Launching New Products on Amazon - Paid Ads and Organic Listing Optimisation

Launching a new product on Amazon can be a challenging time for any eCommerce brand, but as with any new sales channel it can also be rewarding. Amazon has seen incredible growth over the past ten years, with over 200m Amazon Prime members worldwide and the annual Amazon Prime Day event driving more traffic to new sellers every year. 

How can you maximise your Amazon sales with your new product launch?

Factors in the Amazon buyer’s decision making process

As an Amazon user myself (who isn’t these days), there are three important factors I rely on to make a purchase:

• Star rating and reviews - what experience have other customers had with this product and brand?

• Discoverability - how easy is it to find the product I’m looking for?

• Amazon Prime eligibility - can I get the product delivered quickly and reliably?

Not all products listed on Amazon are eligible for Amazon Prime - mainly due to warehouse logistics, production, transit etc. which are not always in a marketer’s control. However, marketers and merchandisers can give a brand every opportunity for a new product to generate valuable reviews and ratings both through organic and paid channels.

Optimising your organic Amazon listing

Making sure customers can find your product is one of the most important elements to optimise - Amazon is ultimately an eCommerce search engine and you should treat your product pages with the same care and attention you would with an eCommerce product page on your own site.

There are four major optimisations you need to make in order to make sure your product is found and is conversion-ready.

Make sure your listing is correctly named - your product name needs to be clear, concise and include any important information such as colour, size and quantity. You need to maintain a balance of including all valuable specifications whilst avoiding keyword stuffing. Amazon has clear guidelines in place for product titles which always need to be followed.

Make sure your listing is correctly priced - you need to make sure that you have priced your product correctly and that you have matched the right prices to your quantities. This can be an easy mistake to make if you have little to no experience on the Amazon platform.

Make sure your listing has a product description - your product description should include an overview of your product and cover all major specifications (colour, size, weight etc.) but also cover the key benefits of your product. This is a good opportunity to add relevant keywords to optimise your organic listing. You can also take advantage of Amazon’s bullet point section to quickly highlight any major points.

Make sure your listing has high quality photography - as with your own eCommerce site, your Amazon listing needs high quality imagery. You need to follow Amazon’s guidelines for imagery (such as making sure the image has a white background), but you also need to make sure to have a range of images (plain, in-use, to scale, lifestyle etc.) where possible.

Take advantage of paid Amazon ads

Even when your organic listing is fully optimised and ready for search, you will need to invest in Amazon advertising to maximise your new product launch. Relying on organic listings alone will see slow results and you won’t be able to drive the reviews, ratings and views that Amazon needs in order to deliver your listing to more potential buyers. There are a range of ad types and campaigns you can use with Amazon’s advertising platform to help drive your new product launch:

Automatic Campaigns

The first step to pushing a new product is to use Amazon’s automatic targeting for visibility. These campaigns will find products within categories that are ‘‘close’, ‘loose’, ‘complementary’ and/or a ‘substitute’ to your product. These campaigns are a good opportunity to find new search terms, which will help you when building generic or branded manual campaigns.

Whilst using automatic campaigns, you should make sure to add mined keywords as negatives so entirely new terms are being generated. If you already have Amazon campaigns running, adding every keyword within the account as an exact negative can be useful.

Sponsored Display

Sponsored Display campaigns are useful at driving brand awareness, which can be effective during a new product launch. If you already have a strong presence on Amazon, an easy way to generate volume through this channel would be to use any top sellers within your new products’ category.

We recommend being aggressive with budget and targeting here, as a lot of eyes are usually focused on the top sellers on any page.

Sponsored Products Ads (SPA) and Sponsored Brands (SB)

Once you have collected new search terms and taken advantage of any existing brand presence, you can also build out manual Sponsored Product campaigns so that your new products can stand on their own feet.

As with most paid media platforms, you can use both brand terms and product focused terms to drive traffic to your products. If you do have a strong brand name and presence, you can use exact match keywords for SPA and SB as a vessel to push a new product.

Remarketing

Finally, once you’ve delivered a range of ads to drive traffic and buyers to your product listing, you can take advantage of remarketing ads. These ads can be highly effective at driving sales with high conversion rates at low cost.

You can retarget product views of your new product for those who did not buy, giving them another opportunity to review the product and make a purchase. You can also use remarketing lists to capture existing customers who may need a second purchase, depending on your product and brand.

Selling on Amazon

Amazon’s platform can be a huge opportunity for many brands, but knowing the ins and outs of the guidelines and targeting options can be challenging. You may need a paid media partner to help you understand the platform and guide your strategy.

If you have any questions about selling on Amazon, you can contact me on LinkedIn for a chat or send me an email at freddie@vervaunt.com.