Amazon's New Title Format That Could be Splitting Your Sales | Brian R. Johnson

Amazon's New Title Format That Could be Splitting Your Sales | Brian R. Johnson Speaker 3: What if the way you write your Amazon title is secretly costing you sales? In today's episode, Brian Johnson breaks down Amazon's new title split, a change that's already altering visibility, rank, and how the algorithm reads your product. You'll learn why the first 55 characters might be the only thing your customer ever sees and how Amazon's machine lens is rewriting the rules of optimization. This is data-backed insight from a man who's He's driven over 3 billion, that's 3 billion with a B, in brand growth. So stay tuned. Our guest is a co-founder of DeepM.ai, which is a leading authority on Amazon search ranking. He's a data-driven strategist who has fueled over 3 billion, that's with a B, 3 billion plus in brand growth, making him one of the most sought after experts in e-commerce. And imagine that. I just run into him at another event. All right. We're talking about Brian Johnson and he's going to be joining us in just a second. But now I just want to give a quick thank you to the sponsors. So we could not do this podcast without our sponsors. I want to give a quick thank you to AZRank. AMZ One Step, Sophie's Society, Titan Network and Connect Cash. And so sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. I did or Coke Zero and welcome Mr. Brian Johnson. Speaker 1: How are you guys doing? Speaker 3: Nice to see you again, Brian. Speaker 2: Good to see you as well. Speaker 3: Let's get on to today's topic. We were thinking about this and today, Amazon titles that could be splitting your sales. Let's talk about that. Speaker 1: So this is not new. I mean, this is one of those things that's been around for at least a few weeks. Amazon, like they often do, is they will test different things. They'll move around ad placements, they'll remove ad placements, they'll remove content, they'll shift. You know, features, they're always testing something. Usually, they start testing, if you kind of want to keep an early eye on this kind of thing, here's kind of an insider tip. They'll usually start in things like clothing. Clothing, for whatever reason, is often their beta test bed for a lot of changes. This particular one has to do with taking, you recall back in January, Amazon changed the restriction. Okay, anybody not conforming to a 200 character long title now needs to conform to that. They announced it on, I think they said like the deadline was like January 21st. I'm guessing as far as the date on that. And then they didn't start actually enforcing it for a couple months later. Then they started enforcing it and anytime you went to go to try to change it, they're like, oh no, you can't do that anymore. So you got to be within the 200 characters. Well, in parallel, you know, they're rolling out as far as, you know, new, you know, analytic models as far as like Cosmo and different content, you know, features like Rufus. And these all are just things that they're, you know, they're testing, they're developing and they're rolling out. And these all have an effect on user experience, on shopper experience and of course obviously by extension that affects any of us sellers, right? And so this one has to do with Amazon testing out splitting the title. So that we have a primary, like a core title, and then like a feature subtitle. So they take your existing 200-character title and they'll split it up, you know, as they see fit. You may not always have control over that, but that's kind of where I wanted to cover. Actually, do you have a slide that I can show that goes through this? That's the new thing that Amazon is testing out. Speaker 3: Okay, let's go back. Let's back it up a bit. So over time, there's been the 255 character rule where everybody was just keyword stuffing. And then that's changed over time. I still have, I run into people, I have clients that when I tried to tell them that they could shorten their titles. Now this isn't just recent. This is going back a year or two. But shorten up your titles. Amazon will take it from there. You don't need the keyword stuff. I'll throw in a phrase, but I just want to have the information that Amazon needs. To describe what it is. And then in the bullets, the same thing. Like recently, it's the duplication, right? You don't want to have duplicate content within your bullets, like duplicate keyword phrases. Can we go back and talk about that? Is it true that, like just in that title, that you don't have to, like get rid of these longer titles, even the 200 characters. I mean, get it, well, it's 150, right? 150 right now, 155. Speaker 1: Well, 200 is the actual, is the limit. Speaker 3: Is the maximum, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, is the maximum. Yeah. And actually the, I'll go into as far as like what those, the different characters, character limits are, visible character limits are. Your title is still going to be 200 characters. Right. It doesn't mean you need to be at 200 characters. It's really, it depends on focus. As you know from, you know, our discussions regarding DeepM is we go through and we head Reverse engineered A9 in order to figure out what are all the signals that signal to the algorithm that affect your organic ranking. That supersedes, you know, the previous methods as far as like traditional keyword research tools. And so then what we look at is from one aspect of that, one signal is SEO of a content field. Let's take the title for instance. And for anybody wondering, the content field that is king as far as relevance, as far as ranking, as far as A9 goes, definitely is the title. But it's not as simple as that. Because A9 also prioritizes focus. What is my focus as a seller? Who's my target audience that I'm going after? And they don't want you to shotgun out and just say, like, my product's for everybody. It's not. And therefore, you'll get penalized if you try to do that. That's a very common mistake when it comes to keyword research tools is like, oh, let's take all the high volume terms, let's shove them together, throw them in the title and the bullet points and we'll magically