Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
Google introduces AI-powered features for retailers, aiming to boost efficiency during the shortened 2024 holiday shopping season.
FTC bans fake reviews and deceptive practices in new rule. Businesses face stricter regulations on review acquisition and disclosure.
Google Shopping can be a goldmine for many ecommerce retailers.
But, it also comes with the risk of losing money if not managed properly.
Even seasoned PPC advertisers can make easy mistakes that can drain the budget and lose campaign effectiveness.
However, making mistakes is a necessary part of any learning process. Each misstep can provide valuable insights to better optimize your Google Shopping campaigns.
In this article, we’ll review seven common mistakes ecommerce retailers make with Google Shopping and how you can turn those pitfalls into opportunities for growth.
The foundation for any successful Google Shopping campaign is undoubtedly the quality of a product feed.
Better data quality leads to better campaign outcomes.
However, many retailers overlook the importance of feed quality, which can lead to issues like:
A poor product feed can result in low ad relevance and a poor-performing campaign.
So, where does one start to ensure a solid product feed?
The first priority of your product feed should be the title attribute. Some key items to consider when optimizing product titles include:
It’s important to regularly audit your Google Shopping product feed to ensure all information is accurate, complete, and optimized for your top-performing keywords.
Google Merchant Center also includes diagnostics tools to identify any errors to fix.
Additionally, leveraging feed management tools can help automate and enhance the feed optimization process.
While Google Shopping campaigns don’t have a keyword bidding component, they certainly have a negative keyword component.
For that reason, many retailers forget the importance of having a negative keyword strategy in their Shopping campaigns.
Ignoring the use of negative keywords is an easy gateway to wasted advertising spend on irrelevant searches. This can lead to reducing the overall campaign efficiency and return on investment (ROI).
To combat this potential wasted ad spend, start by reviewing the search terms report regularly to identify and add any negative keywords.
In your Google Shopping campaign, navigate to Insights and reports > Search terms.
From there, you can review what search terms triggered your products and how they performed.
If you find any irrelevant terms triggering your ads, you can add them as a negative – or better yet, create a negative keywords list to easily add to in the future.
This helps refine your targeting by showing your ads on more relevant searches, reducing wasted ad spend on non-converting traffic.
Bid management is another critical component of a successful Google Shopping ads strategy.
However, many PPC managers will set bids once and then forget about them, instead of adjusting them based on performance data.
This hands-off approach can lead to underbidding or overbidding, and both scenarios can hurt your campaign’s ROI.
Another common mistake is using a “one size fits all” bid strategy, where you set the same bid amount or bid strategy across all products and campaigns.
To start optimizing your Google Shopping bid strategy, utilize automated bid strategies like:
These Smart Bidding strategies help optimize your bids in real time, looking at factors like device, location, time of day, audience segments, and more.
Additionally, make sure that your daily budget aligns with your Smart Bidding strategy to ensure you’re not over- or under-bidding in any particular campaign.
For example, if you have a daily budget of $50 but are using a Target CPA bid strategy with a goal of $25, you’ll likely need to increase the daily budget significantly to give the algorithm a chance to learn more by serving more ad impressions.
With Google Shopping ads, the product image is likely the first thing to catch the user’s attention.
Most ecommerce retailers use the standard images from the official manufacturer’s website.
But wait, why would that be a bad thing?
Well, to start, this means everyone will see the same image across a variety of brands, making it extremely difficult to stand out from your competitors.
For example, when was the last time you searched for “Nike shoes” and got a barrage of Shopping ads for the same shoes, just different retailers?
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024.If you’re used to using the same stock images, try taking advantage of some of the recent tools announced by Google at this year’s Google Marketing Live.
For example, advertisers can use Product Studio later this year, which instantly turns static images into eye-catching videos.
Additionally, you can use the new generative AI tools like their AI-powered image editing for product images from your Google Merchant Center feed.
Lastly, try A/B testing the standard stock photos against lifestyle images featuring the product to understand what resonates better with users.
As with any other campaign type, the structure can make or break your performance.
With Google Shopping, there are essentially three different options when creating a campaign:
Both campaign types have their pros and cons when it comes to Google Shopping. The key is to understand the differences in features, functionality, and amount of control in order to choose the right campaign type for your goals.
In a regular Performance Max campaign, you have the option to add a feed as an asset, among many other assets like headlines, descriptions, images, etc.
This essentially means your Google Shopping ads can show across many types of Google inventory, not just on the Google Shopping network.
Now, feed-only Performance Max campaigns and Standard Shopping campaigns both focus on only showing ads on the Google Shopping network.
Next, let’s talk about the structure of your campaigns.
It may be tempting to lump everything into an “All Products” ad group and call it a day.
This mistake can cost you a lot of wasted ad dollars if not monitored closely.
If you’ve taken the steps to have a well-organized and clean product feed, don’t let that work go to waste!
A well-structured product feed will make your Google Shopping campaigns run much smoother by giving you control of how and when certain products are triggered.
If you’re unsure where to start, try grouping your products by their category. This allows for greater control over the ad listings.
Additionally, if you know you have low-margin products or products you want to avoid completely from showing, make sure to exclude those when setting up your campaign.
Google Shopping is a highly competitive channel, especially when it comes to pricing and its effect on ad performance.
Retailers who ignore their competitors’ pricing strategies may find their ads less appealing to customers, which leads to lower click-through rates and conversions.
