𝟏𝟗𝟎𝟎% 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 $𝟒𝟒𝟔 𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 😱 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐳𝐨𝐧

1900% Growth and astounding $446 000 since the start of the year on Amazon

Overview

All you need to know in order to crush it on Amazon in 2024

We entered 2024 at full throttle, so I thought to myself, “Why not put it down in writing?” and it turned out to be an awesome knowledge bomb, I am sure that most of you being Facebook centric marketers don’t give too many f*ks about Amazon or didn’t have the time so far to give this channels enough of your attention, as you are telling yourself “I am killing it on Facebook, Google and maybe other social media, why bother with Amazon and its complicated, ever changing algorithm that is only feeding me bulls*t” ?

The Truth is you can never have enough marketing channels. Even if you are doing great on FB and other channels, are you really going to say no to 20% to 40% increase on top of what you are already doing through other unexplored channels, in this case Amazon?

That said, Amazon is one of our most favourite channels. We’ve been selling on the platform for more than 9 years now and although I am sure that no one can ever turn it into a completely tamed beast, I can say we are getting on pretty good terms with it.

LET ME START WITH THE CASE STUDY ITSELF

90 days ago we signed a client for our agency. He had bought a miserably performing Amazon business a couple months ago and things were not looking good for him. Sales were going south day by day and he felt pretty desperate. We completely took over the account – from PPC to Listing Optimization and customer support even.

As let me tell you something – when a platform provides you with the means, bloody F$@!king use them, all of them! What I mean is that in most cases on Amazon, running only PPC will not work as well as only optimizing your listings and counting on the organic traffic. You have to, first of all, choose your products wisely, but that is relevant for any channel. Don’t go broad, GO AS NICHE AS POSSIBLE while still having a great margin and volume. You don’t want to be selling to everyone, that golden age is past gone, you have to adjust, it’s a battle of the fittest and most adaptable. I can say that our client had done his homework here as the product is niche and has an angle.

What happens afterwards is the interesting part, let’s see how to expose that angle.

First Stage: Make sure you know your audience

An approach we have is to always strive to put ourselves in the end customer’s shoes . What is he/she really looking for? What will make her/his life better? People are always looking for solutions so we make sure to give these solutions to them. As cliche as this example is – when you go to the brick and mortar store you don’t buy a drill you buy the whole in your wall, the means how you get the hole don’t bother you and the end customer, everybody is looking for the end result, picturing himself with a happy smile face after the job’s been done!

So, how that manifests itself in the Amazon reality is:

1. The Eye Candy Approach

First thing we did was to create high quality images of the product. Sellers should follow Amazon’s image guidelines to ensure their listings are not suppressed. By using high-quality images you can enable the zoom feature which allows buyers to see your products in more detail. All images must be at least 1000 pixels in width OR height. However, Amazon recommends 2560 pixels wide so your images can be zoomable. Make sure to use professional photographers for your photo sessions or even better – 3D artists that will make beautiful 3D packaging that stands out among the competitors. The latter is exactly what we did.

More Details: Have the main image on white background.

For best results order a professional to create a 3D model of your product – I promise it will stand out!

Going further down the other images:

As a second image put one with your top 5 product advantages

Third – image with 2-3 reviews about the product

Fourth – An image with clear and concise directions for use

What’s included image: especially if it’s a box with multiple products

Lifestyle image with a prompt to buy – a message like “Give yourself a nice aroma bath”

A Promotional image. For example: Buy 2 – Get 20 % OFF

An image with a comparison table, where you show how you’re better than the other brands (as it’s not allowed to show other brands on your image, you can simply call them “Brand A” and “Brand B” for example)

Image with ingredients or materials (here you can include close-ups of your product if that’s applicable)

An image with the size of the product

Don’t forget to check your style guide– Amazon has specific style guides for each product category. Stick to them and don’t go too much overboard Click here to find out more

Alright, after we’ve done a great job with the images, now what❓

We are following a strict consistent process to get everything right. Keep in mind that many strategies that used to work in 2018 and 2019 don’t work anymore, so we make sure we adapt to these changes, constantly A/B test, measure the results and execute. I cannot stress more on that A/B test!!! No matter what you “think” is right and what you “think” will work best, always A/B test before pressing the button as sometimes this could cost you a lot of 💰💰💰

1. The Eye Candy Approach

More Details: Have the main image on white background.

For best results order a professional to create a 3D model of your product – I promise it will stand out!

Going further down the other images:

As a second image put one with your top 5 product advantages

Third – image with 2-3 reviews about the product

Fourth – An image with clear and concise directions for use

What’s included image: especially if it’s a box with multiple products

Lifestyle image with a prompt to buy – a message like “Give yourself a nice aroma bath”

A Promotional image. For example: Buy 2 – Get 20 % OFF

Image with ingredients or materials (here you can include close-ups of your product if that’s applicable)

An image with the size of the product

Don’t forget to check your style guide– Amazon has specific style guides for each product category. Stick to them and don’t go too much overboard Click here to find out more

Alright, after we’ve done a great job with the images, now what❓

2. Listing Optimization and SEO

The second thing we did was completely rewrite the listing’s title, bullets and description.