win. Sorry, no. That might work once in a while, but it's not a consistent strategy. When it comes to things like title, there's going to be a mix of both the human perception, the human lens, if you will, and the machine lens. And so you're not only trying to stand out and attract your target audience, and you should have a target audience that you're going after, and speaking to them directly, but then you also are also talking to A9 and Cosmo. And so it becomes this mix that you have to blend together, do a certain amount of experimentation, look at all the data as it comes back as you change, and see what balance that you can find between engagement by the shopper, click-through rate, conversion rates, and appeasing the algorithm gods To say, hey, I'm relevant, I'm important, I'm focused, I'm performing well, I'm performing better than my competitors on all these different signals to A9 and A9 says, cool, I'm going to push you to the top because you're outpacing everybody else. Speaker 3: Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. I'm curious about personas. So we've had guests on here and they say, oh, they don't care about personas. We've had other ones say you have to have a gazillion personas. But if you're targeting, if you're doing your research and you're trying to figure out that one type of person who will buy your product, how do you do that without missing a bigger audience? But I'll give you an example. So I sell natural soap. I have a specific demographic that I'm going after, but I also have this sporting demographic called Mudders. And these are people who like to go crazy and get I run through obstacle courses, get completely soaked with mud, and I have a Dead Sea Mud, and I run a campaign, Get Clean With Mud. How can you target specific personas when you only have limited space? I mean, you can't add a second or third or fourth listing. Speaker 1: Well, technically, you could. Technically, you may get substantially different. You can do it through your content where you can use terminology that focuses in on your target audience, different personas. You can certainly craft your images in order to speak to your target audience, to that persona, the ICP. Cosmo and A9, they're both going to look at the text that's on your listing. They're going to look at the images that are on your listing, and they're going to interpret that as far as who you are, who you're messaging, who you're trying to reach. When it comes to key content fields, like the title, you do want to avoid going too generic with your terminology. An example of that is saying my product is for, oh. Speaker 2: I think we lost him a little bit. Speaker 1: That was the computer problem we were talking about that he has. Speaker 2: Yeah, the one that just was kicking in before. Yeah, I think it's here. So yeah, just continue, Brian. Oh, absolutely. Speaker 1: Okay, good. I wasn't sure. I was hoping it wasn't me. When it comes to, where was I going with this, with things like title, for instance, a key content field like title, there's a couple of things. One is using generic terms in order to try to catch your audience is not usually a good strategy. Having things like, oh, here I have a, the supplement or these accessory, you know, sporting goods accessories for men and women and teens. All those are very generic terms that can apply to millions, you know, hundreds of thousands or if not millions of products and therefore it gets diluted heavily. And so the better you can do to avoid generic Broad terminology like that. You can put it in your other content fields, bullet points, A+, hidden description field. You can show, you know, men, women, teens, whatever in your imagery and your A-plus content, but having it in your title, not such a good plan because you're just going to get it. It's going to get diluted too much. It lacks focus. And so that's kind of where you go in. It's like, okay, is there something specific about, it's not just your, your target audience is not just women. It's women who have a specific, a pain or a challenge they're trying to overcome. You're trying to address that challenge, right? And so use the terminology that addresses their need, not who they are, unless that persona is very unique, like in what Norm was mentioning as far as like mutters, you know, as an example. And I think he was saying mutters, not mothers, right? Speaker 3: Mutters, mutters, mutters. Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah. So try to avoid like generic terminology like that in, in key content fields now. Within a key content field like title, position and sequence also matter. Yeah, so you have some SEO analytics that you could break it down even further. You know, if you're going after a very specific phrase, like the best you could do is if you're going after, if you're trying to rank for a very specific search phrase, you put that search phrase into your title and nothing else. Like 40, 50 characters long, nothing else, right? That is the best that you can do as far as like to utilize that one key content field that has a huge impact on A9 from a ranking standpoint. But then you also dismiss any other related terms that are part of that, what we call clusters, which are related search terms that are similar to that core search term. But if you want to beat everybody else, the best you could possibly do is to put the exact search phrase you're trying to win at in your title and nothing else. What that does is it puts it in the front of the title, it puts it in a sequence of a full phrase, and it doesn't add in a bunch of other words that are then going to dilute the density or the title content. None of us can really get away with that, though. But if you wanted to, that's how you do it. Now, you also have to drive some sales velocity behind that, and you also want to have your other content fields. Bullet points is the second most influential content piece, and first bullet point has more weight than the fifth bullet point, right? Front of the title has more weight than the middle of the title, has more weight than the end of the title. So all of these things matter, not only from a, what do you show to a shopper and what can they see versus how much does