For retailers who sell items in minimum quantities, it may be about lowering your prices. It may also be about analyzing how your feed is structured by showing the “price per quantity.”
For example, when searching for ‘wedding invitations,’ the Shopping results come back with different brands with vastly different price points:
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024It’s clear that from this example, some brands show the price for a minimum of 30 (in the first example).
Other brands in the middle look to show the price per individual invitation.
When regularly analyzing your Shopping listings compared to others in the auction, it may be worth adjusting your price feed structure to stay competitive and remain attractive to active shoppers.
In this economy, it’s no secret that almost everyone is looking for a deal when shopping.
If you actively run promotions on your website, make sure to take advantage of Merchant Promotions and promotion assets in Google Ads.
Running Merchant Promotions will help make your product listing more attractive to shoppers, which could lead to higher click-thru rates and better ROI.
In this example, the Shopping ads shown when searching for ‘king bed comforter set’ showed two listings that were using Merchant Promotions.
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024To set up a promotion, navigate to Promotions on the left-hand side of your Google Merchant Center platform. Then, click Create promotion:
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024From there, you’ll enter the required information in order to save the promotion. After saving, the promotion can take up to 15 minutes to be visible to shoppers.
The required fields include:
The use of promo code is optional, where you can add it in if necessary for users to enter in order to redeem the sale.
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024Later this year, Google also announced the rollout of a new way to tailor promotions in Shopping, like member-only exclusives or special pricing.
Additionally, Google announced on the same day that advertisers will be able to feature ‘first order’ promotions for new customers, which will be available in both Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns.
Avoiding these common Google Shopping mistakes can save you significant time, money, and headaches, as well as enhance campaign performance.
By focusing on things like product feed quality, bid management, negative keywords, and more, you can be on your way to driving better results and achieving a better ROI.
Remember, every mistake is an opportunity to learn and refine your strategy.
Stay proactive and continuously optimize, and you’ll turn your Google Shopping campaigns into a well-oiled machine and power revenue driver for your ecommerce business.
More resources:
Featured Image: ulkerdesign/Shutterstock
Google has announced plans to transition all retailers to its updated Merchant Center platform by September.
This move will affect e-commerce businesses globally and comes ahead of the holiday shopping season.
The Merchant Center is a tool for online retailers to manage how their products appear across Google’s shopping services.
The new Merchant Center includes several significant updates.
An AI-powered tool for content creation. Google reports that 80% of current users view it as improving efficiency.
This feature allows retailers to generate tailored product assets, animate still images, and modify existing product images to match brand aesthetics.
It also simplifies tasks like background removal and image resolution enhancement.
A new tab consolidating various business insights, including pricing data and competitive analysis tools.
Retailers can access pricing recommendations, competitive visibility reports, and retail-specific search trends, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and capitalize on popular product categories.
Google claims the new interface is more intuitive and cites increased setup success rates for new merchants.
The platform now offers simplified website verification processes and can pre-populate product information during setup.
According to Google, early adopters have shown increased engagement with the platform.
The company reports a 25% increase in omnichannel merchants adding product offers in the new system. However, these figures have yet to be independently verified.
Jeff Harrell, Google’s Senior Director of Merchant Shopping, states in an announcement:
“We’ve seen a significant increase in retention and engagement among existing online merchants who have moved to the new Merchant Center.”
While Google emphasizes the upgrade’s benefits, some retailers, particularly those comfortable with the current version, may face challenges adapting to the new system.
The upgrade’s mandatory nature could raise concerns among users who prefer the existing interface or have integrated workflows based on the current system.
To address these concerns, Google has stated that it will provide resources and support to help with the transition. This includes tutorial videos, detailed documentation, and access to customer support teams for troubleshooting.
This update comes as e-commerce platforms evolve, with major players like Amazon and Shopify enhancing their seller tools. Google’s move is part of broader efforts to maintain competitiveness in the e-commerce services sector.
The upgrade could impact consumers by improving product listings and providing more accurate information across Google’s shopping services.
For the e-commerce industry as a whole, it signals a continued push towards AI-driven tools and data-centric decision-making.
Google states that retailers will be automatically upgraded by September if they still need to transition.
The company advises users to familiarize themselves with the new features before the busy holiday shopping period.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
In an SEO Office Hours podcast, Google’s John Mueller answered the question of how to get more product rich results to show in the search results. John listed four things that are important in order to get rich results for product listings.
Product search queries can trigger rich results that presents products in a visually rich manner that Google refers to as Search Experiences.
Google product search experiences can include:
The person asking the question wanted to know how to get more “product snippets in Search Console” which confused Mueller because product snippets are displayed in the search results, not search console. So Mueller answered the question in the context of search results.
This is the question:
“How to increase the number of product snippets in Search Console?”
John Mueller explained that there were four things to get right in order to qualify for product rich results.
Mueller answered:
“It’s not really clear to me what exactly you mean… If you’re asking about product rich results, these are tied to the pages that are indexed for your site. And that’s not something which you can change by force.
It requires that the page be indexed, that the page has valid structured data on it, and that our systems have determined that it’s worth showing this structured data.”
So, according to John Mueller, these are the four things to get right to qualify for product rich results:
Getting a page indexed (and ranked) can be difficult for some search queries. People who come to me with this kind of problem tend to have content quality issues that can be traced back to using outdated SEO strategies like copying what’s already ranking in the SERPs but making it “better” which often results in content that’s not meaningfully different than what Google is already ranking.
