Amazon External Traffic Guide

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2 Amazon External Traffic Guide Follow This Proven 7 Step Strategy To Explode Your Amazon Sales, Get Legitimate Reviews and Build a List of Real Customers In this guide you will learn the strategy that we have been using successfully to drive external traffic to our Amazon listings, to grow our list and boost our sales and organic reviews.

3 Firstly, you are going to learn the benefits of driving external traffic to your Amazon listing and how it can explode your Amazon sales, increase your Best Sellers Rank (BSR), conversion rate and search rankings. So, what do we mean by driving external traffic? External traffic refers to advertising (free or paid) to prospects from channels outside of Amazon. Examples could include Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, , blogs etc. Each of these are referred to as a traffic source. Our strategy involves sending potential prospects to a landing page (also called an opt-in page) where they enter their to claim a onetime coupon that can be used to purchase a product on Amazon.

4 Here are the key benefits of sending external traffic to your Amazon listings: Main Benefits 1. Increases your sales 2. Improves your organic search rankings 3. Increases your review count 4. Allows you to build a customer list Let s take a look at each of these benefits.

5 ! Benefit #1: Increased Sales By leveraging other traffic sources you can get your product in front of the eyes of thousands of new potential

6 customers. If you are selling a quality product (you are of course!) then this can lead to an explosion of new sales and bring the momentum you need to outsell your competition. Also, since you are getting the traffic from outside of Amazon your internal rankings on Amazon s platform don t matter. You can make great sales by leveraging Amazon s trust and their fulfillment centers, even if you aren t currently ranking well on Amazon!

7 ! Benefit #2: Improved Search Rankings Every sale you make from external traffic will give you a boost in your search rankings on Amazon. That means you will rank higher in Amazon s organic search when customers search for keywords related to your product. By using a landing page you can be assured that your product will convert much higher than normal as the customer is already pre-sold before visiting your product page on Amazon. As conversion rate is one of the main ranking factors, this will result in a further boost to your product s organic rankings.

8 ! Benefit #3: Increased Review Count Amazon is making it increasingly more difficult to obtain reviews. They have removed their Verified Badge from sales with over a 50% discount, and banned a significant amount of reviewers (which deletes all of their reviews). By providing a coupon code and communicating with your customer before and after they make a purchase, the review rate % increases drastically. Using our strategy we have achieved up to a 40% review rate! This will subsequently improve your click through rate and conversion rate which will again lead to higher organic rankings.

9 ! Benefit #4: Building a Customer List This last benefit, we believe, is the most crucial. When you make a sale on Amazon, the customer s is masked to prevent you from marketing to the customer off Amazon s platform. Amazon understands that a customer list is a HUGELY valuable asset and they try to stop you in any way they can from building one.

10 If you have a customer s you can communicate with them directly which gives you an incredible amount of influence. You can build your own business which you have complete control over and not rely solely on Amazon to bring sales. Imagine if you are launching a new product and instead of using EXPENSIVE review groups you could just shoot an off to a list of your previous customers who would probably be thrilled to buy your new product. Again, imagine if you decide to start your own ecommerce store. You can just send out an offering a launch discount and you can begin generating sales from day one. So those are the reasons why you should be sending external traffic to your Amazon listings. Now let s move onto the strategy

11 Our Proven 7 Step Strategy Step 1: Getting Set Up Step 2. Creating a promotion on SellerCentral Step 3. Creating a landing page Step 4. Choosing a traffic source Step 5. Building your ad creative Step 6. Running the promotion Step 7. Analyze results

12 Step 1. Getting Set Up There are a few things you will need to sign up for before running a successful promotion. 1. Landing Page Builder The first thing you will need is a landing page builder. This software will allow you to quickly build opt-in pages that you can send your prospects to, in order to capture their s. We recommend AMZPromoter which we created specifically for running Amazon promotions.

13 Our software pulls data from your Amazon listing so you can quickly create a high-converting landing page in just a few clicks. We also include several other features: automatic one-time coupon distribution, custom templates, and detailed analytics and tracking. We host the landing pages on our servers to greatly simplify the setup which will save you time and money.

14 2. Amazon Auto-responder Sending an follow-up sequence GREATLY increases the chance that your customer will leave a review for your product. There is automated software available that only costs a small monthly fee. It connects to Amazon s API and pulls

15 your customer order information and automatically sends s out at a specified time. We recommend using Feedbackz (no affiliation) because of its excellent targeting and delivery features. You can customize who, what, when, where, from and how buyers will get a feedback request . You can even send special s to only customers who used a coupon code. 3. (OPTIONAL) Amazon Associate Program!

16 This is a little hack that is perfectly within Amazon s Terms of Service that that will bring you in some revenue and provide you with more data on your campaigns. Sign-up to Amazon s affiliate program HERE. After setting up your account, you can search for your products on Amazon and generate your own unique URL with a UTM. If your customer purchases through this URL then you will get a commission of up to 10% of the sale. Also because your URL is unique it can provide you with analytics data on where your customer originated from, which is very useful marketing information.