A9 and Cosmo consider what you're focused on and what you're emphasizing and where those each individual words are. It doesn't have to be exact phrase, but if you're trying to beat everybody else, the exact phrase is what's going to do it. But the more practical way of doing that is, okay, I've got three phrases and the words can overlap. I don't need to put three phrases in my title. I need to blend these together in some kind of a sequence that is very coherent to the target audience, put that in my title and therefore I'll catch relevance. It won't be perfect as far as beating, you know, maybe some other competitor is focused just on, you know, a phrase in the beginning and you're not going to beat them on rank, but you're more likely to show up on page one for multiple terms. So that's kind of where some of the keyword research tools. Do that correctly is do you want to show up on page one for multiple search terms and hope that those search terms actually convert for your product? That's a different issue. But ultimately you want to focus in on where it's You know, the farther up, the more visible the words are in any of the content fields, the more likely it's going to carry a bigger weight to Cosmo and A9. So it's no longer just keywords. Speaker 3: When you're creating your bullets or when you're doing your research, You should try to find out what the buyer intent would be for your product. Is that correct? Speaker 1: Well, because you're still trying to convince the shopper that you are relevant to what they're looking for, that you have a solution for their pain, which is always a good thing to address upfront. And, you know, instead of just text, now you've got text and imagery and video that all play a part in keeping that shopper on your product detail page and convincing them that this is going to solve their, whatever challenge they're trying to overcome. Whether that's a big problem or a small problem and ultimately lead to a conversion. Speaker 3: We've been trying to use AI as much as possible to do research and to bring it into the sequence of what we do to either do listing optimization, understanding the personas, just research in general, competitive analysis. And so one of the things that we've started to do is let ChatGPT do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. And we'll go in, we'll find out our exact competitors. We will do a deep research. We will ask about the personas or the intent or whatever it takes to write the bullet points. What sequence should the bullet points be in? And we get some really great information. A lot of the times we'll get the main keyword phrases first. So based on the competitive analysis that we're doing, we'll research their reviews. We'll see what's positive. We'll see what's negative. We'll research their listings and we come out and we say, okay, here's the positives, here's the pros and the cons, and we'll just ask ChatGPT what should the bullet points be based on, and we just kind of get information that way. I'll take a look at it manually and say, okay, I agree with it, I don't agree with it, so you still have to have that human input. But is that something that you're doing as well? Want to understand how Amazon really ranks your products? Watch the latest episode of Lunch With Norm, where Oana shares how Cosmo is reshaping search and what sellers must do to stay visible. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's, we look at, because we base our ranking strategies based off of not the keyword methodology, the classic keyword methodology. It is, or even the second stage of that, which is like the clustered root word kind of cluster, keyword methodology. We integrate that into what we do, but ours is focusing on identifying which signals, in other words, which elements, whether that's content or sales velocity or review scores or whatever the case is, content relevance, We consider those as far as, you know, first of all, we identify what A9 wants. We have the ability to actually reverse engineer what A9 wants for every single product niche. And so we know, you know, maybe out of the top 100 signals that that product niche sends to Amazon, to A9, I should say, to A9, we know which top 10 or 12 matter to the brand. Really should carry enough weight that it has focus. For the brand to work on optimizing and then we benchmark each of those against their competitors for every single search term. So we're always in a position of power where we know more than everybody else on the platform, which is a good position to be in. But it helps us to narrow down, okay, what do I need to do in order to beat this competitor on this particular search term? That's a signal. That may be content. It may be an image, an image to text translation. It may be the price point, the review rating. It may be whether or not they've got the particular words or phrases in the second bullet point or the first bullet point or the front of the title, the back of the title, right? It could be whether or not they're prime eligible shipping or if they've got good stock distribution or if they sell on other eCommerce platforms. All these things kind of play into whether or not you can. I mean, there's a lot that goes in. It's not as simple as like, well, But ultimately, it's still a balance. Even a data-driven approach like this is still a balance with how do I properly speak to the pain of my shopper so they're compelled. Everything else that I'm doing from a data standpoint is simply just appeasing the algorithm so it's more likely that Amazon will show my product above everybody else's. But you still have to, that's only going to last so long as the shopper sees relevance and sees a solution and desires the offer that you provide to them. Speaker 3: Now, I'm going to go down a bunch of different rabbit holes, but this one, I want to talk about this 45, 155, Sorry, 55-145 split. Speaker 1: Yeah, and actually the 145 is actually a little bit misleading, so I can explain that later. Let me show a slide here that will illustrate it a little bit better. Okay, so what we're looking at essentially is when it comes to the two-part title that Amazon is testing, a couple of things as far as like terminology. They