Every Amazon seller needs to know how to sell in a competitive market, and a top-shelf competitor analysis can give you the edge you need.
Because of the immense potential, it should be no surprise that the Amazon seller competition is fierce. With the convenience of the FBA program, access to a customer base in the hundreds of millions, and opportunity for growth, it’s the premier space for those with an entrepreneurial mindset. Many experience issues dealing with the Amazon seller competition, as it’s out of their control with constantly changing variables.
So how can you navigate a path to success on Amazon? It’s all about maximizing every opportunity made available to you. To identify these opportunities and become aware of what works in your marketplace and what mistakes your Amazon seller competitors are making.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Tzu made his name as a military general and philosopher thousands of years ago. However, his strategy also broadly summarizes the idea behind performing a competitor analysis and why you should have a deep understanding of your Amazon seller competition.
In a crowded marketplace, selling a phenomenal product is only the beginning. You must know your selling space inside and out to stand out and steal customers from competitors. In the process, you’ll identify opportunities to increase visibility, better meet the needs of consumers, and capitalize on mistakes or shortcomings of the competition.
What is an Amazon Competitor Analysis?
An Amazon Competitor Analysis is more or less a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis for sellers you’re competing with in the Amazon marketplace. Also called a situational assessment or situational analysis, a SWOT analysis is a framework used to evaluate a competitive position and develop strategies to maximize performance.
This analysis allows you to identify opportunities for improvement and areas where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you’re considering selling on Amazon FBA, it’s important to conduct a competitor analysis to understand the market and identify areas of opportunity.
With a proper competitor analysis, you can uncover gems
Here are some steps to help you conduct a thorough competitor analysis for Amazon FBA:
Identify Your Competitors
Sounds easy, right? To a degree, it is, but there are levels to this.
Conduct a keyword search with your primary keyword, and the search results will compile a page full of your Amazon seller competition. And while every listing in your category competes with you, not all competitors are created equally. So first, we must define competitor within this distinctive context.
It’s important to remember the end goal of the analysis will be to make intelligent, actionable decisions to elevate your Amazon business. Considering this, you may be better served to base most of your research on listings with success more comparable to your own.
Monitoring the success of top sellers or brand names can be helpful, but their market share might not be for the taking yet. For newer or lesser established brands, no strategy can overcome a household brand name or entrenched top seller with thousands of positive reviews or a trusted reputation.
For sellers with a Viral Launch subscription, Listing Analyzer’s Competing & Complementary Products tab can help point you toward your closest competitors.
Audit competitor listings
Take a look at your opponents’ listing in great detail. For the most part, Amazon gives each seller in a category an equal opportunity to create their listing with the same amount of space. By analyzing what others are doing with this space, you can implement what works for others into your listing and recognize shortcomings to avoid.
Images
Product images play a pivotal role on Amazon. Unlike shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, customers can’t touch or see the product in person. High-quality product images bridge the gap for customers, allowing them to get a more thorough look at the product and answering their questions through detailed imagery and infographics.
Additionally, do the photos showcase unique features or benefits? Does it show the customer how it works and what settings it may be used in? Taking note of what your competitors are doing right and wrong and taking action with your own photos can be the difference between a standout listing that jumps off the search results page and a generic listing that gets overlooked.
Title
For SEO purposes, the product title possesses the most indexing weight of any section for a product listing. The keywords in a product title should be relevant to the product and with the most search volume.
If you see a common word or phrase thrown into titles to the point where it seems odd, it warrants additional research. Utilize a tool with access to Amazon search volume data, such as Keyword Research, to see any opportunities to capitalize on competitor mistakes.
From the format to the keywords, the product title represents your first opportunity beyond images to get your product in front of customers. Most likely, customers discover your listing via search, surrounded by a sea of competitors. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Consider what information you want to see in a product title and what would earn your click to learn more in the product description before adding to cart.
What information are your competitors sharing in this space? Which keywords do they use?
Bullet points & description
The customer saw your photos, read your title, and wants to learn more. The bullet points and product description are your next shot at convince the customer why your product is what they need. Keyword indexation remains an essential part of the bullet points, but you can start selling your product in these sections. Check through your competitors’ bullet points and descriptions to better understand how others in the market speak about the product.
Learn from what information others include in their listings and apply it to your own. If you’re going to miss out on sales, never want it to be due to things you can control and information left unanswered in your description. As you analyze the listings, perhaps make a list of questions for your product and check them off as you go. Hopefully, you can even find more questions to make sure you answer with your copy.
Reviews
Often overlooked, you can learn a lot by skimming through competitor reviews. Unhappy customers tend to voice their complaints and Amazon encourages them to explain why in their reviews.
Within the reviews page, sort through the reviews to see what issues customers experience with the product. For example, you can click on the 1-star and 2-star reviews to see what competitors are doing wrong.
On the positive side, check the 5-star reviews for a more comprehensive look into what customers appreciate about a product. What problems are they solving? Is there any way the competition goes above and beyond that you can replicate? Four-star reviews provide precious insights, as they often entail satisfied customers who have experienced a minor problem or see room for improvement.
