Amazon Growth workshop was presented at Linnacademy in Manchester. The workshop focused on three areas crucial for growing your business on Amazon - Organic Search Ranking, Winning the buy box and Paid Ads

1. Growth Workshop
Manchester | 19th October, 2016

2. Outline for Today
• Understanding How Amazon SERP Works
• Sponsored Ads: Automatic vs Manual
• Winning the Buy Box

3. About Online Seller UK
Founded in 2010 with Online Retail Experience
Solutions: Events | Training | Consultancy | eCommerce Solutions
Clients throughout the UK

4. Marketplace Focussed Training Provider
& solution provider

5. 5
About Me
• Started working in eCommerce from 2009
(Used to work in Leprosy Hospital before )
• With 8 years of Online Retail Experience establishing eBay, Amazon
and eCommerce function
• Worked with Small and Large Size businesses throughout the UK &
Ireland
• Currently leading two projects
• Online Seller UK – Provides Meetups, digital marketing training & consultancy
• DaytodayeBay – solution Provides complete for Marketplaces (eBay, Amazon & beyond)

6. Head Line Display
Sponsored Ads
Organic Results
Sponsored Ads
Sponsored Ads

7. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Product Search Terms
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Product Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Parent-Child relationship

8. Price
• Low price have a direct impact on where products show up in the
SERP
• We cannot always “race to the bottom”
• Price Comparison before listing is recommended
• Price reduction can help
• Sale price is taken into consideration
* FBA items of £20.00 or over are
free shipping for all (including non-prime members) * Sale price / Strike through
price impacts sales positively

9. * Price is one of many factors that
helps to get the top spot popularly
called “buy box”
What about
competitive pricing?
Here’s how you can change product price.

10. This dashboard shows your %
of Buy Box Win

11. * If you are selling your own
Repricing wont be necessary
* Match price to be the lowest
* Shipping price is not considered

12. Automated Repricing is available now

13. • Automate Pricing allows you to automatically adjust prices on SKUs
in your catalogue in response to events such as the Buy Box winning
price, without having to revisit the SKU every time you want to
change your price.
• You create a pricing rule, set the rule parameters
• select the SKUs to which the rule applies;
• Automated pricing is applied only to the SKUs that you designate, not to
your entire catalogue.
• You can start and stop automated pricing rules at any time, as well as
changing your rules or the SKUs to which your rules apply.
• You control the prices by defining rule parameters, setting minimum and
maximum price boundaries and selecting which SKUs to automate pricing
on.

14. Creating Repricer Rules
•Choose Buy box price or lowest price
•Lowest price does not mean you win the buy
box, see example on next slide
STEP 1

15. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Product Search Terms
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Product Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Parent-Child relationship

16. Fulfilment Method
• Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) generally rank higher than those which
are merchant fulfilled.
• Consider best selling items on FBA inventory and are not at risk for
stocking out.
• Ensure we don’t run out of inventory

17. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Product Search Terms
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Product Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Parent-Child relationship

18. Product Reviews
• Products with positive (4-5 star) and a high number of customer reviews
relative to competing products will rank higher than those with low quality
and low volume reviews.
*** Sales history is one of the drivers for search rank.
• New Reviews, Verified Reviews and Reviews that are most helpful are given
more weight.
• Focus on your most important products and your top target search queries, use
the average number of reviews from your competitor products as a baseline.
• Two Ways to improve:
1. Use automated tools to ask reviews
2. Use 3 party tools to increase product reviews by giving free product ???

19. * Reviews from discounted products
don’t carry “Verified Purchase”

20. Amazon Product Review Template
•Alter text and test result
•Please note seller reviews does not help on product ranking
and helps to win buy box

22. Request Amazon Top Reviewer for a review
for a free product

23. Vendor Only Program for reviews

24. Vine is Invitation Only program & its not free

25. Suggestion…
• Sell stock at low value for a limited period to generate verified reviews
• Use Sponsored Ads to boost ranking
** We have trailed this strategy successful for a private /white label
stationery product

26. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Product Search Terms
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Product Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Parent-Child relationship

27. Steps: Creating Automatic Campaigns
#1 Campaign Manager
#2 Name, Budget, Date

28. #3 Adgroups- this can be based on product
category
#4 Choose product

29. Steps: Creating Manual Ads

30. #1 Name Group
#2 Choose Product

31. #3 Choose Bid
#4 When product is selected Amazon
recommends keywords
#5 Select relevant keywords

32. #6 Add your own keywords
Note: Choose Broad, Phrase, Exact

33. Keyword Types Explained
• Broad Match – This match type offers ads broad traffic exposure. A
customer search term will match if it contains all the keyword terms
or their synonyms. The customer search term can contain keywords
or synonyms in any order.
• Phrase Match – The customer search term must contain the exact
phrase or sequence of words. It is more restrictive than broad match
and will generally result in more relevant placements for your ad.
• Exact Match – The customer’s search term must exactly match the
keyword in order for the ad to show, and will also match close
variations of the exact term. Exact match is the most restrictive match
type, but can be more relevant to a customer’s search.