The formula consists of 3 things here:

Easily readable title with 3-5 high search volume relevant keywords
We all know that “the customer is King”, thus you need to create your content for your customers. Imagine you’re a buyer, shopping on Amazon: Make it effortless on the eye and use an explicit voice to bring your message across. Don’t think about keywords in the beginning – focus on the feeling you’d like to convey.
Include benefits and Unique Selling Propositions. The mobile view is very limited to about 80 visible characters, so make sure to place the most important information at the beginning.
Bullets with text length between 150 and 200 characters with 2-3 high search volume relevant keywords in each bullet. We have developed internal software with which we can see the real conversion rate for any keyword that is relevant to our product and have been used by the customers on Amazon. We include those as well, if you have your own way to do that definitely do it as it’s a game changer!
Description with multiple text separators and emojis in order to stress on different advantages. You can use software to convert the text into HTML (WordtoHMTL)
Shun from duplicating the bullet points. Tell a story about the product instead.
Make it easy to read. Maximum three lines per paragraph — you’ll need to use simple HTML code here. Make sure to separate paragraphs with text or (line break). Use text for bold text and headings.
Keywords in the description only go hand in hand with other keywords. This is called “dual description” and it’s the perfect spot for your long-tail keywords — with limited effects.

About Keyword Formatting for the above!
Don’t be repetitive – No need to repeat words, e.g. ‘dog leash 3m’, instead of ‘leash dog 3m long’). Repetition shows no positive impact on ranking. Instead, use the opportunity in whatever is left as space to add more relevant keywords.

Use either singular or plural. Adding both is not necessary. The exception: Long compound words in German.

Capitalising letters (or not) is irrelevant.

Minor misspellings (diarrhea, dog leahs, leahter bag) are matched to the correct spelling

Different spellings of compound words (basketball vs. basket ball, Rolodex vs. rolo dex) are not indexed automatically

Cover different variations by joining or separating words through hyphens, e.g., A-B ranks for A, B, A B, AB, A-B (use for max. 2 words, e.g. dog-leash)

3. FBA vs FBM

People often ask me: “Does it make a difference If I am going to sell FBA or FBM?”. The short answer is “YES”. Let me ask you this – if you have paid for your Prime account, which guarantees you that you will get whatever you order to your doorstep in no more than 2 days are you going to use it or not? Of course you are, without even thinking about what other options there are beyond that. Why? Because it’s super convenient and because you have already paid for it upfront. Amazon knows very well how to take your money without you even noticing. Saying all of that, if your product is not FBA and doesn’t qualify for FBA you are screwed…If you are selling FBM and not FBA – visibility is less as people may filter by “Prime” only, traffic is less and therefore sales are less!

Well, our client was selling FBM when we started, we switched to FBA, we put enough stock in the Amazon warehouse and in combination with the above optimizations sales started climbing nicely. We hit 800% growth in the first month. It was time to pull out the heavyweight – PPC.

4. PPC Set-up-the 3 strategies we implemented

Strategy #1 – Dominate the search results for your own brand name

2020 is being dubbed the year of brand building on Amazon. As everyday consumers become more aware, they are seeking out and choosing to support smaller brands instead of the multinational conglomerates that have dominated retail shelves for the last century.

Millions of customers are now going to Amazon and searching for specific brands when looking for products to buy. You should be taking advantage of this and putting extra effort into building brand recognition even if your products are only sold on Amazon!

In terms of Amazon Sponsored Ads almost every seller is making 1 huge mistake that’s costing them thousands, and for some brands, hundreds of thousands of dollars…

You are not running Sponsored Brands Ads (formerly Headline Search Ads) on your own brand name keywords!

You might be thinking “But why do I need to do this, if someone searches my brand name then my listings will come up anyway?”

That’s correct… but so will ads from your competitors that are bidding on your brand name so they can steal your customers! So if you are not bidding on your branded keywords, then when customers search for your brand name on Amazon a BIG competitor HEADLINE AD is the first thing your customers see.

There are hundreds & sometimes thousands of keywords shoppers search with your brand name, and you need to find all these keywords and run Sponsored Brands Headline Ads for every single one. We have seen brands run these campaigns that generate tens of thousands in revenue each month with an ACOS as low as 5%!