Be a keyword sleuth
The most successful Amazon sellers leave no stone unturned regarding visibility. Whether through organic search or sponsored ads, the best sellers ensure their products are seen in high-volume searches and built to turn those impressions into purchases.
Finding out which keywords your competitors are competing for can do wonders for your strategy for overtaking them, in a few different ways.
You can attack head-on by prioritizing the keywords they’re prioritizing. Customers can find your product through various search terms. Most products are found through a few primary keywords, many more secondary phrases, and an assortment of tertiary, low-volume keywords.
While they all provide value, visibility for higher-searched terms can be much more fruitful. Because of this, however, the competition can be intense, with sky-high costs in advertising and costly promotions to climb the ranks. However for sellers without the benefit of a never-ending bankroll, targeting search terms with low-to-medium visibility may be more profitable through advertising and inclusion in your listing copy.
Monitor prices
The hallmark of competitive markets: price wars.
In any market where products are comparable, the cheaper price typically wins. As a result, knowing how low your competition can go and being aware of price changes as soon as possible so you can avoid being undercut can be a lifesaver, especially during high-volume sales events.
Monitoring competitor prices over time presents invaluable information into how they run their business. For instance, tracking prices and how products perform at various price points can consistently give you an edge to optimize your positioning. When you know how low the competition can go and how their performance at each price point, you can exploit weaknesses to climb the ranks.
Streamline your competitor analysis process with Competitor Intelligence
For Amazon business owners, performing these tasks can be extremely tedious and time-consuming. Even worse, the results constantly change as new competitors emerge and existing competitors evolve.
Enter Competitor Intelligence, one of the most helpful competitor analysis tools around! Competitor Intelligence is a reverse ASIN lookup tool that provides a quick and easy one-stop shop for tracking your marketplace rivals across various categories.
Enter a product ASIN to quickly get a massive list of their top-performing and underutilized keywords, alongside the ability to analyze and track indexation, keyword rank, sponsored ad rank, sales, price, reviews, search volumes, notification options and more.
Within Competitor Intelligence, you can enter the ASIN and instantly glean most of the information listed to this point for any ASIN.
Up-to-the-minute and historical data points related to price, rank, sales, revenue and a breakdown of estimated fees are just some of the in-depth details that can be found within seconds. Additionally, if you grant MWS access to the Viral Launch platform, you can compare how your product measures up categorically.
Find out where your challengers rank on a keyword-by-keyword basis for organic and sponsored searches. In the Competitor Keywords tab, a comprehensive list of keywords associated with the product appears. Within the tab, you can find out how the competition stacks up for each keyword. This is sortable by estimated volume, rank, and more.
Get an in-depth look into your competitor’s keyword performance in Competitor Intelligence.
You can even sign up for rank change alerts and hourly keyword tracking. This allows you to stay on top of updates as they happen and never miss a beat when the competition changes.
In summary, a tool like Competitor Intelligence makes analyzing the Amazon seller competition a breeze considering the tedious alternatives.
Conclusion
At this point in the Amazon FBA marketplace, fierce competition in nearly every market appears inevitable. It’s vital for sellers to maximize positioning and offer an enticing value proposition for a realistic shot at lasting long-term success. With this in mind, the importance of analyzing the competition becomes apparent. It’s the most thorough way to uncover advantages in the market.
Whether in competitor analysis tools like Competitor Intelligence or another method, an Amazon seller competitor analysis can uncover the answers to take your e-commerce business to the top. Since the Amazon seller competition is fierce, this type of research has evolved from an elective to a prerequisite.
For this reason, few tasks are more worthwhile than mastering the art and science of competitor analysis.
Sign up for Competitor Intelligence today to take your Amazon seller competitor analysis to the next level and optimize your business.
This week, Amazon confirmed rumors of a second Prime Day-like sales event titled the Prime Early Access Sale with a press release announcing the event. As previously reported, the Prime Early Access Sale will take place for 48 hours on October 11th and 12th.
The Prime Early Access Sale marks the first time the e-commerce superpower will hold two major sales events in one calendar year. However, it’s not the first time Amazon has held a major sales event in October, as Prime Day 2020 took place from October 13th to 14th after being pushed back from its usual July date as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After years of wondering if or when Amazon would look to go beyond Prime Day for annual sales holidays, the Early Access Sale appears to answer those questions. But what exactly is the Prime Early Access Sale, and what can Amazon sellers expect?
Part Prime Day, Part Black Friday?
Perhaps the most notable part of the announcement outside of the announcement itself, is it appears to serve as a kickoff for the quickly approaching holiday season.
“We are so excited to help Prime members kick off the holiday season with Amazon’s new Prime Early Access Sale—an exclusive opportunity for members to get deep discounts on top brands we know they are looking for this time of year. And members can start enjoying exclusive Prime benefits and offers now, plus find gift ideas for the family with our holiday gift guides and this year’s Toys We Love list.”
Jamil Ghani, vice president of Amazon Prime
A significant chunk of the press release focuses on kicking off the holiday season with access to thousands of deals exclusively for Prime members. While Black Friday has long served as the unofficial beginning of the hectic holiday season, the Prime Early Access Sale seeks to get the party started six weeks before Black Friday.