34. Sponsored Ads Best Practices
• PPC without product reviews can convert less. But this should not
deter you to start campaigns
• Use Google Keywords Planner or Keywordtool.io to increase product
search terms http://app.scientificseller.com/keywordtool

35. Sponsored Ads Best Practices
• Start with Automatic Ads and harvest converting search terms for
manual ads
• Start with optimal budget so we ensure maximum exposure as
possible in the beginning and then refine it afterwards
• Spend based on your profitability, find your Cost of sale to determine
how much you can spend
E.g SP – ( PRODUCT COST + ALL AMAZON FEES) = Profit
Profit / SP = Profit Margin
27 – (14+4)=9
9/27=33% * Our Acos must be less than 33% to make profit

36. Automatic Vs Manual
• Use Automatic Campaigns to find profitable keywords
• Use Manual Campaigns to target best performing product

37. Sponsored Ads Best Practices
• Run your advertising campaigns for a week without making any
adjustments.
• Amazon’s advertising reports have a several days latency, which
means that it takes 48-72 hours sometimes for conversions to be
reported.
• Remove non-converting keywords and targeting
• Increase bids for keywords that convert well
• Ad groups can be created based on category

38. PPC Optimisation
• Recommended to have words that you can monitor in manual
campaigns and then the Automatic targeting campaign to find new
customer words
• Use 4 words long-tail keywords. You can always trim down your
keyword list after a week of running Automatic campaigns. This will
improve your ACoS
• Negative words on automatic ads which are using for manual ads to
eliminate competition

39. Paid Ads: Sponsored, Product Display,
Headline Search
• For Vendors Only who sells products to Amazon
at a wholesale rate
How does Vendor work ?
• Initially send trial products for testing
• 60 days payment terms
• Expect High Volume Sales with Amazon
Marketing program like subscribe & save,
lightening deals and paid ads opportunity
• Get authority on product page

40. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Product Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Product Search Terms
- Parent-Child relationship

41. Listing Quality - Images
• Zoomable images have proven to enhance sales.
• Images must be at 1,000 pixels or larger in either height or width to
enable zoom functionality.
• Multiple high quality images give shoppers the confidence to make a
purchase decision and proceed to checkout.
• Images with arrows or text are not allowed though we have found
such images currently on Amazon

42. Product Titles
• Each word in the Product Title is searchable on its own
• Relevant title will drive traffic to your product.
• Include the brand, material, size, color, product type, and descriptive keywords in
your product title for all of your products.
• Optimal title lengths are between 80 and 100 characters, although this does vary
by category, and are being policed more aggressively by Amazon.
• If your titles are over 200 characters they will be suppressed from the website or
will not appear on the search. This was introduced in April, 2016. The product
description can accept up to 2,000 characters and each bullet point can have up
to 250 characters.

43. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Product Search Terms
- Parent-Child relationship

44. Bullet Points
• Bullet points are searchable
• You have 5 Bullet points with 250 character maximum length for
bullet points.
• Include keywords you want to rank
• Highlight crucial product features to give customers the confidence to
make a purchase decision.

45. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Product Search Terms
- Parent-Child relationship

46. Product Descriptions
• Searchable
• 2000 characters limit
• Differentiate your product from competitor products.
• Rich descriptions helps conversion
• See example on next page >

47. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Product Search Terms
- Parent-Child relationship

48. Structured Data: Brands, MPNs, Other data
• The brand of our product is indexed for search.
• Avoid common spelling errors
• Include brand as the first word in your product title.
•A products’ manufacturer part number (MPN) and product ID (UPC,
EAN, or ISBN) are indexed
•These are generally commonly searched in categories: electronics,
automotive, computers, and appliances
•See example on next slide >>

49. * Products are
delisted by Amazon
with Policy violation
notice

50. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Product Search Terms
- Parent-Child relationship

51. Search Terms * 5 Fields with 1000
characters each

52. Search Terms
•They do not appear on product detail pages and are indexed for
search
•Most commonly underutilised
•The best search terms are synonyms and common abbreviations
•Consider using converting search terms from automatic sponsored
campaigns
•Use words that cannot be filled in fields such as product name, key
product features, product description, brand name etc.

53. Some don’ts
• Don’t provide inaccurate, misleading, or irrelevant information such
as competitor product, brand or author name, wrong gender etc.
Providing misleading or irrelevant information is against Amazon
policy; your listing will be removed and your account will be
suspended . Moreover, your product might end up in a wrong browse
node and your sales might get affected.
• When entering several words as a search term, put them in the
most logical order. A customer is more likely to search for big stuffed
teddy bears than for teddy stuffed bears.

54. Some don’ts
• Use a single space to separate keywords. No commas, semicolons,
carets are required.
• Don’t include common misspellings of the product name. Amazon's
search engine compensates for common customer misspellings and
also offers corrective suggestions.
• Don’t provide variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalisation, and
pluralisation (“80GB” and “80 GB”, “computer” and “computers”,
etc.). Our search engine automatically includes different case forms,
word forms and spelling variants for searching.
• Abbreviations, alternate names, topic (for books etc.), and key
character (for books, movies etc.) could be included as keywords.

55. Factors Driving the Amazon SERP
-Price
-Fulfillment Method
-Product Reviews
-Paid Ads
-Listing Quality
- Product Images
- Product Titles
- Bullet Points
- Product Descriptions
- Structured Data – Brand, MPN
- Product Search Terms
- Group Listings - Variations

56. Group Listing Variations
• Main product title is Parent and variants e.g. size, colour are called
child
• They are better when listed together
• Group them together using a parent-child relationship.
• When customer finds one product they will find others as well
• Also they help to build product reviews for all products which again
help in ranking
• Variations are category based
• See Example on next slide >>

58. Stay intouch !
Prabhat Shah
@onlineselleruk
Email: ps@onlineselleruk.com
Landline: 029 2236 2596 Mobile: 0751 88 39629
www.onlineselleruk.com