consider as far as like what is the, you know, we would call like a header and subheader or title and subtitle. I believe that they're We've heard it called from people at CoCreate. We heard somebody say, oh no, it's core and it's highlights. Okay, cool. The core product title, that one runs about 55 characters. The nice thing is they actually try to cut it off so that it shows. So if you look at the table down below, a typical 200 standard title would wrap and then on a mobile device, maybe it cuts off around 80, 85 characters. And so then you get kind of that dot, dot, dot. And it's just kind of like, Oh, you got to click through to see more. The two part splits it up so that now you've got roughly a 55 character, approximately 55 characters, complete words, um, core title. And then, uh, a secondary or the product highlights is probably the next 75 characters. So, um, I, I had stated the 55-145 and it's actually 55-75. Now, if you click through the product listing, it's still the 200, right, unless you're on mobile. Well, actually, no, on mobile it would wrap if you're on the product detail page, but you're still at the 200, so it's not like you need to trim it down from 200 down to 75 or 80 or something like that. Just be aware of what is visible to the shopper now and in the future. This podcast is going to be considerably focused, and therefore, that's where you really need to pick your battles of like, look, if I need to craft the first part of my title, the first 55 characters, what am I absolutely serious about going after? And that's the main message here is the next time that you're out there working on optimizing your title, doing any kind of split testing, Keep the 55 and the 80 and the 200 in mind so that you are prepared for what's there now and visible versus what is coming so that you're in a position where, okay, I have a 200 character title. Mobile currently shows about 80. But in the future, Amazon theoretically is going to roll this thing out where it's going to show the first approximately full words in the first 55 characters. What does that look like for my title? And do I conform to that? Or do I, am I best visible for that? And then what's the next 75 character message? Knowing that the shoppers, it's going to cut off itself. We've got around 75, 80 characters, just like it would on a mobile. And what does that messaging look like? Knowing that the last 50 or so, 50, 60, 70 characters of the product title won't be visible to the shopper while they're in their initial search path. It's not until they get to their product detail page, then they can see the rest of the title. Speaker 3: Right. And so you're putting the brand still in front. So you've got HydroJug, Sport. Speaker 1: Some categories require that. Like electronics, for instance, you've got to have the brand name up front. Usually it's the model numbers that are specific to that. In this particular case, this one's HydroJug Sport. Just an example, and I apologize if this is your brand somewhere out there listening, but I'm not beating it up, but HydroJug Sport I'm assuming that HydroJug has a lot of different, they've got casual and they've got sports and they've got weekender, I don't know, office maybe, I don't know, but it's a long brand name. It takes up a lot of real estate, especially when you get down to the 55 and the 80 character considerations, the longer your brand name, That's kind of the risk of creating a brand name is sometimes we create brand names before we even source the product and it doesn't match up. It's like, oh, American Household Goods. You don't want to have American Household Goods because that just took up 40 or your 55 characters. So you want to try to have as short as possible. Now, if you have the ability To edit your title, and of course some of you have to ask Amazon for permission to do so, you may want to see, okay, is HydroJug sport necessary or is HydroJug enough or do I even put that in there at all? There's some competitors in this particular category where they don't even have the brand name until maybe the end and the shopper never sees it until they're actually on the product detail page. That doesn't help branding. But it certainly helps on a limited real estate from a relevant standpoint. You're going to get ranked higher, not on hydro jug sport. You're going to be ranked on stainless steel tumbler with straw, especially if it's 15 character, 12, 15 characters forward in the title compared to having that real estate taken up by something else like a brand name. Speaker 3: Okay, so we're way past the bottom of the hour. This has been so cool just listening to you talk about this. Got a few more questions when we get back. If this is the first time you're listening to the podcast, we do something a little special. At the bottom of the podcast, our guest tells us about a prize called the, or called, it's called a prize. That's what we call it, but it's... Speaker 1: It used to be like the Wheel of Kelsey or something. Unknown Speaker: It is the Wheel of Kelsey. Speaker 3: But I can't give Kelsey away. So the prize is something our guest usually gives away. And Brian, what is our prize today? Speaker 1: So obviously with DeepM is like we focus in on organic rank or precision rank optimization at DeepM. And so part of that is if most of you are familiar with being retail ready, basically a checklist that says, okay, is my product ready to be sold online or in stores? We have something similar. It's called a subsequent checklist. It's called being rank ready. And what that does is we take all the signals that we're familiar with and we go through and we do a checklist audit for you to see, okay, here's the search terms that you're going after. Here's your products. Are you actually optimized already for those? Now, you're not going to have all the information on that. It is a great preliminary check that we do normally charge for and that is the rank ready audit or rank ready checklist. So we'll go through that and we're going to give three of those away. Perfect. Speaker 3: Perfect. All right, so if you're interested in joining or entering the Wheel of Kelsey, there's a few ways you can do it. First, hashtag WheelOfKelsey. Second, just