Additionally, shopping for the holidays a little earlier this year may have additional benefits beyond saving a few bucks during the promotional period. Due to the uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing supply chain disruption that continues to have ripple effects, crossing items off your shopping checklist over a longer period helps smooth out the always-chaotic holiday blitz starting on Black Friday and lasting for weeks.
More Money, More Benefits
This year, Amazon announced a price hike for the first time in years for their signature Prime subscription for customers, with rates going from $13 per month to $15, and $119 annually to $139.
The Prime Early Access Sale indicates the subscription’s price hike comes with additional benefits, so the roughly 160 million Amazon Prime subscribers get more bang while spending more bucks.
One of the most ballyhooed benefits recently added to the Prime membership is GrubHub+, with rewards and savings on the popular food delivery service. While this may not appear like news for Amazon sellers, the additional benefits outside of the Amazon marketplace for Prime members only makes the consumer base grow even larger. With benefits such as the aforementioned GrubHub+, Audible, Prime Video, Amazon Music Unlimited and countless more perks, the Prime membership base is strong and strengthens the Amazon marketplace further.
Prime Early Access Sale: Full Steam Ahead Into 2023
Although the event’s existence had been hinted about, the official announcement adds intrigue to what should be an interesting Q4. After two years of uncertainty and constant disruption, things are as close to “normal” as they’ve been in years.
While concerns about consumer spending linger internationally, the Prime Early Access Sale and subsequent holiday season provide a worthy source of optimism for Amazon sellers looking to close out 2022 on a positive note.
Amazon Prime Day sales by year, since 2015.
Even if the time for you to prepare for the Prime Early Access Sale is ticking, it goes without saying that sellers should not shrug off tactics to maximize visibility and sales during a period of skyrocketing sales.
Because it’s the first-ever Prime Early Access Sale, it’s difficult to know what to expect. However, if Prime Day is any indicator, this has the potential to be absolutely massive.
For Prime-eligible products, sellers can submit a Prime Exclusive Discount or Coupon before October 11, 2022 to participate in the Prime Early Access Sale.
Any measure sellers can take to put their product in a position for success should be taken, as a wave of sales during the event is sure to put you in *ahem* prime position to ride a wave of sales through the holiday season.
Consider what quick opportunities you can take to refine your business, from pricing to your product description to advertising. Now is the perfect time to check out tools like Competitor Intelligence, Viral Launch’s tool that gives you unparalleled insight into your competition so you can out-smart the competition and stop leaving dollars on the table.
Casey walks through all the reasons to monitor your competitors using our newest tool, Competitor Intelligence. Notifications allow you to gain overall knowledge about your space, take your Amazon PPC more seriously, and make informed choices about new market expansion.
Want to try out notifications for yourself? Learn more about Competitor Monitoring by watching this video: http://bit.ly/2TzLtz0.
You’ve spent countless hours researching markets. You’ve found a product and a supplier to make it. You’ve ordered samples, finalized the design and packaging, researched the keywords, built an awesome listing, and now your product is finally live on Amazon.
…Now what?
In the endless sea of products being sold on Amazon, it’s unlikely that your product will magically float to the top, but you also need to take steps to ensure that it doesn’t sink to the bottom.
Further keeping with the metaphor, Amazon’s sea can be cruel and unfair, but it demands respect. Established products frequently have reviews that were purchased or incentivised, providing a continued advantage over the competition. Today, several sellers still obviously violate Amazon’s thorough and complicated policies in an effort to get a leg up on their competition. There are regularly new tactics and services to buy reviews, influence metrics, and sabotage listings, and while some sellers seemingly exploit these options with impunity, Amazon does serve as an aggressive judge, jury, and executioner when black-hat tactics are discovered. In the blink of an eye, Amazon can shutter your store and revoke access to their marketplace, and it’s not uncommon that honest sellers find themselves caught in Amazon’s net and hit with account suspensions. Despite all of this, Amazon’s dominance over e-commerce continues to grow, providing unparalleled opportunity for sellers.
Assuming (and highly recommending) that you are playing by Amazon’s rules, when launching a new product, you’re faced with the task of cutting through all of the more established competition to get your product in front of customers. While it’s hard to definitively prove, and while you shouldn’t expect a major influx of sales, it’s commonly believed that Amazon does provide a ‘honeymoon period’ to new products, in which they are given a bit of a boost in visibility and performance to help them gain traction. That said, it’s important to implement every tactic possible to drive sales in the first few weeks of activity. If you are unable to drive any account activity, in time, your poor sales history can begin to weigh on your product’s ability to gain favorability with Amazon’s search engine.
The following article will walk you through the first actions that should be taken when launching a new product. Whether you’re a new seller with your first product, or simply adding an additional listing to a large catalog, these universal strategies can help you to build the necessary foundation of sales and ranking traction to succeed long term.
Competitive Analysis
The first step in developing an effective strategy for launching a new product on the Amazon marketplace is to develop a deep understanding of your competition. When releasing a brand new product, your listing will have no reviews or sales history and your competition may be well established in the market. Therefore, it’s likely that in a head-to-head comparison, your competition is going to have the upper hand.