17 ! Step 2. Creating a promotion on SellerCentral This is quite a simple process but there are a few seemly innocuous steps that if you ignore can cost you immensely. So pay attention! Step 1. Log into SellerCentral and click the Advertising -> Promotions tab.

18 You will now see the following screen: Select the Money Off option which will take you to the Create Promotion page.

19 Step 2. Fill out the fields according to your preferences. There are many options available to sellers on how to run promotions. Please refer to Amazon s guide HERE for more information. If you haven t run a promotion before you will need to select Create a new product selection and add the ASIN that you want to run a promotion for. Or you can include your entire catalogue. We recommend you change the Buyer gets field to Amount off (in $), particularly if you are offering a

20 significant discount. This will prevent the customer buying a large amount of your inventory at a heavily discounted rate. From there set your Start and End dates and give your promotion an Internal Description. Don t worry your customer won t see the name you give. Step 3. Select the following boxes as shown in the picture. WARNING: ENSURE YOU DESELECT THE Detail page display text AS IF YOU DO NOT YOUR PROMOTION WILL BE DISPLAYED ON YOUR PUBLIC PAGE. Then scroll down and click Review.

21 Step 4. You will be taken back to the main promotion page. However, there will be a box at the top of the page. Click View or modify your promotion. Click View or modify your promotion. This will take you to the View Promotions page. Press Manage claim codes. You will now be viewing the Manage Claim Codes page.

22 Choose a name and select a quantity of coupons. Don t worry you can always add more later. Press Create and after about 10 seconds or so refresh the page. You will see a link that says Download in the bottom right hand side of the screen. Download the zip file and extract the txt file. In the file you will see a large list of single use codes. Make sure you keep the codes in a safe place because we will need them later.

23 Step 3. Creating a landing page The next step is to use your chosen landing page building software to create a high-converting landing page for your offer. How to do this will depend on what software you decide to use. If you are using AMZPromoter this step becomes very simple. After you have signed up to AMZPromoter, follow these steps and your campaign will be ready to go in a matter of minutes. 1. Login and select 2. Go through each step in the wizard filling in the appropriate details including Campaign Name, ASIN and imagery. 3. Upload the coupons in the.txt document you created in a previous step. 4. (OPTIONAL) Add your Retargeting Pixel, Facebook Tracking Pixel and Google Analytics Tracking code. Select Update & Finish. 5. Press to see a preview of your page. Then press to make your page go live. 6. You will be provided with a URL that you can now use to promote your product.

24 ! Step 4. Choosing a traffic source After you have set up your landing page the aim now is to find high quality traffic that you can direct to your landing page. Let s first define some terms. Here is a quick explanation of the difference between free and paid traffic. Free traffic is mostly generated through social media or search engine optimization. That is, generating organic traffic through optimizing your blog, website for search engines or building an audience on social media channels. This traffic method is only useful for our Amazon strategy if you already have a large audience to market to.

25 For that reason, in this article we will focus mainly on paid traffic. Paid traffic is any traffic that you have to pay to obtain. Duh! Some examples of paid traffic are: Social Media Ads (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) Pay per click (Google, Bing) Media Buys (Banner ads, PPV) Native Ads (Taboola, Outbrain) Sponsored content (promoting a product on a blog) The benefits of paid traffic is it provides results quickly and is highly scalable. The down side is you have to spend money up front to test and tweak your campaigns before you can determine profitability. As an advertiser there are many ways you can reach your prospects. For simplicities sake we will discuss only search and display advertising.

26 Search advertising refers to a person typing in a search term (a query) on a platform (usually a search engine). An ad relevant to their search that is paid for by an advertiser will then be displayed. Google is the most obvious example but there are other traffic sources out there that offer search based advertising. Search based traffic is great because you can you show your customer an ad related to exactly what they are looking for. For example, if you are selling cat food on Amazon you could target the word buy cat food on Google and then whenever a customer searches for that term your ad will be displayed (as long as you are bidding enough). The main disadvantage of query based traffic is it can be quite expensive and you are limited by the amount of keywords that are available.