tag somebody. Tag two people, you get a second entry. And third, because this will take place next week, on Monday, when you receive our newsletter, just enter through the newsletter and you'll see Wheel of Kelsey. It'll be right there, loud in front of your face. Just click it and enter it that way. And then we'll enter for Brian's prize. Okay, Kelsey, is it time for a sponsor? Hey sellers, Q4 is coming fast. Are your products ready to dominate? AzRank is your partner for accelerating sales across the most important marketplaces. Their customized campaigns boost your visibility, make your brand impossible to ignore, and give you the crucial data that you need to win. Launch new products with a surge of external traffic, Maintain top ranking and conversion rates for your best sellers and bring old listings back to life. Play it smart, prepare now, and give your products the boost they deserve this Q4. Visit azrank.com and unlock your product's full potential today. The link's in the description. Now back to the show. We were talking about the 45. Yeah, the 55, 75. That's correct. Speaker 1: That actually adds up to about 130, 135, something like that. Speaker 3: There we go. One of the questions I have is about what Amazon's doing right now. It's giving you a different title. It's breaking up what you originally post. And all of a sudden, it's feeding, you know, the product intent or the customer intent side of things. So they're experimenting with that. How's that going to affect your title when you're putting it in? Speaker 1: So, I mean, you're still going to be able to do your 200-character title. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: And obviously, you want to craft that. But just be aware is that, you know, similar to optimizing a website for different platforms for desktop, laptop, mobile, different types of, you know, different sizes of mobile, it's the same kind of philosophy on Amazon is you're going to have those who are on a laptop, who are on an iPad, who are on, you know, a smartphone of different sizes. And this just becomes essentially one more platform optimization that you're doing is you play the what-if game. 200 characters, somebody reads my 200 character title in my product detail page. They're already on my product detail page, first of all. And therefore, what is the message to them and to the algorithm that that 200 character satisfies? When it comes to now, let's say that they're on a mobile device, you know, and you know, maybe what is the first 80 characters? What's the message that my shoppers are now seeing? Is the message they're getting directed to my target audience, does it have any extra superfluous words that are unnecessary or don't need to be that far forward in the title? And then you ask that question, and then what? The next one is, okay, now what if it's only 55 that's showing? What's that 55? What kind of messaging am I signaling across the 55, the 80, and then finally the 200? Speaker 3: Before the end of the show, I want to talk about flat files and I also want to talk about your thoughts on Rufus and Cosmo and how you can help get ranked with using Rufus and Cosmo or how to do it. Let's go back to the first question, which is about flat files. Changes in flat files. How can we still utilize flat files in our listings? Speaker 1: The advantage of flat files is, and I will certainly defer to other experts. I know Vanessa Hung is big on flat files. There are certainly better experts when it comes to the flat files as far as how to craft those, some of the nuances, some of the gotchas, you know, that you need to avoid. The thing with the flat files is they often have more content field capability and more ways that you can game the system, if you will, using flat files in order to adjust different content fields, including title. That is certainly a great way in order to experiment and to stand out from your competitors who may not be looking at their flat files at all. They may be looking at That's funny. They may be looking at just what is Amazon showing them in Seller Central. What do I have the ability to edit as far as my title, as far as my bullet points? The API and flat files both have, traditionally, they've got more data fields and more options for you to exercise. And so if you're not using either one of those, and I would say majority of your competitors are probably not using flat files or an API, and therefore they're just using whatever is available inside of Seller Central, you can pretty quickly say like, okay, here's what I see in Seller Central. Here's what I see in flat file. Here's what I see in the API. What's different that I can now add in my own content or manipulate in a way that's going to give me a slightly better competitive advantage that may influence A9 or may influence Cosmos? I'm going to blend those together because they're two different faces. A9 is still king. No question on that. Cosmos is certainly developing. And having contribution essentially to what kind of information is being analyzed, the historical experience, you know, the historical profile of the shopper, what they've bought in the past, what have they searched for prior to getting to this one search, you know, and the one product detail page. Certainly looking at things like how are each of the images translated to text by AI. Those all certainly come into play as far as influencing. They still don't beat title and bullets, as an example, or univelocity or relative conversion rate. All of these are going to be relative to whatever your competition is doing. So if you're using something like the API or a flat file, you may have a relative advantage because most of your competitors are not filling in every other element field or any other additional fields that might be available on those two backend sources. Speaker 3: So, you were just talking about with Rufus. I'm trying to figure out how we can optimize it and I'm thinking about questions. Can you ask just a ton of questions because it's looking right for the right customer or what the customer buying intent was or is. In the question set, can you add questions? Just go through, first of all, there's a step, there's a couple of steps