In the digital age, there are a plethora of tools available to help eCommerce sellers drive external traffic to their Amazon listings. However, each brand’s digital marketing strategy will be different, and all the tools—both on Amazon and off Amazon—that can help them boost traffic to their product listings are unique as well.
Deciding which tools to have in your eCommerce toolbox plays a large part in the success of your rankings, sales, and overall eCommerce presence. To help you decide which tools you might want to use to increase traffic to your product pages, Pattern’s eCommerce experts dug in and outlined all of the various tools and Amazon marketing services sellers have at their disposal.
Why drive traffic to Amazon?
It’s a valid question, especially when a growing bunch of retailers are keen to use their D2C channels and avoid Amazon’s price-matching chaos altogether.
However, if you’re already selling on Amazon (or are a new Amazon seller), using advertising and digital marketing to direct traffic to your consumer can actually help you win on the platform (and beyond). The way we see it, there are two overarching advantages to directing traffic directly to Amazon listings.
1. Improve BSR and rankings
The more traffic you have, the more likely Amazon is to boost your Best Seller Rank, and the higher you’ll rank in product searches.
Factors that influence sales rank on Amazon:
- Availability
- Price
- Text match relevancy
- Sales velocity
The catch here is that a sales velocity is determined by a number of factors, including promotions, advertising, fulfillment, reviews, and more. One of the many ways to increase your sales velocity is to use advertising to direct traffic to your Amazon listings.
However, a word of caution: Amazon also determines rank by conversion rate. You’ll want to make sure that the customers you’re sending to your Amazon listing are ready to convert. Otherwise you’ll have the opposite problem: lots of views but no purchases, and Amazon may punish your keyword rank for it.
One option is to create a landing page to capture emails and add one more filter to your consumers before they actually get to your Amazon listing. By offering discount codes or other offers on your external promotions, you can be sure that by the time a potential customer gets to your Amazon listing, they’re pretty invested in the product and are ready to click “Buy Now.”
2. Beat your competitors
Are you more likely to buy a product with 300+ reviews or 3? Just having more eyeballs on your pages and piggybacking off the ‘Zon’s reputation can do wonders for your customer retention. After all, 79% of consumers go to Amazon to check reviews before making a purchase.
By directing consumers to your Amazon listings, you can beat your competition by boosting your organic search rankings within Amazon itself. Increasing your Amazon clout can then help you gain more consumer trust and more customers within the platform.
Amazon tools to drive external traffic
Amazon gives sellers a variety of advertising tools to direct traffic to product listings. Here’s a (more or less) comprehensive list of advertising tools you can use within Amazon.
Create an Alexa skill
“Hey Alexa, help me win the Buy Box.” Yep, you can literally teach Alexa to advertise for you. Well, not exactly. But you can code a custom Alexa response to queries of your own creation (ideally to market your product and Amazon listing).
Amazon Truck/Locker
Granted you have the cash to buy the ad space, you can advertise your Amazon products on Amazon trucks or Amazon Lockers. While this approach definitely isn’t for everyone, it could prove effective for geographic-specific brands looking to push customers to their Amazon listings.
Treasure Truck
Amazon’s Treasure Truck offers deals to Amazon Prime members and allows them to come pick up their order from the truck, which travels all around. Customers sign up for texts to learn about deals and where the location of the truck is. Utilizing new methods like this to drive external traffic to your Amazon listing isn’t the most conventional method, but it could be an effective one with the right audience.
Amazon Fresh
Now you can create Sponsored Ads on Amazon Fresh, Amazon’s online grocery service for Prime members. Similar to Sponsored Ads for products, these ads will show up for products in search. Since Amazon just offered Amazon Fresh delivery for free to Prime members, this looks like a growing opportunity for brands typically found in grocery stores.
Prime Video
You can create video ads for Prime Video. There are two types: In-stream and out-stream. Watchers encounter in-stream video ads either before, after, or during Prime video content. Out-stream ads are displayed much like display ads. These ads can then link to Amazon listings.
Kindle
You can advertise your Amazon listings on Kindle with Special Offers and Sponsored Screensavers. However, Amazon outlines specific creative guidelines that advertisers must adhere to.
Sponsored Display Ads
As anywhere between 1-5 million customers are browsing Amazon at any given time, Sponsored Display Ads are a great option to drive traffic to your product listing. Of course, this is the option Amazon sellers are most familiar with (along with Sponsored Brands (formerly Headline Search), although these aren’t driving external traffic to Amazon).
Display ads allow sellers to create ads that follow potential customers, either by geography or demographic. In fact, there are a variety of targeting metrics Amazon uses with Display Ads.
How Amazon Advertising can target customers:
- In-market, where customers who looked at the product in the last 15 days are targeted.
- Lifestyle, where customers are targeted based on their browsing history.
- Contextual, where ads are based on what customers are currently looking at.
- Specific product targeting, where ads can appear based on specific product searches that direct consumers back to Amazon.
The majority of the aforementioned advertising opportunities have a specific cost of entry that Amazon dictates. For example, to use Prime Video ads you must have a minimum spend of $35,000.
According to Pattern Advertising Director Tony Morales, one of the advantages of partnering with someone like Pattern means that we have a lower cost of entry to try out these various advertising techniques to drive traffic. Because Pattern works with so many different brands, Pattern has already met Amazon’s various spend minimum requirements.
“We can access those tools at a lower cost of entry point, which means we can test it with $2,000. If it works, we can try it with five, then we can try it with 10—we can make sure everything works and we can slowly build it up,” Morales said.
Off-Amazon tools to drive traffic
Of course, there are a plethora of off-Amazon resources at brands’ disposal to drive external traffic back to their Amazon product listing.
Using email campaigns to drive traffic to products is a great way to engage customers who are already familiar with your brand and mission.
Social media
Whether you’re targeting organic or paid traffic, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube are all perfect places to start creating ads to drive traffic back to Amazon. You can also use additional tools like Facebook pixels to track your ad progress on the platform and optimize your conversions.
Search ads
Paying Google and other search engines to show your Amazon listings first in a search can be extremely useful. However, Morales said to remember that Amazon often already buys Google Ads to drive customers to Amazon anyway, so before you invest in Google Ads or Bing or Yahoo, make sure that Amazon isn’t buying up Adwords on your behalf first!
Blog posts
Brands with robust content marketing strategies can use blog posts to their advantage to point traffic to their products. However, if your blog doesn’t have much traffic yet it might be wise to wait before investing too much in this strategy.
Influencer marketing
The advantage of this approach is that influencers (or other brands) already have a built-in audience type that you can tap into. By partnering with influencers or other brand partners to promote your products, you can really dig into niche markets.
In conclusion
There are endless opportunities to drive external traffic to your Amazon product listings. The strategy you choose to implement will highly depend on your audience, your budget, and what tools you have at your disposal.
The best thing about having a partner like Pattern is that we enable brands to tackle many of these opportunities that are normally out-of-budget or too complicated for brands on their own, Morales said. Plus, we’re incentivized to help you succeed (and not at your expense) since we don’t make commissions when you spend ad dollars.
“I think what’s great about working with a partner like Pattern is we’re always going to focus on being a prudent steward of somebody’s resources,” Morales explained. “We make money when we sell products, so we certainly want to advertise wisely because it’s going to help us sell more and it’s good for the brand and it’s good for business.”
If you want to learn more about how Pattern could expand your digital marketing and traffic-driving capabilities, reach out to us.