Content quality on the page level and on the site level are important. Focusing on content that has that little extra, like better images, helpful graphs, or content that’s more concise, all of that is so much better than focusing on keywords and entities.
This is another area that explains why some sites lose their rich results or fail to get them altogether. Google changes their structured data recommendations and usually the structured data plugins will update to conform to the new guidelines. But I’ve seen examples where that doesn’t happen. So when there’s a problem with rich results, go to Google’s Rich Results Test tool first.
It’s also important to be aware that getting the structured data correct is not a guarantee that Google will show rich results for that page, it’s just makes the page qualified to show in the rich results.
This is the part that Google doesn’t talk about. But if you’re read about reviews systems, quality guidelines, Google’s SEO starter guide and maybe even the Search Quality Raters Guidelines then that should be more than enough information to inform any question about content quality.
Google doesn’t say why they may decline to show an image thumbnail as a rich result or why they’ll not show a product in the rich results. My opinion is that debugging the issue is more productive if the problem is reconceptualized as a content quality issue. Images are content, if it’s on the page, even if it’s not text, it’s content. Evaluate all of the content in terms of how the images or products or whatever might look like in the search results. Does it look good as a thumbnail? Is the content distinctive or helpful or useful, etc.?
John Mueller lastly said that the merchant feed is another way to get products from a website to show as a rich result in Google.
Mueller answered:
“There’s also the possibility to submit a feed to your merchant center account, to show products there. This is somewhat separate, and has different requirements which I’ll link to. Often a CMS or platform will take care of these things for you, which makes it a bit easier.”
Mueller linked to this page:
Onboarding Guide – Create a feed
There’s also another page about Rich Snippets, which is more about text snippets:
Product snippet (Product, Review, Offer) structured data
While John Mueller listed four ways to get product rich results, Google Search Experiences, it’s not always as easy as 1, 2, 3, and 4. There are always nuances to be aware of.
Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 7:00 minute mark:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/ViDI Studio
Inventory has always played a significant role in the way you sell on Amazon.
Running out of inventory can impact your organic ranking and can impact your advertising strategy.
Besides the potential loss of sales, poor inventory control also impacts the amount of inventory Amazon will allow you to send into the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program.
Keep reading to learn more about:
Amazon controls your storage capacity limits based on storage utilization and your sales history:
This limits the amount of inventory you can restock to Amazon’s FBA warehouses in one shipment and the overall maximum number of units you can store at Amazon.
Accounts that have been active for less than 39 weeks are not subject to these restrictions.
It is important to note that this is only true for those accounts on the Professional Seller Plan. Those with individual Seller Plans are limited to 15 cubic feet per month.
This limits the maximum cubic feet of storage space you have at Amazon. These limits are reviewed and adjusted monthly.
Any changes you can expect for your storage capacity for the following month will be announced on the third Monday of the month.
Included in your storage usage are the inventory currently stored at Amazon, inventory en route to Amazon, and any shipments that have been prepared but not yet sent to Amazon.
Screenshot from Amazon Seller Central, February 2024The Storage Volume is highly impacted by your IPI (Inventory Performance Index).
We will further discuss how your IPI is calculated later in this article.
Screenshot from Amazon Seller Central, February 2024Sellers who fall below the minimum criteria can have their storage limited. Operating with such limited storage can significantly undermine your sales forecasts.
We will outline the steps you can take to ensure you have sufficient storage for your high-demand season, maximizing your sales on Seller Central.
We’ll also review what you can do if you fall below Amazon’s set criteria.
You can find your limit by going to Seller Central, selecting Inventory, navigating to the Inventory Dashboard, and then selecting Inventory Performance under the dropdown for Inventory.
Screenshot from Amazon, February 2024Your IPI score will be near the top of the page.
To reach your storage capacity, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the small gray box labeled Capacity Monitor.
Amazon says that it considers the following criteria for your storage levels:
If you have a low IPI score, know it will take time to improve your score.
IPI is a rolling average. It can take anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks to increase your score on Amazon, so planning ahead of time is essential.
This means if your IPI is below the 400 Amazon requires, you need to start taking aggressive action today.
This article will outline how to avoid having detrimental storage limits, how it happens, and what to do when you’re already below the threshold.
For those interested in Restock Limits, we’ll explore this topic in more detail later in the guide.
The IPI will only affect those using Seller Central and FBA warehouses.
It does not affect those using Vendor Central, Kindle Direct Platform, or those selling on Seller Central by Merchant Fulfilling or utilizing Seller Fulfilled Prime for their items.
The Inventory Performance Index (IPI) manages how well you control and manage your inventory at Amazon.
This metric is a 12-week rolling average. It looks at several components over three months.
Four components make up the Inventory Performance Index (IPI):
This is the most important metric as it measures where your profitability may take a hit due to storage fees and holding costs for slow-moving FBA inventory.
Excess Inventory percentages help sellers plan when to restock more or remove inventory from FBA.
An item is considered to have excess inventory when it has over 90 days of supply based on the forecasted demand.
This metric is just how it sounds. The formula that Amazon uses to calculate Sell Through rates is:
(Units Shipped In the Last 90 Days)/(Average Units on Hand Over the Last 90 days)
This provides information on products that aren’t selling due to listing issues.
This occurs when your listing doesn’t meet Amazon guidelines.