here. Go and see what people are asking, okay? You can go to Google and find this, just people also ask about your type of product. But then you could take those common questions, add them to your listing, which would have the keywords in them, and then at least it would be in your listing. Would that help with Rufus if it saw all these questions that you're answering and you're probably got a very wide field across multiple personas doing this? Speaker 1: Well, in general, it's going to adapt to whoever is asking the question and what the question is that's being asked and whether or not it finds relevance in the listing. If you're asking a question like, you know, what are the dimensions, it's going to pull from the listing and say, here's the dimensions, right? So, obviously, putting in that as either a Q&A or a specification, for instance, is going to show up as, okay, here's an answer to your question. If they ask for something like, does this work in 120 degree weather with 60% humidity on the back streets of some of this neighborhood, it's going to be like, I don't even know how to answer that, so I'm not going to tell you anything. Ultimately, even the questions that are suggested in Rufus, keep in mind, Rufus is Similar to an additional ad placement or additional content field, it is simply just, it doesn't replace the algorithm. It simply is an addition. It's a very helpful addition for a lot of shoppers and it's getting more adoption. But in general, it is just a dynamic content field that adapts to what the algorithm understands about that particular shopper, their shopping history, what part of the country they live in. You know, if you've got a shopper who's in Alaska and you say, hey, what's the best You know, de-icer, you know, for my windshields. It may offer in Rufus, well, you don't want just a 30 degree Fahrenheit de-icer. You need a minus 16 degree de-icer because you're in Alaska and therefore you're at a higher risk of needing a much more powerful, you know, chemical. Or anywhere in Canada probably is probably also true. But except UDB and Salesforce. But it's going to adapt as a dynamic content field. Does that change how the products are ranking? Not from our observation. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 1: But they're constantly developing. That's part of why this two-part title is also important because if you search for something on Rufus and it comes back and says, oh, here's either sponsored or here's some product suggestions that meet your criteria to consider, it tends to get cut off. You know, you've got a logo or you've got the main image, you know, in a small, you know, format and you have a cutoff title. Well, what if you had a 55 character automatically where it's just cutting it down to the 55 characters? What's that 55 characters? That's Rufus is now also showing in a tight content field that is going to instantly grab the attention of the shopper and pull them through. So you don't want to simply just say, ignore Rufus. It doesn't change the ranking algorithm, but it can certainly affect the engagement by the shopper and who their persona is. But setting up your whole product, your product detail content in order to try to exhaust what could be asked or interpreted on Rufus, I think would be a futile effort. You can certainly say, look, I know that my target audience did. In my particular product, 80% of my shoppers are women, okay? You should probably have more of your content focused in on women and then therefore, things like Rufus are going to address the fact, it's like, oh, this product is definitely for this woman shopper who is currently searching right now. You're not going to get 100% coverage. You're not going to get it every time. You're simply going to increase your chances of catching relevancy to whatever the shopper happens to ask. Speaker 3: All right, this is a question that's happened over and over again, and now I think it's more relevant than ever, and that is when you create your listing, you have to have a balance between the machine and the keyword optimization, the algorithm, and the human. So, how are you writing these, either the bullets or the titles, for the human and where does that weigh? Like, is it more towards the human, more towards the algorithm? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, our approach is definitely in order to manipulate the algorithm, right, to get rank. You know, I can show a brand how to rank number one for any non-branded search term. It doesn't mean that they're going to. It doesn't mean that they're willing to Let's talk a little bit about how to optimize to the level that it would require in their particular product niche for that particular search term in order to rank number one. But I can show them exactly why everything works and what all the signals are and how to optimize for those. But ultimately, just because you're ranked number one doesn't mean you've got the best conversion rate. You don't have the best click-through rate. That's where you then have to go back and balance and say, okay, I've got to find the sweet spot. Between still always recommending constant A-B split testing of titles, just recurring every four weeks, get a new one going. Never stop with split testing. But we can tell you from a data standpoint, from an algorithm standpoint, A9 Cosmo standpoint, here's what you need, exactly what you need to do in order to get that. But you've got to balance that with how am I going to increase my click-through rate? How am I going to increase my conversion rate? And so it's not just a one-shot effort. You've got three efforts you're focused on. How do I grab the attention of the shopper and get them to click through my listing? Assuming that my listing is showing high in search results, right? Whether it's an ad or Rufus or A9 in search. And then ultimately, am I talking to the correct audience with the same terminology that they came in with in order to solve their pain or the solution that they need? And you've convinced them, it's like, this is absolutely the best solution for For that pain, that's where you really need to understand who your target audience is and craft, you know, and that's how you're going to