Tag: amazon seo

Amazon SEO: How To Optimize Your Amazon Listings for Keywords

Selling on Amazon is unlike running any other online store.

The beauty is that it’s both marketplace and search engine rolled into one: Buyers search for and purchase what they need without ever having to navigate to another site. This makes for an exciting and dynamic seller experience — but it also means sellers must market correctly in order to see real results.

Because of this layout, you need to treat Amazon as a search engine when advertising your products. If you want to get your products in front of people who are searching for them, you’ll need to know how to optimize the right keywords for your Amazon listings.

Any failure to understand how to optimize your Amazon listings gives your competitors an advantage in your market. Don’t give your rivals the upper hand!

How Do Keywords Work on Amazon?

On any other search engine, such as Google, getting a brand or product to rank high means building up your organic search engine optimization. The same is true on Amazon. The majority of sales happen organically, with products that are highly optimized.

When optimizing your listing, be strategic. Keep SEO in mind to set up your product for the highest potential visibility, and most important, make sure to get things right the first time. Editing a listing that was already written can hurt the listing’s SEO ranking.

For example, make sure to include the most frequently used variations and prioritize the right keywords for the right audience at the right time. You’ll need the help of our Amazon keyword tool, which is designed to help you find and use every relevant keyword.

For one of Viral Launch client, the strategic use of the Amazon keyword tool helped it reach $40,000 in sales within 30 days of its new product launch. By the end of the launch, the product had gone from ranking No. 300 to No. 1 in search results for the targeted keyword.

A Few Amazon Keyword Tips

Our Amazon keyword tool tells you which keywords shoppers use most often when they shop for products like yours. It also helps you include these keywords in your listing without breaking Amazon’s character limits in any of the fields.

When used correctly, the Amazon keyword tool gives you the power to find all the keywords and variations relevant to any product. To use them to your ultimate advantage, keep these three points in mind when choosing which keywords to use:

1. Lean heavily on search volume data.

Our Amazon keyword tool gives you actionable data about the search volume of any keyword. The industry-leading search volume estimates generated are constantly updated, so the data is always fresh and safe to rely upon.

Each time you research a keyword, the tool will also provide exact and broad match data surrounding it. You can see the immediate and far-reaching impact it could potentially have on your SEO ranking, as well as the keyword’s current standing in the market.

2. Dive into the keyword’s history.

Every relevant keyword around your product has a history, especially those that have the highest search volumes. Our keyword tool is the only one that can bring you exhaustive historical data, helping you dive deep into the history across the entire market — including competitor usage.

Accurate historical keyword data is important for several reasons. It includes historically relevant horizontal keywords you can use to boost the product’s listing. Additionally, it gives you full market context so you can strategize around each keyword’s popularity trends.

3. Keep the keyword’s relevancy in mind.

Although search volume is essential to choosing the right keywords, relevancy to your product is just as important. Some terms might have attractive volumes but may not actually fit the customer base for your specific product.

Because the majority of Amazon sales happen organically, our Amazon keyword tool can give you deep insights into which keywords and variations are most relevant to which products with the Viral Launch Priority Score. It allows you to easily compare terms, finding the most appropriate ones for your listing based on relevancy and search volume.


Finding the right keywords for your Amazon listings is vital to successfully selling on Amazon. But you can’t do it manually. Learn more by starting your free trial of Viral Launch to get access to our suite of keyword research tools.

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The Amazon PPC Ad Types: What They Offer and How To Manage Them

Creating a successful Amazon PPC campaign isn’t just a matter of spending money on some keywords and then hoping to build sales. The strategy, research, and structure of a campaign are what determines its success. And even if you’ve done some thorough preparation, not keeping an eye on how well it’s doing will be a recipe for failure. 

 Every business has a specific vision of what an effective PPC campaign is. It could increase organic rank, drive sales of a seasonal product, or be consistently profitable. However you define PPC success, knowing the full scope of what’s possible within each of Amazon’s advertising channels will help you devise the ideal campaign for your brand. The keywords you target, the spending thresholds you set, and the performance metrics you use are all crucial to building a strong campaign. 

 As you juggle these different tasks, Viral Launch’s PPC tool, Kinetic, can make managing your campaigns easier and help you achieve your Amazon advertising goals. The data it provides on your ads’ performance can ensure your PPC campaign is structured effectively, targeting the right keywords, and spending efficiently. 

 Kinetic also offers automated features that will help you save time by taking bidding adjustments off your to-do list. It doesn’t force predefined rules on your campaign automation or only provide limited data. Similar to Viral Launch’s other software tools, Kinetic gives you the customization, flexibility, and data to make your ideal Amazon PPC ad strategy a working reality.

Here we’ll cover the various Amazon advertising channels—Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Product Display ads—and how Kinetic can provide benefits to each kind of PPC campaign. 

Breaking Down the Amazon PPC Ads: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands & Product Display Ads

The goal of an Amazon ad is pretty simple: convince a consumer to purchase your product. Yet making that happen is both complicated and expensive, and Amazon provides sellers with three different advertising channels for increasing brand awareness and gaining sales opportunities. Whether you choose to use one or a combination of them, each one provides different avenues for reaching consumers and specific advantages.

Sponsored Products Ads 

The first thing you’ll likely see on a search results page is a Sponsored Products ad. They appear at the top of results, as well as alongside them and at the bottom of the page. They provide an excellent means of generating visibility and enticing people to check out your product. As the name implies, these are product-focused ads meant to increase sales. 

Sponsored Products ads feature your product’s photo, your title (or part of it), the average reviews, and your price. These components alone are enough to draw a consumer’s attention and give her enough information to know if the offering is worth pursuing. When it appears next to competitors with weaker reviews or higher prices, the ad can really stand out and steal some sales from those other brands. These ads primarily target consumers who are weighing different options and are ready to make a purchase. Brand awareness can be generated here as a bonus, but the primary objective is to drive sales. 

Where a Sponsored Products ad shows up relies on a variety of different factors. It isn’t just your keywords and your bids (although you still need to target the right keywords and offer a competitive bid). The impressions and clicks it earns also play a factor. The better your ad performs and the more sales you earn, the higher your ad placements will be.

Also, an increase in sales will also help boost your organic rank. Having greater visibility in organic search results will lead to receiving more impressions, views, and conversions. Our CEO Casey Gauss has often spoken about how sales and rank create a flywheel effect in which sales help increase organic rank, which helps boost sales, and the self-perpetuating pattern builds from there. 

Sponsored Brands Ads 

Being a recognizable brand means a great deal. Promoting your products is essential, but promoting your brand can help create a personal connection with consumers that paves the way to brand loyalty. 

While Sponsored Products ads will help with product promotion, Sponsored Brands advertisements will allow you to show the personality behind your brand. Previously known as Headline ads, these ads appear as a banner ad on a search results page (at the top, middle, or bottom). They include your logo, a headline, and three featured product ads, each of which link to their product pages. By clicking the ad, a consumer will be taken to your brand’s Sales page or a customized landing page that showcases your three products and some information about your business. 

Because of their size the information they convey, Sponsored Brands is an effective way to gain attention and establish your business as a market leader. This kind of presentation conveys the legitimacy of your brand and gives people a way of learning something about your brand. By telling a little about the story behind your business, you can motivate consumers to support your brand. These ads can also be used for seasonal campaigns. If your brand’s products go through sales spikes at certain times of year, running Sponsored Brands ads can start generating some attention to help ramp up your usual sales increases.

The target audience for these ads would be top-of-funnel consumers who are learning about the possible choices within a market. The goal is to plant a seed of awareness about your business and make a strong impression that can eventually lead to a sale when a consumer is ready to make a choice. 

Product Display Ads 

If you’re looking for some widespread exposure across a number of different placements, Product Display ads can make that happen. These ads appear not only on search results pages, but on product pages, the customer reviews page, and in Amazon’s follow-up emails to customers. So they cover a lot of ground and reach people at different stages of the sales process. 

Product Display ads are essentially a combination of Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads. They’re used to promote a specific product, similar to Sponsored Products, but they’re similar in size and appearance to a Sponsored Brands ad. A Product Display ad will showcase one item, along with a headline, the product photo, your review count, and price. Similar to a Sponsored Products as, the aim is to gain some visibility and drive some sales. 

Unlike either of these ad types, Product Display ads don’t target keywords. Instead, they target products and consumer interests. When targeting products, you focus on competitors’ products or related products within your main category. Interests refer to the categories and subcategories a consumer has searched within. The more specific your target is, the better. Rather than just targeting “Pet Supplies” for a dog leash, you could specifically target the subcategory of “Standard dog leash” or “Retractable dog leash.” By focusing on one of these detailed subcategories, you’ll have a better chance at connecting with your ideal customers.

