You may be familiar with a Reverse ASIN* Lookup, a popular feature of many Amazon keyword tools. It’s a search that allows you to see every keyword that a single ASIN, or product, is indexed for.
Some people like to use Reverse ASIN lookups to do keyword research, mining their competitors’ listings for juicy, high-volume terms. But while this may seem like a great way to optimize your listing, it’s actually hugely problematic.
The Problem with the Reverse ASIN Lookup
Here’s the thing about a Reverse ASIN Lookup … It only shows you the keywords that a single listing is indexing for. So if you’re basing your keyword strategy on a Reverse ASIN report, you had better hope that the listing has every single relevant keyword for your product.
But wait, you’re running Reverse ASIN Lookups on 10 different listings? How could you possibly be missing keywords when you’re looking at a sample group like that? Well, where are you getting those listings? If you’re hand picking them yourself, what are your criteria for selecting each one? As hard as you try, your selection process is going to be imperfect and time-consuming.
The Keywords You’re Missing
For example, let’s say you select a handful of listings. Competitor listing A is indexing for 20% of all relevant keywords, and competitor listing B is indexing for 50% of all relevant keywords. Competitor listing C is indexing for 70% of all relevant keywords. But all three listings have a 90% overlap.
If you run a Reverse ASIN Lookup on these listings, you’re still missing 68% of the keyword landscape! That could mean thousands of dollars in missed sales. And that’s not even considering the search volume of the keywords you’re missing.
How it Should Work
Ideally when running a Reverse ASIN Lookup, every listing would be completely relevant to your product and have as little keyword crossover as possible with the other listings you’ve selected. They would span the breadth of your market, including unlikely search terms you may not ever think to look for.
But that’s not the reality of Reverse ASIN Lookups. And that’s the problem. Reverse ASIN Lookups are only as strong as the listings’ you input. The good news is that a solution does exist. It’s called a Reverse Market Lookup.
Reverse Market Lookups
A Reverse Market Lookup shares many of the same features as a Reverse ASIN Lookup with one major difference: the set of listings it pulls from. While Reverse ASIN Lookups depend on you to select the right listings for consideration, Reverse Market Lookups find that optimal set of listings for you, using advanced data analytics to scan as many as 10,000 listings.
Keyword Research is the only Amazon seller tool available that uses this advanced system for keyword collection. When you enter your product’s main keyword in Keyword Research, we immediately begin to scour Amazon’s immense catalogue to find all of your product’s most relevant keywords and markets.
We then run our Reverse Market Lookup on thousands of top ranking listings across a diverse range of relevant markets. Can you imagine the amount of time it would take you to find and evaluate thousands of relevant listings for your product’s market?
The beauty of Keyword Research and all the Viral Launch software is that you get thousands of data points analyzed and summarized for you at the click of a button. That means you get a comprehensive view of the market without having to do the work of collecting the information. Create a free Viral Launch account, and try out Keyword Research to see the power of the Reverse Market Lookup.
Want the power of Keyword Research and our Reverse Market Lookup but don’t have the time to write your own listings? Have our team of professional copywriters create optimized listing copy for you. Click here to learn more and sign up.
Using search volume to determine the number of Amazon giveaway units needed to drive keyword ranking is an extremely flawed method.
A significant number of sellers are running promotions and giving away far too many units in promotions. When asked how they are determining the number of units they are giving away, many sellers site their keyword tool. As a result of these bloated suggestions, countless sellers are wasting thousands of dollars in extra inventory and advertising spend.
In this post, I’ll show you what’s wrong with using search volume. And then I’ll walk you through the current best strategies for determining the right number of units for a giveaway. After running over 30,000 product launches, we’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to drive ranking, including how to best estimate number of giveaway units.
Two Major Flaws In Using Keyword Volume To Estimate Giveaway Units
Flaw #1: Conversion Rate
Remember that sales volume, not search volume, is the important metric for keyword ranking. If there are a hundred-zillion searches per month for a product but only 10 sales, you only need to drive enough sales to compete with those 10 purchases.
Conversion rate from search to purchase can be drastic. We have access to some insider, Amazon data, and what it shows is that for some keywords, the percentage of searches that result in a sale can be as high as 50% and as low as 0.01%.
Talk about a drastic difference! That means if a keyword gets 10,000 searches per month, there could be anywhere from 5,000 sales to 10 sales.
There’s no way around this huge variation in conversion rate. What if you took an average? Let’s call the middle a 25% conversion rate. That would mean 25% of 10,000 searches are sales. So monthly sales would be 2,500. But 2,500 giveaway units isn’t going to do much if the keyword is actually converting at 50%. That would mean sales were actually 5,000.
On the other hand, it would be extremely excessive to give 2,500 units if the conversion rate was only 0.01%. In that case, you would have only needed 10 sales. But instead you threw away inventory.
As you can see, without an understanding of conversion rate, estimating Amazon giveaway units using search volume is very misleading.
Flaw #2: Sales Distribution
The second major flaw in determining number of giveaway units from search volume is the distribution of sales across search results. Sales distribution can be summed up with this simple question: what percentage of shoppers who run a search, purchase the #1 ranking product? What about the #5 ranking product? The #15?
If 100% of shoppers who search a keyword end up purchasing the #1 ranking product, sales distribution would be low. Actually, in the case of 100%, the distribution would be 0.
If 10% of customers purchased the #1 ranking product, another 10% purchased the #2 ranking product, and so on, the distribution would be higher and would look like this.
So what is the likelihood that sales distribution is consistent for most keyword searches on Amazon?
If you search, “AA batteries,” you don’t have to scroll very far before you find what you’re looking for. The products are all generally the same with minimal difference other than price and quantity.
Conversely, when shopping for, “father’s day gift” or “baby bandana bib,” style and preference are important considerations for shoppers. Prospective customers are much more likely to browse the results, ultimately purchasing the style, bundle, or color they like most.
Now that you understand what sales distribution is and how it can vary wildly, you can begin to see the second flaw in using search volume to estimate number of Amazon giveaway units. Keyword tools do not consider sales distribution. In fact, they don’t have any information about sales distribution at all.
And that’s a problem for you as you determine the optimal number of giveaway units for your launch. Sales distribution plays a critical role in the number of sales your product needs to outrank the competition.
For example, let’s say 80% of the sales for a keyword search are split between the top 5 products. If your goal is just to land in the top 15, then you don’t actually need to compete with those top 5 products. You only need to match the other 20% of the sales for that keyword.
If you did want to land in the top 5 for that keyword, you would need to match the sales of those top 5 competitors. That would mean giving away enough product per day to match 80% of the sales for that search term.
Now let’s look at conversion rate and sales distribution together. Say conversion rate is 2.5% for that keyword with 100,000 searches. That’s 2,500 monthly sales. And if 80% of sales are distributed among the top 5 listings, that means 2,000 monthly sales are going to those top 5 sellers.
So if you want to land in position 6 – 15, you only need to compete with the remaining 500 monthly sales. If we assume that sales distribution between products 6 – 15 is even, we can estimate that each product has about 50 sales per month. Divide that by 30 days in a month, and you’ve got about 2 sales per day, or 2 units a day that you need to give away in your launch.
As you can see, estimating the number of giveaway units needed to be sold per day to match competitors is highly dependent on the conversion rate AND the sales distribution across the results. Both of these numbers are currently unknown to existing tools and can vary significantly across searches. These factors are what make keyword tool calculations a shot in the dark at best when it comes to giveaway unit recommendations.
How to Estimate the Number of Giveaway Units
First, let’s talk about how a launch works. The idea of a launch is to match or exceed the number of sales for listings on page one for your targeted keyword in a short amount of time. We recommend 7 days, as Amazon recognizes sales history in 7-day buckets.
In order to sell a large number of units in only a few days, you’ll likely need to use a giveaway platform. But how do you determine the number of Amazon giveaway units you need to match or exceed the monthly sales of your competition?
Unfortunately, there is no simple or straightforward answer for you just yet. We will, however, share the processes we have used here at Viral Launch to estimate the number of units to give for tens of thousands of launches over the last few years. We guarantee that this approach is far better than using search volume to estimate the number of Amazon giveaway units you need for a successful launch.
Step 1: Know Your Keywords
First and foremost, knowing your main keyword is critical to a successful Amazon business. Using an Amazon keyword tool such as Keyword Research, allows you to identify your product’s most relevant words. A good tool will help you prioritize by showing you search volume and relevancy for each keyword. We call that our Priority Score.
Step 2: Determine Your Budget
Your budget for your promotional campaign is an important factor in determining which keyword you should target. The higher the sales volume, the more units you will need to rank alongside the page one performers. If your budget is big, go for a keyword that gets a lot of sales. If your budget is smaller, go for a keyword with fewer sales.
Step 3: Determine Monthly Sales Volume for Your Keyword
Once you have selected the keyword you’re going to target based on your budget, search volume, and relevance to your listing, you need to determine the number of Amazon giveaway units to get ranking on page one.
Use a sales volume estimation tool like Market Intelligence to determine the number of sales your page one competitors are doing each month. This will allow you to see the sales volume you need to match or exceed over at least a seven day period.
A simple way to do the math is to take an average of sales for listings on page one you are looking to rank alongside. Let’s say you are looking to rank in the top 5 positions for your keyword and the average sellers are selling 3,000 units per month (100 units per day).
From your keyword research in Step #1, you should have a good feel for your market’s most popular keywords. Let’s say there are 2 high volume keywords, each highly relevant to your product market.
We would suggest giving away at 50% of the average sales volume. So 1,500 units per month or (1,500 / 30 days = 50 units per day) 50 units per day.
Multiply that by a minimum of 7 days of promotions to equal a suggested Amazon giveaway of 350 units.
We understand that the math is not perfect. There are potentially hundreds of words these top performing products are generating sales through, including PPC, outside traffic, etc. We are working hard to develop a solution for better determining the number of sales per keyword as well. However, until we have this more granular data, we are relying on this tried and true method of determining the number of units to sell from a solid metric, sales volume.
The Takeaway
Now that you understand the technique behind creating an Amazon giveaway strategy based on sales volume, NOT search volume, you can apply some of these techniques to your promotions. No matter what traffic source you’re using (i.e. discounted promotions, Amazon Sponsored Ads, or Facebook promotions) to reach page one, you need to match or exceed the average number of sales for your targeted keyword.
Basing these Amazon giveaway estimates on search volume alone could cost you tens of thousands of extra dollars and cut into the bottom line of your business. Take advantage of the advice and knowledge of the true Amazon experts at Viral Launch and make sure your next promotion sets you up for success.
Understanding the nuances of Amazon customer search is what can really help you rank higher Amazon in the most efficient way possible. Just a handful of small opportunities that other sellers might consider crumbs, really add up. Join hosts Casey Gauss and Cameron Yoder for a conversation about how to feast on the crumbs of your product markets.
Keyword Research integrates seamlessly with our other research software, Market Intelligence and Product Discovery. Find product ideas with high search volume, and see exact and broad match volume as you do market research.
Episode Transcript
CAMERON YODER: Hey, everybody, what’s up? My name is Cameron Yoder, and I’m here with Casey.
CASEY GAUSS: Hey, guys.
CAMERON YODER: And we’re actually in – we’re actually in Las Vegas right now. We hit up a couple conferences, a couple Amazon seller conferences. And it’s been a good time. We’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of really awesome sellers, and Casey actually spoke at one of the conferences here. And it’s just been honestly a really good time to meet some of you, and to talk to some of you, and meet some people that we haven’t met before.
