amazon growth workshop - linnacademy 2016

Growth Workshop

Manchester | 19th October, 2016

Outline for Today• Understanding How Amazon SERP Works• Sponsored Ads: Automatic vs Manual • Winning the Buy Box

About Online Seller UKFounded in 2010 with Online Retail Experience

Solutions: Events | Training | Consultancy | eCommerce Solutions

Clients throughout the UK

Marketplace Focussed Training Provider

& solution provider

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About Me• Started working in eCommerce from 2009(Used to work in Leprosy Hospital before )

• With 8 years of Online Retail Experience establishing eBay, Amazon and eCommerce function

• Worked with Small and Large Size businesses throughout the UK & Ireland

• Currently leading two projects • Online Seller UK – Provides Meetups, digital marketing training & consultancy

• DaytodayeBay – solution Provides complete for Marketplaces (eBay, Amazon & beyond)

Head Line Display

Sponsored Ads

Organic Results

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads

Factors Driving the Amazon SERP

-Price- Fulfillment Method- Product Reviews- Paid Ads - Product Search Terms

- Listing Quality- Product Images- Product Titles- Product Bullet Points- Product Descriptions- Structured Data – Brand, MPN- Parent-Child relationship

Price• Low price have a direct impact on where products show up in the

SERP• We cannot always “race to the bottom”• Price Comparison before listing is recommended• Price reduction can help• Sale price is taken into consideration

* FBA items of £20.00 or over are free shipping for all (including non-prime members) * Sale price / Strike through

price impacts sales positively

* Price is one of many factors that helps to get the top spot popularly called “buy box”

What about competitive pricing?

Here’s how you can change product price.

This dashboard shows your % of Buy Box Win

* If you are selling your own Repricing wont be necessary

* Match price to be the lowest

* Shipping price is not considered

Automated Repricing is available now

• Automate Pricing allows you to automatically adjust prices on SKUs in your catalogue in response to events such as the Buy Box winning price, without having to revisit the SKU every time you want to change your price.• You create a pricing rule, set the rule parameters• select the SKUs to which the rule applies;• Automated pricing is applied only to the SKUs that you designate, not to

your entire catalogue. • You can start and stop automated pricing rules at any time, as well as

changing your rules or the SKUs to which your rules apply. • You control the prices by defining rule parameters, setting minimum and

maximum price boundaries and selecting which SKUs to automate pricing on.

Creating Repricer Rules

• Choose Buy box price or lowest price• Lowest price does not mean you win the buy

box, see example on next slide

STEP 1

Fulfilment Method

• Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) generally rank higher than those which are merchant fulfilled.

• Consider best selling items on FBA inventory and are not at risk for stocking out.

• Ensure we don’t run out of inventory

Product Reviews• Products with positive (4-5 star) and a high number of customer reviews

relative to competing products will rank higher than those with low quality and low volume reviews.

*** Sales history is one of the drivers for search rank. • New Reviews, Verified Reviews and Reviews that are most helpful are given

more weight. • Focus on your most important products and your top target search queries, use

the average number of reviews from your competitor products as a baseline.• Two Ways to improve:

1. Use automated tools to ask reviews2. Use 3 party tools to increase product reviews by giving free product ???

https://dashboard.xsellco.com/register/high5?utm_source=affiliate&utm_campaign=b40cd6a922d1b98cfad92ae4e0144aad

* Reviews from discounted products don’t carry “Verified Purchase”

Amazon Product Review Template• Alter text and test result • Please note seller reviews does not help on product ranking

and helps to win buy box

https://www.facebook.com/onlinesellersuk

Request Amazon Top Reviewer for a review for a free product

Vendor Only Program for reviews

Vine is Invitation Only program & its not free

Suggestion…• Sell stock at low value for a limited period to generate verified reviews• Use Sponsored Ads to boost ranking

** We have trailed this strategy successful for a private /white label stationery product

Steps: Creating Automatic Campaigns

#1 Campaign Manager#2 Name, Budget, Date

#3 Adgroups- this can be based on product category#4 Choose product

Steps: Creating Manual Ads

#1 Name Group#2 Choose Product

#3 Choose Bid#4 When product is selected Amazon recommends keywords#5 Select relevant keywords

#6 Add your own keywordsNote: Choose Broad, Phrase, Exact

Keyword Types Explained• Broad Match – This match type offers ads broad traffic exposure. A

customer search term will match if it contains all the keyword terms or their synonyms. The customer search term can contain keywords or synonyms in any order.

• Phrase Match – The customer search term must contain the exact phrase or sequence of words. It is more restrictive than broad match and will generally result in more relevant placements for your ad.

• Exact Match – The customer’s search term must exactly match the keyword in order for the ad to show, and will also match close variations of the exact term. Exact match is the most restrictive match type, but can be more relevant to a customer’s search.

