Last week, I wrote about Five Ways to Drive External Traffic to Your Amazon Listings. However, as useful as each of those techniques is, you need to be sure that you execute them properly to avoid unwanted consequences.
The most common mistake that we see sellers make is sending external traffic “Directly” to their own Amazon listings. Wait a second, didn’t I just write a whole article about driving external traffic to Amazon? Yes, that’s correct, but if you read carefully, I never said that you should drive your traffic “Directly” to your Amazon listing. The key difference is how you send the traffic.
Here are the main issues that you run into when you send traffic directly to your Amazon listing.
- Customer data: You spend your money on advertising (say on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) to drive visitors to your listings and what does Amazon do? They keep your customer information and you never get to know who they are or what they buy or even have a chance to retarget them in the future.
- Campaign data: You will never know with any type of accuracy the results, success or lack thereof of your external advertising campaigns. You can see your overall sales increase, or stay the same, but if you send your campaign traffic directly to Amazon, you will just be guessing what happened.
- Amazon ranking: As if the two above points weren’t enough, you may even be hurting your Amazon rank if the traffic you’re sending is not already at the bottom of your sales funnel and by not buying your product/s, you’re unintentionally lowering your conversion rate. In other words, you’ll get increased views that may not necessarily translate into purchases and that may prompt Amazon’s rank algorithm to lower your position in relation to your competitors.
So, now that we now about the unintentional consequences, you may be wondering what’s the proper way to manage these types of campaigns. The answer is to create highly optimized Landing Pages. Essentially, rather than sending campaign traffic directly to Amazon, you will want to send them to your Landing Page first, and from there, to your Amazon Listings.
When you do that, all of the negative points that I indicated above, turn into positives with a few added bonus advantages.
- Your landing page allows you to get information about your visitors. You can do that by offering a unique discount code when they fill out a form. If they don’t fill out the form, you can still retarget them in the future via remarketing campaigns.
- You can fine tune your campaigns with much more accuracy by learning the types of visitors that click on your ads, your best performing ads, click-through-rates, and a number of other campaign metrics.
- Your conversion rates on Amazon will not suffer, and quite possibly will increase. Visitors who aren’t interested in your product or not ready to buy yet, will not go to your Amazon listing just yet. However, those who are ready to buy, will move from your landing page to your Amazon listing directly, therefore increasing your visitors to purchase ratio (conversion rate).
Amazon also loves external traffic that converts and by qualifying your prospects through your own landing page, you’ll be eliminating most of the non-converting shoppers.
Conclusion
With Amazon campaign attribution still in beta stages and with limited sellers invited to participate, all of the above techniques are fairly easy to implement and will definitely help you monitor your campaigns more accurately while increasing your Amazon sales.
To clarify, you should still run the traditional Amazon advertising within Amazon’s own advertising options, yet, by running a parallel campaign to drive external traffic to your Amazon listings you will be multiplying your sales exponentially while also adding a new source of recurring sales for your products in the future.
As always, if you need any assistance with your eCommerce marketing, our MGR Team will be happy to chat with you one-on-one. Use this link to contact us and set up your free consultation.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR). Happy Marketing!