And as always, it’s just good to be in the community, you know, just meeting and talking with people. Anyway, so we’re actually going to dive into more about Keyword Research, not exactly specifically the tool that we introduced last week, or the tool that we just came out with, but we’re going to talk kind of deeper level strategy behind – or basically deeper level strategy that you as a seller can use when you’re researching keywords, the mentality that you should be developing. And we’re going to talk about, again, just deeper level strategies and strategies that you can implement today when it comes to research.
CASEY GAUSS: Hey, guys. I do want to stipulate that, you know, we are not planning on – we’re not trying to shove Keyword Research down your throat. We really just think that, you know, there are some really cool opportunities that have to do with Keyword Research just in general that we really want you to be aware of because whether you’re in a high, highly-competitive market there is still so much opportunity.
Whether you’re in a low competition market, I imagine there’s tons of keywords that you’re not targeting. So yeah, we’ll jump into just high opportunity keywords. So one, you know, so there’s always people jumping into markets that they really have no business being in, or maybe you’ve just been in this market for a while, it’s just gotten so competitive, and you’ve kind of just lost market share.
Well, there’s still, from what we’re seeing, generally so much opportunity that’s out there. So let’s take the Garcinia cambogia market, for example. If you’ve been around for, you know, more than a year you probably know this product to be somewhat of a joke, right? So there’s a ton of products out there that everybody is sourcing, and everybody knows that everybody else has sourced it at some point. These are products like grill gloves, Garcinia cambogia, turmeric, fish oil, grill brushes, garlic press; you know there’s a number of these products.
And so Garcinia cambogia, like I mentioned, is one of them, a very, very competitive market. At one point it was insanely high-volume. I think it’s still pretty high-volume, but there’s definitely some more mature players in this market. So when we go and we run keyword research we find, you know, just quickly scanning through I found 10 words, each with at least 1000 searches a month in volume, all with over 900 opportunity score.
So the one keyword for this is luxury Garcinia cambogia. There’s over 2000 searches a month for it and 990 opportunity score. What this means is – to recap the opportunity score, basically what we’re doing is for each word we’re going to look at the top sellers for this word, and we’re trying to understand do they have this word in their listing. And if so, where do they have it, and how are they using that? The reason being is we are trying to help you understand how easy it would be to rank for a particular keyword. And so to understand how ranking works on Amazon it’s important to know that Amazon is paying attention to the very specifics of keywords and how they’re used in your listing.
So the rules of indexation and the rules of ranking are different. So if you put brush in your listing you will be indexed – meaning Amazon associates this keyword for the product – you will be indexed for, you know, the singular and plural form of that just by putting one version in. So if I put brush in my listing I’ll be indexed for brush and brushes. But one thing that is – and it, you know, generally doesn’t matter where you put that. You know there are limits in terms of back-end search terms. But regardless, you know, if you put it in the bullet points, you put in the title, it all is indexing the same.
But when it comes to keyword ranking, though, this is quite a bit different. And so, you know, basically Amazon is looking at the content of a listing at the time of a sale. So as a sale goes through they’re looking, okay, what words are in the title, what words are in the bullet points, what words are in the back-end, and so forth, to then boost them up in the search results. And so what we see is that words contained within the title get more rank power per sale than words found anywhere else in the listing.
And so this is a very important thing to note. We also see that the specifics are important. So if you only had brush in your title, but you had brushes, you know, in a bullet point, then each sale that happens the word brush is going to be getting higher ranking or moving up the ranks faster than the word brushes. And so these specifics, these nuances, are very important for you to understand how to build the best listing possible and get that advantage over the competitors.
So taking all of this into account plus a bit more, all the data that we have found through our 30,000+ launches, we’ve put into this opportunity score. So we’re looking at, okay, for luxury Garcinia cambogia, how are the top-ranking products using it in their listing? Is it found in the front end? If so, where and how? And so a thousand is the top opportunity, meaning that nobody has it in the front end of their listing in any form.
So for luxury Garcinia cambogia the opportunity score is 990 with 2000 searches a month. All that to say you’re selling Garcinia cambogia, this really competitive market, but there is plenty of opportunity for you to kind of, you know, get the crumbs. Like I said, I think there’s six words or something like that that combined have over 8000 searches per month. Each one has over 1000 searches individually and an opportunity score of 900. So collectively, you know, these crumbs add up to, you know, half of a piece of bread – or half of a loaf of bread.
CAMERON YODER: A cookie.
CASEY GAUSS: Adds up to – I don’t know what it adds up to, but I don’t know what the analogy is, but regardless, you know, you can add up these words. So for example, luxury Garcinia cambogia, misspellings as well, assuming that they do not auto complete within their search results. But here’s a word that has over 1000 searches a month, but is Cambodia Garcinia, but reviews on Garcinia cambogia, there’s over 1000 searches a month for that. So you could just prioritize the word review somewhere in your listing, and now start getting significantly more boost in the search results and another misspelling, Carcinia cambogia.
So if Amazon isn’t auto-completing these words you can throw them in your listing, throw them either in the front end or the back end. Misspellings probably belong in the back end, but it really kind of just depends on what your brand looks like and what the misspelling is to see if you can throw it in the front end. Again, the title provides a really distinct difference in terms of rank power that it is driving. So all this is saying is even in really competitive markets there’s tons of opportunity out there. Go position your product well. Make sure that you’re doing your keyword research to really understand where are the holes – where are the gaps in the market so that I can push my product in there?
CAMERON YODER: I just want to add a little bit to that. I think high-level sellers might take this piece of information and think that there aren’t keywords that they haven’t seen yet, that they could apply to their listing. But this advice honestly applies to all people. I mean it’s not like every single person knows every word in the dictionary, right? And just because of that, you yourself cannot determine if there’s a group of people searching a word that you don’t know about.
And because of that I would really encourage you all, if you’re low, or if you’re a beginning – if you’re a beginning seller, or if you’re an advanced seller, to go and find – do keyword research with the purpose of finding those words that you haven’t seen yet because you will find them, and all of those added up, even if they’re small, to stick with the crumb analogy, can make a whole piece of bread or an entire cookie, whatever the end result of that analogy is.
CASEY GAUSS: Yeah, another one that we were doing some demos here at one of the conferences and people, you know, could not believe that one, people, other top sellers for these words did not have these words in the front end of their listing, and then they were blown away that, you know, some of the most popular tools out there were just missing these really, really important words.
So another high opportunity keyword, if you search trash can you will find trash cans, the plural form, with over 10,000 searches a month, 1000 opportunity, meaning no one has the plural form of can in the front end of their listing, which is just insane to me. The fact that you don’t think to throw cans, the plural form, in your listing is crazy. But there’s over 10,000 searches a month. Easily just throw cans in your title and now you get all this additional traffic without doing much work at all.
So next up I think we are going to talk about horizontal markets. So horizontal markets, again, from kind of a technical perspective can be difficult to find. So there are some popular keyword tools out there that are missing a lot of these horizontal markets, and this is something that, you know, is really important. So one example is going back to trash can, you know this word, we keep using the word but it just has amazing examples.
For example, a horizontal market would be a word where there are no root words contained within this new word. So basically what that means is let’s say we are selling a trash can, a horizontal market would be kitchen garbage, or garbage bin, or waste bin, because you do not find trash or can anywhere within the word. And so there’s tons of these horizontal markets. They can be difficult to find. Another example would be, you know, let’s say you’re selling a first-aid kit and trauma bag would be that example for you. There’s so many of these horizontal markets. Again, make sure that you’re hitting them. A lot of tools that have existed on the market have not been doing us a good job of finding them. But there’s a ton of opportunity out there.
Next up, so this is talking more specifically about Keyword Research, our tool, but we do want to highlight some benefits of the integrations. This is one thing that, you know, I’m just really excited about. But I guess I get excited about a lot. So one benefit of Keyword Research being now integrated within Market Intelligence is too often we see someone going after a very, very niche market, and the sales on Market Intelligence look amazing.
So if you were – but you don’t really know in reality what keywords are driving those sales. So on Market Intelligence or any tool that, you know, this Chrome extension or whatever that’s showing you estimated sales, these sales are for the product as a whole independent of what words it is not ranking for and where. So people can get confused pretty easily.
So if we look at the water bottle market, let’s say someone searches 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and they think you know, the sales look amazing. The top seller is selling $230,000 a month, the third ranking product 100,000, and you know, 26,000 and 40,000 in between those. So it looks like sales are amazing, but if you look at the search results that are now showing within Market Intelligence you see there’s only 378 searches over the last 30 days for this.
So that is a clear indicator that wow, if there’s only 378 searches this revenue cannot be coming from this keyword. So then if you go and you look at insulated water bottle, what you’ll find is okay, there’s a lot more searches, almost 29,000 searches over the last month. And you can, again, see the revenue. If we were to go to water bottle I would imagine we would see a lot of these same products showing up and obviously much, much higher search volume. So basically what we’re hoping to do here with Market Intelligence is just to help you understand that you should, when doing your product research, you should be looking at the main keywords that are driving the sales. And what is the best indicator of that? That is search volume. Cam?
CAMERON YODER: Yeah, I just want to maybe say this in a different way because I think without a visual picture it’s a little hard for listeners maybe to picture something like this. But I just want to give a picture. Again, let’s stick with the insulated water bottle. So you search 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and you see – you’re pulling up all the results and you’re looking at sales information, so monthly revenue, right? So if you pull up 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and I’m a seller looking to maybe get into the insulated water bottle market, I’m going to see all these huge, huge monthly revenue numbers, right?
And I’m going to think, well shoot, everyone is killing it in the 32 ounce insulated water bottle space, so I’m going to source insulated water bottle – or 32 ounce insulated water bottles. What I don’t know, however, is if those sales are being attributed through other keywords. In other words if someone else, or if other people are buying these insulated water bottles through a more primary keyword, such as insulated water bottle, or water bottle in general. So what I need to do is make sure that people are searching for that specific term or that specific market. And in some cases like this people can easily get tricked into buying a very specific product.
Maybe it’s something that’s a little bit of a longer tail keyword and they think it’s a great market when in actuality it’s actually those sales are being attributed through another keyword. And finding the primary keyword is going to give you a more accurate picture of that market, and it’s going to give you a more accurate picture of maybe what you’re stepping into, to either validate that idea or save you from stepping into a market that will underperform, basically.
CASEY GAUSS: And last topic, integrations with product discovery. So this is something that I have been dreaming of for a while, and especially when I realized that we would be able to integrate keyword research data with product discovery. And this is – it’s because you cannot do this literally anywhere else in the world, and that is find underserved markets on Amazon. So what, you know, we did a webinar last night and we were walking through some examples, and you know, it just made perfect sense.
So basically what we mean with an integration with product discovery, which is a product finding tool, you know, we’re tracking coming up on 100 million products on Amazon. We’re tracking millions of keywords, brands and categories to help you identify, you know, great product ideas, great product opportunities, brands that are killing it so you can emulate their success or find, you know, what tactics or driving such.
Anyways, so if you go to the keyword search type in product discovery you can now put in search volume exact, and the search volume, again, is coming from Keyword Research, and here’s where this gets really cool. So basically by having search volume and sales volume we are able to find markets that are underserved. So what I mean by underserved is people are, you know, searching, you know, bachelorette or bridal shower gifts, let’s say.
So they’re searching bridal shower gifts, and they go there and they’re not finding anything that they want, and so they just end up not purchasing something. The opportunity here is for you to find these markets where people are running tons of searches but no one is buying because they aren’t finding what they want. And this gives you validation to understand people want this, no one’s finding – you know, there isn’t a good option available, so I can bring something totally new to the market that satisfies this need.