How Kinetic Can Help

Each of these ad choices offers effective ways of getting your products in front of consumers, but they each have various challenges, which Kinetic can help you solve. By providing you with a complete overview of all your PPC campaigns, you’ll be able to verify what’s working and discover what isn’t so you can build on your successes and make improvements where necessary. 

Keyword Targeting

Knowing the right keywords to target is vital to your ads’ visibility and performance. Otherwise, you’re wasting your budget on keywords you can’t compete for or that aren’t relevant to your product. Using Kinetic, you’ll be able to accomplish the following:

  • Find which keywords are performing the best for you and capitalize on their results. 
  • Discover new keyword opportunities that previously missed and expand your campaign’s visibility. 
  • Create automated tasks around your new targets. These customized keyword-related rules can raise or lower your bids based on your ACoS, orders, and clicks. The control is in your hands.

Controlling Spending

Once you have the right keywords targeted, you’ll need to ensure you’re spending efficiently. You might have an ad that’s getting some good exposure, but if it’s eating up your budget, you’ll be reducing your profit margin. Kinetic can help you avoid those problems in the following ways:

  • Monitor and control your bids to maximize your budget.  
  • Create a strategy for lowering, raising, or maintaining your ACoS, depending on your campaign goals. 
  • Set thresholds based around a specified number of clicks or your break-even ACoS using Kinetic’s automated rules. 

Monitoring Performance

One of the big PPC misconceptions today is that once a seller has an Amazon ad campaign underway, the hard work is over and all that’s left to do is watch the sales roll in. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple and this kind of approach will only lead to wasted spending and little to no success. Kinetic gives you the ability to view your campaigns at a broad overview perspective as well as at a deeper detailed level:

  • View a list of all your products with snapshots of each of their campaigns. Unlike any other software tool, you’ll have an easily viewable presentation of your products’ data, including total sales, organic sales, and ad performance. 
  • Monitor the metrics for each of your campaigns, such as Sponsored ad rank and keyword performance. Without knowing where your ad is showing up, you won’t have a good handle on your ad’s success, and without seeing your keyword performance, you won’t know which keyword markets are the most valuable for your campaigns. 
  • Control your campaign spending, keep tabs on sales from ads, and make adjustments when needed
  • Filter data by any date range to view specific certain timeframes. Kinetic’s search term data feature also offers ranges of search term data that’s easier and less time-consuming to access than having to create a report within Amazon.
  • Benefit from Kinetic’s recommendations on the rules you set up for your campaigns. If you choose to manually run the rules yourself, rather than automating them, you’ll receive recommendations from Kinetic that will help you better monitor what’s working and what needs improvement. The automated option will enable Kinetic to carry out its own recommendations for you, saving you time and effort. Both options will help in monitoring your campaigns and pinpointing where to make adjustments.

Learn more about how Kinetic by Viral Launch can energize your PPC campaigns and connect with your ideal consumers!

Importance of Amazon Ads Placement Data & How to Use it

Good Amazon PPC decisions can’t happen without good data. Any opportunity to gather valuable data about your Amazon ads campaigns is an opportunity to grow your business.

So if you’re struggling to build a profitable PPC campaign, analyzing the right data will help you develop some effective solutions. Or if you’re hitting your PPC goals, your data will be a crucial resource in keeping that success going. You may even find that your ads are missing some growth potential you weren’t aware of.

Each Amazon ads placement—top of search, rest of search, or product pages—will deliver different amounts of traffic and could require different amounts of spending. The traffic you get on page 1 will be much different than on page 5. Understanding how your ad’s placement is paying off (literally) will help you know how well your campaigns are increasing your visibility.

Whether you’re keeping a close eye on your ad placement or unsure of how to start, Viral Launch’s software tool Kinetic will give you the data you need to monitor your performance. It provides a simplified and agile means of managing your Amazon ads campaigns, allowing you to make improvements or adjustments quickly. Whatever your PPC goals, Kinetic will help you pinpoint the most effective placements for your ads and create sales-driving campaigns for your brand.

Why Amazon Ad Placement Data Matters

When you’ve got a good ACoS, you might consider your PPC campaign a success and want to leave everything exactly as it is. Why fix what isn’t broken? All you need is some automation so you can set it and forget it.

The trouble is that what’s successful on Amazon now won’t deliver the same results a month, a week, or even a day from now. Taking a hands-off approach will inevitably lead to a loss in visibility and be a gift to your competitors. Monitoring, analyzing, and adjusting are all necessary tasks in a successful PPC campaign, and you’ll need to know which placements are giving you the best outcome and which keywords or ASINs are your best targets.

Know Which Placement Leads to the Best Results

After some effort, your Amazon ads are now finally appearing at the top of page one. You’ve taken a step up from the middle of search and expect to see a boost in visibility. As it turns out, you unexpectedly find that the middle of the page was better for your campaign, as it consumed less of your budget and led to a greater number of impressions.

Your ideal ad placement will be dictated by your budget and PPC goals, as well as the data you collect. You’ll need to examine your ACoS and click-through rates, and determine which placement will deliver the best performance. An ad at the top of search will increase your product’s visibility, but the cost per click (CPC) will be more expensive. With lower placements, you’ll drive a lesser amount of traffic, but the clicks will be less expensive. Without knowing what each ad placement can deliver, you’ll be missing opportunities to connect with customers and narrow down your best placement spot.

Know the Keywords or ASINs That Deliver the Best Performance

Keywords aren’t just important to your products’ organic ranking. They’re also vital to getting your ads in front of your target audience. Your Amazon ads placement data can convey which search terms you’re competing the best for. You can then focus on those that will deliver the best return while pausing those that might not be very effective.

Let’s say your ad is targeting three different search terms: 

  • Garlic press

  • Garlic press stainless steel

  • Garlic press and slicer in one

For “garlic press,” your Sponsored Products are showing up on the middle of page 5 and not getting many impressions. “Garlic press stainless steel” is giving you some visibility the middle of page 3, and “Garlic press and slicer in one” is the best of all on page 1. By knowing what’s getting the best performance, you can focus on maintaining that success and start creating plans to make improvements for campaigns that are struggling.

 In addition to Amazon ads placement data, other performance metrics will be crucial to growing the success of your campaigns, and Viral Launch’s Kinetic provides all of those metrics in an easily accessible format. This PPC software tool will allow you to gain insights into your campaigns to help you continue to meet your goals and pinpoint where any adjustments should be made.

Kinetic: Simplified and Efficient PPC Campaign Management

Your ad’s placement will tell you a lot about your campaign, but it’s up to you to unpack the data behind it. Our PPC tool, Kinetic, provides an efficient and in-depth way to evaluate your keywords, budget, structure and overall performance. By providing a full range of data no other tool provides, Kinetic will give you better control over your campaigns and strengthen their performance.

Sales, Spending & Placement Data

Knowing your best opportunities for growth should be an underlying goal for all your PPC campaigns. By telling you exactly where your ads are showing up, Kinetic can determine which placements are giving you the best performance.

You can also learn whether product pages or search results are giving you the most visibility. If product pages are best, you can devise a strategy for targeting competitors’ products with a more expensive price than yours. With your ad running next to them, you could potentially steal sales from those brands. By using Kinetic in combination with Viral Launch’s Competitor Intelligence, you can research your competitors’ products and locate some untapped opportunities for growth.

Kinetic also provides organic sales data, so you’ll be able to determine how your ads are helping boost your organic search rankings. The greater visibility your ads provide, the greater your sales will be, and an increase in sales will help improve your organic rank. Making improvements to your PPC campaigns will help increase your products’ visibility, and monitoring your ad placement data will be important to knowing where and how to make adjustments.

Manage and Maximize Your Bids and Budget

You can’t have a discussion about PPC management without talking about bids and budget. Keeping your spending as efficient as possible is an ongoing challenge, and Kinetic can help you tackle your budget challenges.

 Kinetic’s customized automated rules will enable you to create thresholds for each campaign based around ACoS, clicks, orders, and ad rank. This customization isn’t limited to a few predefined functions. The flexibility it provides is unique to PPC software and puts all the control in your hands.

You can set your bids to increase or decrease based on specified conditions, such as if your ACoS is less than your breakeven ACoS and the click rate is larger than a certain amount. Or you can pause keywords that aren’t performing over a certain target. You can also add bid modifiers to target top or bottom of search and make adjustments to improve or maintain your PPC campaigns.

 All of these automation features will help you reach your PPC goal, whether that’s a profitable campaign, a lower ACoS, increased organic rank, or all of the above. Kinetic gives you an endless amount of possibilities in the automation you can create to use your budget more efficiently and strengthen your ROI.

