On this 65th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff talks about how to drive traffic to your Amazon listings. From the tools to help you in your product and keyword research to how to effectively use Amazon Live. Jump into this episode of The E-Comm Show for Andrew’s best tech stack tools for Amazon selling!
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How to Drive Traffic to Your Amazon Page
SPEAKER
Andrew Maff
CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com | Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff
Andrew Maff
As a marketing expert with over 15 years of experience in e-commerce, Andrew Maffettone (Maff) has not only owned and managed multiple marketing companies in the e-commerce space but has also worked in-house at multiple online selling companies, driving brands to new heights.
With his knowledge of marketing and business strategy, love for staying ahead of the curve, and ability to execute effective marketing solutions, he created BlueTuskr, a team of specialized experts dedicated to the growth and success of e-commerce sellers.
Transcript:
00:02
the benefit is for the customer. So you're gonna put the customer first. That's when this kind of becomes an interesting conversation. Hey everyone, this is Nezar Akeel of MaxPro. Hi, this is Mocha Vander Mers from RASA. You're listening to, and you're listening, and you are listening
00:23
to The E-Comm Show. Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other ecommerce experts. They share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff,
00:50
I'm your host, Andrew Maff. Stone and today are opinion pieces. And I'm going to piss off a lot of people, or I may not. Who the hell knows? So I'm talking about, should you? Or should you not run traffic to your Amazon storefront? Well, my vote is no. Thank you, I'll see you all tomorrow. Now. So some sellers do want to, so it's going to be very dependent on if you are more of an ecommerce seller, I'm sorry, more of an Amazon seller. So a majority of your business is on Amazon, or a majority of businesses off Amazon, usually I find that if a majority of your business is off Amazon, clearly you wouldn't want to do this. But if it is on Amazon, you really have to find that fine line deciphers whether you want to. So a lot of times when I'm doing social media ads and things like that, I might do a retargeting of some kind and test sending them to Amazon. Now the issue is, when you send a customer to Amazon, your margins are crap; you don't own the customer. So you can't really retarget them again, in the future if you have a lot of repeat customers. And I probably would not suggest doing this either. It's also nearly impossible to track. So the best way that I've always done it is the custom source code. So in the back of the Amazon storefront, create a custom source code, it's essentially just an extra part to the end of the URL, if you're not familiar, that allows you to track where traffic is coming from. So if I want to send someone to a specific page on my Amazon storefront, I will create a source code for that specific page, and I will use that link in my Facebook ad. And I'm going to run that traffic there. And then Amazon in the back. And the analytics will tell me what's working, what's not, who came in, who bought etc. But I won't own that data, I won't own any aspect of it. So it is tough benefit is for the customer. So you're gonna put the customer first; that's when this kind of becomes an interesting conversation. A lot of people are more comfortable shopping on Amazon. And the sooner that you kind of just accept the fact that that is the case, then this becomes a little bit more realistic and might be something you actually want to try. But again, you lose margin, it sucks, and it depends on really your approach. But we've also been trying kind of more of an omni-channel approach where you take your buy button on your website, and you make it as prevalent as possible. Great, it looks big. And then somewhere on the product page elsewhere, you put several other buttons that say also available and you can put conversion codes, and event codes into each of these buttons, your developer can absolutely do that. And you can track who's clicking them. But we have tested doing also available on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, jet, whatever you're doing, and letting people purchase wherever they're more comfortable, we've actually found that it can improve the conversion rate of the actual product because people will see that oh, wow, this product is available in so many places. This must be a huge company, you have to remember that a lot of people, a lot of your average, consumers, don't realize that it's that easy to sell on Amazon and Walmart, hence why there's a lot of crap on these websites. But it actually does kind of tell them like, okay, this is a reputable company. I've actually seen it improve the conversion rate of the website. I've also seen improved just overall traffic or, I'm sorry, overall sales from people who are just clicking over and purchasing on Amazon. But if I have an Amazon account, and you're not offering Amazon pay or something like that, and that's the easiest way that I've always bought stuff, I'm gonna go that way or maybe I like Amazon's tracking. Or if you can offer two-day free shipping, obviously, I'm gonna go to Amazon. So there are some benefits to it. My vote is still no, I would rather own the customer. I'd rather invest in the business going forward. I would rather have assets of an email list and social media and my website traffic and things like that that I can control. And I'd rather leverage the traffic that just pre-exists on Amazon and work with it there. And I'll use my storefront for sponsored brand ads, but it is something to consider. It is something to think about. There are other benefits, like doing a product launch; when I do a brand new product launch, a lot of times, I'll send people straight to the Amazon storefront first to kind of get the snowball effect of that new product, then I'll stop doing it. There are a lot of ways and a lot of things you got to think about. But I wanted to kind of bring that up today and talk about the pros and cons of driving traffic to the storefront. And what that may mean for you.
