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.
What items are at the top of your Amazon to-do list? When it comes to maintaining your sales, you should be dedicating a significant amount of time to tracking and improving your Amazon Sponsored Ad campaign performance. Identifying potential issues and fixing them before your campaigns start to perform poorly can save lots of time and headache in the long-run.
Let’s dive into the most important metrics to monitor in your Sponsored Ads, and how you can add smart automation to increase your success rate on Amazon.
A Common MistakeMade in Amazon Sponsored Ad Campaigns
Constantly optimizing your ad campaigns is so important because Amazon’s algorithms are designed to reward products that perform well, and even a single day with low sales volume will negatively impact your sales velocity. As a result, both your organic rank and paid rank will suffer.
As you’re managing Sponsored Ads campaigns, it is very important that you pay attention to every single ranking movement, ensuring that you know when your ad is performing well. Getting this right will not only result in a well-performing campaign, but it will also help your promoted listing gain organic positions. (If your goal is to push organic rankings via sponsored ads, make sure that your listing is optimized for your targeted keywords before starting the campaign.)
Many advertisers fail with Sponsored Ads because they don’t know how the platform works. They’ll throw marketing dollars into this advertising channel without any sort of plan in place. One of the causes of this behaviour is that Sponsored Ads is one of the hottest topics in the Amazon space and every Amazon “guru” out there is trying to monetize this trend by selling information that is often not backed by data. The result is hundreds of new sellers starting to advertise on Amazon only because they’ve been told to do so, and they’re afraid of missing out if they don’t join the trend. Classic FOMO.
Guess what? This behaviour will get you in big trouble.
The Ad Strategy that Can Change Everything
Amazon’s Sponsored Ads engine is run by a sophisticated algorithm. Understanding its mechanism is not easy, even if you have some previous experience running campaigns on Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). There are so many moving parts that it takes just one of them performing poorly to jeopardize your whole campaign.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that building campaigns in Amazon’s Sponsored Ads is just the same as in Google Ads. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While Google Ads is designed to drive traffic from different channels and optimize based on the trackable goals that you specify (eg. lead, purchase, view of a key page, etc.), Amazon’s Sponsored Ads optimization algorithm is designed to favour ads that make Amazon more money.
This, of course, changes everything.
One of the things that I’ve learned over years of managing campaigns on Google Ads is that your campaign performance will only be as good as you are at managing it. For instance, the mistake that most people make with Sponsored Ads is to focus solely on ACoS which is not the best KPI (Key Performance Indicator).
For a campaign to be profitable, you need to first know your breakeven point. This is determined by your listing’s conversion rate, cost-per-click and, of course, the maximum cost that you are willing to pay to acquire a customer (Max CPA). Once you have these metrics, you need to calculate your maximum cost-per-click that you can afford to pay to be profitable.
You can use the following formula to calculate your maximum cost-per-click:
The table below will help you to calculate what your Max CPC should be based on the metrics mentioned above:
Sale Price = The price at which your product sells or is sold at after its price has been reduced.
CoGS = Cost of Good sold including Amazon fees and various manufacturing costs.
Max CPA = (Sale Price – CoGS = CPA) The maximum cost you can afford to pay to acquire a customer and break even.
Max CPC = The maximum cost you can afford to pay for a click and still make money.
This formula will change everything, as you will learn that, often, the keywords you’re currently targeting are not the best-performing. Consequently, you will be more profitable if you focus on those that you can afford to buy clicks for (based on your max CPC).
Once you have this step figured out, the next big metric to monitor is your ad position.
If you are familiar with Google Ads, you probably know that one of the most popular bidding strategies is the “bid to position.” In fact, Search Engine Land even wrote a script to automate this. Of course, having your ad show in position one is the goal for most advertisers, as this will not only increase the ad visibility but get you the highest CTR (ad copy plays a big role here) which means more traffic. This rule is significantly more important with Amazon Sponsored Ads given that nearly 70% of Amazon.com shoppers place orders using a mobile device.
Keep in mind that higher position means, often, higher CPC so you have to focus on conversion rate optimization first (if you listing’s conversion rate is low) and ensure that you can afford to pay a higher CPC that allows you to compete for position #1.
Now that you know how important your ad position is, it is imperative that you build and structure your campaigns in a way that allows you to achieve this result while minimizing your ad spend.
Keep Track of Your Ad Position
After testing this theory with outstanding results for the past nine months, we decided to build a tool that allows Amazon advertisers to monitor their ad position and receive notifications alerting you when your ad is losing positions. Keyword Manager shows exactly where your product is ranking so that you can precisely measure the results of your efforts. You can even view historical data to see where your ads are at now compared to where they’ve been in the past.
Alongside your Amazon Sponsored Ad rank, Keyword Manager shows helpful metrics such as Amazon’s Choice Badge notifications, Amazon’s relevancy score, search volumes, suggested CPC bids, organic rank position, whether or not you’re indexed, and more. No other tool shows you these many keyword insights.
Try Keyword Manager out for yourself. Whether you’re implementing a new Amazon Sponsored Ad strategy with profitability in mind, or you’re monitoring your indexation and keyword rank, Keyword Manager equips you with the metrics you need to position your listing for success.
Keywords are the foundation for ranking. Missing critical keywords in your listing can lead to thousands of dollars in missed sales. Incorporating the right keywords in your listing can give you a huge competitive advantage. But current tools fall far short of providing the insight needed to set up a listing to rank. But that’s about to change. Introducing Keyword Research from Viral Launch, the most accurate keyword tool in the galaxy.