In these instances, your products become stranded and unable to move while still incurring FBA storage fees.
Amazon looks at the percentage of time your products have been in stock during the past 30 days, with additional weight given to items that have sold more units over the past 60 days.
If you maintain a high in-stock inventory, it will result in fewer lost sales.
Screenshot from author, February 2024It is important to highlight that these components are not weighted equally.
Excess Inventory and Sell-Through Rate are the parameters that have the most significant impact on IPI, while Stranded Inventory and Restock Rates can play a minor role in the overall score.
This means you will get more movement focusing solely on the first two components rather than spreading your efforts equally across all four elements.
During the height of the pandemic, Amazon changed the minimum IPI to 500. IT has since reduced the minimum IPI back to 400.
However, Amazon can increase or decrease the minimum IPI desired score at any point in time.
For this reason, we advise our clients to aim for a total IPI of 600.
Your minimum goal should be achieving at least 50 points over the current IPI requirement.
Some product mixes make maintaining a high IPI easier than others. For example, if you are a small brand with many products that move consistently, your IPI will generally tend to be higher.
If you are a seller with a large product mix that changes often, it is the most challenging to manage.
If you’re currently experiencing a capacity limit, Amazon can increase your capacity limit for a specific period of time by submitting a request subject to Amazon’s approval.
It is important to remember that if the storage limit increase request gets approved, your account is subject to paying a “reservation fee” for each cubic foot of capacity requested, and it will get charged at the end of the specified period.
Such fee is subject to a credit depending on your sales achieved during the period (performance credits are earned at $0.15 for every dollar of sales you generate using the additional capacity.)
Another alternative is to continue selling items via merchant fulfillment or using other third-party sellers to move your inventory or send small shipments of your fastest, most profitable inventory to Amazon.
Further down in this article, we will highlight what you can do when your inventory performance is low, you are facing potential inventory limits, or if you’re new to Amazon.
It seems like it would be counterintuitive for a company that is so focused on having as many products on its platform as possible to limit the amount of inventory you could sell.
However, as more sellers joined the platform and with rising FBA and Prime offers, overcrowding at the warehouses started to become a larger problem for Amazon.
Amazon sellers were attracted to FBA because of the low cost of storage rates. Sellers were using the FBA program as a cheap way to warehouse large amounts of inventory.
At first, Amazon tried to increase storage fees. Adding long-term storage fees dramatically increased the storage cost for merchandise aged over six months.
However, even with those changes, Amazon couldn’t curve the overcrowding and demand in its FBA warehouses.
As a result, it started to introduce storage limits in 2019.
From Amazon’s perspective, it wants to ensure customers have favorable shopping experiences and quickly get the products they want.
This means ensuring that the products most likely to sell are available.
Amazon looks at how you have managed inventory in the past and whether customers are purchasing your products to determine how much space is allocated to you.
The better Amazon feels you are at managing your space at Amazon’s FBA warehouses, the more storage space you will be allowed.
If your IPI is currently below the threshold or within 50 points of the lowest threshold, these are the actions we recommend.
The first step is to check the current threshold. As of the writing of this article, the current threshold for IPI is 400.
However, here’s the direct link to the policy so you can find the current threshold, as Amazon can change this at any time. You can find the current required IPI in Seller Support under the heading FBA Inventory Storage Limits (login required).
You can review your current IPI score in Seller Central by going to Inventory, Inventory Planning, and then clicking on your IPI score.
Screenshot from Amazon Seller Central, February 2024Even with aggressive tactics, changing the IPI significantly can take 2 to 12 weeks.
Excess inventory is generally one of the top two reasons your IPI score could be low, since it is the most heavily weighted metric.
The first step to addressing excess inventory is to pull back inventory you don’t expect to sell.
Focus on stock-keeping units (SKUs) that have gone out of fashion or merchandise experiencing a significant demand drop, like seasonal products.
If you don’t expect it to sell within three months, you should pull back the inventory to sell on a different channel by creating a removal order.
You can also start to use the Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) to fulfill your website orders from your Amazon stock.
Sometimes, it makes more sense to discount and/or advertise products to help them sell faster to remove them from your inventory rather than call back inventory from Amazon.
Optimizing a listing that is not moving can also help increase the sell-through rate.
A quick note on having Amazon destroy products – sometimes, the company will liquidate that product instead of destroying it.
If inventory control is an essential factor for your brand, we recommend pulling back the inventory even though it costs more.
While Amazon is great at logistics and moving items through its process, it isn’t great at returning items to sellers.
Often, items arrive damaged or mixed SKUs in multiple boxes, clogging up receiving departments.
If possible, we want to ensure that we’re proactively taking action to avoid pulling back inventory and risk inventory being damaged or unavailable to be sold for a long time.
Amazon looks at this to identify whether the items you’re selling are things customers want to purchase.
The way that we improve the sell-through rate is to send in small shipments of items that will sell out very quickly.
If you’re currently using LTL or FTL, we recommend that you move to small parcel shipments during this process so that you can send more frequent shipments without going out of stock for long periods.
As you’re restocking items, you want to prioritize those that will move quickly, sending small quantities of items that will sell out as soon as they arrive or shortly after.
This allows your overall sell-through rate to increase dramatically and significantly impact your overall IPI.
It is vital that no matter how fast you think a product will move through, as you send these products in, you’re testing small batches to make sure that things will sell at the pace you anticipate.