So one like amazing example that Cam has ahead, or up on the screen right now, is gender reveal. So people are searching gender reveal, and there’s over 25,000 searches a month for this, and there’s only $6000 in average revenues. Gender reveal party supplies, 33,000 searches, and the average product is doing $4,900 a month. So there is a ton of search volume. There’s very low revenue coming in on these products, and that is just one keyword.
If you were to go add up all of the keywords that were related to gender reveal, gender reveal party supplies and you were to look – because the revenue stays the same. The search volume just continues to add up. So anyways, these products are doing, you know, $5,000, $6,000 a month on average, but collectively you know there’s got to be well over, you know, 75,000 searches a month. So just a ton of volume, and basically people just are not buying what they, what they’re seeing.
And so this, you know, go see what’s out there. Obviously people are not super happy. Maybe read some reviews to see what people are really looking for. Go do your research. Go see what you can source, and then bring that to market because you know people are looking for these products. They’re just not finding what they’re looking for.
CAMERON YODER: Yeah people, so people – it’s been very interesting for us to be in Vegas and to be talking to people here just about keyword research in general, not specifically about our tool, but talking to other people and how they use keyword research tools. It’s very interesting for them to use them to find untapped – or to find product ideas, right? So they’re using Keyword Research, other research tools, to find product markets. They’re using the tool for the purpose that they weren’t intended for, right?
And so they’ve asked us – people have asked us about, well should I use Keyword Research? Or can I use Keyword Research to find other markets that I am not in right now? And the answer is yes, you can because other markets are going to pop up. Like if you search trash can, something specific like another horizontal market will pop up or something like it, like mesh bin or something like that. That includes another marketplace for you to jump into. But the integration here with product discovery allows for full search of new product markets that you’re not in yet using Amazon keyword search volume.
So Casey, where we touched on searching for markets that have a high search volume and low sales because that’s indicative of a lot of people searching for a product but not buying, which is indicative of a market that people are not happy with necessarily, or an opportunity for you to make a better product in. On the other hand, let’s say you flip the – so we set a minimum search volume, and we set a max sales number, right, to limit the amount of sales that are popping up for these keyword markets.
Let’s flip that a little bit, and let’s search for markets that have a minimum search volume. So we’re searching for markets that have a high search volume, and we’re searching for markets that have a high revenue, whereas before we were capping the revenue. Now we’re finding markets that have a ton of sales, right, and a ton of search volume. At the same time we’re going to throw in one more metric here. We’re going to cap out the review count.
So we’re searching for markets that have high number of sales, high number of searches, but a capped out number of reviews, something like 100. This, this is a small – and I’m just keeping it simple for podcast’s sake, but this then is indicative of markets that are getting a lot of searches and a lot of sales but are still young, right, so the markets that are still opportune for entry, basically if a market has a lower number of reviews but a high number of sales that’s a better chance of you entering in and competing.
Well this pulls up markets that a lot of people are searching for, that a lot of people are buying in, but that not many other people are competing in, something like that. Our goal with this is to really challenge the mentality of people when it comes to keywords, when it comes to research, when it comes to product research and just keyword research in general. So I would honestly, honestly encourage each of you to begin to question the way that you think about keywords and begin to question yourselves with what you’re looking for, how you’re looking for it and maybe even how you can optimize your processes and your listing optimization.
Well, everybody, we wanted to – we want to thank you so much for sticking with us. We hope that you found some value with this, especially when it comes to just thinking about processes in a different way. That’s what we want to do. We want to challenge sellers to better themselves. We want to challenge sellers to improve and scale their businesses and honestly have fun while doing it. So we thank you so much for tuning in.
Thank you so much for listening. Again, if you have any questions feel free to send us an email, hit us up on Facebook. We would love to hear your feedback on the podcast or just any general questions that you have. Whether it be something about researching keywords or researching markets, we want to hear from you. So hit us up. Thank you so much. We do this for you. If you said hey this weekend, thank you so much for stopping by and saying hey. Hopefully we will see you all sometime in the near future. Anyway, thank you guys so much. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
Sponsored ads provide sellers with an incredible opportunity to gain exposure to streams of shoppers. But most sellers don’t know how to utilize sponsored ads, spending way more money than they need to for minimal returns. Join host Cameron Yoder as he talks to sponsored ads guru and Viral Launch Head of Innovation, Leo Sgovio, to find out how you can grow your business using Sponsored Ads.
Sponsored ads work a lot like a launch, driving sales through a targeted keyword. Read our recent blog post about Viral Launches and how 90% off promotions continue to work for our customers.
CAMERON YODER:
Sponsored ads provide massive potential for sellers to gain exposure to streams of shoppers, but most sellers don’t know how to utilize sponsored ads, spending way more money than they need to for minimal returns. 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 30,000 product launches and our experience working with 6500 brands to help you understand the big picture when it comes to Amazon and, more importantly, for success as an Amazon seller. In today’s episode we sit down with our Head of Innovation, Leo Sgovio, to talk about the best practices for sponsored ads. We’ll talk about how to use sponsored ads to your advantage without breaking the bank so you can put your money towards more important investments for your business. Let’s jump in.
All right, so we’re here today with Leo. Leo, how are you doing today?
LEO SGOVIO:
Amazing, guys. Thank you for having me today on the podcast. I’m really excited.
CAMERON YODER:
For sure. And you’re in Canada right now, right?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yes, I am.
CAMERON YODER:
What’s the weather like?
LEO SGOVIO:
It’s cold in Canada. It’s terrible outside. Actually, it’s not too bad lately. It’s a big plus so I can’t complain.
CAMERON YODER:
Okay, that’s good. Well, just to intro Leo a little bit because he deserves introducing, Leo is a performance-based advertising specialist with expertise in multichannel digital advertising, and he’s the Head of Innovation here at Viral Launch. So he’s worked for over nine years in digital marketing, during which time, during this time he successfully built and managed multimillion dollar traffic acquisition strategies in travel, career, real estate, finance and online retail marketing, including Amazon.com.
So Leo, can you tell us about your past a little bit, just kind of everything that you’ve been involved with because you’ve been – I mean obviously you’ve been involved with a lot. So maybe just expand on the experiences that you’ve had and just briefly kind of what you’ve learned from everything.
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Cam and Casey. So like you said, I’ve been involved in the digital space for a very long time, and that’s really what gives me an advantage when it comes to understanding what the major search engines, including Amazon on the sponsored side of things, does. So I’ve been managing over $6 million, $7 million a year ad spend on both Google AdWords, Bing, Facebook. And so when it came to – when I started selling on Amazon.com I adopted sponsored ads almost from day one because I knew that it was one of the best ways to always drive traffic to my product and always have my product in front of people that were looking for it. So I didn’t use that as a second option when my sales were low, for instance.
And yeah, so going back almost like 10 years ago when, you know, Google was still in its infancy I understood that for them there was an advantage of, obviously, for us as an advertiser it was an advantage on using sponsored ads together with traffic that we were getting organically because there was a field that the search engine obviously looks at it. Okay, they’re making money when you buy traffic from them. And so there is some sort of reward when obviously they see that you are both paying for the traffic through their sponsored programs and as well as, you know, doing well organically. So it’s a win-win situation that works well for the advertiser and the partner you are working with, which in this case would be Amazon.com.
CAMERON YODER:
So how did you initially just even get involved in the SEO space?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, that’s funny actually. When I came to Canada, and I was visiting this country, I was already doing some SEO stuff back in Italy where I’m from, and I got really passionate about it. And I remember and I met one of my family members, and I asked him okay, you need to tell me what’s the hot job right now that is going to make me good money? And he’s like you know you should learn SEO, and a week later I was already Google certified. You know, I had already started all the hoops. And you know I got the certification of Google AdWords, and I was ready to rock it. And then since then I just, you know, kept studying and learning, and this is how I really got into it. But it became a really a passion for me. I would never do anything else right now. I mean I love e-commerce. I love, you know, like understanding traffic sources and generating sales online and all that comes with it. So I’m really happy what I’m doing right now.
CAMERON YODER:
I think your perspective is so valuable, number one, because you’ve been in the space for a really long time, not in just the Amazon space, right, but the Google space as well. So your perspective is very valuable, and it’s a perspective that not a lot of people have, especially in this space. And so I mean we’re talking about – this show is all about Amazon specifically, but there’s value in comparing Amazon to something like Google, especially when it comes to sponsored ads. So can you touch on, just here in the beginning, kind of what the difference is for when it comes to sponsored ads between Amazon, Amazon.com and something like Google?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, so I think it depends on like, you know, what perspective we look at it, right? So for example, in both cases, right, Google AdWords, or Bing, or Facebook, or Amazon sponsored ads, you know we’re familiar with display advertising. You know, format is pretty much the same, as well as, you know, text ads. So if we look at it from a format perspective, then, you know, it’s pretty much similar, right, when it comes to the way we build ads, like starting with a campaign, ad groups, and then, you know, looking it down all the way to keywords.
However, when we look at objectives that’s when things are really a bit different. So for example, on Amazon.com the main goal is to drive sales to your product. And so when you look at Google or Facebook instead there are so many different objectives. You can set it for your goals, for example, or it could be an email capture or, you know, an account creation. Or if you’re an e-commerce store obviously a sale, a purchase. So these platforms are similar in certain ways and completely different in others. So it really depends on how you look at it.
CAMERON YODER:
So really when it comes down to the primary differences Amazon is very focused, right? Like Amazon, the goal of sponsored ads on Amazon is just kind of one; there’s like basically one goal, and it’s to drive sales to your product. At least that’s one of the primary goals, right?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, and that comes, you know, because of the, obviously the intent of the user on the platform. It’s a different kind of intent. When you’re on Google.com you’re, it’s kind of, you’re looking for information. You’re still in the shopping process. You’re looking for something. You’re, you know, gathering information around the web, and then eventually you make your decision. When you go on Amazon.com you’re ready to purchase. You probably already have your credit card on the desk ready to be, you know, typed in – the card, right, the checkout page. So over there you’re going to be really – do your best to make sure that your product is in front of these people. And so sponsored ads help you with that specific goal, right?
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, and that makes sense. People go to Amazon. If you’re searching in Amazon, like the search engine of Amazon, you’re intending to buy something off of Amazon.
LEO SGOVIO:
Correct.
CAMERON YODER:
If you’re searching in Google you’re searching for a large number of different things. It could be to buy something, but it could be just for like, for another piece of information.
LEO SGOVIO:
Correct. And you can see like the conversion rate, for example. It’s a good metric when it comes to, you know, understanding the difference between the two different platforms. Usually an e-commerce site, Shopify or WooCommerce, as a – in a good case scenario, like the average, let’s say, conversion rate is probably like 3%, 4%, sometimes lower, like say in the travel space I’ve seen is 0.8%. And on Amazon I personally aim for at least 25%. So it’s a huge difference there, right? So obviously user intent is, you know, where the conversion rate comes from, right?
CAMERON YODER:
Of course. So okay, in your mind, in your experience using sponsored ads on Amazon specifically, is it – is using sponsored ads more focused on making a profit or gaining something like keyword ranking, or a little bit of both?
LEO SGOVIO:
Well, yeah, I’d say little bit of both. I mean there are different goals that are usually set when I use sponsored ads. The main one is obviously to generate more profit, and I’ll explain that in more detail. Let’s say if I’m just launching a product and want to start generating awareness toward my brand or build sales history, which is very important for a brand-new product, then I don’t care much about profits. As long as I can break even my numbers look good based on the analysis that I’ve done prior to my launch. Then I’m fine with, you know, like breaking even, even losing maybe a few cents, a dollar. But my goal at that point is to generate, to build my sales history so that Amazon, you know, falls in love with my product because eventually it’s going to make money. So once I’m comfortable with these numbers I took the listing first of all to get a good conversion rate. And so when we look at using sponsored ads for rankings, it’s a little bit of a different strategy. But yeah, both – like I use it for both reasons. One is obviously to drive rankings. The other one is for profits.