Sponsored Ads Best Practices• PPC without product reviews can convert less. But this should not

deter you to start campaigns• Use Google Keywords Planner or Keywordtool.io to increase product

search terms http://app.scientificseller.com/keywordtool

Sponsored Ads Best Practices• Start with Automatic Ads and harvest converting search terms for

manual ads • Start with optimal budget so we ensure maximum exposure as

possible in the beginning and then refine it afterwards• Spend based on your profitability, find your Cost of sale to determine

how much you can spendE.g SP – ( PRODUCT COST + ALL AMAZON FEES) = Profit Profit / SP = Profit Margin 27 – (14+4)=99/27=33% * Our Acos must be less than 33% to make profit

Automatic Vs Manual• Use Automatic Campaigns to find profitable keywords • Use Manual Campaigns to target best performing product

Sponsored Ads Best Practices• Run your advertising campaigns for a week without making any

adjustments. • Amazon’s advertising reports have a several days latency, which

means that it takes 48-72 hours sometimes for conversions to be reported.

• Remove non-converting keywords and targeting• Increase bids for keywords that convert well• Ad groups can be created based on category

PPC Optimisation• Recommended to have words that you can monitor in manual

campaigns and then the Automatic targeting campaign to find new customer words

• Use 4 words long-tail keywords. You can always trim down your keyword list after a week of running Automatic campaigns. This will improve your ACoS

• Negative words on automatic ads which are using for manual ads to eliminate competition

Paid Ads: Sponsored, Product Display, Headline Search• For Vendors Only who sells products to Amazon

at a wholesale rateHow does Vendor work ?• Initially send trial products for testing • 60 days payment terms• Expect High Volume Sales with Amazon

Marketing program like subscribe & save, lightening deals and paid ads opportunity

• Get authority on product page

https://www.amazon.co.uk/b/?node=8670626031&ld=NSGoogle


-Price- Fulfillment Method- Product Reviews- Paid Ads - Listing Quality

- Product Images- Product Titles- Product Bullet Points- Product Descriptions- Structured Data – Brand, MPN- Product Search Terms- Parent-Child relationship

Listing Quality - Images• Zoomable images have proven to enhance sales. • Images must be at 1,000 pixels or larger in either height or width to

enable zoom functionality.• Multiple high quality images give shoppers the confidence to make a

purchase decision and proceed to checkout. • Images with arrows or text are not allowed though we have found

such images currently on Amazon

Product Titles• Each word in the Product Title is searchable on its own• Relevant title will drive traffic to your product. • Include the brand, material, size, color, product type, and descriptive keywords in

your product title for all of your products. • Optimal title lengths are between 80 and 100 characters, although this does vary

by category, and are being policed more aggressively by Amazon.• If your titles are over 200 characters they will be suppressed from the website or

will not appear on the search. This was introduced in April, 2016. The product description can accept up to 2,000 characters and each bullet point can have up to 250 characters.



- Product Images- Product Titles- Bullet Points- Product Descriptions- Structured Data – Brand, MPN- Product Search Terms- Parent-Child relationship

Bullet Points

• Bullet points are searchable • You have 5 Bullet points with 250 character maximum length for

bullet points. • Include keywords you want to rank • Highlight crucial product features to give customers the confidence to

make a purchase decision.

Product Descriptions

• Searchable • 2000 characters limit• Differentiate your product from competitor products. • Rich descriptions helps conversion• See example on next page >

Structured Data: Brands, MPNs, Other data• The brand of our product is indexed for search.• Avoid common spelling errors • Include brand as the first word in your product title.• A products’ manufacturer part number (MPN) and product ID (UPC,

EAN, or ISBN) are indexed• These are generally commonly searched in categories: electronics,

automotive, computers, and appliances• See example on next slide >>

* Products are delisted by Amazon with Policy violation notice

Search Terms * 5 Fields with 1000 characters each

Search Terms• They do not appear on product detail pages and are indexed for

search• Most commonly underutilised • The best search terms are synonyms and common abbreviations • Consider using converting search terms from automatic sponsored

campaigns• Use words that cannot be filled in fields such as product name, key

product features, product description, brand name etc.

Some don’ts• Don’t provide inaccurate, misleading, or irrelevant information such

as competitor product, brand or author name, wrong gender etc. Providing misleading or irrelevant information is against Amazon policy; your listing will be removed and your account will be suspended . Moreover, your product might end up in a wrong browse node and your sales might get affected.

• When entering several words as a search term, put them in the most logical order. A customer is more likely to search for big stuffed teddy bears than for teddy stuffed bears.

Some don’ts• Use a single space to separate keywords. No commas, semicolons,

carets are required.• Don’t include common misspellings of the product name. Amazon's

search engine compensates for common customer misspellings and also offers corrective suggestions.

• Don’t provide variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalisation, and pluralisation (“80GB” and “80 GB”, “computer” and “computers”, etc.). Our search engine automatically includes different case forms, word forms and spelling variants for searching.

• Abbreviations, alternate names, topic (for books etc.), and key character (for books, movies etc.) could be included as keywords.



- Product Images- Product Titles- Bullet Points- Product Descriptions- Structured Data – Brand, MPN- Product Search Terms- Group Listings - Variations

Group Listing Variations• Main product title is Parent and variants e.g. size, colour are called

child• They are better when listed together • Group them together using a parent-child relationship. • When customer finds one product they will find others as well• Also they help to build product reviews for all products which again

help in ranking• Variations are category based• See Example on next slide >>

Stay in touch !Prabhat Shah@onlinesellerukEmail: [email protected]: 029 2236 2596 Mobile: 0751 88 39629www.onlineselleruk.com

mailto:[email protected]

amazon growth workshop - linnacademy 2016

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