Learn more about what each of the Keyword Research scores mean and how they will change the way you do Amazon listing optimization
Keyword Research integrates seamlessly with our other research software, Market Intelligence and Product Discovery. Filter for products with high search volume. See exact and broad match volume as you research
CASEY GAUSS:
Keywords are the foundation for ranking. Missing critical keywords in your listing can lead to thousands of dollars in missed sales.
CAMERON YODER:
Incorporating the right keywords in your listing can give you a huge competitive advantage, but the current tools available to sellers fall far short of providing the insight needed to efficiently and effectively set up a listing to rank. I’m Cameron Yoder.
CASEY GAUSS:
And I’m Casey Gauss, your host for Follow the Data: Your Journey to Amazon FBA Success. In this show we leverage the data we’ve accumulated at Viral Launch from over 30,000 product launches and our experience working with 8,000 brands to help you understand the big picture when it comes to Amazon, and more importantly, the best practices for success as an Amazon seller.
CAMERON YODER:
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our most recent seller software, Keyword Research, the most accurate and comprehensive keyword tool in the galaxy.
CASEY GAUSS:
In this episode we’ll talk about why we had to create Keyword Research, including what’s wrong with current tools on the market and how better Keyword Research can help you increase your bottom line. Let’s get started.
CAMERON YODER:
All right, Casey, we’re talking about a big subject today. This is an exciting time for Viral Launch. It’s an exciting time for you. We’re talking about Keyword Research, Viral Launch’s new tool. Let’s talk about how you’re feeling through all this. How has this experience, this product release been for you?
CASEY GAUSS:
This product release has probably been the most stressful for me, so I’m usually like, I guess what you would say kind of like VP of Product or something here at Viral Launch, so it’s always like my job to have all the answers, I feel like, and so we worked on this tool. We probably started working on like the main algorithm for relevance in September. We tried all this like working with a data scientist on natural language processing, and like so we did that for three months, so into like December – actually longer. We did that like through January, and then February we were still trying to make NLP work, natural language processing, work. It wasn’t working, wasn’t working, and there was so much pressure to like get this tool out. Like we’ve been working on it for so long. The front end was done. Anyways, finally we sat down. We spent a week having just breakthroughs on our algorithm, like quality standards, all of that. We finally figured it out Friday, right before the weekend, and that was like only a couple of weeks ago.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, that was not too long ago.
CASEY GAUSS:
That was super exciting, though. So like as an entrepreneur it’s like this series of peaks and valleys, right? And so you’re going through the valley, you’re going through the valley, and it’s that effort. You know, it’s that consistently pushing through the hard times that gets you to those peaks. And I think the deeper the valley the better the, you know, the mountaintop, or the ascent to the mountaintop. So anyways, super rewarding once we finally figured it out, and now we know, you know, if it’s this difficult for us to figure out, hopefully it’s equally as difficult for competitors, like – and hopefully that means that much better quality for everybody. So I am feeling so good. I think this is going to be our most popular tool. I think this is going to be an absolute game-changer for sellers. So I am so stoked to see kind of feedback, see like the impact that this has on people’s businesses. You know, product discovery a super, super valuable because I think product selection is, you know –
CAMERON YODER:
It’s huge. It’s huge.
CASEY GAUSS:
It’s like the single most make-or-break decision that you’re going to make when selling on Amazon. But it takes months and months for you to see the return, right? You come up with an idea through product discovery, but now you’ve got to get samples. You’ve got to find suppliers. You have to order it, and anyways, it’s like months and months until you actually see the return, whereas with Keyword Research there are so many keywords people aren’t finding right now because their like current keyword tools just aren’t surfacing them. And so by putting these things in your listing tomorrow, the next day, or within that week, you’re going to see results. And so I’m super excited to get these case studies back. I don’t know – and like – so again, this is a lot of personal stuff. Sorry if you’re not so interested, but like the team is growing. We’re at like 43 people or something now. And it’s so cool to see like we have a legit marketing team now. We have like a seven-person dev team. And so it’s so cool to see all these different, you know, departments working together. This is going to be our biggest launch so far. It’s so cool to just see, you know, Viral Launch continue to mature and everybody come together. Like I’m just so proud of this team. So all in all, long, long answer to that. Sorry, guys.
Announcing Viral Launch Keyword Research
CAMERON YODER:
Now just in case – okay, just in case you missed the intro or the announcement, basically Viral Launch, or whatever – everything Casey was talking about – Viral Launch has a new tool out based around keyword research, so finding accurate keywords to use in your listing, right? And we’ve just spent the past long time developing it, releasing it. Casey, how would you say – I mean we’ve had a couple product releases up to this point, but how would you say Keyword – that Keyword Research has differed? What’s different about this Keyword Research tool being released than the tools we’ve released in the past, just being the product release itself? So with our release for Product Discovery, what’s different about this time around?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, I mean we’ve just learned a lot of things around what has worked and what hasn’t, getting people’s attention, making sure – you know, for Keyword Research, I think, again it’s such a game-changer you would not believe. And I mean if you ever check out the tool you will really get to see kind of the difference, the night and day difference between what you’re using for your keyword research and our Keyword Research tool.
CAMERON YODER:
Right.
CASEY GAUSS:
And you will like, I don’t know, be disappointed or upset that this is the data that you’ve been using versus like the actual data or what you should have been using, I guess. And so anyways, so I feel a deep sense of responsibility to make sure that the messaging is like perfect for this so that people can truly see like hey, no, this isn’t just marketing speak, but like this is going to be so much better for my business. And so I think there’s a lot of pressure on me, that I’m then trying to put on the team to make sure that we really get this perfect. But anyways, yeah, you know I think the product launch will be hopefully a better, like ramp-up period, getting people more and more excited. You know, we have a much bigger audience at this point, and hopefully people have just continued to realize, you know, Viral Launch is a data company. And yeah, so hopefully this is an easier sell to people because now you love and trust kind of what Viral Launch has been producing on the research side.
