Intro to Amazon Ads (Part 1)

Before launching into Amazon Advertising, make sure that the foundation of your brand is strong, or what your team calls “the ads behind the scenes”.  Before you engage in any campaign creation, budget allocation, velocity, impressions, and so on and so forth, take a look at the core components of your brands and product performance. This is in relation to profitability, historical data on the products, if the products already live on Amazon, and if they are fully launched on Amazon. Then, and only then, we can start implementing our secret sauce, our strategy, that will help the products perform well with ads and organically. 

In this article, we will go through six different topics behind the scenes in order to understand what really goes on in a product's high performance, high retention value as well as maintaining the flywheel effect. 

The first thing we need to evaluate is the product optimization on the detail page.

Product Optimization = Higher Customer Engagement

Is the product using the right keywords? The right title length? The right bullet points? Is Above the Fold (AtF) where the images reside, optimized? Is Below the Fold (BtF), where we tend to see more context in relation to the brand and the product, optimized? As long as all of this is optimized, we can move into more organic retention. 

The second thing we need to review is the title.

Organic Retention = Sales without the need for Ads

The title is the first thing that catches the eye of the customer. You need to ask yourself, is the title in relation to my product? And can I decipher what the product is within five seconds?

The third thing we need to review is customer reviews.

Reviews both Quantity and Quality = Quicker and Higher Conversion

Without reviews, customers do not trust that particular product. Amazon has a great program called VINE. Sometimes it works well depending on the product, other times it does not. Learn more about the VINE program, in our next video and article "Does VINE really work?” But for the most part, you may want to maximize those 30 reviews or 30 products that you can send per credit on your account. You get five at the beginning and that will allow you to at least 20 to 30 reviews. However, that doesn’t mean that if you get 30 people enrolling in that particular product, you’re going to get 30 reviews. Remember, reviews are voluntary. 

One thing we highly recommend is spreading the word to friends and family. Friends are Family can buy your product and give you HONEST REVIEWS.

Make sure people look at the product they buy and give you their honest opinion. That’s the easiest way to get between 30-50 reviews that are in alignment with the brand and also genuine. 

The fourth thing we evaluate is rank.

If you have a product that has 3,000 reviews with a 2.5-star rating average, you are not going to get the desired conversion in contrast to a competitor with a similar number of reviews yet, a 4.0 or higher star rating. So before we start driving a ton of traffic to it, make sure your product is at the highest caliber possible in order for you to maximize the reviews as well as the ranking. 

The fifth thing we evaluate is inventory.

Be aware of inventory and always have inventory on the pipeline so you can maximize your possible rank and product performance.

Do not go into Amazon Advertising and try to make a ton of sales if you don’t have the inventory to support it. The worst thing that you can do is drive so much traffic to your products, whether it's through organic or advertising, that depletes your entire inventory and then you have to start from scratch. This could result in your product going from number 10 to number 50 in a matter of a week. However, please note that historically, your product is not going to keep the same rank that you had because of Amazon's Dynamic Ranking. As long as you maintain a good level of rank, good inventory thresholds, and inventory levels, and you understand the dynamics of higher demand, and higher supply that is at the epicenter of Amazon performance, then you’ll be fine. 

The last thing we need to make sure to do is to win your product's Buy Box.

According to bigcommerce.com, The Buy Box refers to the white box on the right side of the Amazon product detail page, where customers can add items for purchase to their cart. Winning your product's Buy Box is the best way to maintain the rank, content, and performance of your product/s on Amazon. Inability to maintain a good winning percentage of the Buy Box (we recommend 98% or higher), can result in a lower ranking, lower sales, and lower product performance. Inability to maintain a good percentage of buy box (we recommend 98% or higher), can result in a lower ranking and lower performance. 

When your brand has a great foundation and a good advertising strategy, then the flywheel effect will take over. Meaning all these great things you’ve done to build up your brand's success will give you momentum to sustain periods of accelerated growth. 

Hopefully, this clears some of the ability but if you have any more questions, please email us at info@trisbell.com or fill out our contact form. This is part one of our advertising solutions. Stay tuned for part two for more on advertising strategy and making better decisions on the Amazon ecosystem. If you're not sure how to get started, be sure to read our other articles. Send us an email at info@trisbell.com if you want to learn more about what we do, how we do it, and how we can partner together.