Having a great Sponsored Products campaign setup and performance is probably one of the most crucial elements of each Amazon seller’s business, as well as one of the aspects that most sellers still struggle with.
With our agency Growth Hack Consulting LTD, we managed hundreds of accounts since our beginning in 2017. Having generated millions of US dollars in sales for our clients across pretty much every product category available on Amazon.com and other marketplaces, we spent the whole past year trying to figure out the key to ppc performance by simply increasing sales and decreasing total ACoS%. We did achieve some great results, yet we did feel that something was missing in this system. We started looking for some kind of tools or some way to bring external traffic that would bring extra value by increasing attribution value to search terms / keywords, thus ad performance.
Trying to avoid any PPC tool (I never have really been a tool guy) we tried different landing pages, sales funnels, external traffic generators but none seemed just to do the trick. I’ve understood more about the value of organic rank, attribution and ad performance after talking to some of my fellow consultants, and that is when I realized that we had to push for search terms rank to give a real boost to keywords performance.
I am going to introduce with a step-by-step guide the strategy that we have been adopting and internally grooming since November 2019 and since then applying to almost every one of our clients’ products, using mainly tracking links from Pixelfy.me and Facebook ads as spreading medium:
Pros:
- It works with any product, as long as the listing has been fully optimized for conversion and it makes sense to advertise for the keywords you want to rank it for.
- It is great for new product launches as well as boost rank for products already listed for a while.
- It works in any marketplace. In the long run it might reduce your PPC ad spent while keeping higher organic rank.
- The more clicks, the better results, no need for a huge amount of clicks.
Cons:
- It might take a while to get the right research done.
- It might take a while to figure out the right targeting/ads on Facebook.
Here is a quick case study that we showcase on our YouTube channel using the product of one of our partners:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeZOAZRs9kU&t=9s
You can see in the image below how just with $500 of budget for Facebook ads and not changing our PPC targetings/strategy/budget, we were able to achieve impressing results for most of the keywords tested:
Let’s get this started with this step-by-step guide to our strategy:
What you need:
- Your Keyword Data
- Optimized Listing for conversion
- On-going PPC Campaign(s)
- Super URL Generator: Pixelfy.me
- Facebook Ads
- Photo Editing Software (if you like to make more appealing ads)
- Extra: other social media channels/forums with high PR such as Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, Youtube, etc.
1. Create a Percentage Off Promotion for the product(s) you want to rank.
The very first thing you want to do, after you have already selected which product you want to boost rank for, is to create an Amazon promotion for it. You will need to create a product selection first from the Advertising section and then create a “Percentage Off” Promotion (always under the Advertising section of your Seller Central).
Why do we create a promotion? Because the conversion rate tends to be higher when a discount is applied. The amount discounted is entirely up to you, but don’t give a higher discount than 35% or 50% or your ranking effort might be lost – Amazon doesn’t give “ranking juice” to highly discounted purchases.
Common question: should I run the promotion for the main variation or each one of them? The answer here is: it depends on your strategy and ultimate goal. Normally only ONE variation will rank for the same keyword (except a few cases of multiple product variations showing up on the same search result page or in different pages). Depending on the variation and targeting you might want to include or exclude. Eg: “running belt” applies to both green and blue variation. Differently, “man running belt” might not apply to the pink color variation.
In our case, we have applied a 15% discount as our margins are pretty low on this product and keep in mind: you want to have this campaign running for the long term along with your PPC campaigns, so it’s better to keep the discount to a sustainable level.
Use a group claiming option, make up a coupon code that would be easy to remember and make sure to have the promotion running for as long as you plan to use this campaign for (we normally let it run for months).
2. Make a list of Top 10 Search Terms you want to rank for.
Now it’s time to select the keywords you want to use with your Pixelfy.me tracking link generator.
Here’s the main objectives / reasons why you should push organic rank for the most relevant search terms:
- Increase sales: here you’re looking for highly related keywords that have a relatively high search volume.
- Adjust PPC attribution and performance: some of your PPC terms might not get enough clicks/impressions or might get a high ACoS% even though you know that the particular targeting is very relevant. This might happen because your product didn’t get the right attribution by Amazon algorithm. Pushing organic rank helps you fix this problem.
- Confirm PPC value & sales for particular search terms: one more thing you want to do is to keep pushing organic rank for the keywords that are already doing quite well on your PPC. The best results is always obtained by combining organic and paid rank, this is something you want to take advantage of when selling on Amazon.
We take search terms mainly from 2 sources:
Your own PPC Search Terms Report
You will find here the terms that give you most paid sales as well as the terms with the highest potential. Any search term with NO SALES but very high CTR (from 33% to 100%) is a very good candidate to your list. Use the following tool (brand analytics) to see if the search volume is high or not. By the way, using this kind of way to get new search terms will give a great boost to your PPC campaigns keyword targetings. Use this as an extra way to find targetings – this is one of our favorite hacks.
Amazon Brand Analytics
Here you will find search terms with the highest potential of sales. Make sure the keywords used are extremely relevant to your product. The last thing you want is to push rank for keywords that do not convert. This will have the opposite effect on your product listing and decrease your BSR and conversion rate a lot.