increase your conversion rate is you're speaking to your target audience. So it is never a one shot. Hey, this is the best thing you can do. And the only thing you need to do, that's crap. You've got to speak. You've got to work on engagement, click through. You've got to work on conversion, conversion rate optimization. And, but at the same time, you also have to convince Amazon to show your product high for the search terms where you have the highest conversion rate and click-through rates. It's a constant feedback loop that you can look at and say, look, I really wanted to rank for this high volume search term, but my click-through rate and conversion rate is garbage. If I benchmark against my top competitors on page one, I don't rate. I'm not good enough on that search term. Clearly, whoever my target audience is that buys my product is not really using that search term to find my product. And therefore, you can use things like brand analytics as an assistance tool to say which search terms Do I have the highest combination of conversion rate and click-through rate and near price point? Relative to my benchmark competitors in order to be able to see where I focus my product listings and my ads and my influencers and any kind of the search find by promotion or whatever that you know, whatever lightning deal or any kind of promotion that you're doing you're focusing in on a narrow set of You know, maybe five to ten different search terms not five hundred to a thousand search terms. Speaker 3: Right, okay, so let's say that you're a seller, you're listening to this podcast and you're going, oh my god, I haven't done any of this. I gotta jump in and change my listing. So they go in and they're looking at their title, they're looking at their bullets, they're looking at everything. Do they do it all at once or do they hit the title, do the bullets and start playing back and forth? Speaker 1: Without the kind of data you can get from DeepM. So we, because of the way that we reverse engineer A9 on a niche level, we can say, In your product niche, the title has a 23% impact on the algorithm. Your bullet points have a 15% impact. Your price has a 6% impact. We can break it down and we know the specific weights where you focus. Here's the top 10 or 12 things that you focus on and here's the biggest bang for the buck kind of optimizations you can do. But when it comes to preparing for a two-part or just what's visible, consider to just do nothing else today. Look at your hero product. Look at the title. Use a character counter tool online. Throw your title in there. Say, okay, cool, it's 193 characters out of the 200. Okay, now what happens if I trim it back to 80 characters for mobile? What does that message look like? Am I, is that completely the wrong message that I'm sending? Because my shoppers only see the first 80 characters and therefore they miss the most important word that is going to pull them in and differentiate my product. And then if I take it one step further, if I cut it down to 55, now what's that message? If you do nothing else today, hero product, title, 80 character, 55 character, what's the message you're sending? Speaker 3: That's perfect. That's a great way to end this podcast. Well, almost, because we've got the Wheel of Kelsey. Brian, where can we contact you? Speaker 1: I'm on LinkedIn and such, but you can also go out. Obviously, you put our URL up there, deepm.ai. The M stands for marketplace. You can certainly set up an intro demo. We can show you essentially what it is that we can do and if that's a good fit, awesome. If it's not, no worries. Speaker 3: Fantastic. Speaker 2: We do have a few questions if we want to… Oh, okay. Speaker 3: I didn't see that. Okay. Speaker 2: Brian from Simon. I agree that benefits, features, pain points, hooks and value propositions build relevance. That is marketing 101. How does anyone outside Amazon know for sure how the algorithm works? Speaker 1: If you don't have the data, there's a couple of things I would look at. You said outside the Amazon space. Speaker 2: I think he means like Amazon, the company. How do you know? Speaker 1: Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you're not, obviously, I mean, there's two points. You've got, or three perspectives. You have inside Amazon, you have deep M-level analytics, right, as far as reverse engineering A9, and then you have everything else, keyword research tools and the seller perspective. There's a couple of things you can focus in on. Your title is king from a content standpoint. Focus your title in. Obviously, that's what we're talking about today. Focus your title in on the few search terms or a couple of the search terms where you've got the highest relative conversion rates from if you look at your brand analytics, for instance. If you've got brand analytics, you're using things like search career performance, you can see at your ACE and your product level which search terms have a higher relative conversion rate and click-through rate compared to your benchmark competitors, which is usually your top 20 or 30. Title, bullet points, unit velocity. If I were to pick a fourth one, I would say it starts, the percentages drop, you know, get a lot more, you know, overlapping and they change position quite a bit. And there's little, there's subtle things like, you know, in your niche, does A9 prefer recent, like 30-day univelocity or they prefer long-term consistency, like 90-day, 180-day kind of consistency? Do they even look at your review rating or are you in a category where review rating doesn't matter but pricing does, like a commodity, for instance? These are all things that shift from each product niche, from each subcategory. But the tried and true is look at what search terms you've got the highest relative conversion rate on and getting some conversions on in brand analytics. Focus on those. Title and bullet points first, and then drive any kind of promotion, PPC, search, find, buy, any of that kind of promotion. Drive those search terms in order to reinforce that with the algorithm. Awesome. Okay. Speaker 2: We just got a couple more. Have you done any research to see if Rufus will answer differently to the same search query to