Monitor the Performance of Your Keywords

Targeting the right keywords is absolutely essential for your ad campaigns. Keyword research is an indispensable task and one that shouldn’t be thought of as something you only use at the beginning of a product launch. Making sure you’re targeting the right keywords for your products and ads should be an ongoing process.

 The data Kinetic provides will tell you how well your ads’ keywords are performing and their profitability. You’ll be able to make decisions on which keywords should be paused, set as negatives, or broken out into their own campaigns. Any keywords driving a large amount of sales or consuming the majority of your budget are good candidates for having their own campaigns. By breaking them out, you can then increase your visibility and conversions, and Kinetic can help you manage those new campaigns.

Kinetic also offers search term reports you can view, so you don’t have to rely completely on Seller Central. Unlike Seller Central, you can easily compare and flip between different date ranges within the tool, instead of having to download one report at a time. Whenever you need to compare your seasonal data to previous months or years, Kinetic is an ideal solution. The tool also enables you to more easily aggregate your campaign’s performance by search term, which is more complicated in Seller Central.

Improving and Refining Your Amazon PPC Campaigns

Making the right decisions about your PPC ads depends on your ability to evaluate your keywords, budget, and performance. It’s vital to know how many impressions, views, or conversions your ad receives at different placements, whether top of search, rest of search, or product pages. By analyzing your spending data, click-through rates, and impressions, you can have a clear idea of how well your ads are performing.

 Whatever challenges you may be facing with your PPC campaigns, Kinetic will help you develop customized and effective solutions. In addition to ad placement data, the tool provides quality data on keywords, campaign performance, spending, and Sponsored ad rank. Designed to make your PPC management more efficient, it will help you find weaknesses, develop improvements, and put them in action.

The team here at Viral Launch is committed to providing Amazon sellers of all sizes with the resources for attaining long-term success. Our expertise has been built on tens of thousands of product launches, and Kinetic’s sophisticated but easy-to-use capabilities will help your brand achieve their PPC goals and simplify the challenges of advertising on Amazon.

 

 

Improve Your Amazon PPC Bid Strategy & Campaigns

Landing an Amazon PPC ad at the top of page one of organic search results is no small accomplishment, and it’s the result of a series of smaller accomplishments. Targeting the right keyword, knowing the best placement, having a strong sales history, and making a winning bid are all essential to creating a successful Amazon PPC Bid Strategy.

And even after making those accomplishments, your work isn’t over. When it comes to bidding for Sponsored Products ads, you have to continually monitor your bids to ensure you’re not missing good opportunities or overspending for the conversions you’re getting.

Avoiding the PPC pitfalls that will drain your budget and lead to a weak performance depends on following the right bidding strategy. Navigating Amazon’s PPC ecosystem is both complicated and expensive, so It’s important to have a complete understanding of the bidding capabilities Amazon provides and how you can take advantage of them.

Amazon PPC Bid Strategy: Dynamic Bidding

Earlier this year, Amazon made news when it released three new ad bidding features that enable Amazon sellers to place bids on their Sponsored Products ad placements. These “dynamic” bidding capabilities take place in real time and will raise or lower your bids for you, based on a variety of factors, including your sales history and review count. These features help sellers compete in auctions where they’re likely to win or avoid spending budget where they’re not competitive.

The three options are as follows:

  • Dynamic bids – down only: Your bids will be decreased when Amazon determines your bid won’t likely win the auction. This is based on historical campaign data.
  • Dynamic bids – up and down: Amazon will raise or lower your bid, depending on the competitors’ bids and whether you have the likelihood of winning.
  • Fixed bids: Here your bid remains static without changing.

Making the best choice depends on your PPC goals. What you plan to achieve will guide your choice, such as if you’re looking to boost your sales or to run a profitable campaign.

Amazon also provides the Adjust Bids by Placement settings, which allow you to increase your bids even further depending on the placement. Top of search on page one and Product pages are the two offered settings, so you can enter a percentage, depending on how much you want to spend. When aiming for these specific placements, these adjustments can make your bids more competitive.

Once you’ve got a strategy in place, Viral Launch’s new PPC management tool Kinetic can help you gather more data than any other software can provide and strengthen your campaigns. Being successful on Amazon requires more than just offering a great product at a competitive price. PPC ads are essential to having a profitable business in the Amazon marketplace, and Kinetic will help simplify the complexities of this challenging but vital task.

How Kinetic Can Help Your Amazon PPC Bidding Challenges

Monitoring and adjusting your Amazon PPC bid strategy can be the most time-consuming part of your entire campaign. As an in-depth PPC management solution, Kinetic can simplify your monitoring activities, locate weaknesses, and help you make improvements. The tool provides an overview of how all your campaigns are performing and gives you an efficient means of controlling your PPC spending through its customized automation, saving you both time and budget.

Working with Amazon’s Bidding Strategies

Choosing the best strategy depends on your PPC goals and which stage your campaign is in. You also need to anticipate how competitive you’ll be in the auctions you’re bidding in. Doing some research will be a necessary step, and Kinetic will provide accurate, helpful data for structuring your ads. As your campaign grows and build some history, you’ll likely move from one Amazon bidding strategy to another.

Fixed 

We recommend starting a new campaign with Fixed since you don’t have any ad history built yet. Fixed bids are a good way to prevent spending money in auctions that you won’t likely win. This strategy will keep all your bids at the same amount.

Amazon recommends using this strategy as a way of increasing product awareness, rather than conversions. The goal here would be getting your brand and products in front of as many consumers as possible in order to start earning sales later on.

Down Only

Once you’ve begun developing some ad history, the Down Only option will help you start becoming more competitive. As the name implies, Amazon will only lower your bids in auctions where you aren’t likely to win. This is a good way to prevent spending money in auctions where you’re not competitive.

As your ads begin generating some performance data, Kinetic can tell you which keywords are delivering the best performance so you can start devoting more of your budget to them in order to build on those gains.

Up and Down

Once you’ve got some keywords driving a lot of conversions, this two-dimensional strategy is the best option. An Up and Down strategy should only be used if you’ve been in the market for at least a week and have built some ad history. If you use this for a new campaign, Amazon won’t have any basis for knowing if you’re able to convert for a particular keyword.

By letting Amazon increase or decrease your bids depending on the auction, you’ll be giving the keywords a greater chance to deliver. With this kind of strategy, you’ll need to plan to increase your spending, so you’ll come closer to, or actually reach, your spending threshold.

If Up and Down is working well, you can create an automated rule in Kinetic to increase your budget to maintain the success. You may find that your cost per click (CPC) will vary, with some clicks being more expensive than others. You’ll be getting slightly fewer clicks, but for high-converting keywords, and spending more than you were at earlier stages of your campaign, but gaining more sales.

Turning Non-delivering Keywords into Delivering Ones

Running an efficient campaign requires adding any non-delivering keywords as negatives. You don’t want to devote any time or budget to anything that isn’t working. Although adding under-performing keywords as negatives is a necessary task, Kinetic can help with determining what isn’t working and if the fault is in your spending, not the keyword itself.

If you verify that you’re targeting a keyword that’s relevant to your product, any problems are likely due to your bid or budget being too low. As an example, if you have a 50-keyword set with a $20 per day budget, that means you’re spending less than a dollar for each of those keywords. By increasing your budget, you can start seeing some delivery on those keywords and use your budget more efficiently.

Also keep in mind that how much you bid determines which auction Amazon will put you in.

Using Kinetic’s automation, if the impressions or clicks your ad is getting are less than a certain amount, you can increase your bids and participate in a more valuable auction. When that occurs, you’ll likely see some improved performance. Sometimes just increasing your bid, while staying within a certain range, can help an ad’s performance for a keyword or when trying to attain a certain placement.

Eliminating Overspending and Lowering Your ACoS

Increasing your spending isn’t always the right solution, and you might discover that you’re spending way too much for the impressions or views that your ad is getting.

Kinetic’s automated functions can help you control and improve any inefficient spending, such as any keyword that’s spending but not converting. If you’re working with a 50-keyword set, you may find that only 12 are converting. Based on Kinetic’s data, you can automate Kinetic to pause the other 38 keywords that aren’t converting and then determine whether they’re relevant to your product or if you need to adjust your price.

Controlling your ACoS is a typical challenge and if it’s too high, you’re paying too much per click or your conversion rate is too low. Let’s say you were targeting the first Sponsored Products ad position and seeing a low conversion rate there. The best solution would be to lower your bid to attain a lower ad position where you can pay less per click. Once you can achieve a relatively constant conversion rate, your ACoS will decrease, but the trade-off is that you’ll get less traffic at that position. This same kind of strategy can help when trying to create a profitable PPC campaign. The result will be a lower ad position, but one at a more profitable level that still drives enough traffic to earn a strong amount of conversions.