27 Display advertisements are featured in various ad sizes on a website and can be targeted to users by: demographic, contextual, geo-targeting and behavioral targeting. In the early days of the internet, advertisers would only have one data point to target users; the current website the user was on. For example, if the customer was on a forum dedicated to pets, you could purchase banner space to advertise your pet food. In 2016 however, the internet has become substantially more advanced and advertisers have access to a large number of data points. Targeting can be broken down into a few basic categories that include:

28 Demographic (targeting gender, age, education, occupation etc.) Contextual (targeting the ad to match the web content) Geo-targeting (targeting to where your prospect lives) Behavioral (using cookies to identify how a user behaves) Display advertising is great for marketers as it provides a much larger pool of potential prospects and the large ad platforms allow you to create custom, highly targeted audiences. Using the pet food example. Instead of targeting keywords or buying website banner ads you could use Facebook s ad platform to target single women, aged living in USA who like cats. You could show them an advertisement in their news feed that offers a discount on cat food. The disadvantages of display advertising are that it is a disruptive form as advertising, which can sometimes annoy potential customers. Also due to the numerous targeting options available a lot of time can be spent tweaking and optimizing your ads. We recommend you start advertising in this order. Firstly leverage free traffic as much as possible, if you have a social media following, list or have networked with

29 \other people in your space who can promote your product then these channels should be your first priority. After free traffic, for most products you should next focus on display advertising on either Facebook, Instagram (or Pinterest if you market is mainly female). The benefits of these platforms are that they all have huge amounts of traffic and they all provide incredibly detailed targeting options. Although Facebook s clicks are becoming more expensive, it is still very possible to make a campaign profitable due to the huge amount of targeting variable available. Instagram and Pinterest on the other hand have relatively new platforms and therefore clicks can be had for very little. There will never be a better time in history to advertise on these platforms. After mastering these traffic sources you can move onto other sources such as Google (Google Search, Google Display, Youtube, Google Shopping and more), Pinterest, Twitter and native ad platforms like Taboola and Outbrain if desire. Learning how to use each of these platforms is outside the scope of this article. We recommend signing up for Facebook s official education platform HERE. (There are also videos on how to advertise on Instagram).

30 A great primer to Pinterest marketing can be found HERE.

31 Step 5. Building your ad creative After you have selected your traffic source it is now time to build your ad. How your ad creative looks will depend on what platform you are advertising and what format you decide to use.

32 However, there are a few tips that we have learned that will greatly improve your click through rate and engagement: The 80/20 Rule This refers to the ratio between image and text. Make sure that your ad only contains 20% text and the remaining 80% is imagery. Killer Sales Copy For display ad creatives, you are working with a limited space and therefore have to capture the attention of the

33 viewer within a couple of seconds. Aim to keep your text short, convincing and to the point. Make it a no-brainer for the customer by offering them a great deal. Remember though if you are too salesy on major ad platform like Facebook your ad might not get approved. Strong Call to Action (CTA) The CTA can make or break your promotion. There are two different elements in your CTA: design and copy. For the design of the CTA, create a button that captures attention and is irresistibly clickable. Make sure the customer knows exactly where they need to click.

34 Secondly, the copy used for your CTA is also important. Keep the text succinct and make it clear what will happen when the person clicks on the ad. Include Faces Using human or cartoonized faces greatly improves the clickthrough rate in our ads. Definitely something to include if possible Split Testing You should split test your offers heading, color schemes, imagery, CTA and copy and then measure the different click through rates and conversions.

35 If you aren t very artistic you can hire someone for quite cheap to build your ad creative. We recommend searching Upwork or Fiverr for a designer. Or you could use a service like Design Pickle who offer unlimited designs at a fixed monthly price.

36 ! Step 6. Running the promotion If you are using AMZPromoter, you have already uploaded your coupons and built your landing page. Now all you have to do is to link your ad to your unique URL. PRO-TIP. If you would like to shorten this URL you can use a service such as Tinyurl or Bitly for free. Once your ad is live, keep an eye on how much you are spending and tweak as necessary. Once you get a bit of data you might want to try modifying your targeting. For example, if a certain demographic, say Females 25-34, is much cheaper then you might only focus on this.

37 Similarly if you find your conversion rate from mobile is bad then you might want to focus solely on desktop traffic. It is worth experimenting with different targeting options. This will help you learn a lot about your target market and give you valuable insights into your customers. Once you have mastered a single traffic source we recommend moving onto the next source and so on, and keep running as many promotions as time and capital allows.

38 ! Step 7. Analyze results Ok, so you have run your promotion, got a bunch of sales and collected a ton of customer addresses. What now? Analysis time! You can learn a lot from the data of promotion. Data is king, so record and have accessible as much information at possible. For each product we have an excel spreadsheet and each time we run a new promotion we create a new tab to record the relevant information.

39 Our spreadsheet looks something like this: (Product Name) SKU Campaign # Dates Traffic Source Coupons Claimed Units Sold Sales ($) Cost of Goods Sold Gross Profit s Collected Facebook Shares Twitter Shares Google+ Shares Pinterest Shares Cost Per Acquisition Cost Per Click Bounce Rate

40 Conversion Rate Unique Visitors Click Through Rate

41 Final Thoughts That s it! We hope you took something away from this guide that you can use to grow your Amazon business. Selling on Amazon is becoming more difficult, the people who are going to succeed on the platform are those who think long term and use creative strategies to drive more sales, increase reviews and build customer lists. Please steal this strategy and use it to do exactly that! Have any specific questions? Please send us an at support@amzpromoter.com and we will do our best to help you out.