Selling on Amazon Australia and How The Amazon PPC Platform Works
Timestamps
00:38 – Episode Overview
03:30 – Are there opportunities in Amazon Australia
05:20 – Product categories that does well in Amazon Australia
07:13 – Should people get into Amazon Australia now
09:52 – Bringing products from the Amazon US to Amazon Australia as Strategy
11:37 – Biggest mistakes people are making in terms of creating their products
16:32 – Helicopter View on Amazon PPC Platform
23:05 – Ideal conversion rate of a product page
24:29 – Auto Campaign’s campaign structure
26:52 – Thoughts on sending external traffic to an Amazon listing
36:26 – How Brand Registry works on Amazon
Episode & Guest Overview
Ilana:
So welcome back to another episode of Teach traffic. I’m your host, Ilana Wechsler, and today I’m interviewing a guy called Chris Thomas from the Australian seller.com. Chris is very experienced in the e-commerce world, specifically on Amazon.
And we’re going to sort of talk all about different traffic generating strategies to your Amazon store within the Amazon platform, and obviously, off the Amazon platform to your Amazon store. So welcome to today’s show, Chris.
Chris Thomas:
Good eye. And thanks for having me, Ilana. It’s great to be on your show.
Ilana:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. I know we’re all very, very busy people. So I really, really appreciate your time today.
So I mean, I’m personally always interested in people’s stories. So do you want to give us the helicopter quick five seconds? I don’t want to drag on. How did you get into the Amazon world? What led you there?
Chris Thomas:
Well, I’ve been selling online since 2001. So I invented a product. And I figured out how Google works. I got quite good at SEO in the 2000s.
And then, in 2012, my main product, I decided that I would redesign it and launch it on Kickstarter. That was around 2013 in the middle of 2013 and raised about 110,000 us on Kickstarter, which was great. And then that really bootstrapped the business and took it up to the next level.
Continue to sell on my website, doing regular ecommerce, you know, with AdWords and SEO, that sort of thing. But then I decided, having met a friend who was selling Amazon at the time who just started, that Amazon would be an excellent new channel for my business.
And so launched on Amazon at the beginning, I think of 2015. And it just took off. And I’ve been selling on Amazon ever since.
Ilana:
Right. Before we hit record. We were sort of just chit chatting off air, basically. And I’m just curious, which marketplaces Are you currently selling in which Amazon marketplaces?
Chris Thomas:
Yeah, so I’ve got some patents and partnerships on various products. One of the partnerships is actually with my brother.
So we sell, we have exclusive agreements to distribute and sell products on Amazon in the United States and in India, and also in Japan and Australia, so that Amazon has umpteen marketplaces off the web I couldn’t even listen to for about 20.
So the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, UK, all throughout Europe, so that’s Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, I think the Netherlands now Sweden, and then soon, we’ll be going into India, as I said, into India, and Singapore is one. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, there’s a lot going on.
Are there opportunities in Amazon Australia
Ilana:
I know a lot of my listeners are in Australia. So I’m curious as to your thoughts on what the Amazon Australia marketplace is like. Do you think it’s a big opportunity for people or is it still very much in its infancy? Yeah. I’m just interested in your thoughts about Amazon, Australia.
Chris Thomas:
Okay. This has been a really contentious conversation that I’ve had with lots of people over the last three years since Amazon started here.
We’re getting close to four years now coming up two. Let’s put it this way, Amazon is investing very, very heavily in Australia.
They have now up three operations on possibly four operational warehouses with two enormous new warehouses has been built by Melbourne and Sydney.
The one in Sydney is pretty much fully automated, and will be online I think around October of 2021, which is when we’re recording this year.
And so they’ve invested billions. Last year they had revenues, I believe, of over a billion dollars, so put them into the top tier of sort of, you know, Catch, eBay, Kogan, and Amazon. I think there may be a third behind Catch.