05:30
We're going to talk a little bit about Amazon live. So you're not really sure what Amazon live is. It's been around for a little while, I'm not 100% sure how long, but they talked about it during the Amazon accelerator conference. If you weren't a part of the Amazon accelerator conference, you might have missed out, but I'm sure you can still find the videos online somewhere. It's a conference where it's usually every year, and it's kind of like a traveling conference, but obviously, with everything going on with Coronavirus. They did it online this year. It was interesting. It was very staged, for the most part, a lot like most of the virtual events going on right now. But one of the things he talked about was Amazon's lives were essential. On your product page, you can actually just go live, and they kind of want you to treat it like QVC to a certain extent or the home shopping network or whatever your preference is. And, you know, at first, a lot of people were like, okay, you know, another feature from Amazon. But this seems like a bit of a stretch. And it kind of is to me a little bit, it's one of those things where if you can really leverage it, it could possibly do very well for you. But I also think that there are certain types of products that it's going to do well for if you're selling, you know, essentials, so toilet paper, paper plates, or hand sanitizer, things like that. Although today, that might be a little bit different. Normally, I would say that's probably not going to be exciting enough to watch live. The other issue is Amazon's Live platform that you use is completely separate from everything else that you could do with going live basically, so Facebook or Instagram or anything else that you would normally be able to go live with. And there are a couple of platforms out there. Even we use one, and I can't even remember the name of it right now. But essentially, you can go live on the platform, and it will stream to all of your channels. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Amazon. So if you're going live on Amazon, you either need multiple cameras, or you need to just strictly go live on Amazon. The other issue and Amazon just like everything else are that you have to drive traffic to this live video. And this live video may be on your listing, or they may host it elsewhere, which I'll touch on in a minute. But if you're constantly driving traffic to Amazon, we all know you don't own the customer, you don't own the data, and you really get no benefit out of it, minus the fact that you're driving traffic to your own listing. But if you can actually get enough traction, when you watch the accelerator conference, and they kind of talked about it, they didn't really get into, like, what the tiers are. But they mentioned that there are three different tiers. So essentially, you know, you start out here in tier one, or whatever they call the tier, you're advertising your live video on your listing, and then maybe you get a certain amount of views, or maybe you sell a certain amount, I'm not really too sure we actually decided not to get involved with it. But essentially, then you tear up to the next thing. And the next tier has some bells and whistles that are added to it and a couple of things that are kind of like okay, like, I guess that's kind of nice. But the third tier is the one where everyone's like, Oh, wait, that sounds great. And it will actually put you on the homepage. Now. I don't know then how many people are aware of this. But Amazon tested something for a little while called What was the Amazon merch cards where essentially the cards were like little four by four squares of each product and a very small headline that would link over to your product store or your storefront. And essentially, it was like on the homepage, and it did really well because you'd have to pay to do it. It was just kind of a beta program. Because that did so well. Getting on Amazon's homepage is a big deal, and everyone wants to do it. However, you have to get so much traction to your own listings and then get so many views and get so many purchases through these videos just to tear up to this third tier that they kind of made it sound like only the best of the best will get listed there. And don't get me wrong. It sounds very lucrative, and it could be, but you're looking at an incredibly long process of building out these videos of building out an audience who's interested in hearing you on Amazon. And I know Amazon's goal is to obviously just become this massive place where everyone goes and shops They're no one goes anywhere else. But the reality of that seems kind of Slim, where you know, they become just a monopoly. But essentially, if you have that much energy, you have that much time you have much bandwidth to be able to do those types of videos, you can get so much more traction from doing something like that on Instagram, or on Facebook, or on YouTube or anything along those lines where you can not only keep your data, but even direct people on where they're going, and even do other videos outside of just product pitching. The other issue with QVC videos, QVC style videos like that, is that they can be kind of boring and pretty monotonous. sitting there listening to someone describe a pretty mundane product gets really boring after a while. So you can really lose some people unless you have an extremely interesting topic. Or if you can find ways to get influencers involved when they're going live. And that is something that might entice people to go to listing more often that makes sense. But in the beginning, you're definitely going to spend a lot of advertising dollars, you're going to spend a lot of your outreach on maybe social media or on newsletters to actually get people to come out and to check it out on Amazon. So to me, it's kind of like Do you still want to drive traffic to Amazon? Our vote was no, we decided not to do it. And really, I just kind of wanted to touch on that on our opinion of it right now. But you're more than welcome to obviously try it. Let us know how it goes. But in our opinion, I would rather put that bandwidth elsewhere. But Amazon lives. It's out there. Now you can now go ahead and try it. It's available to all people on Seller Central, I don't think it's available to vendors