Inventory that’s being held in FBA warehouses and not available for sale affects your overall IPI.
Fixing stranded inventory can make a slight difference; however, if you need to move your IPI significantly, this component of the overall metric will only make a slight difference.
It would be best to address stranded inventory weekly or bi-weekly, depending on your general sell-through rate.
This is probably the most frustrating metric of the IPI because, basically, Amazon is telling you that you can’t restock items because they’re not selling fast enough.
At the same time, it’s trying to encourage you to ensure you stay in stock.
We have found that this metric is very lightly weighted, and you’re better off focusing on the two key metrics of excess inventory and sell-through rate.
There has been some debate about whether deleting previous SKUs can increase this; however, we have not seen that this significantly impacts the total IPI.
As you’re working to increase your overall IPI, it is important to remember that it can take several weeks to increase.
The IPI is an average calculated over 12 weeks.
You must give the IPI enough time to move before determining whether your actions are making a difference.
It can be tempting to check your IPI often. However, your IPI score is only recalculated once a week.
If you need to raise your IPI quickly or by a significant amount, you may need to take overly aggressive actions in pruning your inventory and pumping fast-moving items through your account to increase your score to the required amount.
You might have to also bid for a capacity increase.
You should only do this if you have the data to support being able to sell through that higher quantity of items so you do not incur extra charges.
Sometimes, this means utilizing third-party sellers to ensure that inventory can be available to customers with a Prime offer.
Some of the brands we work with have focused on selling their fastest-moving SKUs while they improve their overall IPI score and capacity limits.
Then, they utilized third-party sellers to carry their slower-moving items while they worked on increasing their averages.
We have several reliable third-party resellers we refer our clients to if it’s ever an issue.
This means that those accounts saw a faster increase in storage capacity as they were sending in inventory that was selling at a much faster rate and restocking regularly.
If you don’t want to utilize third-party sellers, the alternative is to increase your total number of merchant-fulfilled offerings.
Remember that Merchant Fulfilled offerings generally don’t compete well against FBA offers, so watch your competition to determine feasibility.
While many brands avoid third-party sellers because it may reduce control over their brand, in this instance, it can be an excellent tool to ensure that you don’t lose potential market share to other competing product lines.
Another step you can take is to allocate your FBA warehouse space to items with the highest margin and smallest dimensional size, as they are highly profitable and sell quickly.
Leaving items with lower profitability or moving slower through Merchant Fulfilled (MF).
If you’re a new seller coming to Amazon or moving from Vendor Central to Seller Central, start by sending small quantities at first.
You have a grace window of 39 weeks when opening your account.
However, you want to ensure you send in small amounts of inventory. A few cases per product can help you identify the overall sell-through rate.
There is no minimum for sending inventory into Amazon FBA. So, it is possible to test as little as one unit at a time to test products on Amazon.
Sending in small shipments does increase your overall shipping cost and can reduce profitability in the short term.
However, when you’re first investigating the platform, sending in smaller quantities can help you better understand your product’s demand and help avoid additional fees that can be required to call inventory back or pay for storage fees.
Once you have a better idea of your sell-through rate, you can start to increase the total sizes of your inventory.
It is a delicate balance to have enough inventory so that you don’t run out of stock but also that you don’t have excess inventory.
While, in general, you want to aggressively avoid stockouts, the impact of a low IPI score should take priority.
To succeed on the platform, you must take an active role in your Amazon inventory management.
In prior years, simply avoiding restocks was enough.
However, these new requirements require a greater focus on monitoring your sell-through rate and storage utilization on Amazon.
Prepare now to support your Amazon marketing and sales goals for the coming holiday season.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
Amazon’s algorithm operates differently than most other search engines, which means you need a distinct strategy when attempting to rank on the platform versus platforms like Google and Bing.
To oversimplify, Amazon’s search engine is highly capitalistic; you need sales to get your products to rank organically.
Keyword-rich content is no longer enough to rank; you must have a strategy that includes great copy and images, advertising, and proactive account monitoring to ensure your products can rank and maintain that ranking over time.
Let’s jump into some key points on how to rank your Amazon products.
Unlike Google, Amazon advertising does impact organic search within the platform.
The Amazon algorithm determines how a product has converted for a specific keyword phrase in the past to know what to put at the top of the organic rankings.
There are, of course, other ranking factors – however, this is the most impactful.
This creates a chicken and an egg problem. To get sales on Amazon through organic ranking, you first have to cause sales for that keyword phrase.
Then, to stay at the top of the organic rankings, you need to continue to outsell your competitor for that keyword.
Any dip due to changes in advertising, pricing suspension, account suspension, or conversion rate issues will cause you to lose your placement at the top of organic search.
This means you need more than just a listing that will convert and is indexed for relevant keywords.
Ranking and launch strategies on Amazon will require that you jumpstart your listings with advertising and potentially a deal or discount to get the organic ranking needed to sell.
It also means proactively avoiding anything that will cause a temporary pause in sales for your products.
The most fundamental piece for ranking is ensuring your product is indexed for the most relevant keywords. When looking at keywords, we want to prioritize keywords and phrases that will bring in the most qualified buyers.
When crafting your listing, the most important keywords should be in the title.
Your title will be the primary copy that customers will see on the search engine result page (SERP) and will also be the primary copy for your ads on several of Amazon’s most popular ad types.