CAMERON YODER:
So kind of the baseline, bottom-line goal of sponsored ads really, like we said before, is to drive a sale. But in that, that purpose and that primary goal kind of splits into two things. You can use those sponsored ads to either drive a sale or promote keyword ranking, really. Like it’s kind of twofold. So Leo, can you describe for us then, can you even expand a little bit more on advice you’d give when it comes to increasing ranking using sponsored ads?
LEO SGOVIO:
Sure. So the first thing I do when I start with a brand-new product, for instance, is launching ad campaign and set it on automatic targeting, which means that Amazon targets your ads to all relevant customer searches based on your product information. So if my product is in a highly competitive niche, which means that the search volume is high, obviously, I wait let’s say 4 to 7 days and then I download the report that shows me the customer search terms and the keywords that resulted in clicks on my ads.
CAMERON YODER:
You said you do that first, right? That’s like one of the first things you do?
LEO SGOVIO:
I actually, yeah, that’s one of the first things I do because I want to make sure that whatever I’m doing after makes sense, right, like I’m targeting the right keywords. And so at this point I know what consumers are searching for rather than just relying on you know, a guess, or I see how there through other tools. And I first tweak and optimize my listing to ensure that those keywords are included in the key section of my listing. For example, the title, the description, bullet point. This is very important because if I’m targeting something out through a launch, for example, either way or sponsored ads and my listing is not optimized, I don’t think I’m going to get as, you know, results as good as otherwise, right, if my listing was optimized for this keyword.
And so once I make sure that I have the right keywords in the listing I then create campaigns targeting these specific keywords using exact match and phrase match only. Then I look at the report. Usually if I have time I look at the report, you know, on a daily basis, maybe every two days. I just want to make sure that the campaigns are performing well. I look in my [unintelligible], and if it makes sense for me then I keep running these campaigns, or I tweak. So ideally this process lasts about a month, and during this month I try to build campaigns very targeted. So with my experience with, for example, Google AdWords, Google also, when you add a very thin campaign, a campaign, very tight so the name of your campaign, ad groups, what you are targeting in terms of keywords, as well as the ad copy. So I try to use the same practice, same guidelines on Amazon as well. And so I end up with a campaign that only has exact match keywords because those ones are clearly [unintelligible] and usually the CPC is pretty low, and then I go and use one for like phrase, phrases only. And then I keep an eye on this one because obviously it gives me a little bit more insight. It might be that search strengths change, or people are searching for the product in different ways because maybe a press release came out, or someone is advertising the product in a different way, and so people go on Amazon and search for it. So I try and go and discover these new keywords within this report.
But again, it’s very important that, you know, the listing is obviously, you know, it keeps optimizing it so that eventually Amazon grabs these keywords from your listing and ranks your product, especially if you have that automated campaign still running to gather data.
CAMERON YODER:
I think a lot of people get overwhelmed from this whole process. Like they see sponsored ads. If they’re not familiar with SEO they get overwhelmed easily, and then they just throw on an automatic campaign and then just leave that forever because it’s just easy to do. But I really like your process. And correct me if I’m wrong, but there were like maybe like three steps with it, -ish, maybe four. So run the automatic campaign, get the primary keywords, change your listing to match the most, like the best keywords, or at least use that as part of that process, and then run specific kind of targeted sponsored ads and then reevaluate consistently?
LEO SGOVIO:
Correct, correct.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, that’s – and you’ve found that process to be just very effective?
LEO SGOVIO:
It is, yeah. It is. It’s like you said, just four simple steps. Like find, optimize, tweak and scale.
CAMERON YODER:
Yep. And that’s very easy to digest, and I, for our listeners I think that’s so valuable. Again, just to map it out and to make it less complicated, that’s great. So you’ve touched on this already a little bit, but when talking about looking up specific keywords you mentioned using auto campaigns. Again, that was like the first step that you mentioned, but is there any other way or any other thing that you would recommend for sellers to really dig into which keywords they should select to optimize sponsored ads or just there listing in general?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, so this is my perspective on things, but I believe that automatic targeting campaigns are one of the best ways to start because you’re buying data straight from Amazon rather than relying on tools that might not give you accurate results. And so you really see what users are searching, and this is also very good practice when you’re starting a Shopify site or an e-commerce site. Usually you build a campaign in AdWords with a broad match, and you just, well, you’re wasting money. You’re just throwing money outside the window, and that’s fine because you’re just buying data from that source. So it’s the best way to know exactly what people are buying. And so you have now a good set of keywords to go after.
However, if I’m just getting an idea of what people search, I usually – I do these, and I’ve shared with some people a couple of times, and I’m hoping that those that are listening will start adopting this method. What I do, I usually scan my competitor’s listing why I keep this Chrome extension open. It’s called SEOquake. This extension was initially used for, or was an SEO extension, was just, you know, built to understand what the page was optimized for and calculate the keyword density within the page. And so I use this extension to show me what are the keywords that this specific competitor, let’s say the top 50, are going after. So the SEOquake, once I click on a link, sorry, a page analysis, it’s going to show me a list of keywords. And then I can filter by two-keyword phrase, three-keyword phrase, four-keyword phrase [unintelligible] keywords. And it will sort them by keyword frequency. So it’s basically like a density score.
And so it gives me a good overview. It’s like okay, if this user, this seller is optimizing for this keyword it means that it’s probably working for him, right? It’s probably ranking well, and so I should also keep an eye on this keyword. And then what I do, I combine in Excel all the keywords I find using SEOquake, the keywords I have from the automatic targeting campaigns, and then some keywords – I also use the Google keyword tool to get an idea on, you know, what people search on Google because it’s very important considering that these days Google is still the homepage of any website out there, and every search starts on Google. And then my secret weapon, it’s actually the AMS person campaign builder, like the campaign builder, because what I do, the way I use it, I create just a fake campaign. I never launch it. But what you could do there, you just create a new campaign and, you know, ad group and then with AMS you have the option to actually advertise any product, not only yours. And so you can now select a competitor’s product, and Amazon is going to give you suggested keywords based on that product. And I thought that was amazing, right, because I get keywords straight from Amazon without really relying on anything else that I don’t know data.
CAMERON YODER:
So you create a campaign for a competitor’s product, and you don’t start – did you say you start the campaign or you don’t start it, you just –?
LEO SGOVIO:
No, I never start it. I delete it after. I just download the keywords that Amazon is giving me, and then I delete that campaign. I don’t need this. It’s just for me to see okay, this is what Amazon thinks are really good keywords.
CAMERON YODER:
Gotcha. Okay, wow. Shoot, I actually have not heard of that before. That’s great. And you found success from that so far, at least mixing that with other things?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, of course.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, that’s great. And so jumping back to the other tool, the other tool that you mentioned was SEOquake, and I think the principle – I don’t think people are very familiar with the principle of what that’s doing, or at least with the idea behind something like keyword density that you mentioned. So in this case what this is doing, or one aspect of SEOquake with Amazon is it’s pulling – it’s basically kind of a – you put in a search term like fish oil, and then it searches for keyword density, which in this case means which keywords are being used frequently across each listing, right? And then it’s giving you that information.
LEO SGOVIO:
Well, kind of. Like so if you search for fish oil on Amazon, then what you will do, you will click on each one of the results, and once you are on the listing, then you will click on this chrome extension, SEOquake, and then it will analyze that page and give you a result of all the keywords that have been used in that page and score them by, like score them by frequency, right, or density. And so the ones that are obviously at the top, maybe if you look at one keyword phrase or the two keyword phrase you might find words like “buy now” or these things that don’t really matter because they appear on every page. But as you go down to like the third and fourth result, now you see like some pretty cool keywords, like for example fish oil, right? And then you get a 4%, 5% density. So this is now – I don’t want to go off topic, but it’s very super important for SEO, for example, we can have another podcast about it, but what I do usually, I analyze each keyword, each listing, and I see that on average each one is optimizing this listing with a let’s say 4% density, right? And so when I build my listing I try to match that or go a little bit higher so that when the Amazon bots go and crawl my page, consider mine as relevant as theirs, if not more, right? So that’s obviously now going into optimizing listing, but that’s what I use also the tool for.
CAMERON YODER:
Gotcha. And that’s very relevant. I think that’s something that not a lot of people are familiar with, so that’s great. I’m going to switch up topics just a little bit, just to keep things moving. But when it comes to cost, that’s one thing that a lot of sellers ask is oh, how much should I be spending on my sponsored ads, which I’m sure depends a which ads you’re running. But do you have any just general advice on costs that people should be spending or where people should cap themselves at, anything along those lines?
LEO SGOVIO:
Yeah, I actually have a really simple formula that helps to calculate the cost, and obviously it’s focused on ROI. But the formula is pretty simple. What I do, I look at my organic conversion rate. So for example, if my listing is converting at 30%, and then I look at the selling costs, so how much is this product costing me after all the FBA fees and the margin that Amazon is making, the referral fees. So by dividing that, right, by the conversion rate, you get your break even ACoS. So by making the calculation you get, okay, in order to break even my ACoS should be, let’s say, 10%. And so once you have that you know your organic conversion rate and the selling price, now you calculate your recommended default bid.
And now you obviously base your budget on that, right? Like if you cannot afford to spend more than $0.50 because now you’re going to lose money, then go below that. And so I usually calculate that default bid just before starting so I know that, and you know, in this case I’m breaking even. And then I tweak my campaigns as I go. So I launch, you know, like a bunch of different campaigns. The budget is obviously based on how much you can afford to spend. But at least you know that worst-case scenario you’re not losing money; you’re breaking even, unless you’re willing to lose money, for example, doing maybe just a ranking campaign but you don’t care about making money; you just want the product to end up on page 1. And so that’s usually what I do. It’s pretty simple, and I think it would be really beneficial for the listeners.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, that’s really good. And there may not be another answer to this. I just want to kind of jump back to automatic campaigns. So automatic campaigns can be good for finding your initial keyword list, right? But are there any other things that people should use automatic campaigns for, or should they just kind of stay away from them once they get more advanced? Like you said before, it was kind of that first step in your process for optimizing sponsored ads and listing and everything. But is there any other place for automatic campaigns, or not necessarily?
LEO SGOVIO:
So I think the main goal of an automatic campaign is to give you that initial set of keywords, kind of like understanding of what people look for when buying, looking for your product. However, obviously once you get familiar with the sponsored ads and become more experienced with the platform I will suggest to, you know, keep automatic campaigns running with huge budgets. Most likely you’re going to waste a lot out of it but however, I still have some catchall campaigns that I’m usually running on automatic targeting, and those ones, usually what I do, I lower my bid so I won’t be more than let’s say $0.10, $0.15, and they turn out to be pretty profitable, to be honest with you. So yeah, I usually just keep a catchall one after I’m done with, you know, the optimization scaling process, and these ones will just catch everything else that I’m not covering in my targeted ones.
CAMERON YODER:
Yep. So once a campaign is, I guess, successful in your mind, in your eyes, once a product is converted organically for a keyword that you’re targeting through sponsored ads, what generally would you say is the next step, just to kind of lower everything down and keep on going or to just keep an eye on everything? Like where – what is the next step from that point on?