CAMERON YODER:
Right. Let’s jump back a little bit. So again, talking about just Keyword Research and the tool in general, what made you think that Viral Launch should or needed to come out with a Keyword Research tool?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, good question. Actually I want to preface first, so there’s a million keyword research tools out there, keyword tools out there for Amazon. I would really encourage you to at least, you know, listen to this podcast, even if it’s on 2X to get through it, like just at least check out the tool. I think you really owe it to your business. There’s so much that is different here, and I don’t want you to just pass it off as another tool. So anyways, why did we need Keyword Research? A lot of reasons. So like it has been – it has just always blown my mind. It has always been a goal of mine to, if somebody else didn’t do it, build a better version of Merchant Words, right? So not to hate so much on like the tool – like it’s so bad, right? So if you search like – we have all these just hilarious examples, right? So if you search –
CAMERON YODER:
Specific keywords that we’ve searched.
CASEY GAUSS:
Right. Reading glasses, right? Reading glasses for babies, high search volume. Reading glasses for dogs, over 10,000 searches a month Merchant Words is estimating. You search eye cream, cat eye cream is I think like the second suggestion, saying there’s like 90,000 searches a month. If you search fish oil, fish oil diffuser – there’s no such thing – is one of the top suggestions. They say like 80,000 searches a month. And from these case studies that we’re doing, a lot of the time Merchant Words only has like 10% of the actual words that are related to the product or the market that you’re searching, and their volumes are so off. And so, so many times Merchant Words is suggesting words that don’t even – people aren’t actually searching on Amazon, but you’re prioritizing them. You’re putting them in the listing simply because intuitively they make sense. But you’re not really following the data.
And so we had to create Keyword Research because keyword tools are so important. We see so many people – like you cannot rank for keywords, high-volume keywords if you’re not prioritizing them well in the front end of your listing. Or if you don’t even have them in the front end of your listing how are you going to rank for them? And ranking, like driving sales through organic search, is the majority of people’s businesses on Amazon. Like this – you know we say the lifeblood of Amazon for like reviews, this is like the oxygen or something, you know? You absolutely have to have this, and this is what is, you know, really driving your sales is what keywords that you have in your listing. And these current keyword tools were just misleading people so bad. Or sure, maybe they have a bunch of good results, but you, for every good result there is like 100 bad results, and you’re spending hours sifting through these words.
CAMERON YODER:
And I think it’s an important perspective to point out – there is one thing I want to reemphasize that you said, but another thing that is important for listeners to understand is if you’re a listener and you’ve used a keyword research tool in the past, then you’ve been trained to not trust results, right? If you use whatever, one of these tools, you’re going to pull up results and you’re going to know – everyone that we’ve talked to has said this – you’re going to know 100% that some of these results are bogus, but you’re going to use it anyway because it’s the only thing available. So we wanted to change that, and it’s going to be, I think honestly maybe a little bit difficult for people to jump on board at first because they’ve been trained to not trust it. But this is actual data. It’s real data, and it’s something that you can trust.
The Most Relevant Keywords
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, so like the two biggest selling points here, I think, are just the relevance of words. So you’re only getting words that are relevant to your listing. We even show a Relevancy Score so that you can see how relevant is this term to the term that I put in, right? And then second is the search volumes. So this is all data only from Amazon. We’re not using any kind of outside sources to build up the keywords, the volumes. Like you’re getting only good, high-quality data. And so the level of trust, like Cam is saying, is going to be kind of night and day difference. So yeah, I think it will be a bit of a learning process, but anyways, I mean you, like I said, you will see the differences here. And there’s a bunch of additional features, but yeah, we can just stay in the meat of it right now.
CAMERON YODER:
Let’s break down what’s – we talked about it a little bit already, but I want to get kind of a streamlined process going of what is wrong with current keyword tools, right?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, yeah.
CAMERON YODER:
So okay, what is one of the number one things that is wrong with keyword tools out there presently?
CASEY GAUSS:
So I think across the board the biggest problem is that there’s so, so many keywords that these other tools are missing. And I’m not just talking about some long-tail keywords. I’m talking about high-volume, related words. So it’s so difficult right now – and this is where our big breakthrough was. It’s so difficult for you to – and this is why we originally were testing out natural language processing using semantic, finding these semantically-related words from content. It’s very difficult from a technical perspective to get the word first-aid kit and be able to come up with the word trauma bag and know that trauma bag is a related word that you should be prioritizing because first aid and kit, none of these seed words are in these, some of these other high-volume words. Like again, trauma bag or emergency kit, like that has kit, but emergency isn’t in first-aid kit. And so it can be hard for these tools to find these other words. And so we have some case studies. You would just not believe the number of words, important words, the volume that the majority of tools out there are missing.
You know, there is an example. We’re still finalizing the case studies completely, but anyways, just at a high level there is an example for eye cream, right? So we said there is 600,000 aggregate searches a month for all the keywords related to eye cream, so 600,000 – 540 related words, and the most popular keyword tool out there missed 450 words out of 540. The volume they missed was 475,000 searches out of 595,000. So what that means is either if you just typed in eye cream into this keyword tool, then you are missing out on, you know, a huge, huge percentage of volume, or you’re going to have to intuitively know to go search all these other words, and you’re going to have to spend a ton of time running all these other searches to try to get the comprehensive list. And then the fear sets in of how many words did you miss? You know, you have to spend all this time, as well. So the second most popular keyword tool – we don’t really want to name any names – but second most popular keyword tool missed 312,000 searches a month out of 595,000. So yeah, they missed like over half, right? And they missed 350 words out of the 540. So it’s like insane.