As another example, if bidding on a keyword is getting you to the first row of ads but with a high ACoS, you can set a rule to improve your spending. In Kinetic, you would create a rule that would decrease your keyword bid by 30 or 40% whenever your ACoS is greater than your breakeven ACoS and your click rate is greater than 20. Once this rule is in place, you can begin gathering data on its performance to see how well it’s working. When your ACoS drops, you can create a rule for maintaining that level of spend.

Reducing Your Monitoring Frequency

Although Kinetic isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of tool, it can free you up from checking your campaign’s spending, keyword performance, and placement throughout the day. Its automated rules can adjust or pause your spending based on the conditions you create, so you won’t be making manual adjustments in Seller Central.

If you usually monitor your campaigns on a weekly basis to see how certain adjustments have performed, Kinetic can provide all the data you need and enable you to download search term reports, rather than using Seller Central. However frequently you choose to monitor your campaign, Kinetic will help you optimize it with adjustments that will improve your visibility and conversion rates.

Learning Where You Can Best Compete

The keywords you target play a huge role in how successful your PPC ads are. Keeping a constant eye on the keywords your ads are targeting is one of the crucial tasks of monitoring your campaigns.

In the past, the usual Amazon PPC bid strategy was to bid for the top keywords in a product category. Since those were the main keywords, that was the most logical thing to do, but the outcome would be a low click-through rate and an even lower conversion rate. To add insult to injury, your organic ranking for that keyword would drop.

A smarter strategy is to discover which keywords you can best compete for, and Kinetic can help you verify your targets or find missing opportunities. By targeting the right keywords, you’ll be giving yourself the best chance at conversions and avoiding wasted spend on the wrong choices. You’ll then be able to achieve some visibility and sales for your products, and in turn help boost your organic rank.

Amazon’s algorithms are paying attention to every aspect of your PPC performance, so if you target keywords you can’t compete for, it will actually have a negative effect on your campaign. Instead, examine your data, find your best targets, and adjust your spending.

Streamline Your Bid Strategies, Strengthen Your PPC Campaigns

Having a huge budget at your disposal, as great as that might be, doesn’t automatically mean your PPC ads will be successful. It’s your overall PPC strategy, including your bidding decisions, keywords and placement targets, that will determine the success of your PPC campaign.

Whether you’re aiming to increase sales, boost brand awareness, or run a profitable campaign, Viral Launch’s Kinetic will help you achieve your PPC goals. Its automated features will give you greater control over your bidding tasks and help you use your budget more efficiently. You’ll also be able to quickly pinpoint weaknesses in your campaigns, make improvements, and increase your ads’ impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Amazon’s PPC advertising ecosystem is complicated, and PPC is a major challenge for any Amazon sellers, no matter the size of the business. Having a good Amazon PPC Bid Strategy is important to your success. Each of Viral Launch’s software tools can help your Amazon selling efforts, and as PPC becomes more important for business growth, Kinetic will be an indispensable asset in simplifying your advertising challenges. With this customizable tool, you can ensure your PPC campaigns are built on accurate data, an optimized structure, and competitive bidding strategies.

Click here learn more about how Kinetic can energize your PPC campaigns and connect with your ideal consumers.

Amazon PPC Advertising: The Essentials for Building Your Ad Campaign

The average Amazon consumer probably doesn’t know much about Amazon PPC advertising, but the ads themselves will be a familiar sight.

The average Amazon consumer probably doesn’t know much about Amazon PPC advertising, but the ads themselves will be a familiar sight. When scrolling through search results and viewing product pages, a series of product ads is always competing for the buyer’s attention

Every Amazon seller wants their products to be found as easily as possible, and Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) ads are one of the central tactics in making this happen. Optimizing a product listing is crucial to having a strong ranking, yet it requires much more than that to be competitive, and PPC will play a huge role in getting products in front of their intended audience. Knowing how to start an Amazon PPC advertising campaign can seem intimidating, but understanding the basics is the first step in learning how to take advantage of its inherent sales possibilities. Here we’ll provide an overview of Amazon PPC advertising and the advantages it can provide for increasing product exposure and sales.

Learning the PPC Facts

Let’s start with some fundamentals. The advertisements that appear on Amazon’s search results pages and on product pages are what Amazon refers to as Sponsored Products ads. “Sponsored” refers to the fact that these ads are paid for by the product’s seller.

 The ads appear based around keywords entered during a product search. As a seller, you’ll bid for a keyword related to your product, such as “thank you cards.” Whenever someone searches for that keyword, the amount of your bid will determine the position of your ad. If you have the highest bid, you’ll win the first position. The second-highest would claim the second spot, and so on. You don’t actually pay for the bid until a consumer clicks the ad to view the product page, which is why these ads are known as pay-per-click.

Another important topic is CPC or cost per click. This cost reflects the efficiency of your ad spending based on how many consumers clicked your ad. If you spent $80 on an ad, and 40 people clicked the ad, your CPC would be $2. The significance of CPC is that it indicates how well your ad is performing. To differentiate, PPC is the overall advertising plan, whereas CPC is the performance gauge of your plan. Note that Amazon PPC ads are available only to sellers on the Professional plan.

What You Can Gain from PPC

Visibility

Sponsored ads enable a great means of exposure with your target audience. PPC ads draw attention to your product, providing a photo, price, and title (or the first part of it). It also shows if you’re a Prime member, when the consumer will receive it, and your review rating. These basics all form the hook that will intrigue someone to click the ad to learn more. Consumers can then compare your offering with those of your competitors and become familiar with your brand.

Sales

Greater visibility leads directly to greater potential for sales. In some cases, sponsored ads have enabled no-name businesses to steal sales away from larger, more established brands. By doing so, a smaller business can build enough sales to compete with those large brands and take market share away from them.

Performance Monitoring

Within Amazon’s Seller Central, you can monitor your Sponsored Products performance and make adjustments depending on how well you’re doing. You can reduce or increase your bids on the keywords you’re ranking for or choose to stop bidding on keywords that aren’t going well. All this allows you to use your ad budget wisely and fine-tune your campaign.

Keyword Categories

Not everyone searches for products using the exact same keywords. Giving your ads the biggest potential for exposure requires connecting your ads with the different possibilities of search terms. Keywords are categorized in three different groups:

  • Exact: Just as it sounds, this would consist of an exact match of a keyword, such as

    “thank you cards.” In this category, your ads would only appear for searches for this exact match.

  • Phrase: This category would be a step beyond exact match but include the phrase itself in the
    same order as exact match. Many different derivations may exist, but the keywords must appear
    in the right order. Here are some phrase match examples:

    • Thank you cards with envelopes
    • Thank you cards baby shower
    • Thank you cards wedding

  • Broad: This category provides the broadest potential for your ads to appear. Keywords can
    appear out of order and include modifiers. Examples would be

    • Card thank you funny
    • Gift cards thank you
    • Cards thank you religious

By using a combination of all three categories, your ads can appear in front a wide array of consumers and increase your chances of clicks and conversions.

Using Automatic and Manual Campaigns

As you start your campaign, you have a couple of different campaign options when it comes to targeting keywords. You can either take a manual approach and choose which keywords you want your ads to target, or you can allow Amazon to do the targeting for you automatically, based on what it considers the best keywords to be for your product.

 Automatic is the best place to start and will enable you to compete in the auctions that make sense for your product. When using an automatic campaign, you’ll set your budget limits and Amazon handles the rest. After you’ve begun, Amazon will send you a report breaking down your performance, listing your keywords, clicks, and conversions. You can determine how frequently you’d like to receive the reports, which can be generated every 12 hours.

A manual campaign will put all the control in your hands, but you’ll need to do your research before choosing your keywords. It’s best to use a manual approach after you’ve had an automatic campaign under way and now you want to target specific keywords that you’re ranking well for. You’ll also be able to bid for exact, phrase, and broad matches, and you’ll be able to set your bids depending on your budget and performance.

Weeding Out Negative Keywords

As your campaigns grow and certain keywords are performing well, you can start eliminating those keywords that are no longer relevant or aren’t leading to conversions. Amazon’s algorithms will monitor any keywords that you’re bidding for that aren’t generating clicks, and your organic rankings will consequently suffer. Removing those poorly performing keywords will help your spending be as efficient as possible and help you focus on the keywords you can compete well for.

 Also, when it comes to those keywords you’re converting well for, you can devote an entire campaign to that specific keyword. In order to do so, you’ll need to remove that keyword from an existing campaign by making it a negative one. You’ll then create a manual campaign devoted to that keyword.