LEO SGOVIO:
Well, if you’ve identified some good profitable campaigns I would scale the budget as much as I could. I mean as long as you are making money I would just feed the beast, right? Traffic on Amazon, like is there. Like people are searching for your product. So why leave that, you know, food on the table for somebody else to eat it? And yeah, like I would still try to look for other low-hanging fruit. So what I usually do, for example, one of my best practices with not only like with sponsored ads I only go and target, for example, my competitors with display ads, right? It does work extremely well for me when I target some related products, not necessarily my competitors. Obviously I get some good results when I target a specific competitor, they’re selling the same product and I know I have better and more reviews than them. So it’s pretty easy to win that customer. But it’s also very profitable for me when I go and look at for example, I’m selling, I don’t know, a face cream and someone is going to buy something related to it, maybe like a face brush or something to like related anyway, but not necessarily my direct competitor. And that works really well for me. There is a tool that shows you, for example, the frequently bought together. It’s called YASIV, y-a-s-i-v.com, yasiv.com. It shows you all the combination of like it’s a graph that pretty much maps all the frequently bought together. And that’s a good way to target your competitors and non with display ads. Those tend to do really well, and what I do is – I’m giving away a tip here as well – I usually target one competitor at a time per campaign. And this way it’s easier for me to see which one is winning, and then I just pause anything that is below like, you know, like 10% ACoS. And like you know, ended up with like 1500 winning campaigns.
CAMERON YODER:
So this is a – I know it’s a relevant question, but it’s a little bit out there, as well. How much time do you think people should be spending on sponsored ads and optimization, just optimizing the ads that they’re running, the campaigns that they’re running or starting new ones? How much time should people be spending on this?
LEO SGOVIO:
I would say obviously at the beginning you need more time than later on when you’re product has really been selling organically. But I would say probably I think a couple of hours a week, like two, three hours a week is plenty. You don’t need to, like the first week just to set everything up, and then maybe the second week, you know, it goes down to two just to, you know, go through the reports and make sure that everything is optimized. Maybe even one hour is enough. It doesn’t take really a long time unless you have, you know, a lot of products. Then it’s a different story. Maybe I will use a service for that. But I wouldn’t, like personally, I don’t spend a lot of time on building and managing campaigns.
CAMERON YODER:
And I guess it takes time. Like you said, it’s going to take more time at the beginning.
LEO SGOVIO:
Of course, yes.
CAMERON YODER:
Especially if you’re not familiar with how sponsored ads work, or SEO, or practices in general, like that. But once you learn all of that, really I’m assuming it just becomes easy to kind of just press play and go and spend a couple hours here and there a week, optimizing everything.
LEO SGOVIO:
Correct, yeah.
CAMERON YODE:
So I mean you’ve given a lot of really cool hacks and tips so far, especially like yasiv.com and the other tool that was called – what was the other tool called, the chrome extension?
LEO SGOVIO:
SEOquake?
CAMERON YODER:
Yes, SEOquake. But are there any other just general hacks, tips or tricks that you would recommend for people when it comes to sponsored ads?
LEO SGOVIO:
With sponsored ads, to be honest, it isn’t – like it’s a straightforward process and platform. So there are no really hacks that you can adopt so that, you know, your sales go up. I mean it really comes down to how smart you are and how, you know, like if you think outside of the box, okay. Really like what I find really effective is the kind of wording I use in my headlines, for example, or my, you know, like display ads. I try to trigger some sort of interest in like, so playing with the customers’ emotion, and then that usually gives me a higher click through rate, which means, you know, lower CPC. And that applies to all the different, apart from including, you know, Facebook, or Google, or Bing, if you play with a good ad run you usually tend to perform much better. What I would suggest as a good tip is to, you know, build different variations of your ad, not only one, because one of them most likely is going to outperform the other ones. And so I think that’s super valuable.
CAMERON YODER:
So essentially split test the ads you’re running?
LEO SGOVIO:
Exactly, yes.
CAMERON YODER:
Well, Leo, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for everything you do, for all your information. Really, there’s so much value, I think, and in the space that a lot of people get overwhelmed by. Leo, again, thank you so much. Really it was a blast having you on the show.
LEO SGOVIO:
Thank you, guys.
CAMERON YODER:
Well, that is all for this week. Thank you all for joining us on Follow the Data. For more insights and reliable information about how to succeed on Amazon, subscribe to the podcast and also 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 leverage the tool. And if you want to check it out, just search “Viral Launch” on YouTube. Go to our page and look for my face. So if you’re listening on iTunes and you like what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review and rate the show. You can also leave feedback on our Facebook page or tweet at us @viral_launch. Use the hashtag #VLFollowtheData.
And if you have a seller friend who you think would appreciate the show, tag them in your post and send them our way. We want to really be a great resource for sellers and the information source in this space. So please tell your friends. Tell your family. Spread the word, and share the show. And thank you all again so much for listening. And as always, if you want to be featured on the show, or if you have an Amazon-related question, or in conjunction with today’s episode, if you have a question for Leo or another idea for an episode, feel free to leave us a voicemail. Our number is 317-721-6590. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
Keywords are what set your listing up to rank well and sell well, but there’s a catch. People also need to understand what your product is and what it does from your copy. How can you inform shoppers and do Amazon search optimization at the same time? Join hosts Cameron Yoder and CEO Casey Gauss for this conversation with Viral Launch Lead Copywriter Yale Schalk. And find out how to set up the best possible listing with these 3 Amazon SEO tips.
Looking for an expert Amazon copywriter? Yale and the Viral Launch team would love to help you improve your Amazon search optimization. See pricing here!
CAMERON YODER:
Contrary to common belief, getting ranking on Amazon is not about lowering your BSR. It’s about getting sales attributed to a keyword. Keywords are what set your listing up to rank well and sell well, but there’s a catch. People also need to understand what your product is and what it does from your copy. How can you inform shoppers and capture all your product’s keywords at the same time?
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 30,000 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 I sit down with our Lead Listing Specialist, Yale Schalk, to talk about the best practices for writing an Amazon listing. We’ll talk about the keyword research, writing for Amazon SEO and how to convert shoppers. Let’s jump in.
So okay, we have Yale in with us today. Casey’s also sitting in on this.
CASEY GAUSS:
What’s up, guys?
CAMERON YODER:
So we’re talking to Yale today about listing optimizations. First, Yale, thank you so much for coming in on the show. How are you feeling about being on the podcast?
YALE SCHALK:
Awesome. Awesome, Cam. Really, really excited to debut on our expertly-produced podcast, which by the way I just want to say that everyone should be subscribed to, and you know, every morning you wake up just find your nearest rooftop and shout it and tell everyone. But yeah, excited for that and really excited to kind of jump into some key information that I really know is going to help a lot of people out there.
CAMERON YODER:
Yale is also already on the ball with recommending the podcast, which is great. I love it. Yale is our Lead Listing Specialist, okay? And he’s been a veteran writer with 10 years of experience writing about retail products. So he’s written for brands like Nike, Adidas and Reebok and is known in the office for his excellent taste in sneakers, okay? So actually Yale, what is your favorite pair of sneakers?
YALE SCHALK:
Oh, wow, that’s – it’s literally an impossible thing to answer. You know, obviously, I was raised on Michael Jordan and Air Jordan sneakers, so I can at least narrow it down to that, but from there it’s all bets are off. There’s just too many.
CAMERON YODER:
Well, all that being said, Yale is definitely deserving to be on this podcast talking about listing optimization when it comes to Amazon specifically. But before we dive into Amazon-specific SEO and Amazon-specific listing ops, I want Yale – Yale, can you touch on just SEO in general, SEO as a practice?
YALE SCHALK:
Absolutely, for sure. So you know, when people think of, you know, the term SEO or, you know, properly search engine optimization, you know they think of Google, right? They think of, you know, their minds go right to Google because Google is this ubiquitous thing that is just out there. So but SEO is not confined to Google. You know, it’s like if you’ve ever seen the movie The Matrix, you know at the end when Neo sees everything in just this digital rain, and it’s just like streaming lines of green code everywhere, you know, I like to think of SEO like that. I think it’s, you know, it’s very much in the fiber of anything that you search on the internet, and it’s necessary, you know, any time that you type something into a search bar.
CASEY GAUSS:
Well put.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, The Matrix.
CASEY GAUSS:
I love that analogy. If you haven’t seen The Matrix you just missed out on a great analogy.
CAMERON YODER:
Watch The Matrix, buy some sneakers, and then you’ll be set. So that’s general SEO, right? So can you move further maybe into like, I don’t know, Amazon or Google specifically?
YALE SCHALK:
Absolutely. So the way it works is basically that, you know, the input for a search is almost always language, and then the search algorithm uses that language to return a set of results, and then to get your content in that results list you have to give the algorithm basically what it wants. So then that begs the question, okay, so what does the algorithm want? In terms of Google SEO, that’s about proving credibility with, you know, relevant headings and meta-descriptions and links, and of course language for Amazon. It’s different from the standard SEO set up in that the results exist within Amazon’s platform. You know, for example, you don’t navigate to a different domain when you click on a result. So Google looks for site credibility with links and traffic, while Amazon looks for language, you know, or specifically keywords. So it’s really important for everyone to keep in mind that Amazon is really its own ecosystem when it comes to how searches are conducted and how those searches help determine the results you get when you or, you know, your potential customer, is looking for something.
CASEY GAUSS:
And I think it’s important to mention that – I think this is a stat from either 2016 or 2017, but over I think it’s like 55% of product searches begin on Amazon. So when it comes to king of search engines, when it comes to product searches, I think Amazon takes the crown.
YALE SCHALK:
Absolutely.
CAMERON YODER:
And that’s something I don’t think a lot of people think of, simply put, Amazon as a search engine. But in fact, like you said, it is, and listings in a sense really are all about SEO when it comes to Amazon specifically. So Yale, would you be able to introduce to us just some tips, maybe three basic tips that you have for everyone when it comes to listing optimization and keyword optimization on Amazon?
YALE SCHALK:
Absolutely, for sure. And you know, I think the good set up for this is like, you know, obviously everyone wants the highest visibility for their product. You know, ideally that’s page one. That’s what everyone wants to be on Amazon. So you really cannot afford to overlook the importance of keywords when assembling your product listing. You know you can have, and you know I never tire of saying this, but like you can have breathtaking photos, and you can have the most exquisite product description, but you know, without the proper keywords and the correct placement of those keywords in the listing, you know you’re basically – you know you’ve got a Ferrari with no engine. You know, it’s looking amazing, but it’s not going anywhere. So I just really want to emphasize, you know, first off that, you know, you can’t just throw information together and hope something happens. You know, I can tell you that it won’t. It doesn’t work that way. So it’s vital to get that keyword foundation in place.
So I would say for the first tip is plurals, plurals of words. So Amazon says that they account for plurals of words. So if you search swaddle blanket, you know, you’ll get different results than if you search swaddle blankets. So some listings will have, you know, both the plural and the singular form of the keyword while others won’t. So when someone searches blankets it’s, you know, hard for the algorithm to determine, you know, what exactly that person is expecting. So the algorithm is very smart, but it has its blind spots, and so one of the blind spots is it doesn’t know, you know, for example for this example that, you know, if you’re looking for multi-packs of swaddle blankets or if they’re looking for all the swaddle blankets on Amazon, so having both forms of the word, you know, or multiple forms of those words, those keywords, is really important for you to show up in any search related to your main search terms.
CAMERON YODER:
So tip number one, overall is suggesting to use both the singular and plural form of your primary keyword, or how many keywords do you think this would apply to?