The tools that people are using are missing out on major, major search volume. And that’s a problem, number one. Second is time, right? So right now existing tools provide so many junk words, right? And I understand from a technical standpoint like it’s hard to get rid of these words. We’re making sure to return only highly-relevant words. At the same time able to get a very broad scope. So we are significantly reducing your keyword research time because we’re able to return only high-quality, relevant terms. And we’ll show you how relevant these terms are. And so if something has a very low Relevancy Score, then now you know, like okay, I shouldn’t be prioritizing this. And we have a priority score to help you do that.
CAMERON YODER:
It’s kind of a – it’s a compounding effect, right? So if you use – if you’re using other data tools, like you said before, just simply put, other tools from the data that we’ve accumulated, are not providing the full list of keywords that should show up for the keywords that you yourself are searching. And then from that you yourself have to put in more time double checking, cross-referencing all of those keywords to make sure that you’re getting the right ones in for your listing.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yep, I would definitely say those are the two biggest ones. I mean obviously we have some features that solve some other problems, but yeah, I’m good with sticking with those.
Our Market Relevancy Calculation
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah. So okay, how then does – what does Keyword Research do, which is Viral Launch’s tool? What does Keyword Research do to get the most relevant terms, because it’s not about – it’s not all about volume, right? It’s also about relevancy. So it’s about pulling up a tool. A great tool is going to pull up all the words, or as many as possible, for related to the search term that you input. But it also is going to be so much better if the terms that are brought up are relevant to the keyword. So not only is it volume; it’s relevancy. So what does Keyword Research do to pull up volume, a lot of keywords, but not only that, keywords that are relevant for the term that people are searching?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, I mean we don’t want to share too much because we don’t want to allow other people to replicate what we’re doing. But essentially we have this entire – like you would not believe the amount of data that we’re crunching just to try to get this list of words. And so we have this huge kind of extraction process that is very difficult where we’re going and just getting an insane amount of words. Then we go and we have this even larger algorithm that goes and then scores each of these words to help give it this Relevancy Score. And then yeah, then we have our own process of getting the search volume for each of the words, both exact and broad.
And another thing – this is kind of like a, you know, side feature or whatever, but another thing that we’re doing that you’re not really going to find really anywhere else except maybe one tool or something, but is trend. So you know if you’ve used Market Intelligence or Product Discovery you know that we love data, right, especially understanding historical context so that we can better understand or predict where it’s going in the future. So we’re showing you the search volume trend. So you can see okay, you know, fish oil looks like a good market – it doesn’t, just so you know – anyways, fish oil looks like a good market, but search volume is like significantly declining. Or you know, this term is increasing very rapidly. You should definitely prioritize that. And so yeah, I don’t want to share too much about our process, but I don’t want to give too much away, but essentially it’s really focused on keyword aggregation, just getting a very, very – casting a very wide net. And then we pull in all these words, and then we go through them to look for the words that are winners, and then we throw out the ones that aren’t.
CAMERON YODER:
This tool is – Keyword Research is really designed to improve the Amazon seller experience when it comes to keyword research and just creating a listing in general, right? So Casey, what are your favorite features of the tool that are going to help listeners of the show or just Amazon sellers in general?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, so I mean we’re continuing to talk about it. The things I’m most proud of are just the breadth of words we have, what we call all these horizontal words where you search eye cream, but then you get face moisturizer, right, or moisturizer for face, like you get eye gel, right? So you get all these words that are similar, but like maybe what we call horizontal words that maybe don’t share any of the seed words. So I’m really proud of that. So the quality, the breadth, and then I really love the trends just because I like seeing where everything goes. Usually these search terms report, give like hundreds and hundreds of words, which is awesome that we have all these long tails in there.
Opportunity Score
And then one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is our Opportunity Score. So to date we’ve always looked at keywords in two lights, right, is this relevant, and then what is the search volume. But what we haven’t really taken our time to do, just because manually it can take a long time or just a decent amount of work, is looked at these keywords from a strategic standpoint. So how are my competitors prioritizing these words? How difficult is it to rank not just by, you know, how many units I need to sell, but by how other sellers are prioritizing these words. So if, for example, nobody had fish oil in their title, they didn’t even have it in their bullets, all they had was fish oil in their description, it would be so much easier for you to rank for fish oil if you had it in your title. And so there would be this, you know, strategic arbitrage opportunity for – so maybe fish oil isn’t the best example. Let’s take burp less fish oil, for example. So burpless fish oil, a decent volume keyword, and let’s say nobody, none of the top-ranking burpless fish oil listing, or results for burpless fish oil, have that keyword in their title. And there’s still good volume. Nobody has it in their title. So that’s an awesome opportunity for you to prioritize it, put it at the beginning of your title, run some promotions for it. But you’re going to be able to rank a lot easier than if everybody else had it in their title. And so we’re showing you what we call this Opportunity Score which shows you, you know, how well, or to what degree, are the top sellers for this keyword prioritizing the keyword.
How to Use Opportunity Score
And our hope here is that, let’s say you do happen to be in the fish oil market, which I really hope you aren’t unless you have, you know, a good amount of money. But anyways, so let’s say you are in this fish oil market. Well, there’s plenty of words out there that other people are not prioritizing that still get decent amount of volume, so you can more easily rank for those words, build up your sales and just continue to climb up the ladder, right? So go after burpless fish oil because there’s good volume and nobody has it in their title, or only a couple people do. Then go after this other mid-volume keyword that has good volume but people only have it in their bullet points, or a couple people have it in their title. Like basically we’re showing you this Opportunity Score so that you can strategically look at words from a volume perspective, from a relevancy perspective, but also from a how are my competitors leveraging this word.