Putting Your PPC Campaign in Action

Now that you have an understanding of what PPC can help you achieve, you’re likely already thinking about how you can put it to use in your Amazon selling endeavors. In addition to being something any seller should put into practice, PPC can have distinct advantages when launching a new product or for getting seasonable products some attention during specific times of year. Taking advantage of the advertising channels that Amazon provides is crucial for giving your products some valuable exposure and a reliable means of increasing your chances for sales.

 As you get started learning your way around Amazon PPC advertising and get some hands-on experience, the team here at Viral Launch can answer questions and provide help when needed. Our Amazon PPC expertise and insights have been built on years of launching thousands of products. We’ve helped new brands establish themselves in the Amazon marketplace by using our sales and rank strategies to lay the groundwork for long-term success.

Are you interested in putting some of this strategy to work for you? Start your free trial of Kinetic, or learn more about how Kinetic, our Amazon PPC tool,  helps sellers automate, manage, and understand their Amazon PPC.

February Feature Updates With Lasting Impacts for Your Business

Imagine signing into a single platform that fully equips you to build a successful e-commerce brand through innovative solutions and data-driven automation. This is our mission here at Viral Launch, and we work tirelessly towards making this a reality for you.

Some people may call our team “obsessive.” But hey, we’ll take it as a compliment. We’re obsessive about data. Obsessive about innovating. Obsessive about driving real results for your brand. And because we are so invested in truly driving success for our customers, we want our tools to be as effective and user-friendly as possible. To achieve this, we release product improvements and bug fixes every single day.

Most recently, we made a few game-changing updates to our newest tool, Competitor Intelligence, along with pushing a few other notable improvements to our other seller software.

8 Notable Updates to the Viral Launch Software Suite in February

1. BSR Added to Rank Trend Graphs

Competitor Intelligence, Keyword Manager

Have you ever wondered which keywords are driving sales for you or your competitors? With this update, you can view the correlation between BSR and keyword rank, which gives you insight into how heavily the product’s sales depend on that specific keyword’s ranking. If the historical BSR trend closely resembles that keyword’s rank trend, you can conclude that an important portion of sales are being driven through that keyword.

For example, let’s say you sell fish oil. Looking at your product’s historical data in Keyword Manager, you see that your organic keyword rank dropped significantly for the keyword “burpless fish oil,” but your BSR remained relatively consistent. Here, you can infer that not many sales were being driven through that keyword. But if your keyword rank dropped for “fish oil,” and your BSR dropped along with it, you know that “fish oil” is an important sales-driving keyword for you. The more similar the trends, the more your sales depend on that specific keyword. This same method can be applied to competitor ASINs in Competitor Intelligence.

Close correlation
No substantial correlation

To find which keywords are driving sales for your products or competing products:

  1. Toggle on “track” in Keyword Manager or Competitor Intelligence for keywords you’re interested in
  2. Click the blue “Org. Rank” or “Spons. Rank”
  3. Toggle on BSR

2. ‘Your Keyword Rank’ Comparisons to Your Competitor’s Rank

Competitor Intelligence

Tracking your competitor’s keyword rank is a great way to understand their strategy and revenue-driving keywords. This update allows you to take it one step further by viewing your organic keyword rank side-by-side in a brand new column called “Your Rank.” This way, you can visualize which keywords your competitor is out-ranking you on to take action.

3. CPC Suggested Bid Enhancements for Greater Accuracy

Keyword Manager and Competitor Intelligence

Did you know that Amazon may suggest a different advertising bid for your product vs. a very similar product? Your suggested CPC bid is dependent upon a number of factors (basically, Amazon is going to prioritize products that convert over those that do not). For this reason, we typically show a generic suggested CPC bid, or one that is not specific to any individual product. However, with a recent update to Keyword Manager, you will now see your product’s suggested CPC bid, tailored to your specific ASIN directly from Amazon. Plus, if you have linked your product in Competitor Intelligence, you will also see this enhanced, tailored suggested CPC bid. Three cheers for increased accuracy! 🤓

4. Real Sales Data instead of Estimates for Your Linked Products

Competitor Intelligence

In Competitor Intelligence, you can view your ASIN and a competitor’s ASIN side-by-side through linking your product. This allows you to compare and contrast your organic keyword rank, price, units sold, review rate, and more. With this update, instead of seeing sales estimates for your product, you will now see your real sales data pulled from MWS access for your units sold, revenue, and net profit, which allows you to more confidently measure your success and strategize for the future.

5. Faster Keyword Load Times

Competitor Intelligence

When plugging in a competitor’s ASIN to get a list of their relevant keywords, you previously had to wait for all results to load before getting started with your competitor keyword research. We’ve now optimized performance so that you can start researching right away while results come in as loaded.

6. Adding Keywords to Your Bank in Bulk

Competitor Intelligence

You can track other brand’s ASINs in Competitor Intelligence, but to track your own ASINs, you’ll want to use Listing Analyzer. As you’re completing your competitive research in CI, you’ll come across keywords that you may be interested in tracking for your own products. In the past, you could add competitor keywords one-by-one to your Keyword Manager bank in order to track them for yourself. But with this update, you can now select multiple competitor keywords and add them to your product’s bank all at once!

7. ASIN Tracking from Your Competing and Complementary Products

Listing Analyzer

Amazon recently released new targeting options for Sponsored Product campaigns. The Product Targeting feature allows you to choose specific products to target placements for your sponsored ads, which changes the way you manage your campaigns and helps shoppers find your products on detail pages. In January, we added a Competing and Complementary Products tab to Listing Analyzer. By understanding your listing, we’ll give you a list of suggested products for you to target where you may convert well. And recently, we added the ability for you to easily track these suggested products in Competitor Intelligence. To utilize this update, simply click the three “more options” dots next to the product, and click Track in Competitor Intelligence.

8. Tutorial Videos Added to Better Understand the Tools

Competitor Intelligence

Because there are so many features and capabilities in our 7 seller tools, it can be overwhelming at times. Each feature is thoughtfully integrated, and by fully understanding each tool, you can harness the power of the entire suite to have massive impacts on your bottom line. Of course, our goal is to equip you with the data and insights you need. But beyond that, we want to enable you to utilize the full functionality of each and every tool. So, we’ve added additional tutorial videos to Competitor Intelligence, and we will continue adding how-to’s and walkthroughs on the Viral Launch YouTube channel.

Two bonus enhancements to improve your Viral Launch experience:

  • We now auto-refresh keyword analysis when you track an ASIN with data more than seven days old in Competitor Intelligence
  • We pushed an update to your tracked keyword quota in Competitor Intelligence and Listing Analyzer; we now deduct per unique keyword across all of your products to ensure you’re getting everything you pay for.

Pro Tips: Unlocking the Full Value of Your Subscription

Most people understand the basics of what is available inside of each Viral Launch tool. But for those that truly understand the deep-rooted capabilities, the impact to their business is absolutely game-changing. For example, you may know that Competitor Intelligence allows you to track a competitor’s keyword rank, but did you know it can also be used as a powerful hijacker monitoring tool for your own product?

Your subscription is a treasure chest that you’ve already uncovered; we want to help you unlock the value inside. To get the most out of your Viral Launch subscription, here are three Pro Tips.

  • Hijacker Monitoring: Plug in your own product ASIN to Competitor Intelligence, head to Manage Notifications, and turn on Buy Box Owner Change alerts. And wa-lah, you’ve just set up hijacker monitoring! You’ll get an email immediately if/when another seller takes the buy box from you.
  • Monitor Your Competitor’s Product Strategy: To stay in the loop on strategic changes your top competition is making to their product offering, head to Competitor Intelligence and turn on product notifications. You can specify when you want to receive an email notification about changes to their Best Seller Rank, sales quantity, review quantity and rating, price, and buy box ownership. If you notice a strategic and successful pattern, you can implement a similar strategy for your own product.
  • Product Targeting Suggestions: We mentioned this briefly, but the Competing and Complementary Products tab in Listing Analyzer makes it quick and easy to get started with product targeting, saving you time by cutting down on manual research so you can make smart decisions quickly. Using this feature, you can discover complementary products frequently bought together, identify competitor products in your keyword markets, and sort/filter by products with high sales to maximize your ad’s exposure.

“No excuses. No explanation. You don’t win on emotion. You win on execution.” -Tony Dungy

What is the biggest difference between you and the brands sitting atop page one for your main keywords? Time in the market? Budget? Expertise?

There will always be a reason not to push harder for your brand’s success. The competition is too big. They’re too good. They’re too far ahead. But you can compete, even with your toughest competitors. You just need a competitive advantage that they won’t see coming.