For established brands, your most important keywords will be your brand and product name. Then, you should include relevant keyword phrases for your product.
When writing for Amazon, you are balancing two goals: writing persuasive copy that reads easily and converts to sales, and that maximizes keywords you’re indexing for.
This means before you write your title and bullets, ensure you’ve done complete keyword research and include the most relevant root keywords in your bullet points.
First, look at root keywords relevant to your products and incorporate them into your listing.
Make sure that you are utilizing the structured data for your listings are filled out completely.
Amazon has been surfacing a lot of different kinds of structured data like product weights, compatibility, and materials.
Making sure this is filled out completely and correctly will help with indexing and conversion rate optimization.
Screenshot from Amazon, December 2023Amazon has been playing with displaying different structured data in the SERPs and Product Detail pages.
Take the time to fill out all of the available data in the structured data to index your product correctly.
Once your product is live, it’s vital you check that the structured data surfacing on the primary detail page is correct, simple for the customer to identify, and matches your product’s features (dimensions, material, unit count, etc.).
Then compare this to your competitors to make sure it is easy for the right customers to identify whether your product is a good fit for them.
Each product detail page on Amazon is ranked individually. Unlike Google, you’re not able to build authority for a specific brand, and it’s okay to have duplicate content across multiple of your listings.
While it might seem like some brands have built-in authority, it’s only because several people are already searching for them.
As soon as their listings go live, they immediately get sales and conversions, which helps Amazon understand their product better and, in turn, helps their ad relevancy and organic ranking.
Brands with an existing audience and search volume on Amazon will generally have faster, more successful launches.
Unlike direct-to-consumer sales, on Amazon, your competitors will be right next to you on the SERP and on your product detail page, advertising right below your product information.
This means being very clear on your unique selling proposition if you are more expensive than your competitors.
If your product is expensive, it’s crucial to communicate this in your listing copy and primary images, highlighting your product’s unique selling point in a way that customers understand.
It’s also vital that your images mimic the information in your bullets. On mobile, the bullets are further down on the page.
Amazon has also hidden the bullets in some categories under an “About the Product” section that needs to be clicked to be expanded.
Screenshot from Amazon, December 2023On Amazon, you need to make sure you add infographic images that display the most important information about your product.
Any information critical to the purchase should be included in the images and/or A+ content.
Ensure your images are the correct size and aspect ratio, as Amazon’s interface may compress images, making your product look smaller or harder to identify.
Once your listings are online, be sure to verify how the thumbnails are loading and how they look next to your competition. This is especially important as the primary image is also used for advertising for most of Amazon’s ad types.
For secondary images, make sure that you include infographics so that the primary details for your products are easily found.
Amazon allows you to add videos to the product detail pages, which can help with conversation, so you want to include these as much as possible.
Reviews used to be the way to manipulate Amazon’s search algorithm. Amazon has worked to close that loophole, and they take review manipulation very seriously.
However, reviews still play a role in marketing on Amazon. Reviews help with proof of concept and will help with click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rates.
Programs like “Amazon Vine” or the “Request Review Button” give you information to maximize the total number of reviews for your product.
The text that’s included in reviews can also be indexed for search on Amazon.
This means that if you have a large number of reviews, you might be able to rewrite your list copy to focus more on conversion and not worry as much about maximizing the total number of root keywords you want to be indexed for.
When launching your product on Amazon, you’re given a short period of time to audition for search terms for that specific product. To maximize this short window, make use of the following:
Today, it is difficult to rank for competitive search terms on Amazon without some paid advertising.
One of the biggest factors for ranking on Amazon is how that product has converted for a specific keyword phrase in the past.
This means that when you are developing an ad strategy you need to not only be looking at what will cause incremental sales, but how your ads will impact your organic ranking.
Two of the biggest mistakes sellers make when running ads on Amazon are advertising too many stock-keeping units (SKUs) or reaching for too many broad targets.
This spreads their budget too thin and doesn’t allow for the advertising to make a significant impact on sales rank.
Focus budgets on a smaller number of targets or SKUs to make sure that you get enough conversions per keyword term. The goal is to rank in the top three positions for the most important keywords and expand that out over time.
It is also sometimes necessary to exclude a relevant but overly broad term in your advertising strategy.
Let’s assume you have a locking beach bag.
“Bag” is a relevant keyword; however, it’s broad. Not only will it be expensive to run ads on that keyword, but even if you did rank organically for the word “bag,” it’s likely you won’t convert well for that word because it’s not specific enough to bring in the buyers you want.
“Locking beach bag” or “beach bag with lock” will have less search volume but will bring in a customer more likely to convert.
In quick terms, here’s a general winning strategy for advertising:
Once you’ve established the ranking of your product for the most important keywords, you can look to more ROI-focused campaigns that utilize different search types.
Use video ads with Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display whenever possible, as these video ads tend to convert well and take up a lot of space in the SERP.
Once you have your listing completed and your ads running, it’s time to start looking at how you can increase the visibility of our products.
This includes A/B testing your primary image, title, and bullets to maximize click-through rate and conversions.
Utilize the data that you’ve gotten from your advertising and integrate that back into listing changes to test if a change in title can help increase click-through rate and conversions.
Sales and deals can play a large role in ranking products.
Especially during tentpole events like Black Friday or Prime Days, deals or discounts can increase your conversion rate and the total number of conversions for specific keywords, which is key for improving your organic ranking.