CAMERON YODER:
In other words, what are people, what keywords are people searching for that competitors are not putting or prioritizing in their list, basically?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, yeah, completely. And then right now we still have a lot to do with this tool, actually two other features. One, I like seeing we’re aggregating all the exact search volume for the word to show you, okay, fish oil, for example, has you know, 500,000 searches a month and then, you know, whatever, omega-3 has X number – like so it’s really cool to go and see what the total number of potential impressions are for this keyword or this market that you’re thinking about entering, right? So the last one is sponsored ad suggested bid, and so this is, again, another cool opportunity for you to identify these arbitrage opportunities, right? So if you see there’s a ton of search volume on this keyword but the suggested bid cost is really, really low for a keyword – boom. There’s an opportunity for you to go get in on a high-volume keyword while paying less than, you know, market average across the board for that kind of volume. So that’s one of our premium features. But again, basically we’re trying to build this very comprehensive tool to help you identify these arbitrage opportunities. Where can I easily rank because no one’s prioritizing it? Where can I easily bid on keywords or do it, you know, cheaply because nobody else is? Yeah.
Integration with Viral Launch Software
CAMERON YODER:
One of the things I’m really proud of with the tool, and I’m honestly looking forward to in the future just for Viral Launch in general is an integration between the tools. So we’re actually working on integrating Keyword Research with our other tools, Product Discovery and Market Intelligence, which will provide you – honestly it will save a lot of time. One of the goals with this tool, again, is just saving time and money. And so as you’re using something like Market Intelligence you’ll be able to look at the market data for a keyword, but also will be able to kind of cross reference keyword data at the same time. That’s just – I’m looking forward to future integrations with the tools that we’ve come out with or just kind of further implement with the current tools we have.
CASEY GAUSS:
That should be live when the tool goes live. So if you’re listening to this podcast, then yeah, Keyword Research should be integrated with Market Intelligence. It should be integrated with Product Discovery. Basically what that means is you run, you know, Market Intelligence on the fish oil market or page, then you’ll see obviously Market Intelligence data, but you’ll also get to see what the search volume is exact and broad for those keywords. So I think that’s huge. No other tool is doing that. And so it’s like basically the way to get access to that is you have to have a subscription to Market Intelligence. You have to have a subscription to Keyword Research. And then second, yeah, we throw this into Product Discovery, and I think I’m super, super excited about this, the reason being is for the first time ever you’re going to be able to look for markets where the search volume is high but sales are low. And what this means is opportunity markets where customers are coming and they’re looking for this particular product, but they’re not finding anything interesting. They’re not finding what they’re looking for.
So take, for example, grill brush with LED lights, right? Like let’s say everybody wants to brush their grill at night and they want lights and whatever, right? So if there were, you know, 20,000 searches for grill brush with LED lights, but there’s very few sales for the products that are ranking for them, then that means that there isn’t a good grill brush with LED lights, well so I would imagine. There are some other factors that are in there. But anyways, it’s a really cool opportunity for you to find these underserved markets, and you just can’t get that anywhere else. And again, the way that you get this integration is you have to have this Product Discovery subscription and the Keyword Research subscription, and then they work kind of in unison there. So yeah, I forgot about the combination or the integration, and I’m really excited about that.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah. Casey, is there anything else you want to let our listeners know about Keyword Research?
CASEY GAUSS:
No, not really. I mean we’re – next step, phase 2 is we’re working on a listing building feature, which is really going to hopefully help you prioritize words, based again on opportunity, volume, help you to make sure that you’re writing the best listings possible. But yeah, I think that’s about it.
CAMERON YODER:
Look forward to it. If you haven’t yet, go check out the tool. If you even haven’t yet, go create an account on our website. There is a free trial for the tool. So really if you haven’t yet, go to our website, create an account, check out a free trial. You will be blown away. We also are going to have a couple different resources on YouTube, and we’re going to be putting up more content for Keyword Research as well, so keep an eye out for that.
Well, that is all for this week. Thank you so much for joining us on Follow the Data. For more insights and reliable information on how to succeed on Amazon, subscribe to the podcast and check us out on YouTube. I have a series of Product Discovery walk-throughs up on our channel that will really help you understand how to best leverage the tool. In fact, I just posted a new video about how to use the new Product Discovery search presets. So if you want to check it out just search Viral Launch on YouTube, go to our page and look for my face.
CASEY GAUSS:
If you’re listening on iTunes please, please do not forget to leave a review and rate the show. If you’re listening on any other platform like SoundCloud, Stitcher, leave us a comment. We love feedback. If you haven’t gotten that from any other interactions with us, we love honest feedback on literally everything. And if you sell on Amazon, which I imagine is the demographic of people listening, then you know how important reviews are. And so we would love it if you could go leave us a review.
CAMERON YODER:
Thank you, again, for listening so much, and as always, if you want to be featured on the show, have an Amazon-related question or an idea for an episode, or you just want to say hey, feel free to leave us a voicemail. Our number is 317-721-6590. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
In this episode, we field a few questions from our listeners. Being your own boss and running your own business is an incredible part of being an Amazon seller. But navigating the Amazon space all alone can be hard, and reliable information can be difficult to find. How does Amazon really work? What are the best strategies? Join host Cameron Yoder and producer Becca Longenecker to find out.
Want to be on the show like today’s listeners? Have your own story of entrepreneurial success? We’re working on an episode that features our listeners! Leave us a voicemail at (317) 721-6590 with stories or questions about your Amazon business.
Talk about barrier to entry: language is a huge one for going international. Read our recent blog post about the importance of getting a native speaking copywriter to create your listing.