YALE SCHALK:
I would say as long as you’re starting with your root keyword you want to kind of work in maybe the most common – and this is something that you’ll be able to kind of see in your keyword research, but and you’ll be able to notice patterns of what people are searching for, but usually you’ll just find like those simple little variations, those little, like little degrees of that root word, you know, just plurals and just different tenses of the word that people might throw in there when they’re searching for products.
CASEY GAUSS:
I think it’s important to mention also, I think one common mistake, and I don’t know if this is one of the tips, but you know, people always want to know am I indexed for this word. So just because you’re indexing for a word does not mean that you’re driving the same amount of keyword power or keyword juice, however you want to refer to it, to those words. So this is an important concept, and you’ll hear more about it.
YALE SCHALK:
For sure.
CAMERON YODER:
Let’s go on to tip number two.
YALE SCHALK:
Tip number two. Tip number two is keyword stuff the title. Yeah, you heard that right. Keyword stuff the title. So there’s been – this has always sort of been a philosophical debate on, you know, are you going to be rewarded if you keyword stuff? Are you going to be penalized if you keyword stuff? But I can tell you in the case of Amazon, in the Amazon world you’re going to be rewarded. So the title is definitely the most important, you know, real estate in your listing in terms of SEO. So you should really use as many keywords as you can fit, you know, without compromising quality or under-serving your character limit or overstepping that. I mean when you overstep that’s definitely something you’ll be penalized for, but so you know, what do I mean by compromising quality? So you know you have to make sure that you’re showing shoppers the information they’re looking for, like you know, things like ounces or fluid ounces might be important to consider, you know, if they’re considering price, or you know, certain features like dimensions or certifications like organic are there to include. So you know, this tip is really about just including as many super relevant keywords, you know, while leaving just enough space for those important, you know, product tidbits that people are looking for.
CASEY GAUSS:
And I always like to say, you know, I would much rather have, you know, a 3% lower click through rate because my title isn’t as beautiful but rank for, you know, twice as many keywords or three times as many keywords simply because I’m putting them in the title versus having that super short, you know, elegant, you know, four-word title that has like my brand name and just a few other words. Let’s say it’s a frying pan, so brand, you know, stainless steel frying pan. There are so many additional words that you need to be including in your title to maximize the position and total volume of keywords that you can rank for; well, rank well for. And so yeah, I would much rather have this longer title, rank for so many more keywords than you have this beautiful title that may drive slightly higher click through rates.
CAMERON YODER:
Yale, what’s your opinion on having the brand name in a title?
YALE SCHALK:
It’s awesome that you mentioned that because I was just going to follow up on that point. Yeah, a thing that I really want to talk about for a second is not insisting on including brand names in titles. I empathize with, you know, every seller that, you know, wants to do that. I mean, everyone wants to have the competitive advantage and get their brand out there, but I would say that you have to apply a pass/fail in terms of your brand name. So look at it this way. You just have to treat it as another keyword, and if there aren’t a ton of people searching for your brand name, then it’s always a good rule of thumb to substitute in an actual, you know, high-volume search term instead of your brand name. And I know that there might be a conception out there that, you know, people aren’t going to see your brand and you know, that’s something like that’s going to be a disadvantage for you, but you know, don’t worry. It will show up – you know, your brand is going to show up in the subheading. You just want to make sure that you make the most use of the title.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, to summarize it, people, you know, aren’t searching your brand name. If they are searching your brand name they’re going to see it in the search results. It says, you know, by brand in most categories. And even if not, if they’re searching for your brand name they should know what your packaging looks like because you should have cohesive labels or packaging or whatever in your photos. They will recognize your brand. You should not be concerned about them recognizing or not recognizing your brand. And by including that brand name in your title you’re just wasting super, super valuable character space.
CAMERON YODER:
I think the question should be what more valuable words you can put into your title that would take the place of your brand name.
YALE SCHALK:
Absolutely.
CAMERON YODER:
Yale, what is tip number three?
YALE SCHALK:
Tip three, prioritize keywords and then write your copy. Yeah, this is another thing that I’ve seen a lot where maybe sellers get focused on, you know, really fleshing out their copy, their listing, and they’re focused on, you know, stuffing as much information and even sort of messaging, you know, that they’ve come up with into the listing. But I would say that, as we’ve said, you know keyword is king, and you really have to sort of like lay that foundation first and then, you know, work in your copy from there. You know, again, it seems to make a lot of sense to look at your listing from your sort of branding ideas and everything like that. But you’ve got to get the keywords right, and then you know, then you can provide the insight and wrap everything around that.
CASEY GAUSS:
I think this fits well, actually, with your second tip, which was keyword stuffing the title. In a lot of cases I think people have a rough time picturing where – and correct me if I’m wrong, Yale, but people have a tough time picturing where to get started with keywords, and so maybe they’ll write – they’ll try to eloquently put together like a string of words that connect well, maybe have some keywords in, and then they’ll try to like piece together other keywords that they want to put into the sentence that they’ve developed.
YALE SCHALK:
Right.
CASEY GAUSS:
When in this case you’re saying like no, start with the foundation, like with your title. Let’s say with your title. Start with the foundation of as many keywords of like a bunch of high-end keywords, keywords that are going to convert or have a lot of traffic leading to them. Start with that foundation of all those keywords, and then maybe piece them together. Is that what you’re saying?
YALE SCHALK:
Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean you really do, like we said, with the title you really have to get the right keywords up there upfront and you know obviously try to assemble those in, you know, the most beautiful way that you can and sort of balance, you know, walk that line of getting the keywords and getting the product information up there for people, and then from there it’s really just a matter of prioritizing.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, and this is what I was kind of alluding to earlier that I didn’t want to go into because I didn’t want to steal Yale’s thunder, but just because you are indexed for a word does not mean you are driving the same amount of ranking power. So what this means is just because you have, you know, keyword XYZ in your description that yes, you – or a bullet point or whatever – yes, you will be indexing for that, but just because you are indexing because the word is in a bullet point doesn’t mean you’re driving the optimal amount of power, and you’ll drive that optimal amount of power by having it in the title, preferably the highest volume keywords at the beginning.
CAMERON YODER:
Yale, can you touch on just a little bit about how much energy people should be putting into their bullets, into their descriptions or their backend keywords? I think a lot of people tend to freak out about the bullets as much as they do the title. And you already mentioned that the title is going to be your primary keyword ranking driver, but where are the other aspects of a listing when coming into this?
YALE SCHALK:
Oh wow, yeah, so you the – yeah, of course, like we said, the title is obviously the most important part, and you know, where the keywords are really prioritized there. But from there I think the most important point for crafting your listing is to keep in mind that buyers by and large are on Amazon to basically scan information. They’re not there to, you know, read novel length listings, and a lot of the times yes, you know, obviously your product information is obviously helpful when they’re, you know, comparing products and trying to make a decision. But a lot of the time they’re just scanning that information, and they need it very succinctly. They need it very concisely, and that’s really going to a lot of times be the difference between, you know, someone adding your product to cart and checking out and, you know, maybe passing over and going with someone else. So yeah, definitely keep that in mind. You know, think of it in terms of a priority list. So the title is the number one priority, then the bullets number two, product description three, and so on. So yeah, definitely assemble your information accordingly.
CAMERON YODER:
Yale, is there anything else that you’d want people listening to know, even if it’s just in general, about listing ops or if you’d want to summarize in any way? What more, what else do people need to know?
YALE SCHALK:
I would say, you know, I think the thing that comes to mind most for me is that each segment of the Amazon selling process is so important. And you know, that’s really why Viral Launch exists. You know, we exist to help you get that right. You know, so I would say use our software. Get in touch with us to do your product photography. Get in touch with us to do your listings. You know, we really have – we’ve really refined and really perfected the entire process. So you know, we really are here to help you be successful.
CAMERON YODER:
That’s great. Casey, do you have anything to add?
CASEY GAUSS:
No, Yale’s just been killing it. You know I think that too many people – you know, I’ve definitely seen plenty of people say, you know, I don’t have time for keyword research. I don’t have time to put into my listing so I just threw something up, and I’m moving on. Essentially people just look at it as just another box to check, and the thing is like Yale mentioned at the very beginning of the listing, or sorry, the podcast, the listing is absolutely critical to achieving success on Amazon, especially as you continue to enter more and more competitive markets. The greater the level of competition, the greater your listing needs to be from a, you know, keyword structure standpoint. So if this is not on point it’s going to be so much more difficult for you to drive rankings, to sustain rankings and to drive sales. And so if you aren’t willing to take the time to invest in this listing, you know, I think your Amazon FBA journey is going to be pretty difficult.
CAMERON YODER:
This is one of those – it’s another one of those no-brainers. It goes with photos. Like why would you not have the best photos possible? Why would you not have the best listing optimization possible? If you don’t optimize this, if you don’t put energy or effort into it, then you’re not going to get the results that you could if you would have put that time or those resources into it.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, it’s just another corner that people like to cut that really ends up biting them, you know, later.
CAMERON YODER:
Don’t cut corners. In this case one of those corners is listing optimization. So do not cut listing optimization.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, I got good feedback from somebody at a conference that I spoke at this weekend, and they loved the – you know, everybody’s looking for that silver bullet. And we say you don’t need a silver bullet. You need an arsenal. And one of those weapons in your armory needs to be an amazing listing.
CAMERON YODER:
Well thank you so much, Yale, for joining us and for providing so much valuable information on listing ops.
YALE SCHALK:
Absolutely.
CAMERON YODER:
Well, that is all for this week. Thank you so much for listening to Follow the Data. For more insights and reliable information about how to succeed on Amazon, subscribe to the podcast and check us out on YouTube. For those of you who are looking for your next great product I have a series of product discovery walk-throughs videos on our YouTube channel that show you really how to leverage the tool. Just search Viral Launch on YouTube, go to our page and look for my face in one of the videos. Don’t forget to leave us a review and let us know what you think of the show. And if you really like the show and you like what we’re doing here at Viral Launch, tell your fellow Amazon sellers about us. We want to be a resource for sellers and the information source in this space. So please tell your friends, spread the word and share the show with other Amazon sellers.
Thank you, again, so much for listening. Feel absolutely free to hit us up on Facebook or tweet at us if you have any questions or feedback. And if you want to be featured on the show or have an Amazon related question or an idea for an episode, feel free to leave us a voicemail. Our number is 317-721-6590. Also feel free to just hit us up on Facebook or tweet at us if you want to be featured on the show, too. We can always take those questions and feature them on the show if you don’t want to call in. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
3 Tips for Launching Your Next Product from Viral Launches Launch Director, Andrew Field (Follow the Data Ep. 20)
Viral Launch has long been known as a successful launch platform, pushing products up to Page One in just a number of days. But to get your product to the top and make it stick, there are a few things you need to have in place. Join host Cameron Yoder for a conversation with Viral Launch Launch Director and employee #1, Andrew Field where he reveals 3 tips for ensuring a successful launch.
CAMERON YODER:
Page 1, the coveted seat of Amazon’s top-selling products, the only place where shoppers are really looking or purchasing. If you want to sell well, you’ve got to get your product to Page 1. Viral Launch has long been known as a successful launch platform, pushing products up to Page 1 in just a number of days. But to get your product to the top and make it stick there are a few things that you need to have in place.
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 30,000 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 sit down with our Launch Director, Andrew Field, to talk about the best practices when it comes to launching a product and the strategy behind it all. So launching is an incredibly effective method when it comes to keyword ranking on Amazon. And today we’re going to dive into Andrew’s perspective on the dos and the don’ts when it comes to launching. Let’s jump in.
All right, so Andrew, how are you doing today?