different people? Speaker 1: Yeah, it would. So it'll shift slightly based off of substantial demographic differences. I did this actually just recently where I did a search and then my wife on her phone did a search and it came back with two different answers. We're the same household. We have the same profile, but we're on two different devices and it responded slightly differently. So it is quite dynamic. I would guess that it's probably going to get even more and more dynamic moving forward. At some point, I'm kind of waiting for Rufus to start showing real-time AI-created explainer videos and that kind of stuff. I'm like, well, in this category, here's some things you should know. Why wouldn't they? It's getting that fast, getting that advanced. Like, oh, you asked this question. It's like, well, let me explain it to you in a short little video that is not pre-made, but I'm making for you right now. Speaker 2: All right, these in the last two will be pretty quick. From Simon, this would suggest that we don't try to second-guess the algorithm and stick to true marketing principles. Focus on specific pain points and customer needs. The algorithm will do the rest. And following up on that, Simon says, massive respect to Brian. His Canopy webinars taught me a heap about how goddamn complex this Amazon game is. Speaker 1: You know, I stick to the fundamentals. I think actually Kevin King, you know, stated that recently is like after all the, you know, the talks about, you know, Cosmo Rufus, and I'm not dismissing those by any stretch. Cosmo Rufus, they do exist. They do have an effect on the shopper. They do have an effect on how you optimize, but you're also, the fundamentals are still gonna be the Pareto. They're still gonna be 80% are gonna still be focused on the algorithm. And this additional 10, 15, 20% that they're adding on through Cosmo and Rufus, Yes, you can get an edge, but most sellers don't even optimize properly for the basics, for the foundational principles, for the fundamentals of simply just like, do I understand who my target audience is? Have I focused my content and my promotion on the search terms that I actually have a very good conversion rate on? Or am I trying to compete with 800 pound gorillas by just going after a splatter of high volume search terms? Most of your competitors just do this broad shotgun approach and you can easily beat them. It's not like the algorithm continues to evolve and change that much. It's not like it's like, oh, that doesn't work anymore. It's like, yeah, it does. You just never have tried to optimize for it and most brands don't. That's why there's so much opportunity. If you just do a little bit more than your competitors just by observing what they're doing on who are your page one competitors, go through and look. Okay, where do they have this phrase, this word in their titles? You know, you could use a tool like a Jungle Scout or a Helium 10 or any of these where it shows like here's all the page one titles and you can go through there and just highlight, okay, I'm going after this search phrase or I'm going after these two words. Where is it along everybody else's title? That's probably one of the simplest things you can do is everybody have those words and those phrases at the front of their title. Okay, that's probably gonna be a little more difficult for me to rank against. Maybe there's something else I should go after. What do I convert on really well as far as alternative words? Speaker 3: I remember back in the day, I always listened to tapes in the car. One of them was Brian Tracy's Psychology of Selling and one of the phrases or one of the things he was saying was, You know, a lot of the times, the Kentucky Derby, Triple Crown winner, during a horse race, they literally win by a nose. You'll always know the winner. They make the millions, but who knows the person in second place? And that's the same thing here. The person who just does that little bit extra will get those extra sales and everybody else will eat the dust. Speaker 1: Well, I like the analogy, the bear, running from the bear analogy. You don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun everybody else who's also running from the bear. Speaker 3: That's right. All right, Brian. Now, I think, Kels, let's wrap this up. Let's go to the sponsor, then over to the wheel. Are you an Amazon seller that checked out your listing and said, it should be doing better? What am I doing wrong? There's got to be a better way. Well, guess what? There probably is. You just haven't had someone tell you exactly what's working and what's not. Flat World Network is for frustrated Amazon sellers. We'll take a look at your listing, your rank, your PPC, your traffic, and guess what? We're going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about your listing. And if you're interested, we'll even fix it for you. So if you're serious about scaling, go to flatworldnetwork.com and book your free audit today. Now, we're back. Now, let's go over to the wheel. Speaker 2: This is for Juana's giveaway from two weeks ago. We're going to be announcing the winner. Brian's giveaway is going to be announced on the next episode next week on who the winner is. So, let's give this a shuffle. Again, this is Juana's prize from two weeks ago and it looks like the winner is Susan B. Speaker 3: All right. That's a great giveaway. Speaker 2: Congratulations, and we'll be reaching out to you to receive your prize. Speaker 3: All right, Brian. Thank you so much for your time today. My pleasure. As soon as you see me at another event, you'll run. Speaker 1: I never do that. I'm always there for you. Speaker 3: All right. All right. Okay. We didn't think that we'd just be talking about titles today. Speaker 1: No. Speaker 3: That was the fun part. But it just goes to show you, you know, there's a lot behind this. It's something we were just talking about it at the end. You do those little things, just get your bloody listing optimized. And then start playing around and start split testing, but get the minor things done first. Well, it's not minor, but you know, just get it done. All right. That's it for today. Thanks for joining us and we will see you next Monday.