That said, there are a number of tactics that can be implemented to either circumvent your competition or exploit their weaknesses. In order to do this, you must first understand your competitors and how they are interacting with the market. Using Competitor Intelligence, you can easily analyze the tactics of your competition to build a thorough strategy.
The primary benefit of Competitor Intelligence is that it provides you with in depth keyword data for a competing listing. This data enables you to view relevant keywords for the market in relation to their performance. You can see the listing’s organic ranking and advertising rank (PPC positioning) for each keyword, alongside search volume metrics, opportunity score, and relevancy score.
By comparing search volume to organic ranking and ad strategy, you can start to develop an understanding of what keywords are driving the bulk of sales for your competitor and see an overview of where they’re focusing their advertising budget.
Along with this, you can also observe the keywords that your competitor is not indexing or ranking for. This data can also be important as you may be able to note keywords which are being overlooked, implying that these search terms can be efficient opportunities for driving additional sales!
You’re also able to select and track individual keywords in order to receive updates on rank change, indexing changes, etc., allowing you to quickly adapt to any fluctuations in the market or strategy of your competitor.
On the Product Analysis page, you can directly compare metrics with your competition while reviewing historical trends. With a new product, this data can be a quick and easy method of understanding any competitive advantage that you may be able to emphasize in order to persuade buyers.
Pricing
When first launching a new product, you will have no reviews and no sales history. While your product may be the best product in the market, you will have no explicit advantage over established product listings.
Although you can (and absolutely should) implement quality images and use your copy to highlight features that demonstrate superior value or quality in comparison to your competitors, ultimately the search results on Amazon provide shoppers with:
One image
Title
Prime eligibility
Selling price
Review rating/quantity
This means that your ability to provide a complete value proposition to potential shoppers is relatively limited. Through this lens, one of the easiest ways to begin to build traction for a new product is to start off by pricing competitively.
Setting a product’s price point below your competition is one of the best methods to draw sales away from more established listings. While it’s very unlikely that your product is review competitive, and similarly unlikely that you will have better ranking than much of the competition, appealing to value can help to draw in more budget minded shoppers.
The social proof provided by reviews helps to provide quality assurance to shoppers, meaning that even if your product is objectively better, a competitor’s review status makes their product less of a risk. Because of this, beating your competition on price provides an alternative comparable tangible value, which has the potential to objectively influence sales.
While it can be a difficult decision for any brand owner to cut into their profit margin, one of the most fundamental mistakes that a seller can make is thinking in the short term. It takes time, effort, and money to build a business. You may not obtain the expected return from your first run of inventory, but taking measures to steadily gather sales in the early stages of your product can be a strategic investment to build a foundation for long term success.
Although traditional business rhetoric would suggest that lowering your price immediately tarnishes the perception of premium branding, this is not the case on Amazon. In a crowded marketplace with limited control over your brand’s messaging, a low price is a powerful asset for driving traffic to the listing.
Keep in mind through this stage that your price is not permanent. As your product begins to gain momentum, you can start to raise price until you hit the amount that you’re ideally shooting for. That said, it’s important to understand that the market dictates price. While you (more or less) have the ability to sell your product at any price you wish, the overall field of competition really establishes the fair market value. At every stage of your product’s lifecycle, it’s crucial to consider this when deciding on your selling price. In order to sell effectively, you will always need to remain competitive with the market.
Additionally, testing a few price points can be worthwhile. In certain instances/markets, an aggressively low price may work against you as it can create the perception that a product is of lower quality. For instance, an extremely low price and no reviews may be a cause for caution with an ingestible product such as a supplement. It’s important to make sure that you’re monitoring data to ensure that you’re getting improved click through and conversion rate (unit session percentage) to develop evidence to support the effectiveness of your price point.
Also, lowering price alone will not help to put your product in front of consumers. It will only help persuade shoppers to select your listing over a competitor. You need to combine a low price offer with marketing and advertising strategies to drive sales. For these reasons, it’s extremely important to make sure that you’re monitoring performance. If you’re failing to keep a close eye on performance and the overall effects of any variable changes on Amazon, you could be missing out on critical data to help you sell more efficiently.
Review Generation
Providing a value appeal to shoppers can be an effective strategy in response to the review quantities of competing products, but that still begs the question: How do you generate reviews?
Prior to an October, 2016 change to Amazon’s terms of service, building a base of reviews was a simple process. Sellers could simply give away a quantity of products to receive ‘honest, unbiased reviews’, effectively buying a review base. However, in time, consumers and (probably more importantly) news outlets, began to notice that a vast quantity of products being sold on Amazon had massive quantities of reviews that appeared to be purchased or positively influenced, thus implying that consumers cannot trust the statements that are intended to provide them with quality assurance. Because Amazon very transparently prioritizes customer experience over all else, they quickly enacted policies to forbid any incentivized reviews as a response to the criticism.
Unfortunately, sellers quickly learned that typical shoppers don’t leave reviews, meaning that this policy change quickly created a divide between established products with large review quantities, and new products which were subject to organic review growth rates.
Review generation, however, was (and is) an extremely important aspect of selling successfully. Practices for driving fraudulent reviews continues to be driven further and further underground; with Amazon playing cat and mouse, enacting stricter policies and liberally doling out account suspensions.
