Optimizing Your listing on Amazon in 2020
Keyword research, Conversion rate, click through rate, content optimization, Split testing and AB testing
The competition on Amazon is increasing. Barriers to entry has never been easier for anyone to sell a product. You can easily source and sell product through platforms like Alibaba and Amazon. Plus the fact that retail businesses are continuing to diminish with the rise of online sales. These brick and mortar brands and products are starting to understand the need to sell online. As these products start to pivot their business models, the online marketplace will continue to become more competitive. Amazon’s sales continue to grow quarter over quarter. The Amazon A9 algorithm continues to evolve. They have made it so that the algorithm scans, reads and analyses all the data on Amazon. The algorithm uses artificial intelligence to optimize listings for the end user.
Optimizing you listing for search results and search engine optimization (SEO) on Amazon deals directly with your keyword research. If you fail to do the proper keyword research, then people will simply not be able to find your product on Amazon.
Keyword Research
Most of your keyword research should be done prior to sourcing your product. We do not recommend any single tool for keyword research. Rather we recommend various keyword tools based on their strengths to gather all the necessary tools.
Some of the places your keywords will be indexed from include; the title, backend keywords, bullet points and product description, other keyword types, and more details.
Conversion Rate, Click Through Rate, Content Optimization
Content optimization will assist with your Click Through Rate (CTR) and ultimately the Conversion Rate (CR). Your attributes, description and images lead to a higher Conversion rate.
We are going to focus on 4 main parameters to analyze and change the way your products are converting.
If you go into the reports section of your Seller Central Account. Click into Business Reports, then the Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Team.
- Sessions: It means visit to your listing by a user. Any user that visit your product in a 24-hour period counts as just one session, even if the potential customer visited the listing 2 or 3 times. So a page view is different than a session.
- Session percentage: It is the percentage of sessions for a SKU or ASIN relative to the total number of sessions for your products. If you add the percentages of all your product in this column, you will see a total of 100%. This parameter is important because shows which one of your listings is responsible for the most and least traffic. By Analyzing this data, you will see what are you doing right, what are you doing wrong and what you need to change.
- Units ordered: It means how many item were sold in a specific period. By default, the period in these reports last 30 days. You can change this anytime at the top-right corner of your page. The units ordered are the total of units and not the total transactions.
- Unit session percentage: This data shows you the percentage of visits turned into sales. If 1,000 people visited your page, and just 20 of them bought your product, you can clearly see that your percentage is 2% . Your listing needs some improvements.
Real world scenario
- Considering hypothetical data from the last 30 days, have a look at the table below to understand these concepts in more detail.
| Product |
Sessions |
Sessions Percentage |
Units Ordered |
Unit Session Percentage |
| A |
10,000 |
67% |
400 |
4% |
| B |
100 |
2% |
60 |
60% |
| C |
8,000 |
31% |
2,300 |
28.75% |
- Starting with product A, we can see that it has the majority of the traffic of the listings with 10,000 sessions in a month. This figure is great. 400 units ordered. However, Unit Session Percentage shows that just 4% of sessions converted into a sale. The problem here is that the listing is discoverable, but when people view it they don’t purchase.
- Jumping to product B. We notice that the number of sessions are much lower than product A but the Unit Session Percentage shows that the product converts into sales. The issue is that nobody is finding the product.
- Product C is a great listing. It has a high number of sessions and a consistent percentage of units sold per session.
- Now, how can I fix these problems and improve the number of my listings? At the bottom of this article please engage with us on this blog.
A good way to approach fixing these scenarios is through Split testing. Split testing or AB testing can start to help with getting conversions on Amazon. It will show us which listing preforms better against one another. It will help you to optimize the listing pictures, wording, titles and pricing of your product.
The results are more visitors, more conversions, improved conversion rate and ultimately higher profits.
Two easy to implement split tests are Price and Lead Product image.
If you are altering the price you can put that price up and down by 10% higher and lower. A higher price may lead to lower sales but possibly a better profit. The other way around is if you decrease the price and it leads to an increase in sales volume. It is something that you must test and analyze the results to get to your optimum sales volume for the Amazon business model relative to your competition.
The lead image is important to get visitors to click into your product. It allows you to stand out amongst the other listings that are in competition in your category and keywords. If you run a split test you can start to analyze which featured image is best to get those customers to your product listing and ultimately check out.
There are reports that indicate that a simple split test of a lead image/ featured image can increase the sales of your product by up to 90%.
Some tips include
- starting with something easy to manipulate like price or featured image.
- Only test one variable at a time
- You need to be constantly evolving your split tests to stay ahead of the competition
- Gather enough data to ensure your decisions are being done
