaigns can run in all shapes and sizes, complexities and spend.
We could spend multiple blog posts on building ad campaigns but let’s keep it simple.
If you are a long time Amazon seller, ask yourself “What is the Unit Session % of my top selling products?” If you can answer that question, you’re an All-star!! Unit session % tracks how well your products are converting based on the traffic that is coming to that page (Unit Sessions). This little number gives us massive amounts of insight into how well our campaigns are performing.
Now each campaign is going to be different, but on average we have found that a good Unit Session % will be anywhere from 25-35%. When a product has consistent traffic and is converting at a high %, our organic rankings have gone up dramatically faster than a product with low conversion rates. Again, think back to one of the basics of the Amazon A10 Algorithm, traffic + conversions = organic rankings. Consistently tracking our products conversion % will give us valuable insight into how to improve our overall campaign.
So say we have a 10% unit session %. What do we do? Here are the key things to look for in order to improve your conversion rates:
It can be daunting and overwhelming to know how to be successful on Amazon. But by following these simple Key Performances Indicators, you can put a “why” behind your campaign’s performance and create a game plan to increase your sales and profitability.
For even more information on how to be successful on Amazon, check out our other blog posts for The Best Amazon PPC Strategy in 2020 or 20 Amazon Trends to Watch in 2020.
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