Reviews are a social currency on Amazon and a review quantity and rating alone can largely make or break a product listing. Like any blackmarket good or service, where there is demand, there are entities who look to profit through offering a supply. To this day, some sellers do venture into black-hat tactics to drive reviews, or use reviews to sabotage competition. And while some sellers are able to slip through the cracks, Amazon typically catches up and dispenses swift justice.
As a (hopefully) honest seller, who is looking to avoid the Amazon’s punitive wrath, opportunities to compliantly stimulate review growth are limited, but extremely valuable.
Entering Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program is the best way to quickly get a start on your review generation. This program was seemingly developed by Amazon as a means of compensating for their strict policy changes by allowing new listings some opportunity to gain momentum. The Early Reviewer Program is eligible to SKUs that sell for more than $15 with less than 5 reviews. Amazon charges $60 per SKU and will run their program for a period of one year, or until five reviews are generated. Through this period, shoppers who purchase the product will receive an email from Amazon offering a $1-3 Amazon gift card in exchange for a review on the product.
While it’s not a magical solution to make you review competitive, the Early Reviewer Program is an affordable opportunity to help get a new product listing started. This small advantage enables you to establish some social proof to help sway customers.
Beyond this, and while it’s somewhat of a grey area with regards to Amazon’s policies, sellers also utilize product inserts and email follow-up campaigns to generate reviews.
With either of these tactics, it’s critical that you utilize completely unbiased language and stay away from statements implying or steering the customer towards positive feedback (ex.: “If you love our product, please leave us a review on Amazon.”). You cannot attempt to route negative reviews to your own customer service and you similarly cannot use language that only encourages reviews based on positive reception. You also cannot offer any sort of gift, coupon, or incentive in exchange for a review (ex.: “Please leave us a review to receive a coupon for a 50% discount on your next purchase.”). Even if you’re looking to provide a free gift or coupon to all buyers, regardless of reviews, it’s advisable to not offer any type of promotion, incentive, or gift while requesting a review.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon is deliberately vague about the overall compliance of follow-up email campaigns. It is directly stated that you cannot incentivize or influence reviews in any way and there are restrictions as to how you can utilize email campaigns (i.e. you cannot use emails correspondence to pull traffic from Amazon or market other products to buyers). We have not encountered any issues with use of unbiased email and insert language but Amazon has been known to test buy products to monitor these tactics.
Building a review base for a new product is quite possibly the biggest challenge that you will face when selling on Amazon. While shoppers place an extraordinarily high value on rating and review quantity when making purchasing decisions, less than one percent of shoppers will leave a review for a product they purchase. That said, in most markets, you don’t need thousands of reviews to effectively sell. You just need enough of a review base to provide confidence to your customers.
The value of reviews definitely can’t be understated and it’s important to use the tools at your disposal to stimulate growth. That said, it’s definitely worth it to abide by Amazon’s policies and approach your product with a long-term perspective. Reviews help to drive sales, but in order to drive reviews, you need people to buy your product. Use the Early Reviewer Program to your advantage but also prioritize strategies to generate sales first, and let the reviews develop over time. While it’s not necessarily fast, this strategic perspective will help to ensure that you’re able to facilitate some sales activity which will continue to build momentum as you progressively accumulate more reviews and better ranking.
Product Targeting
While it’s definitely valuable to understand your market and competition, along with review generation and the use of price as a variable to persuade buyers, it’s equally important to understand how to place your product listing in front of potential shoppers. After all, if the best, lowest priced product has a listing on Amazon, but shoppers can’t find it, can it make a sale?
It’s not good enough to have the best price or the best offering if your listing is buried in the results. You also can’t generate reviews without sales. So, considering the reality that Amazon is an extremely crowded marketplace, and that it’s unlikely that your brand new listing will automatically end up on the first page of relevant search results, you’ll likely need to pay for visibility through Amazon’s advertising platform.
However, before you jump into setting up campaigns, there are a few methods that you can utilize to collect important data and work towards efficient campaign performance.
Using your understanding of the competition and your competitive price point, you can delve into product targeted advertising. A product targeted campaign is a campaign that specifically focuses on another listing. Typically appearing on a listings detail page, a product targeted ad can seek to lure buyers to it’s listing by appealing to a shopper interested in a related product. There are two main tactics to explore when using product targeting.
First of all, you can run campaigns directed at competition. It’s important to note that in order to be effective with this strategy, you need to find products that have good visibility and traction (thus allowing you to piggyback on their traffic) and you also need to have some competitive advantage (lower price, better reviews, features, color etc.) in order to reach and lure shoppers.
For instance, if you’re selling a hammer, and a shopper is viewing a listing for a hammer, in order to pull their interest, your hammer has to be cheaper, better liked, or have visibly better features in order to draw the shoppers focus away from the product that they’re currently viewing.
The second main tactic involves using product targeting to align your product with complementary listings. The same concept applies to selecting complementary products to target in that it’s advantageous to look for products that have a large quantity of sales and page one ranking for valuable keywords. The difference is that instead of trying to pull sales from your competition, with complementary targeting, you’re ideally seeking to have your product purchased in addition to the targeted complement.