ANDREW FIELD:
I’m doing great, man. Thanks for asking.
CAMERON YODER:
Doing great. Awesome. That’s good to hear. So just to introduce Andrew a little bit, I want to introduce him just because, just to validate his perspective, basically. So Andrew, believe it or not – well, believe it because it’s true – Andrew was employee number one at Viral Launch. Andrew, what do you have to say about that?
ANDREW FIELD:
I mean it’s been crazy watching the company grow over the last almost three years, going from a team of just Casey and I to now 40+ people. It’s awesome.
CAMERON YODER:
Dang. Employee number one is not something that a lot of people can say, honestly. Like some people jump on early with a tech company or just a startup in general, but Andrew was literally the first employee, official employee of Viral Launch.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yes sir.
CAMERON YODER:
Which is insane. So he is our – he’s Viral Launch’s Launch Director. Also to just kind of say where Andrew started, Andrew started – well, Andrew, talk about where you started.
ANDREW FIELD:
So basically I started in kind of a customer service role. I was always scheduling launches, so any launch that comes in, someone submits a launch for X number of units over X number of days, I’ll review it, make sure everything works, make sure the URL is directing to the right product, just kind of oversee everything that goes into that launch.
CAMERON YODER:
So personally approved roughly 20 – you said 20,000?
ANDREW FIELD:
25.
CAMERON YODER:
25,000 launches. So he’s worked with a lot of sellers, personally and through just Viral Launch’s system, to help get them to Page 1. So he’s seen a lot of what works and a lot of what doesn’t work when it comes to launching and ranking on Amazon. So he oversees our launch platform, and he’s just seen a large number of people pass through the system. And that is what we’re working with today. Andrew’s perspective is very valuable, and is something that I think a lot of listeners here can benefit from. So Andrew, just to kick it off, I’m sure many people are familiar with this, but could you just outline what a launch is?
ANDREW FIELD:
So basically the idea of a launch is to get your product to match or exceed the number of sales for listings on Page 1 for your targeted keyword. So for example, like if a product – you want to get your product raking on Page 1 for a keyword where the average number of sales is right around 1000, we’d recommend probably around 200 to 250 units over like 7 to 10 days. And the idea is to drive all of those discounted sales through the targeted keyword to get your product to match the sales history and sales volume for the listings that are ranking on Page 1 currently.
CAMERON YODER:
Okay, so just to like put it into a good perspective, the definition that we’re using today of a launch and/or promotion is basically looking at the sales on Page 1 for a keyword and matching those sales through something like a launch to get you to Page 1 –
ANDREW FIELD:
Exactly.
CAMERON YODER:
– for that keyword. Okay. So can you break down – again, we’re going to get into more strategy as we move on, but can you break down just how a launch works from start to finish? You already talked about it a little bit, but just kind of break it down for everyone.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so it depends on if a seller works with a coach or not. Generally if a seller works with a coach their launch is successful. So we have the knowledge to look at a market and say okay, you need to give away this many units to get ranking for this keyword. Maybe we would notice that this keyword might not convert well for you, so you probably shouldn’t target that keyword. So it depends on the keyword you’re going after. So we would look at the market to see what kind of sales they are doing and then base a recommendation off of that.
CAMERON YODER:
Okay, that’s good. So let’s talk about – let’s outline – I want to outline three strategy tips that you have for people. Just what would your three top tips for people be when it comes to running promotions or product launches?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so first thing you want to make sure you have a well-optimized listing. So if your copy is bad or your photos are bad, that listing is not going to convert well once it’s ranking on Page 1. You want to make sure you have a competitive price point. So if your listing is 35% higher than every listing on Page 1, you’re probably not going to convert that well.
CAMERON YODER:
Right.
ANDREW FIELD:
And you also want to make sure that you’re targeting the best keywords. So kind of the best way to figure out what the best keyword is, is to do a lot of research. So you want to look at many different keywords that you would consider relevant and then see which products on Page 1 are most comparable to the listing that you have. So if you see a bunch of products on Page 1 that aren’t necessarily similar to your listing it’s likely that you won’t convert well for that keyword. And if you see a bunch of products on Page 1 that are very similar to your listing, those listings are obviously converting well for that keyword, so it’s likely that yours would as well.
CAMERON YODER:
Right. So let’s, so just to go over those three tips that you mentioned, that’s number one, you said optimize your listing. Number two, you said competitive – have a competitive price point, really. And number three was targeting the most effective keywords, right?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yep.
CAMERON YODER:
So let’s break down – let’s break down each of these. So number one, you talked about – and you went over it a little bit, but specifically when giving advice to people about optimizing their listing, like again, out of everyone that you’ve seen, what works well from the perspective of the seller that should be optimizing his or her listing?
ANDREW FIELD:
So first and foremost you want to make sure you have a great title. Keyword rich, still reads well, but is going to help you rank for as many relevant keywords as possible. Some of the data that we’ve seen – so somebody runs a launch that should work based on the number of units that we recommend. We do a reassessment and see that the targeted keyword was not in their title. That can cause them not to be able to rank for that keyword. They may be indexing, but they’re not getting the same ranking power as they would be if they had that keyword in their title.
CAMERON YODER:
Now what about – can you break down the importance of a title in a product’s copy compared to something like the bullets or the description?
ANDREW FIELD:
So the title is going to be your most important. That’s where you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck. Your most important keywords you want to put towards the beginning of the title. The less important keywords you move towards the back. But your most relevant keywords are going to be all focused on in your title. That’s where you’re going to get the most ranking effect when running launches.
CAMERON YODER:
And in your perspective, again, just from what you’ve seen with data and with launches, is there any – should people just cram a bunch of primary keywords together in the title or string them together like masterfully to create a title that makes sense, or like where’s the fine line between that?
ANDREW FIELD:
So there’s a perfect balance that you want to find. You want to find a balance between sales-inducing copy and copy that will also help you rank. So having a professionally-written listing is key, someone that knows the science behind writing a listing.
CAMERON YODER:
What about photos? What advice on photos do you have?
ANDREW FIELD:
So you want to have a photo that will catch the eye, just based on the thumbnail. So you’re main photo is going to be the one that drives the most clicks to your listing. So yeah, you want to make sure that your listing stands out from the competition with excellent photos. Once you get into the listing you’ll notice a lot of competition on Amazon likely doesn’t have lifestyle photos. That’s something that you can really give a competitive advantage to your listing if you have really nice lifestyle images showing the product in use. It helps develop an emotional attachment between the potential buyer and the product itself.
CAMERON YODER:
That’s good. I think with this first point talking about optimizing your listing, I think a lot of people get, just get lost from the fact that a product launch can get you to Page 1, right? But if those creatives are not in place, like if your copy is not optimized, if your photos are not great, then yeah, you’re going to lunch on to Page 1, but you’re not going to be able to convert once you’re there.
ANDREW FIELD:
Right.
CAMERON YODER:
And the whole goal of a launch, at least for us, our perspective is our goal for you is to reach Page 1 for that, or those primary keywords that you’re targeting and then to stick there. And your best chance of doing that, like you were just talking about Andrew, is to really optimize your title, your copy, the rest of your copy, and your photos.
ANDREW FIELD:
And definitely price point.
CAMERON YODER:
And definitely price point, right, which is your second point actually. That’s a really good lead-in. So your second point was to make sure your price point is in line with competition. Can you break that down just what you generally recommend?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so I mean that kind of starts even before sourcing a product. So if you can only source this product and you have to sell it at a substantially higher amount than other listings on Page 1, you probably won’t be able to convert. You probably won’t be able to compete in that market moving forward. Amazon is a space where you have to have the best priced product. You need to present your product in a great way, but you also have to offer a good value to the customer. Since most products on Amazon are private label nobody really knows and has an attachment to a specific name brand, so price point is going to be a huge converting factor for you.
CAMERON YODER:
And that’s what – and we talk about on the show all the time and in our videos and everything, the importance of really setting your goals before you even start the whole process of really sourcing anything because if you set your goals on what you want to make, then that will kind of determine the manufacturers that you choose or the products that you go after and the margins that you’re looking for.
ANDREW FIELD:
Exactly.
CAMERON YODER:
Because like you said, I mean if you can’t handle the margins or the price war, then – or if you get into a market that is an average of $20, right, and you’re trying to source a product that’s like $40 because it’s better –
ANDREW FIELD:
Right, it’s going to be very difficult to compete in that market.
CAMERON YODER:
Right. Okay.
ANDREW FIELD:
Even if you have a well-optimized listing, good copy, good photos, if your price point is twice as high as everyone else, best of luck to you.
CAMERON YODER:
Right. Let’s talk – let’s touch on the third point, your third point that you made, or the third tip, general tip. So you said make sure that you target the right keyword. I want you to – can you break down for us what you would really recommend when people are trying to find the best keywords to pick to rank for? What’s your advice when it comes to that?
ANDREW FIELD:
So yeah, I get that question all the time. Basically you want to look and see what other listings like yours are converting for. Even another way, just run like an automatic sponsored ads campaign. Let it run for 10 days. See what kind of conversion you get for these keywords. See how many impressions you get for this keyword. And find the one that performs the best. That’s typically going to be the best keyword for you to target with the launch.
CAMERON YODER:
Okay. Other than that, like what about – and we have Market Intelligence, right, which gives us access to like sales estimate data. Would you use that in that case?
ANDREW FIELD:
Right. Yeah, I mean to an extent. It’s almost difficult when you’re just looking at sales estimation data because you’re not sure which keywords those sales are being attributed from. Mostly it’s common sense. You can tell which keywords are going to be most relevant to your product. You can use tools like MerchantWords to find – I mean other sales estim- or search estimation data. But that’s not always all that accurate.
CAMERON YODER:
I really think people overthink the primary keywords where, again, there are always exceptions to this rule, but really chances are if you’re able to put yourself in the mind of a buyer or of someone who is buying your product, you’ll probably be able to narrow down maybe the top three primary keywords that you should at least look into with something like split testing.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, and as far as finding the primary keyword, I don’t think that’s really all that difficult. If you look at your competition you’ll generally see that the primary keyword for that market is going to be at the very beginning of most all of your competitors’ titles. So that’s an easy way to identify the primary keyword.
CAMERON YODER:
Right, to look at your competition and see what they’re driving. And again, that doesn’t always mean they’re picking the right one, but typically –
ANDREW FIELD:
Right. If you see most sellers in a market doing that, that’s generally meaning that that’s the primary keyword for the product, yeah.
CAMERON YODER:
Right, right, that’s good. Okay, so those were the kind of three general strategy tips, but let’s break down just launch strategy in general even more. So Andrew, what would you say – what are some of the most important things that people should keep in mind before they do something like a launch?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so I mean we’ve already kind of touched on it, but make sure that your listing is well-optimized. You have to have great listing copy. You have to have great photos. You have to have a competitive price point. The question that people always ask is once I get to Page 1 will I stick? I think people are asking the wrong question, and the question should be, will I sell? Because what good is it if you stick on Page 1 if you don’t sell? You need to be asking the right questions. So if your listing is going to convert, if it’s going to be competitive with the other listings in the space, that’s the question you should be asking.
CAMERON YODER:
What would you say about reviews?
ANDREW FIELD:
I mean reviews are important. I think we’ve kind of talked about this on the podcast before. Reviews are the currency of Amazon. That’s another thing that kind of goes into the optimization conversation. If your listing has far fewer reviews than other listings on Page 1 for that keyword, you’re going to find it more difficult to convert. Sometimes what we suggest right after running a launch is to drop your price a little bit, sometimes almost even to breakeven, just to generate sales, develop a strong sales history, keep that product on Page 1, and then you can gradually bring your price back up to like increase your margins.
