Cracking the Code: Proven Techniques for Effective Amazon Listing Optimization - Part 2 - Conversion Rate Optimisation

Much like in part one, see here https://www.amzppc.co/post/amazon-listing-optimisation we're going to uncover the key areas that we've seen to have the biggest impact on conversion rate (CR)

Understanding why conversion rate matters

Raw figures are the best way to explain this. We had a client very recently who had a conversion rate of around 13% and they were doing around £95,000-105,000 per month consistently. This product had been in the top five for the category for many months, I believe it may have been a full year. The listings were quite good, full of A+ content, six images, videos, they'd hit all the major areas. The client, however, decided this was not good enough and built brand new images for main images and A+ content. The result was an increase to a conversion rate of 16%, achieving the best seller badge in the category and over £130,000 per month in sales.

Conversion rate is a simple maths game, double your conversion rate, double your sales from the same traffic, which also means halving your ACOS.

So what are the factors that can impact conversion rate?

1. Pricing
2. Reviews
3. Images/Videos
4. Title
5. A+ content
6. Bullet Points
7. Variations
8. Store Page
9. Advertising Defence
10. Remarketing
11. Targeting

There is some overlap with clickthrough rate post I made previously and all the factors in that list do impact CR but I didn't want this to be 5000 works so we're going to focus on this as these are definitely the key point.

Pricing

Pricing is always going to be one of the biggest factors in CR. Naturally customers think less about purchasing a $5 item than a $500 item, it simply means less to you if you lose a smaller amount so the purchases are made quicker, with less research and with less thought. Therefore, yous shouldn't look at this as "I need to drop my prices right now" but more how good is your conversion rate given your price point. I have outlined these benchmarks before in my SEO post www.amzppc.co/post/seo-how-to-rank-number-one-in-amazon

But here are the rough guidelines for conversion rate based on your price point. If you are significantly below these then you can assume that one of the other factors is lacking.

<$20 - 20%

$20-50 - 15%

$50-100 - 10%

>$100 - 5%

Reviews

Who has shopped on Amazon? All of us, right? Who bases their purchases based on reviews? All of us again. We naturally trust a product with 100,000 5-star reviews more than a product with 5 2.5 star reviews. Therefore you should be making a concerted effort to improve your reviews as much as possible. I will outline this more in a future post but here are some quick tips to improve your reviews.

Setup a follow up system with helium 10 or similar software this will send messages to your customers requesting them to leave a review. This, on average, increases review rates by around 10x so if you do anything today, do this.

Address customer complaints. If customers complain that a strap is breaking reinforce it on your next batch of purchases.

Add a thank you note in the package asking customers to leave a review. You need to be very careful about this and I'll address it in that future post but do your research before implementing this to make sure you don't violate Amazon's terms of service.

Images and Videos

These are one of the biggest areas for improvement you can make almost immediately. Firstly, you need to have 6 images, if you're not using all your slots you're missing out on opportunities so fill them right now. Next up, get a video in place. If you don't have the budget for a high-end production right now speak to an animator and get a 3D render of your product done where it moves around, spins, whatever. You want to show off your product in as many angles as you can.

Now we need to consider what images you should use. Look at the below image.

It's a very nice high-resolution image. It's also completely terrible for conversion rate as it tells you nothing about the product. We all knew it would spin, it's a fidget spinner, so if you're going to use an image say something meaningful. See the below.

It still shows the product in use but it tells us how big it is, that it's quiet, fits in your hand and they even tell us why it being quiet is good by telling us it's not distracting. This is key. When you mention a feature "It's quiet" you should explain why that's good "it's not distracting". Or "it's waterproof" should be followed up by "never worry about dropping it in the sink again". You need to paint a very descriptive idea of how someone is going to use the product.

The customer cannot see the product in person so this is your chance to sell it to them and if there's something worth saying, you need to say it in an image.

On mobile nearly half of all users on lower priced items, sub $20, don't even get past the title and the images so use your images to sell your product.

A client of ours in the pet industry sells a very high end product where all the models are over $200. They had plenty of very nice high resolution images like the gold fidget spinner but their conversion rate was 1.2%. With a single image change, not all 6 just 1, where they added text to the image like the above, they increased that to 1.6%. That is 30% more sales for a single image change.

Our rule is all images outside of the main one should have one clear and concise point on them. Not 5, not 10, 1 single point in a.short sharp sentence in big bold text so everyone can see it.

Title

Your title is one of the first pieces of information a potential customer will get from you. We covered this on the previous post here https://www.amzppc.co/post/amazon-listing-optimisation

A+ Content

To run A+ content you're going to need brand registry, if you don't have this already you can read all about it here https://amzppc.co/post/brand-registry-on-amazon A+ content is the section under the bullet points where your text-based product description would normally go. Only this time you can replace it with images and videos. You can therefore look at it as another set of main images and anything you did not cover in your main images can be done here or you can elaborate on your major points.

Bullet Points

Bullet points will matter more if you have an expensive product and less if you have a cheaper item. Generally, the main purpose of bullet points is to lay out the features of your product in more depth to help inform buyers of what they would be purchasing. They aren't nearly as important as any of the above factors so you don't need to put a huge amount of attention on them but here are some common pitfalls to avoid.

1. Use 5 bullet points. Any less feels like you have nothing to say and more feels like nonsense.
2. Keep them around 1-2 sentences long. Any shorter and it feels, again, like there's nothing interesting about your product, and more is information overload and nobody is going to read it.
3. Keep to this format. Feature -> Benefit. For example. A DURABLE SENSORY TOY - Our hand roller fidgets are engineered to withstand heavy fidgeters. They're made using heavy-duty ABS plastic with a matte soft-touch surface that won't chip or fade.

Variations

This is probably something that you didn't think of but there have been numerous studies on choice and its impact on decision making. Basically, if I say "do you want this fidget toy" you have a yes or no option and therefore it's 50/50, in theory. Whereas, if I say "which fidget toy do you want the red or the blue one" the human brain is deciding which colour it would prefer rather than if it should make the purchase. Therefore, if you have multiple variations of a product I'd advise you put them under one parent listing rather than keeping them separate. This also helps by combining reviews so it's a win-win.

Key takeaways/TLDR

Advertising defence, remarketing and targeting I will be covering in another post specifically focusing on advertising but the key takeaways are this. Your listing is your opportunity to sell your product to someone. Your biggest areas of leverage are reviews and images so focus on getting a solid review process in place and spend some time thinking about what your key selling points are and make sure you're highlighting those on your listing, that is going to make the biggest difference to improving your conversion rate.