An example of this would be running ads for your same hammer, targeting items such as tool belts, tool boxes, or boxes of nails. The idea is that while someone is shopping for a box of nails, they may realize that they also need a hammer, and your ad placement may result in a convenient purchase.
To easily identify competing and complementary products to effectively target through this campaign type, you can use Listing Analyzer by Viral Launch. After running an analysis on your listing, you can use the Competing and Complementary Products tab to view and sort related listings. By filtering these results to meet your objective (higher sale price, high sales volume, etc.) you can quickly identify ASINs to hone in on with product targeted campaigns.
While both of these tactics may result in lower engagement, and typically won’t assist organic visibility growth as much as keyword targeted campaigns, they can help you drive some additional sales. Additionally, product targeting can be helpful when first launching a product because you’re able to specifically align your ads with individual products, allowing you to hone in on products that your listing has a competitive advantage over.
Automatic Campaigns
Another method to effectively cut your teeth in with PPC and gain some additional visibility is through an automatic campaign. Auto campaigns are more or less the ‘easy’ format for running PPC. While manual campaigns provide you with the ability to target specific keywords and products with varying degrees of specificity, an automatic campaign will defer to Amazon’s algorithms to establish targets for your advertising.
While you may instinctively think that it’s a better strategy to fully control your campaign spend and targeting, an automatic campaign can be a helpful way to hit on a broader range of keywords and drive some wider visibility. Additionally, there may be specific keywords that you convert surprisingly well for. Also, because there is less of a targeted approach, your advertising spend will tend to be algorithmically dispersed, which can result in a lower cost per click, meaning that it’s possible to continue running very efficient automatic campaigns over a long-term period as a means of increasing and rounding out traffic.
In addition to this, it’s important to regularly review your advertising reports. When running ads, it’s easy to get caught up in the concept of spend vs. return. Obviously, inefficient advertising can feel like wasted money. That said, it can be advantageous to instead look at advertising spend as a means of purchasing data. Though it’s far from perfect, Amazon provides access to a number of reports which can give insights into your campaign performance. These reports can be valuable resources for understanding how your product is reacting in the market and how to effectively compete. For instance, using the Advertising search term report, you can review which keywords are getting impressions, driving clicks, and converting into sales.
As you continue to run automatic campaigns, regularly reviewing data can provide you with insights into which keywords are driving revenue, inevitably allowing you to create more focused manual campaigns focused on well performing keywords.
Using automatic campaigns is a great way to familiarize yourself with Amazon’s advertising platform if you are a new seller, and it’s also a great way to begin to generate some sales and visibility if you’re a launching a new product.
Discovery Campaigns
Assuming you’ve done thorough keyword research, running some more specific advertising campaigns, which we refer to as discovery campaigns, is another way to drive focused traffic. A discovery campaign is essentially a manual campaign which is established to test the PPC performance of your high value keywords.
Ideally, you have a list of keywords used to write your product’s listing. Within this list, there should be a range from high competition/high value terms down to low competition/high opportunity terms. Pulling from this list, you can begin to test small groups of keywords (around 5 per campaign) with manual testing to monitor their performance.
By closely reviewing reports, you can begin to determine which keywords are generating interest (by receiving clicks), and which keywords are generating sales. It’s also important to monitor how your budget is being allocated. You may find that a few of your keywords are receiving a very limited amount of impressions (implying that other keywords are consuming your campaign’s budget). If this is the case, you’ll want to restructure your campaign or increase budget to ensure that you’re adequately testing each term.
If a keyword is spending without generating sales, it may be worth removing it from the campaign. That said, the fact that it is spending implies that it’s receiving clicks. For this reason, it may be worth reviewing the competition for this keyword to determine any tangible values that are hurting your listing’s ability to drive a sales.
On the flip side, if a keyword is effectively driving sales, it may be worth breaking the keyword out into its own campaign with a dedicated budget. In this way, you can ensure that you’re dedicating a thorough budget to the terms that are most efficient. If you’re able to maintain ACoS, you may more or less be able to reliably generate profit by fueling these campaigns with spend.
If keywords are not performing, you typically will want to rotate them out of your discovery campaigns, however, you may not want to completely throw the keywords out. As your product begins to build momentum and generate reviews, it’s likely that your listing will convert differently. Therefore, as your listing becomes more competitive in the market, some targets that were previously inefficient may become more relevant.
Conclusion
When launching a new product on Amazon, there are three major variables that you should immediately begin focusing on:
Competitive advantage: Understanding how to position your product with a tangible value proposition (most commonly achieved by pricing below your competition)
Review Generation: Given the Amazon’s restrictive policies around reviews in parallel with their importance to consumer decision making process, using every policy compliant tactic to your advantage in order to grow a review base is critically valuable and continues to improve your listing’s ability to sell effectively.
Visibility: You cannot expect shoppers to find your product simply because you’re listing it on Amazon. Using PPC to drive visibility is one of the only ways to truly get your product in front of consumers when launching a new product. Knowing how to set up some basic early campaigns to begin to target keywords and advantageously align your product with other listings in the market is the best way to begin to drive revenue.
Keeping these three points in mind when launching a new product can help you to contextualize an overall strategy for effective product growth. Amazon is crowded and your competition won’t always play by the rules. But by approaching the market strategically, and with thought towards the long term, there is still limitless opportunity to be successful.