You might find potential keywords using other keyword search tools, but I’d stick to these 2 tools to have the best affinity and relevance to your own data.
3. Create Your Tracking Links with Pixelfy.me
The next step is to start creating your tracking links. For this strategy, we use the Super Url 2.0, which has proven to be the best so far.
In order to keep things under control remember to create a new campaign for each product you create tracking links for. You want to keep your product ASIN, your target search terms and the intermediate landing page text at hand to copy and paste while creating 10 or more tracking links.
I definitely suggest creating an intermediate page with instructions since we are planning to drive traffic via Facebook Ads. The objective of your Facebook Ad copy and creative design will be to catch the user’s attention. Once the user will be on the intermediate landing page, they will have the chance to copy the code to paste at checkout to redeem their discount.
Common Questions: Why not using a URL Rotator? Because what we want to do here is to be able to switch on and off each keyword depending on their performance and to potentially even use different budgets or different creativity in more than one Facebook ad campaign or groups.
Make sure during the creation of EACH tracking link, that your product shows up on the search results, in other words it is INDEXED by Amazon for the keywords you want to rank for. If the product is not indexed already, you will not only waste budget on ads that deliver to a page where your product is not (but your competitors are) but also provide a bad experience to your target audience. In order to check your index, click on the “proceed to amazon” button. If you don’t see any result on the search page, your product is not indexed. Otherwise, like in the case of the picture below, you will see your product as a result.
If you’re not indexed for the keyword you want to rank for, try to edit the tracking link and use a similar search term, maybe more relevant to your product. You could come back a few days or weeks later to see if the original search term has been indexed.
4. Create Your Facebook Ads Campaign.
When it comes to creating the Facebook ad campaign for our product, we go for traffic campaign, being our objective to send as many clicks as we can to the tracking links previously generated, and not being able (in the case of most Amazon sellers) to track sales coming from Facebook. Ultimately, you will want to have for each product a PPC campaign on your Amazon Seller Central as well as a Facebook > Pixelfy.me traffic campaign, using similar keywords to push at the same time external traffic and paid traffic to boost your organic rank.
For this reason, the best way to setup Facebook Ad campaign will be to have it on-going on a daily budget (normally $10 is ok to see some results in a couple of days or weeks, depending on how good your conversion is).
It is important to have figured out before this stage your best target audience, in order to have a low CPC and a higher conversion rate. From our tests, one of the best ways to come up with new effective target audiences for your Facebook ads is the use of Micro Targeting (you can read more on this blog post). Micro Targeting applied to Amazon Sponsored Products will also help you to increase sales on your PPC by setting up some specific EXACT-only targeting campaigns. Again from our tests, a number of click as low as 100 or 200 is enough to start moving your rank (depending on how competitive is your category and on how good or bad your product was already doing), this means that with a low enough CPC, even after $30 spent you should start seeing some results.
As you can see on the picture below, we suggest to create:
- One ad set per target audience
- One ad per tracking link (the name of the ad is the search term used)
In this way you will be able to switch on-off the keywords tracking links directly on your Facebook business manager, based on their performance.
If you want to create some stunning graphics, I suggest using the free tool canva.com.
5. Create a Support PPC Campaign
At this point you want to backup your Pixelfy tracking links with some aggressive PPC campaigns. Create a new campaign with one group only, exact match only, using exclusively the keywords you have on your pixelfy.me tracking links:
Make sure to give a higher bidding to TOS (top of search results) as you want to boost your search results organic rank. You might keep the budget of this campaign lower than your average daily budget. At the beginning you might have a much higher ACoS% than your target ACoS%.
6. Extra: Other social traffic
I recommend using other sources of traffic, especially social media & forums with very high page rank, that allow you to use anchor text on your links.
Some of my favorites are: Reddit, Quora (great for the EU marketplaces), Pinterest, YouTube, Influencer Networks, Deal sites and other kinds of forums.
Social Media traffic is great because it has a high level of interaction and it’s very likely to be driving traffic from people in the target niche – using influencers for this would be amazing. Anyway this kind of traffic requires a lot of time, it might not be approved (most of the forums ban promotional posts) and might be expensive to use big influencers. Facebook is amazing because you can literally create what I call a “twin” campaign of your PPC campaigns for each one of your products and manage the daily budget: to some of our best performing campaigns we give up to $50 a day on Facebook.
Conclusions
It took my team and I a while to come up with the best tool for our objective and we are very impressed with how well Pixelfy.me is working. Not mentioning that it’s been super safe since we started using it in October 2019, we never had a problem. This strategy is working with amazing results for our clients and I’ll be very happy if any of you would see improvements in their rank and PPC performance after implementing it. In some cases we were literally able to double sales and cut by half our PPC ad spent. I am aware that this is not the only way to use Pixelfy.me and you might as well apply some changes to this strategy for what works best with your products. Do not hesitate to get in touch with me at davide@wearegrowthhack.com for any question.