CAMERON YODER:
Would you say there is like a flat number of reviews that someone should have before they run a launch, or is it kind of just dependent on the market that you’re going into?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, it’s completely dependent on the market. I mean you’ll find brand-new markets out there where the average review count is 10 reviews. You can run a launch on that product with zero reviews. You’d have no problem. But if you’re going into a market where the average review count is 500 reviews, you’re going to find it a lot more difficult to convert with zero reviews. So I mean if you’re looking for a flat number – so for example, like for a market with 500 reviews as the average review count for listings on Page 1, I would suggest launching with no less than 100. That’s kind of my suggestion, so maybe 20% of the average of listings on Page 1.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, I think that’s a good baseline to build off of at least. Okay, that’s good. So next question, what do you see people doing wrong when it comes to promotions or launches? So what shouldn’t people do?
ANDREW FIELD:
So I think sometimes people have unrealistic expectations for how their product is going to perform after a launch. So getting a product ranking on Page 1 generally isn’t a problem. It’s typically pretty easy. But people think that all of a sudden their sales are going to skyrocket, which may not necessarily be the case. If your listing isn’t competitive you’re not going to see those sales. I know we keep going back to the having an optimized listing, but that’s how important it really is.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so I mean that’s why I think people need to discuss their strategy with a coach or a seller coach or someone that knows what they’re talking about before running a launch. Ask questions like will this listing sell in this market? Am I targeting the right keyword? How many units should I give to target this keyword? All those kinds of things.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, and this is not a – it’s not a plug for what we do. It’s just simply a really simple and easy thing that you guys can do and have free, really free access to.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, exactly. Like no matter what strategy you’re using to get your product ranking on Page 1, these are the questions you need to be asking.
CAMERON YODER:
Right.
ANDREW FIELD:
Talking to people with experience is just a great resource for you.
CAMERON YODER:
Right, and that’s what our coaching team – our coaching team is meant to really give strategy to people.
ANDREW FIELD:
Exactly.
CAMERON YODER:
So they’re accessible to you. Okay, so let’s see. We see a lot of people, and we actually have – Casey and I have talked about this on the show before, too, but it’s always important to bring up because it comes up frequently, and it’s funny how often or how periodic this question comes up from people that are performing launches or thinking about performing a launch. But we see a lot of people talking, again, about how steep discounts don’t attribute ranking anymore. So what have you seen when it comes to that?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so I mean, like we said at the very beginning, I was employee number one. I’ve been giving launch suggestions for three years now. This has come up periodically forever. I mean I don’t think it will ever really go away. People are always looking for a reason not to give their product away at 90% off, which would totally understand. Nobody wants to give their product away at 90% off. But the data does not show that it doesn’t work. It still does work. Just for a specific example, just in the last like 14 days we ran three launches for a turmeric product, or three separate turmeric products. We got each one of those listings ranking on Page 1 for turmeric, turmeric curcumin and curcumin. Those are incredibly competitive markets where sales are 10,000+ a month. If 90% off promotions didn’t work there is no way that we would have been able to get those products ranking there.
CAMERON YODER:
Right.
ANDREW FIELD:
So we just kind of let the data speak for itself. There is always going to be those rumors out there, but as long as the data is there to combat it, I mean I don’t see it being an issue.
CAMERON YODER:
And that’s if – and that’s not to say that that could not change in the future, right?
ANDREW FIELD:
Right.
CAMERON YODER:
Because Amazon could pull a lever or something and all of a sudden maybe somehow, whether it’s accidental or intentional, make promotions not attribute ranking through stuff like that.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s been a topic of discussion forever. But as of right now that’s not happening.
CAMERON YODER:
Exactly. And it’s not like we will hide that information from you. Like –
ANDREW FIELD:
Right. I mean there’s no point in us running launches if they don’t work.
CAMERON YODER:
Exactly.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, I mean if launches don’t work we’re going to be straight up and say okay yeah, this strategy probably won’t work. Maybe there’s something else that we can try.
CAMERON YODER:
Right, and that’s why it’s important for us to keep you guys updated, at least from what we’re seeing with our launches since we run so many every single day and since Andrew has seen so many. It’s really important to help you guys know where we’re at and what we’re seeing. And what we’re seeing is that steep discounts still do work when it comes to product launches. Okay, so let’s see. When people are performing a launch, when they’re in the middle of the launch – dang it. Hang on. I lost my place. Oh yeah, yeah, okay. So let’s talk about when people are in the middle of a launch or a promotion. Will people, or should people expect to see results right away, or when should they expect to see something happen when it comes to keyword ranking?
ANDREW FIELD:
So my – like my typical launch suggestion lasts for 10 days, usually 10 days, seven to 10 days. Usually people will start to see ranking improve around day five. So during a launch you can expect to see a lot of different things. You can expect to see a big fluctuation in BSR, both up and down, big fluctuation in ranking, both up and down. But right around day five it typically starts to stabilize. So at day five you’ll start to see ranking like steadily increase. So like let’s say if you start on Page 3 for your targeted keyword. You might jump down to Page 6 during the first two days. Day three comes around and you’re back up to Page 3. Day five comes around, you’re creeping up Page 2. Day six, day seven, day eight, you’re moving up Page 1. That’s the typical – that’s typically what it looks like.
CAMERON YODER:
People tend to freak out when they’re on like day two of a launch, right? Yeah, explain that. Like they’re on day two of a launch and they see the product went down in ranking. They’re like what in the world? What just happened?
ANDREW FIELD:
Right, yeah. So I mean that’s just part of Amazon’s algorithm. That’s where people – I think that might even be where some of these rumors are stemming from where people run launches for like quote unquote tests, and after two days they’ve dropped to page 20 and they freak out, right? Let that launch run its course, and it will work. If you end prematurely you’re hurting your sales history, and it’s just going to cause problems down the road. Let that launch run, and you’ll see ranking improvement as long as you’re running with the appropriate strategy, of course.
CAMERON YODER:
And some of these – so some of these questions or this data is like dependent on the market, too. This specific question. Let’s say someone reaches Page 1 for their primary keyword before they expected to, like maybe before their expected launch day or the end of the launch.
ANDREW FIELD:
Sure.
CAMERON YODER:
Would you recommend that people stop their launch early, or just like kind of let it ride for a little bit?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So if a listing reaches Page 1 and organic sales pick up to match the listing, the other listings on Page 1, then yeah, I mean go ahead and end that launch. There’s no reason to give products away at that point. If you get to Page 1 and sales pick up just a little bit you may want to let that launch continue so you can build a stronger sales history and maintain that Page 1 ranking, and then you can see organic sales coming in in the future.
CAMERON YODER:
Now what would you advise when considering launch numbers specifically? So like when somebody wants to find out the number of units that they should give away or the number of units they should put a heavy or steep discount on, what would you say to that?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so I mean this is going to sound like a plug for Viral Launch, obviously, but Market Intelligence, a great place to start. Analyze the market. Analyze that keyword. See what listings on Page 1 are doing in terms of sales volume. And you want to match that with your promotion. So generally, to develop a strong sales history you want to have your launch last for at least seven days, sometimes more. So seven days is kind of like the window where you need to run a launch for at least seven days to develop a strong enough sales history to maintain Page 1, or to even get ranking on Page 1. The additional three days that I usually recommend on the end of that are to help develop an even stronger sales history. So once the steady flow of promotional sales stops you’re able to stay there longer and generate organic sales recurring.
CAMERON YODER:
What would you say, what would you talk about post launch strategy? What’s the best strategy people can implement after an initial promotion if they run one for a keyword?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so after your initial launch you’re likely ranking on Page 1 for your primary keyword. If your listing is competitive you’ll probably start seeing an increase in organic sales right away. But let’s talk about a scenario where maybe your product isn’t just as competitive as all the other listings on Page 1. I kind of alluded to it earlier, but like some of the recommendations we have are to drop your price a little bit. Develop a stronger sales history for that keyword. Other things you can do – I’ve got to think about this for a second.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, yeah. No, you’re good.
ANDREW FIELD:
I had a bunch of stuff for this, too. Yeah, so like another thing you can do is run another promotion for another keyword. The best way to see the most organic sales is to be ranking on Page 1 for as many relevant keywords as possible. So if you see that you have – you’re in a market where you have 10 relevant keywords that are all going to attribute to your aggregate sales you want to be ranking on Page 1 for all 10 of those keywords. You don’t want to just be ranking on Page 1 for one of those keywords, and then you’re only seeing 10% of the sales that you would be seeing if you were ranking on Page 1 for all of your relevant keywords. So generally I would say to target multiple keywords with multiple promotions.
CAMERON YODER:
Let’s say you have two primary keywords for a product. If you run a launch for one specific one, and let’s say they’re similar. Let’s say maybe they’re similar, but they’re different enough to where you would need to run two separate promotions to rank for both of them. If you run – let’s say you run a pretty like intense launch for one of the primary keywords and you get to Page 1 for that keyword. Have you seen ranking attributed to the other primary keyword in some cases?
ANDREW FIELD:
Oh yeah, absolutely. So that kind of goes back to having a good, or a well-optimized listing. If you have those keywords in your title, if you have the correct keyword sequences in your title – so for example, like if you have like a fish oil, fish oil is your main keyword. Another keyword would be fish oil supplements. If you have fish oil supplements in your title and you’re targeting fish oil with your promotion you’re going to see a good, a sizable increase in ranking for fish oil supplements. You may even reach Page 1 for that keyword with the launch targeting another keyword. So yeah, I mean this goes back to making sure that you have a well-optimized listing.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, I think it’s good to, if people are trying to decide whether they should run a promotion for two separate keywords or run one targeting both or what have you, I think it’s always good to maybe even run one really targeted one for the primary, like the main keyword in that case, fish oil, and then see where you end up for fish oil supplements. And then if you want to just run another promotion for that right off the bat, you know where your baseline is going to be after the ranking has been attributed from the primary.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, no, that’s a really good analysis, yeah.
CAMERON YODER:
So Andrew, what else – do you have anything else that you want to tell people when it comes to launches, or launch strategy or launch data?
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, so get advice. Don’t try to go it alone if you don’t have any experience. There’s always someone out there with experience that has looked into hundreds of thousands or however many markets and has the experience to tell you okay, this is the keyword you should target, this is the kind of strategy that will get you there, this is what an idea listing looks like in this market. You should try to emulate that. These are what your competitors are doing. This is your primary keyword. There are so many intricacies that go into a launch that you really need – there’s no substitute for experience and going into all the data.
CAMERON YODER:
Well, Andrew, thank you so much for being on the show today. It really is good to have a perspective like yours since, I mean you’ve been around the block. You’ve seen it all. You’ve seen brands built from 0 to 100, literally, and you’ve seen a lot of product launches go through. So thank you for taking time to be here and giving advice to everybody.
ANDREW FIELD:
Yeah, thanks for having me, for sure.
CAMERON YODER:
I’ll do and outro, but for now –
Well hey, that is all for this week. Thank you so much for joining us here 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’ve been working on a series of product discovery walk-throughs that will really help you understand how to leverage the tool. So just search Viral Launch on YouTube, and go to our page, and look for my face on one of the videos. And if you’re listening on iTunes it would seriously help us out so much if you would leave a review to let us know what you think of the show. And if you know another seller who’s feeling lost in the Amazon information war that’s out there, send them our way. We really want to be a resource for all sellers, and honestly, the information source in this space. So please tell your friends. Spread the word, and share the show with other Amazon sellers.
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