As more of a moral point, reviews are consistently the most challenging aspect of beginning an Amazon based business. That said, while our increasingly Amazon-based society relies on reviews to inform our purchasing decisions, most of us are guilty of not contributing by adding our own opinions after purchasing products. If it were a cultural norm for shoppers to leave a review, consumers would benefit from more well rounded recommendations, and small businesses would more easily be able to establish themselves.
While lofty and idealistic, maybe reviews should almost culturally be viewed as a tax; a few minutes taken to write your opinion in exchange for the overwhelming convenience of e-commerce. While that may be too ambitious to actualize, taking a few minutes to think about how much a review can mean to the plethora of small business owners who are grinding to achieve success is worthwhile. Though it’s easy to forget, lending a hand by leaving a review makes it that much easier for someone to overcome one of the many hurdles that come with deciding to start your own business.
If you are in the process of launching a new product or are interested in selling on Amazon, Viral Launch is always willing to assist. Feel free to contact us at service@viral-launch.com with any Amazon related questions. Our expert team of coaches are excited to help you dominate!
Competitor Intelligence is an advanced Amazon reverse ASIN lookup tool that gives you unparalleled insight into exactly how your competitors are performing. Enter a product ASIN to quickly get a massive list of their top-performing and underutilized keywords, alongside the ability to analyze and track indexation, keyword rank, sponsored ad rank, sales, price, reviews, search volumes, notification options and more.
Join Casey as he talks about this game changing new tool and how you can use the features whether you are a new seller or scaling a 7 or 8 figure business.
With Competitor Intelligence, we’re giving you more access to data through a powerful new research tool that allows you to analyze, tracker, and reverse engineer your most successful competitors.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” -Sun Tzu, The Art of War
At Viral Launch, we’ve spent several years developing Amazon tools to help you understand your business, markets, and products. Now, we’re helping you to understand your competition like never before with our newest tool, Competitor Intelligence. As Amazon becomes an increasingly complicated marketplace, using every bit of data to your advantage is key to driving success.
With Competitor Intelligence, we’re giving you more access to data through a powerful new research tool that allows you to analyze, tracker, and reverse engineer your most successful competitors. Analyze the strengths of your competition and rise to them. Analyze their weaknesses and exploit them. And most importantly, discover new ways to unlock the sales potential of your products.
The Powerful Benefits of Competitor Intelligence
Competitor Intelligence puts your competition’s most valuable data in the palm of your hand.
Reverse ASIN 2.0
Competitor Intelligence begins by scouring billions of Amazon data points to find every keyword your competitor’s product is currently ranking for in the organic and sponsored ad results. You can filter through this comprehensive list to quickly find their highest sales driving keywords. For example, by searching for keywords with at least 1,000 searches per month and where the competitor is ranking in the top 15 organic positions, you are able to quickly identify which keywords are likely driving the most sales for the product. Within less than a minute, you can find all of your competitor’s most important keywords! Very powerful!
Unlike other reverse ASIN tools, Competitor Intelligence also grabs keywords that your competitor’s product was ranking for historically. This paints a more comprehensive perspective of competitor’s keyword and advertising strategy.
Thirdly, we identify keywords to your product market that your competitor is not ranking for but are still relevant to the product. This gives you direct insight into missed keywords that you can easily take advantage of to get a massive leg up on your competitor!
Compare To Your Products
In Competitor Intelligence you have the ability to compare a competitor’s product to your own. This gives you the ability to quickly identify which related keywords your competitor is ranking well for that you are not even tracking! This makes it incredibly simple to identify weaknesses in your own product. Without this feature, it can be difficult to remember which keywords you are/are not tracking when analyzing a competitor.
Product & Keyword Notifications
Product notifications allow you to stay on top of your most important competitors with absolutely no work at all. Imagine getting a notification when a top competitor raises their price, making them a better target for your product targeting campaigns. Imagine getting a notification when a competitor runs a giveaway spiking their BSR, giving you time to boost your own sales with PPC, lower price, or a giveaway of your own. There’s so many ways you can use product notifications to stay on top of your most competitors, all with a daily report on significant changes to your email inbox.
Keyword notifications in Competitor Intelligence allow you to get notified on changes to your competitor’s keyword ranking daily or even hourly. This allows you to stay on top of other top sellers without having to check the keyword rankings multiple times per day.
With Competitor Intelligence notifications, you’ve never been able to stay ahead of the competition so easily.
Compare To Your Products
One of the largest downsides of switching to a new Amazon keyword tracker is having no historical ranking data in the new tool. You essentially are starting off without any historical data to understand how your list is currently performing.
In Competitor Intelligence, when you turn on tracking for a given keyword, we immediately give you access to our historical organic and sponsored ad ranking data for that keyword. Especially when analyzing a competitor’s product for the first time, this can provide deeper insight into a product’s historical keyword and sponsored ad strategies.
