Almost 90% of UK shoppers use Amazon and 40% have access to its Prime subscription service, according to research that highlights the challenge for high street retailers.
If you are considering selling online, Amazon is definitely the best place to start, with its millions of loyal customers and rapid growth year on year! And, recently, we helped a Yorkshire based online seller with their Amazon account and their sales grew by 1200% within a month. With an in-demand product and great price point, this product was always going to do well, however, with a bit of a push we were able to help them reach out to more customers quicker via advertising.
Amazon Advertising can often be an ‘additional burden’ to Amazon sellers when we consider the cost on top of the 15% commission already paid to Amazon. But with the growth of Amazon Advertising, it is a key time to be making it part of your strategy to help grow your business.
Advertising acts as a catalyst and accelerates sales. Once you have a conversion, your product ranks better organically, which will lead to an increase in sales overall.
The screenshot below shows how an advertising flywheel works. With ads you generate more sales, leading to the chance of more reviews, which means an increased sales rank and more organic sales. Ads generate lots of data which can then be used to optimise campaigns, leading to better results and continued sales.
HOW OUR TEAM HELPED
We started work by completing product optimisation in July, ensuring all product pages were complete with relevant keywords. We used tools such as Sonar to research the most common customer search terms. We also looked into reverse ASIN search queries of the most popular products.
Whilst we were working on product optimisation, we began setting up advertising. This ensured that before our SEO ranking improved, the products were ranking highly in search results with advertising; as well as giving us enough time to test campaigns, seeing what worked, what didn’t and gather informative search term and placement data, ready for the peak.
THE SITUATION
- A client with a new brand in the DIY category
- Sales dependent on warm weather
- Currently reliant on the website for sales and Amazon at infancy
- There is no process of launching new products; no strategy for optimising existing listings for conversion
- Highly knowledgeable about the product
WHAT DID WE DO?
We spent time understanding the industry and category and took time to understand customer search behaviour. We started by putting together recommendations for the client to make content changes. The client was already highly knowledgeable with the product information but needed some guidance with how Amazon SEO works. We then focused on advertising whilst the client worked on improving the existing product listing content.
Our Advertising process included:
- Used Auto Targeting campaigns to generate traffic to our pages and drive sales via the on-page search terms
- Used search term report to understand what keywords were and weren’t working
- Created manual ads with targeted keywords from the search term report & keyword tools e.g. Sonar Tools
- Optimised manual ads with bid adjustments and negative keywords
- Created product targeting ads targeting competing products
In the campaigns, we split out each product into its own ad group, which allowed us to measure the success of each product. Our target budget was £300.00 for the first month but after seeing the demand within a week, we were able to increase the budget.
THE RESULT
- 1200% increase in sales within the first month and a 127% increase in sales in the second month (see screenshot below)
- 30 SKUs successfully launched and optimised within 3 months.
- Started selling newly launched products after strategically targeting ads
- Used PPC to drive sales, while maintaining a profitable ACoS of 5%
- Amazon sales are now 20% above website sales and in about the range of 35k a month