CAMERON:
Being your own boss and running your own business is an incredible part of being an Amazon seller. But navigating the Amazon space all alone can be hard, and reliable information can be difficult to find. How does Amazon really work? What are the best strategies? Today we field a few questions from our listeners to help you make sense of it all.
I’m Cameron Yoder, your host for Follow the Data: Your Journey to Amazon FBA Success. In this show, we leverage the data we’ve accumulated at Viral Launch from over 28,000 product launches and our experience working with 6500 brands to help you understand the big picture when it comes to Amazon and, more importantly, the best practices for success as an Amazon seller.
In today’s episode, we’re hearing from you and answering your seller questions. There’s an awesome variety of topics and some great content here for those of you who are just getting a product into FBA or who are looking to refine your selling process to make your business more profitable. Let’s jump in.
[fade out intro music]
BECCA:
Hey, I’m Becca Longenecker, the producer for Follow the Data, and I’ll be joining Cameron in today’s episode. Before we get started, I just want to give a huge shoutout to everyone who has called in and left us a voicemail, everyone who has subscribed, everyone who has left us a review, and everyone who has listened so far. There are a lot of podcasts out there, and we feel really honored to be one of the ones that you choose to listen to.
CAM:
Yeah, Becca’s our producer, and she gets to listen to every episode all the time, even the stuff, the content, that we don’t get to put into the episodes. And so I’m psyched to have her on the show, welcome Becca.
BECCA:
Thank you Cam. So at the end of every Follow the Data episode, we encourage you all to call into our voicemail box and leave us a message with your Amazon questions or responses to the show. And we’ve really enjoyed hearing from you, so today we’re going to play a few of those voicemails for you and answer a few of the questions that you all are asking.
CAM:
So let’s play the first voicemail response.
BECCA:
Alright
CAM:
And then we’ll go from there.
LISTENER #1 JOHN:
Hey, my name is John Farrell. I’m actually I’m new to selling on Amazon. I just listed my first private label product, and I think this is a question for myself, but I think that it could serve well for a lot of people who listen to your podcast and may be new. So basically to get my product ranking—and you’re saying that sales history is so important—so what I’m doing is I just listed my product last Monday, so it’s been exactly a week since I listed it, and I did 3 sales a day for the first week, and now I’m upping it to 5 sales a day for the second week, and then 7 and then I’m going to do a blast on Viral Launch.
But I’m having difficulty in … I’m getting a lot of different answers regarding … because my product isn’t … it’s still too new, it isn’t showing up on any pages of search results for any natural keyword terms. So what I’m doing is I’m having people. I’m I’m sending them to I’m sending them links to the product to buy from the link and hoping that you know one of these days, it’s just going to pop up on one of the pages, and then I can have them buy naturally by sending them the keyword and they can search through pages search for my product and buy it.
I’m not even sure if that’s the best way to do it. That’s what some people are telling me. I want to get your feedback on that as well as I wanted to know when I should expect to start having results as far as all when I should start showing up naturally on the pages for keywords, and if it … taking this long is you know not normal, so that’s that’s the question. I have for you guys. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
CAM:
Yeah, so that’s a good collection of questions and situations from John. And there’s a lot of … there’s a lot there, honestly, to go over. And so starting out, if you haven’t seen the podcast episode where we talk about sales history, I recommend going back and checking that out after this podcast.
So John, one of the first things that he talked about, and maybe one of the first things we should go over is the fact that his listing wasn’t necessarily active right off the bat. And we don’t necessarily have data to show that this happens for every single person that opens a product on Amazon. But from what we can see, that is a normal occurance for you to … let’s say you create a listing on Amazon, right? So you buy the product from like Alibaba, and then you create a listing on Amazon, and you create a listing on Amazon, and then you ship the products into FBA. And once those products get into FBA, a lot of people will think ‘Oh, well I can just start selling immediately and start ranking immediately, but in some cases the … when you search for your product, just through the normal search function on Amazon, it doesn’t pop up. And so there seems to be this period of time where maybe it’s going through Amazon’s system, or whatever, where it takes a little bit of time for it to load into Amazon and for you to really be able to … not even to … you don’t necessarily have to wait for that to gain sales because you can send people a direct link to your product, like John talked about. But when it comes to something like keyword ranking, and you can’t even find your product when you search a keyword, that’s probably not the best time to do something like a launch.
BECCA:
Yeah, um next Cam do you want to talk about the part of his question where he is talking about how he is giving away 3 units and then 5 units and then 7 units, and he’s kind of doing this … like building up sales velocity—a term that we’ve heard people talk about a lot—and in that Sales History / Sales Velocity episode that we did, you guys kind of try to explain that. Maybe you can go over that again?
CAM:
Yeah, so really when it comes to a brand new seller. This is less important. But when we talked about the comparison of sales velocity to sales history it’s sales history that matters more, right? So if you have been a seller for a long time, and you’ve built up a pattern of a bad sales history, you’re going to have a harder time launching, or ranking on a page for a specific keyword and sticking there. On the other hand, if you have a positive sales history, so if you’ve been selling for a decent amount of time, and your sales have been pretty good, then the … let’s say you launch on to page 1, you’re going to have a little bit easier of a time sticking on there because of your positive sales history. In John’s specific case, he’s talking about a very early strategy of kind of messing around with low numbers of sales velocity and increasing them, like within a week’s period of time. For John’s case, that’s not super important. Like that, honestly it probably wouldn’t make a difference, if you were to space it out like that. What matters more, what matters more in this case, than incrementally spacing out sales from specific people, what matters more in John’s case is keyword ranking, right? Which he might not be able to do yet because his product is not available to see yet to everybody. And more than that are getting reviews, getting his initial reviews. Like if I were to talk, if I were to sit down with John and talk about what to do first, I would say when you’re product goes live on Amazon, you need to get reviews in place.