There are many different coupons, deals, and sales types on Amazon, and there is no right or wrong approach.
Right now, we’re seeing the best results with coupons at launch and Prime exclusive deals for tentpole days, and for products with existing sales history.
Sale pricing can also be an effective tool, but make sure that you’re monitoring the average selling price over the last 30 days; this determines if that sale displays with a slash through price.
Monitoring how discounts and deals display, what badging is included, and the impact on the average selling price of your item over the last 30 days is important, as Amazon does change these quite often.
Account health can derail your ranking progress overnight.
If you run out of stock and your competitors are getting sales when you’re not, you will fall down the organic rankings for your most important keywords, and your competitors will take your place.
The same is true with managing inventory; you must proactively prepare for stock-outs. If a product is at risk of stocking out, cut deals and lower ad spend to extend coverage and avoid a stock out.
Here are some other account health and maintenance issues to watch out for:
Screenshot from Amazon Seller Central, December 2023You should be checking Voice of the Customer one to three times a week on Amazon Seller Central. Under Performance, Voice of the Customer.
If Amazon determines that your price is higher than the 30-day trailing price or sees a lower price off Amazon, it might suppress the featured offer (Buy Box).
This suppression causes conversion rates to fall significantly.
Not only does this impact your ranking, but more importantly, it can affect your ability to run ads since sponsored product ads will not run if you do not own the Buy Box.
The overall ranking on Amazon isn’t an on/off switch; it takes time, and you must work on trying to index for keywords over a more significant period.
It’s normal that for the first 30 to 90 days, ads won’t be profitable as you focus on optimization.
The larger your ad budget, the more quickly you can work to try to rank for those keyword phrases. With larger budgets, it is important to look at ad performance as a group or SKU basis to maintain profitability.
If you’re working with a smaller budget, it’s essential to set expectations, focus on growth over the long term, and make sure you give enough time for your product to start to make progress!
More resources:
Featured Image: claudenakagawa/Shutterstock
Microsoft has unveiled new AI and data tools to bring retailers into the modern digital age.
The new offerings expand Microsoft’s existing retail industry cloud platform. They use Copilot, Microsoft’s latest AI helper that uses generative models like the advanced GPT-4 system to enhance productivity.
Microsoft has added Copilot templates to its Cloud for Retail platform, integrating OpenAI’s generative AI capabilities into Azure.
These new tools are intended to help retailers provide more customized and personal shopping experiences for their customers, similar to having a dedicated personal shopper.
The goal is to meet the expectations of today’s consumers, who increasingly want personalized interactions when shopping online or in stores.
By providing tailored product recommendations and offers, retailers can encourage shoppers to add more items to their carts.
The Copilot templates leverage generative AI to dynamically generate unique content for each customer, helping retailers build stronger relationships and boost sales through more personalized shopping journeys.
Microsoft is previewing new tools to help retail workers be more productive.
The tools are designed to help sales associates and other store staff quickly access information while helping customers. One example is an AI assistant that lets workers ask questions in natural conversational language on their mobile devices and get relevant data.
Microsoft says it’s developing these AI retail tools because there’s demand from retail employees for more digital technologies that can streamline their daily workflows.
Microsoft is tackling the problem of scattered and inconsistent retail data by providing new tools within its Microsoft Fabric platform.
This includes a standard data structure for the retail industry, a way to connect e-commerce systems, and pre-made templates for analytics like figuring out what items customers often buy together.
The idea is to help retailers and brands unite their data sources and gain insights from AI more easily.
Microsoft is integrating its Copilot AI into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, its marketing analytics platform, to assist with campaign creation. The AI can help generate project ideas and recommend content for campaigns.
Microsoft launched a new Creative Studio feature in its Retail Media advertising platform that utilizes AI. This tool helps retail advertisers quickly create and customize banner ads to improve campaign results and target ads to specific audiences.
With Microsoft’s new technologies, stores can improve customer shopping experiences, make retail jobs easier for workers, and harness data to help executives make important choices.
A study done for Microsoft shows that retail companies are seeing major benefits from using AI, highlighting how vital these technologies are in retail.
Featured Image: Photo For Everything/Shutterstock
Microsoft is announcing the launch of its Retail Media Creative Studio, a platform designed to support the creation of digital advertising content for retailers.
The new platform leverages generative AI to allow easy and customized banner ad creation in seconds. The launch comes as retail media is projected to become a $100 billion industry by 2026.
Integrated with Microsoft’s existing retail media platform PromoteIQ, the Retail Media Creative Studio is scheduled for a preview release in early 2024.
Developed in response to feedback from retail partners, the Retail Media Creative Studio aims to address the unique challenges of retail advertising.
Among its notable features is that the studio provides tools that convert product URLs into fully-designed banner ads and offers AI-driven content generation.
The creative studio can generate ads that adhere to a retailer’s branding guidelines with minimal input through its user-friendly interface.
The Retail Media Creative Studio offers several functionalities to simplify the ad creation process, including:
The platform also aims to expedite the approval process, enabling quicker campaign rollouts and better team collaboration.
Microsoft’s AI capabilities provide real-time optimization of banner ads by analyzing performance data and adjusting to maximize efficiency.
This process is designed to reduce the need for manual testing and potentially increase campaign effectiveness.
In addition, Micraaosoft is piloting an integration of in-store media through a partnership with Vibenomics, a company specializing in in-store audio and visual experiences. This initiative seeks to offer a comprehensive view of consumer behavior across both digital and physical retail environments.