Seamless Integration With Other VL Tools
As with the rest of the Viral Launch software tools, we’ve built seamless integration into Competitor Intelligence making whatever tasks you are doing among the tools, that much simpler. For example, when you identify a new keyword you want to steal from your competition and begin tracking for your own product, you can click the “add to bank” option and the keyword will immediately be added to your keyword bank. No awkward copy in one tool and paste in another. 🙂
Powerful Keyword Metrics
With each keyword found, Competitor Intelligence gives you access to powerful metrics like search volume, historical search volume trends, opportunity score (a very important metric for keyword ranking), suggested sponsored ad bid cost directly from Amazon, is the competitor indexed, organic rank position (and history), and sponsored ad position (and history).
These powerful metrics combined give you deep insight into your competitor’s keywords helping you to make more sophisticated and informed decisions for your own keyword strategy.
Competitor Intelligence Product Analysis
Competitor Intelligence begins by providing you with in-depth analysis on your competition, allowing you to view a side-by-side comparison on crucial stats like units sold, revenue, profit, and review quantity, rating, and rate. These comparison stats can assist you in measuring up to the competition.
Additionally, you will be provided with historical sales and price analysis, cost breakdowns, discounts, and review trend data. By seamlessly integrating with Product Discovery, you’re also able to see detailed statistics on your competitor’s brand as a whole.
Harnessing the Power of Competitor Intelligence:
Part research and optimization, part reverse ASIN, and part product tracker, Competitor Intelligence brings a new level of data and analysis that can help you at any stage of selling on Amazon. By perfectly integrating with the Viral Launch platform, you can track performance of competing brands, add their keywords to your keyword bank, and review markets based on your competition’s positioning.
Product Research:
Understanding your potential competition is key to understanding a market that you’re looking to enter. When conducting product research, Competitor Intelligence can be utilized to isolate competitive listings and review their strengths, weaknesses, and overall approach to the market.
Using Competitor Intelligence, you can know which keywords are driving sales for top sellers in a market, allowing you to better understand your potential product and consumers, review any obstacles to your success, and understand a product’s market as a whole, rather than just looking at a single search term. Because Competitor Intelligence also shows keywords for which your competitor is not indexing and/or ranking, it can also help you to identify gaps in the market (relevant keywords that aren’t being focused on by competition), helping you to target low hanging fruit and drive additional sales.
Additionally, by tracking top performing products, you can keep tabs on your competitors through the sourcing process to ensure that you’re aware of any market changes. You can set up notifications to be alerted to price drops, sales drops, review changes, etc. By continuously monitoring market stability within the context of your top competition, it can help inform you of any shifts in market conditions and allow you to formulate a proper strategy for entering the market.
Keyword Research, Listing Optimization, and Product Launching:
Reviewing competitive data can also help you to develop proper listing content through understanding what keywords are driving sales for your competition.
By seeing broad keyword ranking and ad placement for top selling products, you can gain an insight into which keywords hold the most priority for driving sales for your product market. This can help you to structure your listing to provide maximum indexing weight on high value search terms, increasing your relevance for these keywords.
Additionally, Competitor Intelligence makes it easy to view which keywords are not being exploited by your competition. By isolating terms with search volume that are not being emphasized by competing product listings, you can identify quick-win keywords that you can drive ranking and sales through without much contention. Using your copy to hit on these search terms can provide additional opportunity overlooked by your competitors. This feature is perfect for finding keywords to run giveaways on, or to target with PPC strategy with our new sales and rank strategy.
Long Term Use:
As your product becomes more established in the marketplace, Competitor Intelligence can provide you with valuable data to help you monitor your market and retain your momentum by keeping an eye on your competition for you.
Using Competitor Intelligence’s notification system, you can be alerted to any changes to competing listings, allowing you to exploit, or respond to, any shifts in the competitive landscape. With keyword notifications, you can also be alerted to ranking changes, helping you to respond quickly to a dynamic marketplace.
Review the keyword data from your competition. Determine what keywords are underemphasized by your competitors, allowing you to discover untapped opportunities in your market to generate more sales.
Monitor your competition’s advertising strategy. By understanding where your competition is spending on PPC, you can either attack it head on, to minimize their visibility, or circumvent it to target search terms that are cheaper and easier to drive traction through. Knowing where your competition is spending helps you to formulate an effective strategy around your own advertising.
By setting up notifications, you can have rapid insight into price changes, sales fluctuations and review updated. Having immediate access to this data gives you the upper hand to make adjustments to strategy or attack competitor weaknesses, adding increased efficiency to your strategy.
Wrapping Up: Amazon Competitor Intelligence
Competitor Intelligence by Viral Launch gives you the power to wield your competitor’s data against them. By understanding competing products, you can understand the market and use it to your advantage. With side-by-side comparison metrics to review your strengths and weaknesses and robust keyword analysis to help you target your audience, Competitor Intelligence gives you the tools to drive success in an increasingly crowded Amazon landscape.
More than a reverse ASIN tool, Competitor Intelligence is the amalgamation of Viral Launch’s pioneering data aggregation techniques, giving you the power to see what keywords your competition is targeting, what keywords they’re missing, where they’re driving sales, how they’re spending on on advertising, and how your product measures up. Leverage this data to dominate your market and lead your product to success.
Give yourself the ultimate competitive edge with Viral Launch’s Amazon Competitor Intelligence tool!
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