BECCA:
Well, even before it goes live, right?
CAM:
Yeah, yeah! Even before. Like in John’s case, he should get reviews.
BECCA:
Even when it’s not showing up in search.
CAM:
Right, even when it’s not showing up in search. Even when he can’t do something like a launch to increase keyword ranking because he can’t show up in results. Getting those reviews in place is really going to solidify his social proof so that when he does go live, then he can perform something like a launch and get to the front page and have that social proof there and ready to go instead of just having no reviews in place.
BECCA:
Going back to that incremental change. I just wanna make sure this is clear. So I think a lot of people think that the incremental change is what Amazon wants to see—they want to see that you’re sales number, your sales volume is growing. But actually Amazon’s just more concerned with how high your sales volume is. So it doesn’t have to be incrementally changing over time, if you right off the bat can get that sales volume up and you can match the sales volume of your page 1 competitors, you can climb in the rankings.
CAM:
We’ve actually seen this and we’ve talked about this. Casey and I talked about this a little bit before. But there’s this small period of time, this grace period it seems like, when your product goes live for the first time. Or actually newer products, if you funnel a certain amount of traffic through it, at the very beginning, Amazon seems to take preference to that. It’s kind of like, Oh, you’re a new product, and you’re preforming really well at the beginning, so we’ll reward you. And in some cases, people can achieve ranking quicker and or stick on page 1 longer if they perform a launch right off the bat. Again, with that social proof in hand though. So with that … that’s a combination of good photos, good reviews, good price, all those things. But all those things combined together, really if you’re an early product it might be good to perform a launch if you have all those things in place right away.
BECCA:
That’s pretty cool.
CAM:
So I just want to summarize again because there are a lot of points in there that are important. But so when you’re thinking about sales history, it really is not that important if you’re a new seller. It matters if you’ve been selling for a little while and you have bad sales history. That’s gonna negatively affect your ability to rank and stick on ranking. If you have a good sales history, that’s good. If you’re new, you don’t really have a sales history yet. You just need to make sure that you’re not building a bad sales history, a bad reputation.
BECCA:
Alright, let’s move on to the next message.
LISTENER #2 DANIEL:
Hey, my name is Daniel Metz and I’m recent listeners to the show. I just listened to the episode about the Amazon reviews, and what I think is going to probably happen is that the reviews that you see will be weighted. Based on 30 days or 60 days or 90 days something like that, but they will still have access to like lifetime reviews just giving a greater weight to the more recent ones and that the actual star rating in order to be more accurate will reflect a more recent time frame as opposed to all of the reviews over the entire life of the product offering. I’m a recent user. I’m just now doing my first Viral Launch, and I really appreciate the company, just the the way the company is run. In comparison with all the other companies, and so just wanted to call and let you guys know. Thanks. Bye.
BECCA:
Thank you Daniel for that affirmation. We have really tried to differentiate ourselves in the space and to be a legitimate resource for sellers in a market where there are a lot of proclaimed solutions that don’t actually deliver on results. We have been and continue to be super customer-centric, results driven, and innovative, and it’s really encouraging when people recognize that. So thanks.
BECCA:
Daniel’s call was about the episode that we did on the future of Amazon reviews. So if you haven’t listened to that episode, I would definitely encourage you to go back into our feed and give that one a listen. Cam and Casey talk about the way that Amazon reviews are now and how that could potentially be bad for sellers in the future, and what they think Amazon will do to change that.
CAM:
So the concept is, if you’re new to selling, and you’re trying to sell this awesome new face cream, and everyone else has like 12,000 reviews, it’s going to be almost impossible for you to compete. So we discuss that and what we think Amazon is going to do.
BECCA:
Yeah, so that sounds like a definite possibility, Daniel. Casey and Cam throw out the idea of a weighted system in that episode as well, and it seems like a great way to go for Amazon. I also think you’re right that they’ll probably have to allow sellers to keep the lifetime reviews for their product. I think they would probably get a lot of backlash if they tried to take down legitimate reviews. Although, they have taken down reviews in the past. But yeah, I think you’re probably not far off with your prediction.
CAM:
Let’s go on to the next question.
LISTENER #3:
Hey guys appreciate you guys doing this. I’m a new seller. My question for you guys is really about launching, so I have a new shipment coming in. It should be within like the next 30 days month or so, and I’ve been reading through Facebook group try to figure out the best strategy to get things started get a launch going. So I know you guys do launches, but I’m also seeing a lot about running sponsored ads doing those at the same time, a little bit confused as to really what I should do, so if you guys could give your best advice on sponsored ads, running at launch, how those compare. Yeah, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
CAM:
That’s a question that we see actually a lot. So the question is, basically, how does PPC compare to a launch, or to running a targeted giveaway.
BECCA:
So PPC, or for those … or sponsored ads … payed per click advertising, PPC, is when you see those sponsored ads at the top of a product search, those top couple of products, they’ll says sponsored, and those are a way to get your product in front of people for a specific keyword and drive sales through that keyword. So it’s basically functioning the same way as a Viral Launch. With a viral launch you pick a keyword to target, and then you put that product in front of a buyer group at a heavily discounted price. And the sales that you get from that discounted product promotion are going through a targeted keyword. So with sponsored ads and with a product launch, you are getting those sales attributed to a keyword, and that’s the really important aspect of a launch and for sponsored ads as well.
CAM:
So they’re both trying to accomplish the same goal. However the main difference for something like an effective launch or PPC is, honestly it’s time.
