We live in the age of information. Nowadays, any question can be answered with a click of the mouse or a touch of your fingertips. So, it’s very easy to learn a lot concerning any subject matter, such as increasing the sales performance of your company on Amazon.
However, there are still reasons why many businesses still get expert advice from an Amazon consultant. Of course, you can intensify your research and get more information, but not every issue can be resolved by knowledge. Sometimes, you need time, expertise, and experience to get the job done. Let’s discuss the many ways an expert can help you in increasing your company’s overall sales performance on Amazon.
Dealing with A9 Updates
Like any search engine, the A9 algorithm that powers Amazon’s search engine can’t stand still. It has to move forward with updates that no one outside Amazon knows about until it’s done. Your business might be running smoothly one minute and turns to chaos the next. Most people need the help of Amazon SEO services to keep track of the updates, find out what the updates impact, and implement a viable solution without your business taking too large a hit. Doing those things takes a lot more than just having the right information.
Reoptimizing Your Listing
Just like the recent 2020 updates on A9 (conveniently called A10), a lot of things changed in terms of optimizing your listing. Amazon emphasizes customers’ search results now, with a heavier emphasis on your sales history, feedback, seller authority, and conversion rate.
- More focus on impressions: Impressions are the number of times your product listing is viewed. In the old A9 rules, impressions didn’t really have an enormous impact on your search ranking. Now, the more people see your product, the better your chances of getting a high rank. Many sellers use social media to give their product the needed impressions boost, while others increase visibility through writing articles for blogs and creating videos. Be in constant communication with current and former customers using different methods.
- Take care of your conversion rate: Of course, additional impressions wouldn’t get you anywhere without sales. The new updates for A9 don’t just ask you to improve your visibility. They also ask you to sell more. Using optimized images in your listing helps push you in the right direction. So do A+ content and Amazon store — the next level conversion techniques.
- Keywords are still essential: Nothing changed in how you should use keywords except for a couple of things: keyword placement and effects. People used to cram as many keywords as possible within the 200-character limit and forget everything else. Now, keywords should be placed strategically in a product listing elements with more emphasis on readability and conversion. If putting the keywords in the title seems a bit awkward, you can put them in another part, such as the bullet points or product description. The more you convert, the less important the location of the keywords are.
Creating an Effective PPC Campaign Strategy
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are probably one of the most complicated aspects of Amazon SEO. It’s a bidding system that charges you money for every customer who clicks. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as keyword research, budget, overall goals, and PPC analysis. In formulating an Amazon PPC marketing strategy, you need to understand what kind of advertisements are available:
- Sponsored Products: These ads are keyword-targeted and can be used to promote individual products. They appear on the search results page or product detail pages. You need to be a professional seller ($39.99 a month) to use Sponsored Products ads.
- Sponsored Brands: These ads allow brand owners to promote three products using a custom headline and a brand logo. Once clicked, customers may be sent to a custom landing page on Amazon or your Amazon store page. They can be found on the top of search results and below the fold of SERP. Only sellers in the Amazon Brand Registry can make use of Sponsored Brands.
- Product Display Ads: These are for vendors only. They use product or interest targeting to show the proper ads to buyers with certain interests. They appear below the “Add to Cart” button.
Every effective strategy formulated by an Amazon consultant is based on gathering relevant data and analyzing them properly. Without these two processes, you might as well be a sailboat with no rudder and no destination. To understand what data is needed, you have to comprehend the basics:
- Impressions: These are the number of times your ad appears on the Amazon website. Of course, more impressions translate to more visibility.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Once your ads show on Amazon, it matters how many people actually click on your ads. The CTR is derived by dividing the number of clicks on your ads with the number of impressions.
- Cost-per-Click (CPC): This is the amount that you bid for your ads. If you win the bid, the CPC will be one cent more than the second-highest bid. For example, you won with an offer of $2 per click. The second-highest bid was $1.35 for each click. Your CPC will be $1.36, not $2.
- Spend: This data shows how much you’ve already spent on ads, which pertains to the number of clicks on your ads multiplied by your CPC.
- Orders: As customers see your ads and click on them, some will make a purchase. The “orders” statistic pertains to the number of items bought through your ads. This doesn’t include purchases derived from organic searches.
- Sales: Multiply the numbers of orders you have with the price of your product, and you’ll get the “sales” data.
- Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS): This refers to the percentage of your total spend versus the sales data. It generally determines how well your PPC campaign is performing. A lower ACoS is generally preferred over a high one. However, every company has its own standard. For big companies, an ACoS of 30% might be acceptable, probably not the case with smaller companies. If you don’t know what your business can afford, communicate your objectives to an Amazon consultant, and he’ll take care of the rest.
Keyword research for your PPC campaign isn’t easy. Many sellers do effective keyword research by first creating auto campaigns for their product. Auto campaigns try to find the correct keywords for your product by trial-and-error. You can’t adjust the bid for specific keywords on auto campaigns, only for the entire campaign.
Then, an Amazon consultant can review the data from your auto campaigns and pick the best-performing keywords. Transfer them to manual campaigns where you can adjust the bids for individual keywords according to their performance. This task is tedious and can take up a lot of your time. If you’re not confident with your analytic skills, you shouldn’t be embarrassed about getting expert help. It’s your business, after all.
Maintaining Account Health
Sometimes, it’s so easy to get lost in fulfilling orders that you forget about keeping an eye on your account’s status. Maintaining a healthy account takes up so much time, as well.