With the current product, object to this case study we were able to get down to 18% AcoS, which was a huge optimization from the previous 32%

Strategy #2 – Steal sales from directly from your competitor’s listing

You’ve put the work into researching, sourcing, and buying a great product that you’re proud of. The quality and features are better than the competitor products out there, and now you’re ready to dominate your niche. One great way to gain sales that would otherwise go to a competitor product is to run Sponsored Ads directly on your competitor’s listings!

A new feature that Amazon released in 2019 is the ability to directly target specific listings instead of only keywords and search terms. This is called Product ASIN Targeting and it presents some interesting opportunities for advertisers on Amazon, with a huge number of strategic possibilities available. Within the new manual targeting capabilities, you can fine-tune your PPC campaigns to target categories, brands, and ASINs.

You can get really creative with how you use the new ASIN Targeting features, but one of our favorites that we see perform well every time is to find high converting ASINs from your Automatic Campaign report and target those directly.

What WE DID!
️🚀 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝟏: Find top performing ASINs and target them manually
Identify the ASINs with the highest conversion rate (and lowest ACoS) in our Automatic Campaign Search Terms report and target them manually in our campaign. Now our ads were showing up directly on their listing.
️
🚀 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝟐 Find low performing ASINs and add to negative (negative targeting)
Conversely, we also used the ASIN Targeting feature to prevent our ad from being shown for low-performing competitor ASINs, aka ‘Negative Targeting’.

Again, from your Search Terms report we found the low-performing ASINs on our list that we didn’t want our ad to show up for. Then, we added these ASINs as ‘Negative ASINs’ using the new Negative Targeting feature, and prevent our ad from being shown for these ASINs.

🚀 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝟑: Find inferior ASINs to outperform
We also targeted competitor ASINs where we knew our product had a clear advantage, in our case an extra feature no one else had. We then manually looked through the search results to find these competitors, but was the effort well rewarded? Oh, yes!

Strategy #3 – Retargeting Customers Off Amazon

For brand registered brands, you now have the ability to run Sponsored Display ads. Retargeting ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram are some of the best performing campaigns, and that’s no different with Amazon.

When you create a Sponsored Display ad, Amazon shows ads off Amazon to people who have viewed your product or similar products. This means that you can be browsing a random site you found on Google and be served an ad for that garlic press you were checking out on Amazon earlier.

This is incredibly powerful 💪 for brand recognition to stay top of mind for your customers, and give a presence that you are a larger company than you actually are because of your omnipresent marketing on and off Amazon.

We took advantage of that and spend 100$ per day for our retargeting campaigns, for which we got 410$ back on average 🤑

We used the below Copies:

You were eyeing our (awesome product) but didn’t buy?
Checked out our (awesome product) but didn’t buy?

Here is a discount code just for you:
Use it to get 20% off of your entire order
→ LINK

We used still images or GIF like videos of the product, looking all cool and enticing.

Budget was $20 per day per ad set – make sure to terminate all ad sets that don’t convert well enough after 2 days or a maximum of 3.

As you know conversion is strictly personal, so make sure to do your math right!

One last thing we did is social proof posts:

Budget was $20 per day per Ad set, it was a killer ad!

Final Thoughts

Make sure you pick your niche and product right guys. Wherever you are in your brand building trip, you can always pivot if the tests so far don’t seem to be bringing in money.
It is not important if you are just getting started on Amazon or you have been in the field for years. At any given moment you need to be selling a product that people need, are looking for and actually would like to buy. Saying all that, go niche, but don’t go super tiny niche, always look for niches with at least a decent amount of search volume and sales. If you have a product no one wants, no one is searching for, is flimsy and cheap it means you haven’t done your homework right and you are destined to end up with your finger up your a$$.
The above would have never worked if our client didn’t do his job right, developing and improving the right product and making sure clients are happy with what they receive.
You should constantly ask yourself the following questions:
Does my product solve a real problem?
Do I have enough social proof from other similar products and brands that this is something people really need?
How am I differentiating?
Do I have any domain knowledge about this niche and if not how fast can I obtain some? (and I recommend you do that only if it’s really interesting for you and you have a passion for it).
If you are not passionate about what you are creating and selling your product will only last a short while.

Our client really loves his products and we really love scaling brands on Amazon, so it was a win win with a WHOPPING total growth of 1900% and then tripling the sales over the course of the last 90 days Good thing that there is still a lot of room for improvement, so hopefully I will write another post to update you guys in a month or so.

Everyone has their own struggles, no matter if you are making $1mln in revenue per day, month, year or you are not even there yet. And it’s really really really hard to be fully involved in running your business and running your ads or god forbid your complete marketing strategy at the same time, at times could be seriously overwhelming

With my post I wanted to give you another perspective and show you that you can achieve success and growth in Amazon and other channels even without spending huge budgets on Facebook. From our past experience Amazon sometimes becomes the main channel, contributing to 40% of the total revenue and 52% of the profit. Yes, this could be achieved but that’s only in case you have the right means, experience and people on your side.