Amazon continues to grow everyday as the dominant eCommerce platform – and taking advantage of the traffic that Amazon generates is vital. But beyond SEO and onsite advertising, utilizing off platform marketing techniques can help your presence on Amazon grow even further. The challenge of off-platform advertising to date has been how to measure the effectiveness or return on your advertising. However, the Amazon Storefront has made it possible to drive outside traffic and track which marketing channel performs best.
While Amazon has become the number one starting point for online shoppers, there is a limit of shoppers who will actually find your product through Amazon. Your visibility will all depend on how your listings are indexed for keywords and how relevant your product is for the shopper’s search term. And this means that it is nearly impossible to take advantage of all the traffic searching for a product in your niche. Driving outside traffic to your Amazon Storefront guarantees everyone clicking on your advertising is seeing your products – not other sellers.
Why Should You Drive Additional Traffic to Amazon?
You do not have access to your customer demographics or emails via Amazon. So the benefits of finding Amazon customers outside Amazon are endless.
Here’s an example of what we at AMZ Advisers did for one of our clients. We created a storefront to focus on one of their products that we wanted to get ranked for a main keyword in its category. We developed a promotional video and offered a promotional discount to customers who wanted to try their product. Our goal was to get their product from page 6 to page 1 for a specific search term. We were able to generate enough targeted traffic to increase the product’s sales velocity. The result was the product jumped from page 6 to the bottom of page 1 for the main keyword and greatly improved the visibility on related search terms as well. The total change equated to almost 2,000 more-page views a month and greater than $15,000 in additional revenue.
Performance tracking is no longer a problem either. The insights section of the Amazon Storefront allows you to create custom source tags which can be great for a number of reasons. To measure the best return between marketing channels you can create a tag for email, SEM or Social Media for example. You could also create separate tags to allow you to split test advertising campaigns on platforms like AdWords or Facebook.
What Traffic Sources Can You Use to Drive Outside Shoppers to Amazon?
Your two default options for storefront traffic from Amazon is organic visits and running headline search ads. It is possible for customers to find your storefront organically within Amazon, but at this point it is still too difficult to rely on getting steady traffic and sales. Headline search ads provide a banner ad to your storefront at the top of search engine results pages. This can drive more steady traffic to your storefront but can also be costly depending where the keyword bids are. Alternatively, outside sources can provide steady traffic at no or very low cost.
Social media advertising is an extremely cost-effective way to generate traffic to your Amazon storefront. This type of advertising could be anything from paid campaigns to influencer marketing. We typically focus on Facebook and Instagram advertising for our clients. These platforms allow you to reach a large number of customers and provide excellent targeting capabilities to optimize campaigns.
Our strategy usually involves creating promotional videos or using carousel images. Video marketing has been very successful, as I mentioned earlier, and has led to customer link clicks as low as $.05. Continued refinement can get that cost even lower. Facebook may not be the best place to find to find people looking to buy. But with costs that low, developing a great storefront can help you convert browsers into customers.
The focus of our work with our clients is mainly on the Amazon platform – and therefore building email lists has not been a primary focus for us. However, email marketing can provide targeted traffic at no cost to you. Reaching out to existing customers and offering some type of promotion to entice an Amazon purchase can be a great way to generate sales from your storefront.
Some businesses may object to sending their traffic to other places like Amazon because it is essentially giving away some of their profit. Introducing an Amazon traffic email into a drip marketing sequence can lead to increased sales velocity. While there may be some objection to doing this due to the lost profits, the increased search engine result visibility that a high sales velocity could produce would more than offset any loss. Combining email with traffic from other sources could help build a solid off-platform strategy to help increase sales velocity over time.
Another way to drive outside traffic to your storefront could be search engine marketing. Amazon is the place online shoppers go to look first, but Google is still the first place that overall internet searches begin. You could gain additional traffic by targeting long tail keywords. Google Adwords is one of the dominant advertising platforms and as a result keyword bids can be quite high. Going after long tail keywords can keep your bids and spend down – while generating good traffic.
Utilizing off-platform traffic to drive shoppers to your Amazon storefront is more efficient than ever. The ability to track advertising performance now makes advertising off Amazon a much more viable option for sellers. Building out a sharp looking storefront can help increase your brand recognition and convert browsers into customers. The source of traffic that you choose depends on what is right for your business, but using a variety of channels can be a great way to drive outside traffic to your Amazon storefront.