Here at Viral Launch, our team of around 70 go-getters work hard every day – innovating, analyzing, building – to equip you with the data, insights, and automation you need to rise to the top of your market and then replicate the process over and over again. These updates are more than just tool improvements; they’re our way of contributing to your brand’s success – because at the end of the day, your success is our success.

Check out all of the new capabilities in your Viral Launchpad, and let us know what you think! We thrive on your feedback, and the best feature updates are ones that are sourced from sellers like you.

See the New Features Live


PPC Campaign Structure: Pushing Units and Making Bank

PPC Campaign Structure: Pushing Units and Making Bank

In today’s episode, Casey Gauss and Viral Launch PPC aficionado Brock Brothers discuss how to set up and manage efficient PPC campaigns. From budget allocation to breakout campaigns, Casey and Brock share best practices for driving sales and ranking for both new and old products on Amazon.      

Have a question about how our team can manage your PPC campaigns? Email solutions@viral-launch.com with your name, phone number, and at least 1 ASIN, subject line: “FTD”.  A qualifying note – this program is meant for sellers with a portfolio of $50,000 in revenue per month across their entire product offering.   

Listen on iTunes 

Listen on Stitcher

Introducing Listing Analyzer and Keyword Manager | New Space-Age Technology by Viral Launch

Viral Launch Adds 2 New Space-Age Tools to Software Suite

As an Amazon seller, data is your secret weapon. Arming yourself with the right data and knowing what to do with it can make all the difference between success and failure. But between choosing and tracking keywords, monitoring the health of your listing, running ads and more, you’ve got a lot to keep track of.

That’s why we’ve spent the last nine months growing our team and working in the lab to build innovative space-age tools that’ll revolutionize the way you make sense of all that data. Because from Day 1, our goal has always been to help you make the right decisions for your Amazon business.

So, without further ado, we’re now proud to announce our two newest tools: Listing Analyzer and Keyword Manager. As of November 13, 2018, these tools are now seamlessly integrated within the Viral Launch platform and can be accessed through a Pro Plan.

The launch of Listing Analyzer and Keyword Manager also signifies the start of a new era for Viral Launch as we have plans to release more groundbreaking tools, made just for Amazon sellers like you, in the upcoming months.

Ready to learn more about how you can use Listing Analyzer and Keyword Manager to optimize your listing and monitor your success? Here’s the rundown on Viral Launch’s newest tools.

Listing Analyzer: Discover Innovative and Impactful Improvements

Your listing is comprised of several main components. You’ve got your title, bullet points, product description, backend search terms and photos all working in tandem to turn browsers into buyers. The keywords you use and the amount of reviews you’ve gathered can make all the difference between a successful product and a dud.

But with all of these moving parts, how do you identify what’s working and what’s not? That’s where Listing Analyzer comes in.

By using information directly from your listing, you’re able to analyze in real time how your listing fares in all critical aspects compared to top competitors in your product market. As you can see in the image below, Listing Analyzer provides you with a Competition Analysis, Review Evaluation, Photo Analysis, Listing Text Analysis, and a list of the top keywords. And for those of you who miss school and getting graded for your work, you’ll also receive an overall Analysis Score on a 1-100 scale so you can see how your listing is doing as a whole.

Speaking of keywords, one of Listing Analyzer’s most impressive features is its use of our groundbreaking ARCS™ technology, which stands for ASIN Relevance and Conformity Semantics.

By using ARCS™, Listing Analyzer is able to programmatically — with no human interaction — look at an ASIN and determine what its main keywords are. So that means you can forget about Reverse ASIN Lookups and complicated keyword spreadsheets. Listing Analyzer is the only tool in the galaxy that allows you to input an ASIN and get back all of that specific product’s most important keywords. You’re not only seeing what the product is indexed for, but you’re seeing exactly what your product should be indexing and ranking for, all without lifting a finger. Learn more about our revolutionary ARCS™ technology here.

By using the data from Listing Analyzer, you’ll learn the immediate, actionable steps you can take to make your listing as powerful as possible. And with seamless integration to Keyword Manager and Listing Builder, you can use your product’s main keywords, identified by ARCS™, to both track your keywords and easily integrate them into your listing’s copy.

Listing Analyzer Key Features

Keyword Discovery

Competitive Analysis

  • Average Competitor Statistics
  • Price Comparison
  • Monthly Sales Comparison
  • Review Evaluation

Content Evaluation

  • Listing Optimization Score
  • Photo Set Analysis
  • Search Volume Measurement
  • Character Count Insights

Keyword Manager: Your Most Important Keyword Analytics All in One Place

Depending on what type of product you sell, you’ve likely got hundreds of keywords to keep track of. Are you indexed correctly? Where are you ranking for the top keywords? In what position are your sponsored ads showing up? And if you sell multiple products, the number of keywords you’re tracking becomes exponentially greater.

Keyword Manager, our second new tool, is here to help. This tool will help you understand your most important keyword analytics all in one simple-to-use dashboard. As you can see below, you can check in real time where you have Amazon’s Choice badges, whether you’re indexed or not, your keyword rank position (with trend graphs), where your sponsored ads are ranking, and much more.

You can then easily curate your product’s keyword bank to include keywords you’d like to monitor. Add, remove, edit and track thousands of keywords to ensure you’ve got all your bases covered.

Keyword Manager Key Features

Advanced Keyword Insights

  • Index Checker
  • Organic and Ad Rank Tracker
  • Real Suggested Ad Bids

Intuitive Keyword Management

  • Track Thousands of Keywords
  • Keyword Bank
  • Integration with Other Tools
  • Organized Analytics

BONUS: Listing Builder Gets Some Love

Are two brand new tools not enough for you? Yeah, us neither. In addition to adding Listing Analyzer and Keyword Manger into the Viral Launch platform, we’ve also made some updates to Listing Builder that we’re sure you’re going to love.

If you’re not up to speed on the aptly named Listing Builder, this tool helps you write a listing in a more streamlined and effortless manner. Import your full list of keywords and sort them by volume, priority or opportunity. Keywords are automatically crossed off your list as you use them, allowing you to easily see and keep track of what you’ve used and what you still need to include. Listing Builder tracks your used and total search volume and gives you an Optimization Score based on the quality of your listing’s SEO.

Already have a live listing? You can also enter your product’s ASIN to import your existing listing directly into Listing Builder and immediately see your Optimization Score.

Listing Builder now has a couple of news ways to get started writing a listing. As you can see below, you can enter a keyword, select recent or pinned keyword searches, and search through your bank of products all from a blank Listing Builder template.

NOTE: Choosing the “enter a keyword” option pulls up all related keywords so you can hop right in and start writing. You can still manually filter out any keywords you want by choosing the “trash can” icon within the keyword list.

Listing Builder is also seamlessly integrated within our two newest tools. Let’s say you’ve uploaded your current listing into Listing Analyzer and you realize you need to make some changes. All you have to do is choose “Edit in Listing Builder” and all of your data will be taken to Listing Builder so you can continue to make changes.

And in similar fashion, if you’re tracking your keywords within Keyword Manager, you’re able to immediately export that list into Listing Builder.

Try Out the Tools for Yourself

If you love data as much as we do, then these two new tools (well… two and a half new tools) are perfect for you. Ready to take them for a spin and dominate on Amazon? Head on over to the Viral Launch dashboard to check them out for free.

Listing Analyzer and Keyword Manager are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s coming next from Viral Launch. These are the first of several new game-changing tools set to be released in the near future. All of our new tools will help usher in the next phase of Viral Launch and give you great insights for selling on Amazon in general. You don’t want to miss what we’ve got planned!

To stay up to date with what we’re cooking up, we encourage you to subscribe to our blog, check out our Youtube channel and listen to our podcast Follow the Data. Not subscribed to our Viral Launch Platform yet? No worries! Check out this link to get started with a free trial!

6 Best Amazon FBA Tools and Apps

When it comes to selling on Amazon, there’s always an abundance of items on the to-do list. As many brands are made up of just one person or a small team, there’s a lot to keep track of from picking a product and managing inventory to creating a listing and advertising… and everything in between. So how do you keep track of everything? Luckily, there’s an Amazon web app or tool for nearly every step of the selling process.

Here’s a list – in no particular order – of some of the best paid and free Amazon FBA tools and web apps designed to help you take your e-commerce business to the next level.  

1.Take your Business On-the-Go with the Amazon Seller App

Before we get started, we should first mention one smartphone app every seller should have.

This might be pretty obvious for more seasoned sellers, but it’s definitely an important one. This is essentially Amazon giving sellers a free tool to help make their selling experience a whole lot easier and organized even when you’re on the go. You’d be crazy not to take advantage of it, right?