Looking forward, Microsoft continues to adapt its retail media offerings to meet the changing market demands.
For more information on Microsoft’s retail media initiatives or to inquire about partnerships, interested parties can refer to the Microsoft Advertising PromoteIQ platform or explore Microsoft Advertising’s retail solutions offerings.
Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
Wondering how to boost your ecommerce SEO to help you rank higher on SERPs?
Do you feel like you’re getting a new competitor every day?
In the era when everyone has an ecommerce storefront, how do you make sure your store has as many advantages as possible?
Gaining traffic and visibility is listed as one of the top issues that online sellers face, especially if you’re just starting your business and the next step is to choose your URL.
So, what are some of the major issues you might face as a new ecommerce company? How can you solve them?
Let’s dive in.
The game has changed and .com domains aren’t the only way to get customers to take your business seriously.
If the primary goal of your website is to sell, nothing says that better than a .Store domain extension.
It’s the perfect call to action that instantly connects with potential customers and attracts them to your site.
Some of the key advantages of using a .Store domain include:
An ecommerce website on a .Store domain gets 87% more visitors than its .com counterparts.
Your domain name is basically like the virtual storefront of your business, and choosing the right one can have a significant impact on your success.
Why It Works
When users see a .Store domain, it instantly communicates that they are on an ecommerce platform where they can make purchases.
This clear and direct messaging not only attracts more visitors but also translates into increased sales, which ultimately results in more revenue for your business.
An ecommerce site sporting a .Store top-level domain (TLD) gets an impressive double the amount of search visibility.
How?
Well, search engines love contextually relevant keywords, and having the word “store” in your domain name can be a powerful keyword tactic for your site’s rankings.
This added relevance doubles your visibility on search engines, ensuring that potential customers looking to make an online purchase can find your store more easily.
Marketing costs can be a major concern, especially for new and growing businesses – and this is yet another way the .Store domain can transform your SEO strategy.
When users come across ads for a product category, they are 12% more likely to make a purchase if the ad directs them to a “store” domain.
Thus, the cost to acquire your user is much lower.
The true impact of .Store TLDs on both paid and organic traffic were examined in a groundbreaking study conducted by Contrast Digital.
This extensive report uncovers a wealth of insights that can reshape your understanding of domain performance.
According to the data, there’s a potential long-term benefit of using .Store domains from a SEO standpoint.
We’ll dive into some key facts from the study below, but you can download the full report to dig into the detailed results.
This extensive 12-month experiment examined the performance of two distinct websites.
The key difference between the two websites was the domain extension.
One website was on .com while the other was on a .Store; with the second-level domain being identical (think example.com vs example.store).
Both sites comprised 82 pages categorized into products, categories, blog posts, and information pages, maintaining identical layouts and product descriptions in order to control variables and conduct a fair assessment.
Googlebot’s crawl time, along with impressions, clicks, and click-through rate measured through Google Search Console, provided a detailed comparative analysis.
Significance testing using MATLAB code offered insights into potential differences between the sites’ metrics, forming a comprehensive overview of their organic performance.
Key Performance Trends:
Overall, the significance tests consistently show that .Store TLDs outperformed equivalent .com TLDs in clicks, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR) over the 12-month experiment.
Want to learn more? Check out the full report for additional insights.
This report delves into the Google paid ads segment of the experiment, evaluating the performance of example.com and example.store over 5 months.
After allowing both websites to naturally perform for three months, paid media was introduced to assess their response to targeted paid traffic, with a primary focus on understanding consumer trust around TLDs.
To ensure fairness in the paid ads environment, settings were adjusted to rotate ads indefinitely, preventing bias toward any particular ad.
Additionally, landing page destinations, ad content, keyword targeting, and max bids were standardized across both accounts, eliminating variables and placing emphasis on individual performance.
Key Performance Trends:
Overall, the .Store domain consistently outperformed .com and emerged as the superior performer in the paid experiment.
We know how difficult it can be to capture the attention of your ideal audience, particularly as a new online business without an established track record.
Another key issue you might be facing is profitability.
As essential as marketing may be for your brand, it can certainly be costly to execute effectively.
So what are some ways you can get the most bang for your buck and maximize your return on investment (ROI)?
How can you add value while keeping your customer acquisition costs low?
Though there are various marketing tricks and tactics you can try, sometimes, the answer can be just as simple as picking the right domain name.
Oftentimes, the domain you choose for your business can tell consumers a lot about what you offer and what they can expect.
So if you’re looking to enhance your online retail presence and lower your cost per acquisition (CPA), it might be time to switch things up.
With a .Store domain extension, you can gain a significant performance advantage and get a leg up on your competitors.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Will customers trust an address that doesn’t end in .com?
How does Google classify a website with a .Store domain and how will it impact your search rankings?
Domain names are not actually a part of your overall search engine rankings – however, that doesn’t mean you can just forget about them.
Your choice of domain name can be an important aspect of your UX and public image, and should usually be the most recognizable aspect of your business.
Till now, the domain extension decision for anyone building an ecommerce site was largely determined by conditioning, perception, and an overall lack of data.
The idea that .com domains are the only viable choice for websites is incredibly common.
However, there’s now an objective, data-backed study available which, for the first time, shows that .Store as a top-level domain (TLD) can actually benefit ecommerce sellers in a major way.