11:46
to talk to you all about the massive slew of Amazon Chrome extensions that exist out there. Now, I have a list of 12 of them as well as a small bonus one for you today. But I'm gonna say that I would not recommend using all of them. If you've ever used more than five or six, going on to your Amazon account or onto an Amazon listening is like signing on to like a really shitty website that's just trying to hit popups every corner that they possibly can, there's just way too much going on. Because of all the extra bells and whistles, they get added to all the product pages or the search page or anything like that. But so let's go through his list. So the first one is called Keepa. And this is an Amazon price tracker. So a lot of them are Amazon price trackers. People love to track prices and BSR. And mostly those two things for the most part, but some people also do some other stuff, but I'll get into that Kiba Amazon price tracker is relatively simple to use. I don't use it, but I know it's one out there that a lot of other people use. The camel iser is another price tracker with a little bit different reporting way that they show it. I prefer theirs. I also don't use theirs though. But it is different in the way that they kind of level out their reporting. I know a lot of sellers that kind of prefer that one. Then there's the FBA calculator. Pretty self-explanatory, a lot of people will find their price or be looking at different competitors, or different products that they want to get into and are kind of curious about what it may be costing them in the FBA calculator can obviously show up on the screen and be able to help you with that. There's also AMZ bass. So it's product research. And you're going to realize that so many of these do product research, but that is basically price tracking. Not suggested predicted like sales and things like that, which I'm going to touch on in a minute here. It just gets interesting jungle scouts a big one. So Jungle Scout, I'll give them some love to the fact that I like them because they've gotten so big, they put out a lot of content, they help a lot of different Amazon sellers, with just knowledge in general, they offer a lot more than just what their Chrome extension does. But their Chrome extension is pretty much meant for product research, and it gets relatively in-depth. The AMZ knows the Amazon FBA keyword tool. So this is a way of helping you look at different keywords that people may be searching. Amazon has slowly started to actually just show the suggested search terms that people are searching for, but this one gets a little bit more extensive and allows you to kind of do a bit of a deeper dive into what people are searching. Amaze owl is another one for product research. Helium 10 is typically my preference, not necessarily for product research. But it does have product research. It also does search terms, and gives you some PPC stuff, and there are a lot of extra things that come with it. But the Chrome extension itself is mostly meant for product research. Then there's the then there's Oh AMZ Scout Pro, also product research. If I'm doing product research, I'll usually use helium 10. Probably compare it to Jungle Scout, And I will also compare it to unicorn smasher. So this is another one of the interesting things here is we actually took I think it was five different product lines, five different companies and looked at three or four competitors of each. And we basically took people that we worked with and then looked at their competitors. And we tried to decipher like, okay, which ones of these are most accurate and oddly enough, unicorn smasher actually came out to be the closest, almost every single time in terms of projected sales, or how much you know, it assumes that someone is selling. And the odd thing to me was that it was really close. Sometimes it was almost completely accurate. And I have no idea who owns that company. All I know is that unicorn Smasher, I don't know who runs it, I don't know what else it does, all I know is that you can get the Chrome extension, there's a free version, there's a paid version. But I would suggest using unicorn Smasher, just because I've seen how accurate it is. I still use helium 10 and Jungle Scout as a comparison, but unicorn smasher is usually my go-to, then there are two others that aren't necessarily meant for Amazon sellers, but they basically are still useful to the meta SEO inspector. So this will kind of dig into your meta title meta description; it's SEO stuff. So a lot of Amazon sellers don't typically look into this kind of stuff because they're so worried about what kind of traffic they're getting from the existing traffic on Amazon. But they never really think about the traffic that they may be getting if they are product were list, as you know, ranked number one on Google. So if you can actually adjust your Amazon listing to not only cater to the Amazon algorithm but to also cater to Google's, there's a lot to know there. So it's a very interesting tool to have to still leverage, even though it's not completely catered to Amazon sellers. The next one is the same concept. So it's Moz. They call it the Moz bar, and it will