  • What it does: In short – a lot. This is essentially Seller Central in your pocket. With this app, you can analyze sales, quickly make pricing changes, view fees, create listings, upload photos, manage orders, respond to messages and much, much more.
  • Why we love it: For starters, we love it because it’s free. It’s also great because it has many of the major features and functionality of Seller Central available to you at any time. With this app, you’ll be able to manage your business from just about anywhere.
  • How to get it: This app is available for free in the Apple or Android app stores.

Ok, now that we’ve covered the Amazon Seller app, lets get back to the best third-party web-based apps and tools for sellers!

2. Take the ‘Ew’ Out of Reviews with Feedback Genius

Amazon reviews are a touchy subject to say the least. That’s why finding any tool that helps sellers manage and gather reviews within Amazon’s terms of service is like coming across an oasis in the middle of the Sahara. One of the most popular review apps is Feedback Genius from Seller Labs.

  • What it does: Reviews serve as social proof on Amazon, and they’ve got a major impact on clicks and conversions. Therefore, reviews are extremely important, and sellers must have a solid review-gathering game plan. Feedback Genius is a powerful Amazon FBA tool to help sellers gather and manage reviews as well as communicate with buyers through automation and helpful notifications.
  • Why we love it: Feedback Genius is great because it takes a lot of the legwork out of review aggregation and management. This app allows sellers to automate the bulk of their messaging to buyers and set up notifications so you never miss a review or feedback.
  • How to get it: Visit the Seller Labs website and create an account. New users can also try out a 30-day free trial!

3. Track Inventory and Run Ad Campaigns with Teikametrics

Making sure you’re on top of your inventory and successfully managing your advertising campaigns are extremely important aspects of selling on Amazon. Knowing how much product you have left and when to restock helps you to maximize profits and maintain ranking. And getting in front of shoppers through sponsored ads expands your sales potential. Luckily, there’s an FBA-focused tool out there that can help you keep track of inventory and advertise your products called Teikametrics.

  • What it does: This tool helps Amazon sellers create and follow smart inventory systems and sponsored ad campaigns. Manage your investments, track replenishment, and find your true profitability with Teikametrics’ FBA platform. You can also automate your sponsored ad campaigns to increase profitability. It’s all in one place.
  • Why we love it: Teikametrics is great because it’s designed with the FBA seller in mind. You get help managing inventory to reduce stock-outs while also learning valuable strategies to improve sales velocity and ranking. And when it comes to PPC, Teikametrics’ automated bidding allows you to get the best placement for max profitability without lifting a finger.
  • How to get it: Visit the Teikametrics website to create an account and get started.

4. Utilize Viral Launch’s Suite of Tools to Launch your Business into the Stratosphere

Here at Viral Launch, our mission is to provide sellers with the best information and tools out there for their selling journey – whether it’s from us or not. So with that being said, please forgive us for this shameless plug. Our Viral Launchpad (see what we did there) is based around 4 main tools:

  • Product Discovery: Our product finding tool allows you to find individual products that meet your criteria, review initial keywords, discover successful brands, and search subcategories for up-and-coming products. It also has advanced filters allowing you to customize your research process to get personalized results.
  • Market Intelligence: Once you’ve used Product Discovery to find a few products you’re interested in, it’s time to use Market Intelligence to verify your choices. This tool lets you verify demand for products by showing you estimated sales numbers, keyword search volume, trends, market conditions and much more.
  • Keyword Research: Like we mentioned earlier, finding the right keywords to include in your listing is huge. Our tool allows you to search a general keyword associated with your product and then presents you with a list of other possible keywords. Along with the keyword list, you’ll also get data like Search Volumes, Priority Score, Relevancy Score, Opportunity Score, Trends and more.
  • Launches: Also known as giveaways, launches are a great way to help move your product up in keyword ranking. At Viral Launch, our clients work with one of our Amazon Seller Coaches to target a major keyword for their product with a lot of search volume. Then, we determine what number of units to give away at a discounted price and for how long. Amazon recognizes these sales which in turn moves the product up in rankings for the major keywords, getting it in front of the eyes of more shoppers.

5. Own Your Taxes with Avalara

Is there anything more fun than doing your taxes? Oh, wait, there is? That’s right, unless you’re a CPA or an Excel whiz, taxes are tedious at best and massively confusing at worse. As an FBA seller, taxes can get even more confusing as changing legislation makes things increasingly difficult. Not to fear, Avalara is here with tax tools designed specifically for the needs of Amazon sellers.

  • What it does: Among other tax solutions, Avalara software automates sales tax compliance. Amazon sellers can easily understand how much they owe in each state that they have nexus. Avalara can even prepare and file your returns according to a filing calendar. It’s like having your very own accountant on your payroll!
  • Why we love it: Avalara provides real-time rate calculation and automatic return filing. No more manually entering data and other tax information… with Avalara’s sales tax engine, the right rates and rules will be applied every time!
  • How to get it: It’s simple, visit the Avalara website, sign up and get started!

6. Make Accounting Easy with Quickbooks

Whether you’re a solo Amazon seller or part of a small team, there’s a lot to keep track of. From expenses to taxes and everything else, that’s a lot of work to put on the shoulders of one, or in some cases, a few people. But with Quickbooks Online, you can keep track of all the important aspects of your business all in one place.

  • What it does: It might be better ask what Quickbooks Online doesn’t do. Sellers love this tool because of the wide range of services it offers. With Quickbooks Online, you can keep organized books with everything in one place. Automatically import and categorize your transactions, and you can even share your books with your accountant for seamless collaboration. This way, when tax time rolls around, you’re set up for a painless experience.
  • Why we love it: To be successful in any business, you need to know how much cash you’ve got on hand and how much cash you’re spending. Quickbooks Online allows you to see in real time how much money you’re making and spending… all in one place.
  • How to get it: Visit the Quickbooks website and sign up for the plan that best fits you and your business! There’s also an option for a free 30-day trial. If you’re having trouble setting up Quickbooks for your Amazon FBA business, get help from the pros. Find a bookkeeper like CapForge Bookkeeping Pros, who specializes in FBA, and they can help you set up your books correctly. After a free consultation, you’ll understand how CapForge can simplify your Quickbooks for peace of mind.

 

Bonus Round: International Sellers

7. Take Your Business Worldwide with WorldFirst

One of the main reasons Amazon provides sellers such a massive opportunity is because of the sheer size of their user base. Millions of shoppers from around the world are browsing Amazon every single day. But with different rules and regulations in each overseas economy, selling worldwide can be tricky. With the help of WorldFirst, you can build your business overseas and easily bring your money back home.

  • What it does: Amazon requires you to open a bank account in any country where you sell products, which can cause logistical headaches and great confusion. WorldFirst allows you to set up Amazon receiving bank accounts in overseas marketplaces like USD, JPY, CNY, GBP, EUR and CAD.
  • Why we love it: One of the best things about WorldFirst is that it’s extremely cost effective. For starters, it’s free to open an account which makes it easy to get started. There are also no fees for receiving money and no monthly charges.
  • How to get it: All you have to do is visit the WorldFirst website and sign up for an account.

Combine Amazon FBA Tools and Web Apps with Hard Work and Dedication

While the Amazon FBA tools and apps listed in this guide are great resources, they aren’t the end-all-be-all for whether or not you’ll be successful on Amazon. By that, we mean that merely signing up or using these tools won’t ensure success. It’s also completely possible these or other popular tools just aren’t right for you and your business – and that’s fine!

The best way to maximize your chances of successfully of being a successful seller is to combine Amazon FBA tools like these with hard work and plenty of research. It’s also important to make sure you stay up to date on any changes that may be taking place within the Amazon marketplace.

The great thing is a lot of this information can be easily found online, it just takes some effort on your part to find them. Like we mentioned above, Viral Launch hopes to be your source for information about all things Amazon. We encourage you to subscribe to our blog, check out our Youtube channel or listen to our podcast Follow the Data.

12 Common Mistakes to Avoid as an Amazon FBA Seller

When starting your Amazon FBA business you’re taking a risk. One false move could cost you precious time and money or worse. A mistake when looking for what to sell on Amazon FBA could send your business crashing down before it even begins. The Amazon ecosystem can be confusing to navigate, but by arming yourself with plenty of information, you can maximize your chances for success.

So if you’re a newer Amazon FBA seller, you’re in luck. We’ve compiled a list of the most common mistakes to avoid when starting your FBA journey. Most of these are centered on the Private Label selling experience since over half of Amazon FBA sellers have one or more Private Label products.

