Organic Ranking on Amazon - A Case Study

Brian Johnson.m4a so my name is Brian Johnson and I'm going to talk about organic ranking on Amazon specifically I'm going to show you a rank case study that we did so we had one of our clients here it was a car pay who's the the brand name they sell a variety of deodorant and antiperspirant and they had products that were not ranked very well at all they were selling about three units per day on average so one of the things that they wanted to do they were actually working with a partner of ours that does the search find buy rebate type of giveaway and they went to them initially and said like okay we don't need all the frills and all the bells you Know all the optimization, everything we just we had this one specific search term in mind and a purse for women, and we want to rank really high. The problem was they're starting out in position rank 257 so they're way down the line as far as the search term, so clearly they weren't optimized for it at all. They thought that a rebate or some kind of a promotional giveaway would spike their organic rank, and therefore then they would just stick the landing and be ranked high, and then therefore they could just win. Common misconception, so the service gave away on there to their private audience for rebate giveaways about 15 units. Per day for about 10 days, right this total promotion cost a little under $6. 000, so it wasn't it wasn't cheap; they ended up peaking at about a rank of 36 and then they settled back down over the next two to three weeks, down to about position 105. Right, very common experience that a lot of brands experience because they think that simply just doing the spike to give away yes it does get up and it does get a much higher rank; they went from 257 up to 36 but then it fell right back down again. Now, was this a success because it went from 257 to 105? Yeah, but really, the what actually happened is they went from the three units per day; they ended up settling in about six units per day. So did they double their sales on that product as a result of investing $6? Yes, that is true. But you can see here, along with the 15, it was being given away, and there were some extra organic sales that did of course come along with it while they were there. They were pulling in about 22 units per day on average, right? So then we took a step back because we knew better. We went in and we used with my company; we did a deep data analysis of their product niche and what we can do is we can identify the A9 rank factors – in other words, over 100 rank factors that matter the most to A9, and we boil it down into what are the top 10 to 12 that specifically matter to A9 ranking for this specific product niche, for this antiperspirant product niche. What we do with that then is we then go through, we optimize the key fundamentals that are going to have the biggest impact on the organic ranking. Some of those include velocity; but we would use things like PPC or the search find by type of promotion or coupons or your lightning deals in order to spike or to raise the unit velocity. But like I said, there's a dozen different ones that really matter to A9 for the specific niche and we looked at other things as far as content. optimization we looked at optimizing as far as the unit velocity we also looked at improving conversion factors and some of those have to do with you know again it depends on what a9 wants for this specific subcategory for this specific product niche we went through we helped them optimize their content title was important for this particular for this particular product niche so was bullet points on this one trying to think what else on this it was they had a small amount on ratings and review price didn't matter as much they were overpriced relative because they had a much higher quality than their average but so They had that to overcome, but they didn't want to change their price because it was a premium product, so we didn't make any price adjustments on that in order to affect conversion rates, but we did go through and optimize some of their other search rank factors, wanted so when we started again to reboot with this search find by promotion again. Now, we could have done this just turned on PPC and been really aggressive across PPC, but oftentimes that can take anywhere from six weeks to four months in order to reach the same kind of peak; this was an example of where we want to accelerate and get the The faster result that they wanted, yes it did cost again but there were on board as far as being able to do that and expecting better outcome. And because of analyzing what mattered to A9 as far as the rank factors and the fundamentals, we were able to help them optimize that. And when we started back again, you recall they were probably about a hundred and five, they had slipped down even a little further to about a hundred and ten, that was about a week later. We again did the 15 units per day times the ten days as far as the rebate giveaway. They ended up peaking at about search rank three on this one search term, and then they settled. Down into about position five or six, and it was bouncing around between five and six the difference on that is they went from three units per day they went up to six units per day in the last you know, last search after the last search went by holding up around this area here, top-top five, top ten. They were pulling about 49 units per day, so huge leap as far as their their sales velocity; as a result of properly identifying what A9 wanted for their product in their product niche prior to doing any kind of either whether it's PPC or a giveaway they needed to know that ahead of time, so that absolutely worked great as we expected it would. After that, so what do you do after that is it gonna slide right back down again? It doesn't because we've already improved the the average standard; we've lifted kind of the foundational, the fundamentals by through optimization and like I said, it could be title optimization, feature optimization. There's price ratings, there is as far as what kind of badges they have. There's several that came up that we were able to identify and help them tweak because we knew their relative strength and weakness against their competitors on that particular search term; but from a maintenance standpoint, we had them add in enough PPC. In order to keep the unit velocity up there just a trickle, you know, compared to what the giveaway was really doing 15 a day; we added just enough in order to keep them in the 5 to 10 range. Now, what we did is, we then we said okay, how do we scale this? Let's move on; let's look at other related search terms to this ESE-ka regional target search term, which we call a search cluster. And we looked at the ones that were both relevant and had strong KPIs. Now, a strong KPI if you look at things like brand analytics, you can determine what your relative conversion rate strength is; click-through rate strength is; price-uh-disadvantage would be a weakness. For this particular brand compared to others selling antiperspirants, and so we were able to identify okay here's the additional set of I think it was probably four or five additional search phrases-is that could all be clustered together. We help them to optimize their content fields and their other search rank factors again. And with the the end result on this whole project, you went from about three per day what they originally had on this product; they were now doing 60 to 70 units per day and that's been held holding pretty steady on average, right? It does vary from week to week of course but they're holding in about. 60 to 70 units per day through proper data analysis optimization combined with a peak promotion like a search find by rebate, the all right, so that was that's that's the case study. Uh, common question is the search find by uh partner that we use is called Stello and my company that does the the deep data analysis uh to identify the A9 ranking factors, that's called Deep M. In fact, I could probably write it up here, so that's just Deep M and dot ai if you want to look it up online. My name is Brian Johnson and I look forward to seeing your success on your next launch also.