show you your Amazon domain, Thor. He's not really going to tell you much, but your page authority. So this is essentially out of every keyword that you rank for out of Amazon's domain. What is your specific product listing page rank? For now, if you compare that to a website page, it's going to be much higher, and you're gonna be like, Well, I'm not getting that much traffic. So as much bullshit, it's not. The fact is, is that Amazon's domain has so much authority that it will bring your page authority up, but it won't rank as well just because of how big Amazon is. But it is an interesting thing to track, it's very easy to do, if you have a relatively smaller product line, if you have a big product line, you have 1000s of products, it's kind of difficult, just because of the amount of tracking you would have to do. But it is a very beneficial Chrome extension. Now, that is 12 of them that are specifically or helpful to Amazon sellers, I have a list of like 50 of them that are useful for just ecommerce in general. So I'm going to give you a bonus one that found that I love and it's called extensity. So essentially, it takes all of your Chrome extensions and makes it into like almost like a bookmark folder so that you can just kind of file through them. Because the issue I've had is that I've now gotten so many Chrome extensions that it just starts to take up my entire area and I barely have any room in my search bar. And then they actually start to go into their own little folder. So the issue now is, or the solution now is that extensity actually puts them all into one folder for me. So I just know where they all are at the same time. And it definitely helps a lot. That's my list going to talk to you about a lot of different Amazon product research tools. So we cater obviously a little bit more to the marketing side product research isn't necessarily our forte just because that tends to be how can you source it? Where were How can you fulfill it, what are the overall FBA fees gonna be and it turns into operations, which I don't care for? But so there's a bunch of different product research tools that I've used over the years, just from sellers who have had access to them or some that we have on our own. And a lot of them do almost the exact same thing. They had product research. And then they also have now all Dovin into Dovin and didn't drive into about gotten into keyword research, PPC tools, couple of them have the automated review emails, they have price tracking, they have Buy Box tracking, they have all these alerts that you can set up there's profitability reports, there's a ton of different stuff that they all have. So really, there's just a race to what is going to be like the main Amazon tool that everyone uses. And then what is like the other two that are kind of offered to the side? But right now, I've narrowed it down to six that I typically look at, and yesterday I mentioned a lot of different Chrome extensions. A lot of these have Chrome extensions as well. One of the first ones is Helium 10. Helium 10 is my personal preference, I find it to be the easiest to use, but they also have a lot of extra stuff to them. As opposed to some of the others may do things very well, they don't offer as much as Helium 10. And at this point, Amazon is slowly becoming like it, this area where there's going to be a platform where everyone just does everything. And it's kind of like HubSpot would be for Shopify, right, where you do email marketing through that, you do social media through there, you do your paid advertising, and all of your automation, your sales, and everything is basically done in there. And it's starting to get to a point where there's software out there that's trying to do the same thing. And I feel like that's kind of what Helium 10 is because they have product research, keyword research and PPC tools, and different competitor stuff that you can do. Like, there's a ton of crap in there. That is great. The next one is the seller app. They're also keyword research PVC tools that a couple of sellers use, I have been in it, but I've never used it myself. I don't have a true judgment on it. MZ Scout they have a lot of keyword research stuff as well. But on the product research side, I've heard that it's good, I don't know. No, one seller uses it. And that's their preference. It depends on how you're doing your product research, what it is you're looking for the data that you're looking for. And each of these might treat the process a little bit differently. So it's kind of what you're used to or what process you want to implement. Jungle Scout is a big one, they put out a ton of great content if you're looking to continue to learn and kind of get to know more stuff about the Amazon industry. They also have probably the best social media and everyone. So social media rep for Jungle Scout is soliciting props.
21:47
But they're great. They have a huge, they've been around for years, they might be the oldest one I can remember. I O scout is another ton of keyword research stuff behind there. I don't know anyone that uses them, but I've heard them, and I've seen them in a lot. I've seen them at conferences and things like that. And then yesterday, one of my odd favorite ones was unicorn smasher. So unicorns matter, primarily a Chrome extension from as far as I can tell, I like it. All the numbers seem to be relatively accurate, but I would suggest my personal tech stack is unicorn Smasher, Helium 10, and Jungle Scout, all for kind of different reasons more or less and then also just so I can compare across the three of them. But that is our list of product research tools. So usual rate review and subscribe and see you again.
22:45
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