#1 – Following the wrong resources

It’s extremely easy—maybe a little too easy—to find courses, gurus or service providers that give out or sell lists of the “best products to sell on Amazon.” If you see someone selling or giving out “hot product ideas,” run away.

There’s a huge market for courses, gurus, and consulting services centered around the Amazon FBA seller journey. And it’s not hard to see why. Amazon can be confusing, to say the least, and people want to be told how to be successful. The problem is, when everyone takes the same advice, especially when it comes to products, it can lead to oversaturated markets. That means it can be exceptionally hard to generate visibility and drive sales. A market can be great, but if a few hundred sellers all source that same product, the supply can overtake the demand, leaving you with high competition and a bunch of inventory that’s too hard to sell.

#2 – Following trend markets

Just like you ran from the gurus and best product lists, do the same for trendy markets. Chasing trends can be extremely risky, especially as a newer seller. They’re only really profitable for those who are really, really early to the party.

For an example of this, look no further than 2017’s fidget spinner:

In late 2017, the fidget spinner made some early sellers a lot of money. But as more people hopped on the bandwagon, demand crashed, and a lot of money was lost. Think of it this way, if a product is trending on social media or TV, you’re probably too late to the party. Even if a market looks amazing, with tons of sellers moving thousands of units with low review quantities, you probably won’t have enough time to capitalize on it. On the short end, it’s going to take you two months to get your product to the market. And by that time, public hype will have started to die down.

If you do hop into a market that quickly becomes saturated, many sellers find themselves in pricing wars with their competitors, limiting their profit margins. This could lead you to sell below cost and lose money.

The people that profit from a trend market either get extremely lucky with timing or they have a low cost (meaning they are a manufacturer) or a ton of capital to pour into a product to drive and hold ranking. Everyone else will likely end up taking a financial hit.

#3 – Not thoroughly researching restrictions/barriers for your desired market

There are quite a few categories on Amazon that have a required approval process to begin selling. For these categories, you may need to submit formal documentation and invoicing. You may also have to pay an upfront fee to be permitted to sell in the category. This can be disastrous for new sellers hoping to hop into a category quickly and start selling. Make sure you have taken the time to understand categories that require this upfront work by checking out Amazon’s approval process. Additionally, there are also specific products that have different restrictive barriers.

#4 – Sourcing low-quality products

If you are planning on selling a private label product, make sure it’s high quality. Sourcing a low-quality product can doom your Amazon venture from the start. Reviews are extremely hard to generate on Amazon, and a few negative reviews early on can sink a listing in a flash. Take the time to order samples and analyze durability, functionality, and overall quality to address any concerns that could drive complaints from buyers. Also, take the time to read through negative reviews from your competition and see if there are any issues that you can improve on. You may even want to purchase a few of your competitor’s products to compare to your samples as a quality check.

#5 – Sourcing an expensive product (for that market)

Another thing to be aware of is all the hidden costs of starting a private label business. Until you actually get started with the selling process, it can be difficult to understand all the costs associated with an FBA business. Between shipping, sourcing, Amazon fees, PPC, promotions, listing creation and more, there’s a lot of costs to be aware of before you jump in. At Viral Launch, we actually have a tool that can help you with initial cost estimates. Amazon also has some great resources about referral fees by category and shipping tiers you should check out before getting started.

While it’s extremely important to have a high-quality product, if you cannot match or beat the majority of your competition on price, it’s probably not advantageous to enter the market. We recommend being sure you can break even by selling at a lower price than everyone on page one. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it will afford you some flexibility to adjust pricing with fluctuations in the market.

Keep in mind that while quality is important, it is extremely hard to sell a higher priced item based on quality on Amazon. You’re allowed limited space for copy and images and shoppers are typically looking for low prices.

#6 – Selling a product you’re passionate about

This one might surprise people. It might make sense to some to sell a product you’re knowledgeable or passionate about, but it can often do more harm than good. Sourcing a product you’re passionate about can cloud your judgment, lead to mistakes in pricing and make it harder to bail out if a product just isn’t selling. While it’s not wrong to sell something you’re passionate about, it can cause you to react emotionally rather than logically. So just remember to focus on the bottom line.

The 12 Most Common Amazon FBA Mistakes to Avoid – Video Version
Check out the video version of this blog below and don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe:

#7 – Not inspecting a product

This is another note for private label sellers and it goes hand in hand with sourcing a low-quality product mistake. It’s important to ensure the product that comes off the manufacturing line and to your customers is in good shape and quality. Many sellers hire an inspection agency that will go in and observe the manufacturing process to check out inventory and monitor any defects or flaws. This step can save you significant time and money in the long run because you’ll catch mistakes before the inventory is sent to the United States or Amazon.

#8 – Sourcing a patented product

When looking for private label products to source from a manufacturer, it’s important to consider patents. In some cases, sellers will have a product manufactured that’s actually under a patent. Most likely, manufacturers you’re buying from won’t know the product is patented and will try it to sell to anyone who will buy it. However, that doesn’t mean it’s legal. Imagine investing a bunch of capital in product inventory only to get a cease and desist or lawsuit from the patent holder.

#9 – Not putting enough effort into building your listing (including photos)

If you’re a private label seller, you own the product listing. That means you have to set it up. You’ve put a lot of effort into finding and sourcing your next great product. It would only make sense to put the same amount of effort into creating your listing, right? Unfortunately, many Amazon FBA sellers don’t subscribe to that notion. Between your photos, title, bullets, and product description you don’t have much space to capture a customer’s attention and explain what your product is and does. That’s why it’s so important to use the limited space you have to its full advantage.

Effective listing copy accomplishes two goals. It provides persuasive sales copy while also helping you to index for valuable keywords. Before launching a listing, make sure to do extensive keyword research. Find the most relevant keywords for your product and make sure they’re in your listing, most importantly in the title and bullets. And, make sure you’re writing engaging and accurate copy for your product. If you’re not comfortable writing your own copy, check out the listing optimization service from Viral Launch.

As for photography, many sellers think a smartphone photo and a few clicks in Photoshop will do the trick, but they’re mistaken. Professional photography can play a huge role in whether or not a product fails on Amazon. Because Amazon is such a crowded marketplace and you have limited space to sell customers on your product, including high-quality photos can truly make a difference in sales.

#10 – Violating Terms of Service (with reviews or by attacking competition)

There are a lot of companies that pitch different “black hat” (against Terms of Service) strategies. Most of these are centered around generating reviews. While these strategies may seem tempting, Amazon heavily polices review generation. If you get caught paying for (or otherwise incentivizing) reviews, you’re putting your selling privileges at risk. Engaging in review manipulation tactics is common on Amazon, and many sellers get away with it initially, but Amazon has been seriously cracking down on review fraud and the impact can be extremely detrimental to your business.

#11 – Not monitoring your listing or data

For private label sellers, your product listing is sort of like a living, breathing organism. There are ups and downs and changes from day-to-day. Far too many private label sellers throw their listing up and think they’re done. It’s important to continue monitoring your listing to collect data and see how it’s working. You should also keep track of how competitor listings are doing and the category as a whole. Make sure to monitor your ranking for important keywords and ad campaign data as well, using those insights to develop a long-term strategy. Getting your listing up is only half the battle. Tweaking and optimizing based on feedback is the other half.

#12 – Putting your product into the wrong category

As a private label seller, one part of setting up a product listing is deciding what category your product will be listed in. During this step, it’s important to place your product in the proper category. Some sellers try to categorize their product in a lower competition market as a way to earn the Best Seller Badge. However, many searches filter to a specific subcategory, so incorrectly categorizing your product could filter you out of crucial search results.

Sellers can look up their product in Seller Central to determine potential categories, just make sure your product is relevant to the one you choose. If my first aid kit, for example, is not for survival or tactical purposes, there are several options below I would want to avoid in terms of category choice. More than likely, I would want to be in generic first aid kits under Health and Personal Care:

Learning from Your Mistakes as an Amazon FBA Seller

This is the part where I wish we could tell you a magical secret that would make you wildly successful with your Amazon FBA business and richer than you could have ever dreamed. But on Amazon—and in life—these magic shortcuts just don’t exist. The only way to maximize your chances for success as an Amazon FBA seller is through hard work, data leveraging, and constant research and education.

It’s also safe to say that you’ll make some mistakes. The hope is, however, that those mistakes are minor and few and far between. But, when you do make mistakes it’s important to learn from them. Hopefully, this blog has helped open your eyes to things you’ll want to keep in mind and help you from making a big mistake that could doom your FBA business.

Here at Viral Launch, we’d love to be your resource for all things Amazon. To hear more from us, we encourage you to subscribe to our blog, check out our Youtube channel and listen to our podcast Follow the Data.

Best of luck on your Amazon FBA seller journey!

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