Grow Amazon Sales Through Keyword Search Traffic
In order to grow sales on Amazon, product content and advertising should include keywords and phrases for which customers search. If you don’t index for keywords, customers will not find your products, and your product will not have an adequate rank to achieve your sales goals.
Just like on Google, Amazon customers find your products through organic search and paid advertising. We recommend using both strategies (organic and paid) to build awareness and convert customers. You can wait for customers to find you on their own (organic search) or speed up product awareness and bid on keywords automatically chosen by Amazon or manually selected.
The Amazon Sales Funnel
Keyword Search
A standard sales report only shows the page views and conversions on your product page. Before a page view happens, the buyer journey starts at the beginning of a search when a keyword or phrase is searched and filtered products are shown.
Let’s talk about metrics before we talk about Amazon keyword strategy. When a customer sees the product on a page, it’s called an impression. When a customer clicks on the product, then it’s a page view. When the same customer clicks on the same page more than once in a 24 hour period, this action shows as one session.
Browse, Posts, and Off-Amazon
While we’re focusing on keywords for the rest of this blog post, there are three additional strategies to attract prospects into your Amazon buyer’s journey and increase traffic onto your Amazon detail page.
1.Browse is used by a small number of Amazon customers to find products. This is on the left hand side of the screen when you log onto Amazon. Browse is also used when someone is on a page, and he or she clicks on the category listed in product details.
2. Posts are primarily on mobile devices and recently been added to Storefront pages as a “Posts” tab. Similar to Instagram posts, these are linked to the product pages, Storefront, and product categories.
3. Traffic from off-Amazon sources can be incoming from social posts, blogs, partnerships or paid media.
How To Attain Best Seller and Amazon’s Choice
Incoming off-Amazon traffic and Amazon keyword search traffic count towards your overall sessions/units calculation for unit session percentage. Amazon uses this to determine how likely it is that they’ll get their sale and a happy customer if they show your product listing to a potential customer. This is the source of the “Best Seller” badge and your overall ranking in your subcategory.
However, to get “Amazon’s Choice” you’ll need to target specific keywords, then convert on them.
If you have a 15% conversion rate, for example (good for a price point around $15-$40/unit), it would cost you about $10 to sell a product through advertising at a $1.50 average CPC (cost per click).
Once you sell sufficient products via advertising, it trains Amazon to think your products can make them money. For example, if you spent $100 getting 10 sales on the keyword “mini cupcake tin,” then the following week, your rank on that keyword could improve by about 10 points; so if it was at 50 rank before, it would be at 40 rank now. Obviously, the actual ranking and improvements are calculated on a keyword by keyword basis.
At $1.50 CPC, you can get about 660 clicks with $1k in advertising spend. With a 15% conversion rate, that would equal about 100 units sold. At about $25 average sales price, that’s about $2,500 in revenue just from advertising.
Use Organic and Paid Keywords Together
When you get those clicks and sales on specific keywords, then you gain organic rank. That allows you to increase your proportion of organic sales to advertised sales. This is why you should initially plan on sales only from advertising and see all organic sales as an additional win.
After you’ve started making headway on keywords that you’re targeting and gaining rank on, start setting goals to increase organic sales.
The end goal for organic sales is to hit 80-95% of sales coming through advertising. We do not recommend stopping advertising for top products in your catalog. Lower traffic/less important products can run fine through the use of virtual bundles, Posts, and placement on your top products’ comparison charts after they’ve gone through an exercise to gain solid keyword indexing. For some of our clients, they advertise all items, and for the less important ones they just allocate less budget.
How to Choose Keywords Using Third Party Tools
We currently use Helium10 and MerchantWords to find keywords in addition to auto ads. The best way to find good keywords is often through auto ads, but tools like Helium10 or MerchantWords can help find good keywords that you may not have thought of.
Here is the process we use to find keywords:
Step 1: Run Auto Ads at various bids so you find the optimal keywords for your products. This will also help you to get indexed even for keywords that you don’t end up targeting again in future.
Step 2: Run manual ads using variations of successful keywords from your auto ads (I usually use MerchantWords to find these easily).
Step 3: Run a reverse ASIN search on your top competitors (make sure they’re the same brand avatar as yours – as in, don’t choose Oil of Olay if you’re selling an organic product for example) in Helium10 and MerchantWords. I’ve found that the results do vary between these two tools. I recommend the Helium10 extension in Chrome to make this easy; just click on Keywords and it’ll pop up in a new tab.
Use the CPR 8-day Giveaways to estimate the volume of additional sales you’ll need to improve your ranking. If it says 8, then you need to buy more than 1 sale through advertising above where you’re currently selling for a week. If you see a 24, then you need to sell 3 more items a day through advertising on that specific keyword.
Step 4: Optimize based on conversion rate, NOT ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale). Because ACOS is a measurement of advertisement cost, rather than effectiveness, you can end up turning off successful ads that could help you significantly increase your organic sales just because the customer search term is expensive to convert through ads.
Step 5: Narrow down your successful keywords to the top few that can perform well based on conversion rate.Then put your advertising budget towards these ads.
Step 6: Watch your keyword ranking increase and make more money!
Struggling With Your Advertising spend?
Do you know what keywords you’re targeting? Are you confident they’re the ones that can grow your sales? Let’s talk about how we can help you improve your advertising program!