BECCA:
Yeah, so the reason that we do a launch the way we do, where you’re discounting your product so heavily and putting it up on this buyer site is that we have … you know the buyer site has over 100,000 people subscribed who are checking in daily for deals, and with a heavily discounted product, you can move a lot more product. So you can have, you know, 10 sales a day or something like that whereas with PPC you might see 1 sale per day, 2 sales per day come through a specific keyword. And so the purpose of a launch really is just to get that volume because you can move up through the ranking so much quicker.
CAM:
A launch is simple. A launch is an attempt to match the sales of top sellers for a specific keyword, right? And with our launch platform and with other giveaway platforms, if you can funnel all those sales through a 7 day or 10 day period of time, that’s gonna be more effective than just throwing money in the air and hoping. PPC just takes so much more time.
BECCA:
And with PPC you’re usually targeting a handful of keywords all at once, and with a launch it’s just really really specific, and you’re just going all after that one keyword.
CAM:
So it does depend on the market that you’re in and the keywords that you’re kind of trying to rank for. A lot of people also ask if they should do PPC while they’re doing something like a launch, and honestly the answer is … well it doesn’t really hurt. At the same time, I know people who very effectively only run launches. So they take all the money that they would be spending on something like sponsored ads, which can be expensive, and they put it towards a launch, and if they drop in ranking, then they just run another launch. Monetarily for them, just looking at the numbers, it makes more sense with the keywords that they’re trying to target. Some people will do a launch and PPC, but basically a launch is going to be more effective. It’s going to be your base line.
BECCA:
The other thing I guess to say about PPC is, one way that it can be really helpful is to target a whole bunch of keywords or do those auto campaigns through Amazon and then you can figure out which keyword your product sells the best for or converts the best for. And that can be a good way to find a keyword to target on your product launch.
CAM:
Yeah, that is a good method that a lot of people use. It takes some time to get, but if you’re not sure about what keywords to target, it can be a really good option.
BECCA:
Alright, moving on to our next voicemail.
LISTENER #4:
Hey Casey and Cam, so I’m a fairly new seller in the Amazon game, and I had a question for you guys about selling internationally. I heard that it’s pretty easy to go over and sell internationally because the markets aren’t as strong and developed in the US, but I’m kind of wondering is it really worth it for me to go and sell international because I’m so new and so fresh in the game should I just spoke with my efforts on US or is it worth it to try international right out of the gate? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks guys.
BECCA:
So that’s a tough one. Cam, what do you think about going international right away?
CAM:
Being completely honest, honestly there are 2 arguments here. I know sellers in both. I know sellers who have succeeded in both. First off, nothing is as easy as it sounds, so people often say, Well yeah, I’ll just start one of those Amazon businesses and launch it and it’ll be just super easy. I’ll make tons of money. But if you as an Amazon seller think back to the first time, whether you were using a course or not, I’m sure somewhere along the line of you starting your first Amazon business, or your first product, selling your first product, you thought: Hey, this is much harder, or some degree harder than I thought it would be originally. But international is a different game than selling on Amazon or is just different than if you were to try to sell outside of the United States. So my first response to this listener is that you need to establish what your goals are. What kind of numbers are you shooting for? How much effort or time or energy do you want to put into this? Because that could determine if you want to stick with your home country, where you’re most comfortable, or not. You also want to do more research on international markets and the US market. So for us, we use Market Intelligence and with that we’re able to look at sales numbers in Europe, sales numbers in the United States and market trends as well, and almost across the board, the numbers in the United States completely beat out the numbers in other countries. Now, you have to keep in mind the barriers too. So one of the biggest barriers in the United States is going to be competition. So just because there are a lot of sellers here. There’s a lot of traffic. So obviously if there’s more traffic, there’s going to be more competition. That’s the biggest barrier. And if you’re going international, then some of the biggest barriers are going to be something like language barriers—the copy for your listing—culture barriers—understanding how people are buying, different selling licenses and laws, transferring money back to your home country.
BECCA: On that topic: we have a podcast episode with World First from a couple weeks back that you should go check out. We talk to Lucy Marshall, and she kind of explains who they help Amazon sellers at World First transferring their funds back home.
CAM
If you haven’t listened to that and you’re an international seller, give that a listen. All that being said, there are some barriers to entry to consider, to really consider. And it all depends on what your goals are. Overall, start small, and once you feel confident in your ability to sell, then maybe maybe consider going international. But all that being said there’s still a ton of opportunity here in the United States.
CAM:
Well hey guys that is all for this week. Thank you so much for joining us here this week. Again, I just want to iterate, we really do love hearing from you guys and all of these were questions that we’ve received from you and that we’ve been hearing in the space, and so it’s honestly just really good to hear feedback, but it’s also good to hear questions that you have at the same time. So I’m gonna give our number here. It’s (317) 721-6590. We absolutely would love to have you call in and give any questions or feedback. We would love love love to feature you on the show.
For more insights and reliable information that will help take your business to the next level, subscribe to the podcast and check out the Viral Launch blog at viral-launch.com. And also check out our YouTube channel. We’re really … we’re shooting for a lot of content in 2018. I’ve said this before, but check out our YouTube channel, we’re doing a weekly walkthrough of Product Discovery right now. It’s kind of like a course. And you’ll see those videos. They’re called Fireside Chats. You’ll see those videos under the playlists that we’ve created. And you will also see my face in those.
BECCA:
Don’t forget to rate the show and leave us a review on iTunes. That helps me out with my job. Your feedback helps all of us here at Viral Launch cater our content for you as the listeners and it helps other people find the show as well. We also want to say that we really appreciate everybody who has left a review and has given us feedback so far, and a special thanks to everyone who we featured on the show today who called in with a question.
CAM:
Again, thank you guys so much for listening. We are looking so forward to putting out more content for you. Feel free again to reach out in any way. Until next time remember, the data is out there.
