Ranking Amazon Products without Sponsored Ads with Dan Little and Danny McMillan – Session 015

Richard Morgan
September 13, 2017

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Ranking Amazon products is something Dan knows a lot about. Living in Sweden Dan has been running Amazon Businesses for 4 yrs with 4 brands over that period, one of which he sold. He continues with the 3 brands, ten products and many variations and sizes. So he knows a little about ranking Amazon products.

Product Selection strategy

Uses Jungle Scout
Sells in sports and outdoors
Goes for £20-50 sell price
Looks for a BSR between 100 and 2,000
Currently looking at oversize
No limit on number of reviews

Identifying main Keywords

Use google keyword planner
Dump competitor listings in there and pull out a big list of keywords
Use common sense and think up what I would call it
Uses (Amazon Marketing Service) AMS predicted High/Med/Low search volume – you need vendor express to get onto AMS
Create a dummy headline search ad, put in 10-15 best selling products you want to promote (i.e. Skipping rope) on your page and
When you put in the keywords it will show you the search volume (Lo/Med/Hi) based on Amazon’s data
Build a list of all the Med and High keywords for the next stage

How many Keywords to go after

I aim for main 5 keywords
These will capture 80% of the sales anyway and once Amazon tracking sees you can rank for these you’ll start showing up for smaller keywords too

Keyword Stuffing

Only 250 bytes availble now (250 chars)
Once you have your main keywords in your title, bullets and description
The backend is really only for the ‘variations’ on keywords not the main ones

Copywriting for listings and ads

Outsource sales copy to Asteroid Aim
Make sure they optimise the listings to the top 5 keywords I’ve selected
They write great sales copy to sell to people and not keyword stuffed copy for Amazon algorithms
Emotional and take a customer on a journey – sells better

Pricing strategies for ranking Amazon products

Take the average market price and price yours 30% less straight away
Retail price is £15 and I put on a sales price at 30% off
Then promotion on Facebook with a further reduction

Facebook Landing Page

Offer on Facebook and send to a landing page – gives a further 49% off on (79% off in total)
A big enough discount to attract a lot of buyers
At 49% it should allow you to get ‘verified’ reviews
Normal prices £15
Sales Price is £10
You get a further 49% off and you get it for £5.10

Tools that help

Started with ZonPages as it was simple to use
Follow the 80/20 rule and get it out quickly – it’s just as likely to do well
Changed from ZonPages as it was English only and Dan sells in Europe
Started using AMZ Coupon Server for WordPress and it works in the same way
Put your coupons in and a bit of technical skill needed for this tool
Buyers claim the discount code and make the sale

Structuring your URLs

Randomisation is good
If Amazon see a load of traffic coming in to the same link – it’s less liekly they will give you the rank juice to get up the page quickly
I now use GENI.us – it tracks the customer’s IP address and sends them to the relevant Amazon store on his affiliate link
You can split the traffic based on OS. Put in 3 different store front URLs with different keywords and split traffic across iOS, Android and Windows
Second keyword is Android, 3rd is in as Windows with Most as iOS with your top keyword
Now Amazon sees people coming to your page from different URLs and keywords and appears more random and natural to the Amazon algorithm
The more random you are the better it works
This is an easy way of rotating them – once you get to No1 you can go back to GENI.us and change the keyword – no other changes needed and traffic is going to a different keyword and you continue to rank for more and more keywords

Budgeting for ad campaigns

Budget for your velocity
Still use 80/20
Generally about £100/day on Facebook campaigns
If you get too many coupons being taken or too many people going to the page in a day, slow it down by reducing the budget
The Facebook element is a small part of your overall promotional budget
You can normally get clicks for 25p to the page (promotion at 79% off to a landing page with available through amazon badge on the ad)
Of 100 people to the page, you’ll get 10-50% that will sign up for the discount code and 10-50% again will go through and actually buy it
Follow up emails might help improve conversions in chasing those who take the coupons
Real cost comes from discounting the product and incurring Amazon fees
79% off could be that you’re losing £3 per unit – could be 100-200 discounted units (£600-£1,200 on discounts)
Plus £200 in FB ads
Could be £1,500 costs
At position 1 on page 1 you get 60-70 units sales per day at £3 profit per unit – it won’t take long to cover your £1,500 investment

Audience Targeting

Pick an audience in the target location
25 – 54 age range – younger not so good conversions same for older
Male and Female unless gender specific product
Very generic interest (i.e. Fitness as a range)
Then dial in by narrowing the audience by saying ‘also interested in AMAZON.COM’
Audience of about 1m when finished – if lower then add in something else as an interest
Select the specific operating systems and select ‘only on wi-fi’ – as where the customer looking at your ad is will make a difference in whether they complete the full sales process
Someone out and about at a bus-stop is less likely to follow your ad and purchase than a person sat at Home on their sofa in a wi-fi zone

Switch from Promotion to Organics

Stopped using PPC in my last 2-3 launches
Didn’t see it as effective for ranking amazon products as Facebook ads in terms of speed and much more costly
Once you’re at the top and have organic sales coming in because you’re still 30% cheaper than the rest of the market price
And you have organic reviews come in to
You should be good to continue your sales

When to stop FB promotions

Set 100-200 through this discounted route
Send more traffic to the landing page but without discount codes for the extra 49% – but they still get the 30% off on your listing
Still use GENI.us links and via the relevant keywords – they just don’t use the discount coupon
Using ‘storefront URLs’ you can rank in days and not weeks
Run the FB promotions for 3-4 days and on day 5 they should be shooting up as long as you are converting when the traffic comes through
If your product is NOT GOOD then you’re driving traffic but no conversions so a complete waste
Product selection must be quality and pick out the reviews from competitor products and make sure your product supplier manufactures it and improves on all the defects
Promote all these defect improvement on your listing to be head and shoulders above the competitor products on quality
It is worth it to spend the time and a little extra on manufacture (and it is only a little extra) to get a superior quality and better product – once you’re market leader you will stay there long-term and make more profit

PPC is dead for ranking Amazon Products during launches?

The Amazon rank algorithm is based on
- Sales velocity
- Conversions
Check Sessions by parent product and sales by parent product in terms of units
Compare this to your sponsored products sales
Take off the sessions from PPC and take off sales from PPC and you’re left with your true organic results
Look at your conversion rates – are the ads converting better than your organics?
You are looking for your conversion rate on your ads being ‘higher’ than your conversions on your oranics
If it’s not higher then your ads are dragging down your average conversion rate – ditch the ads and get higher conversions on your organics

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

How much are you paying in click cost to get one sale?
A 25% conversion means you need 4 clicks to get a sale
At £1 a click that’s £4 CPA
If your margin is less than £4 then you are losing money on every sale
Is the sponsored product ad converting less than your organic traffic? Is the margin less than the CPA? – then turn ads off
If margin is less than CPA but sponsored ads conversion is higher than organic then consider keeping it on

Tested it with no Amazon Ads

No Amazon paid traffic
Just 200 units through the 79% off route (which was really 49% only off)
And the other 100 giveaways to get feedback to further improve the product (using Google form)
Found that within a few days at Page 1 and in a few weeks at Position 1 for the 3-5 keywords I use
So why waste money on anything other than Facebook Traffic