So they and that was a 100% increase in their revenue from the previous year. One of the issues that Amazon faces I think, at the moment in Australia, in particular is that a lot of customers hesitant to shop there because the range isn’t very good and Amazon’s trying to attract more merchants to sell on Amazon Australia, but because As the customers aren’t sort of that engaged there, and eBay is still the dominant platform. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg.
So I think Amazon needs new customers, but at the same time, they also need new merchants to be able to flesh out the catalog. So there’s a bit of a, I think they’re still fighting an uphill battle, but they will get there. They’re not going away. And I think they’re playing a long term game here.
Product categories that does well in Amazon Australia
Ilana:
Yeah. Interesting. Are there certain categories that do well, on Amazon, Australia, like, maybe they’ve got the merchants and they’ve got the customers there versus other categories?
Chris Thomas:
Definitely. So a lot of the consumable categories, things like nappies and things, you know, and toys, they do very, very well, electronics does very well, on Amazon, Australia.
Amazon actually is still fleshing out its categories that it’s offering as well. So recently, as early as last year, or recently, as last year, they actually opened up like the pet category, for example.
So now you can order your cat litter in your pet food and things like that. And there’s grocery as well. So there’s a lot of different categories that don’t exist, that exist on other marketplaces, and still not here in Australia.
And I think as the category assortment really begins to grow, then the customers will continue flooding.
And, you know, look what I’m saying to any potential client of mine or indeed any student of mine, is that if you’re looking at Amazon, Australia also need to think about a multi channel approach here in Australia in order to be able to get the scale that you might be expecting out of your business.
So that would include selling your exact same products on eBay, potentially on Catch. Kogan is a little bit more curated as a marketplace. There’s my deals if your that was a handful of other marketplaces as well. And you know, obviously, including Amazon, Australia, so it’s sort of an omni channel approach here in Australia to really make a fist of it, I think. Interesting.
Ilana:
So is it quite easy to get on Catch? I mean, do you? Is it the similar model to Amazon? Where you send product into the warehouse? Or are you as the vendor sending the product out?
Chris Thomas:
That is a really good question. I don’t think Catch actually has a fulfillments offering at the moment, maybe they do. I’m honestly not sure. So you might have caught me on X, I’d actually don’t sell in Catch. I’m not fully familiar with it. But I do believe it’s not too hard to actually get your products listed there.
Should people get into Amazon Australia now
Ilana:
That’s really interesting. And what would you say to somebody who is looking to get into the Amazon game? If they’re located in Australia? Would you recommend starting with Amazon Australia? Or would you say, there’s not enough people in Amazon, Australia? Don’t start here, would you then do different marketplaces first, they have a lot more traction like the US, for example??
Chris Thomas:
God, that’s another really great question. I think Amazon Australia’s a great place to get started, cut your teeth and learn how Amazon works, because it is a lot different to eBay. incredibly different in many ways. So it might be a great place to sort of launch your very first product to understand the process from one end to the other.
So you know, product, I guess product research to some extent, you know, sending a product to an Amazon warehouse and what that what’s involved there creating a shipping plan or an event shipping notice, right through the listing optimization and keyword research, and then out to the sponsored advertising, which we might touch on a bit more detail.
The big differences really, some kind of try and answer your question a roundabout way, but Amazon in the United States is, to some extent, quite saturated. So whereas it can be a lot more difficult. And the riches on Amazon in the US are in the niches that’s really that you know that the same has never been true.
In Australia, the riches are in the top 100 best selling products, you know, like this, you need to have a product that is in a fast moving, there’s a lot of keyword volume and research that’s, you know, basically keyword via a lot of people looking for the product on Amazon in Australia. And so there’s various tools that you can use to assess that keyword volume to understand the demand because on Amazon keywords are products effectively.
And that’s the only way that people can actually find your product generally apart from say today’s deals where people will shop for stuff, you don’t even know what they want to buy. They just look for something that’s shaped. The only other way that people find products on Amazon is by typing keywords into the search bar. So search engine is different from Google.
And so some of the tools that help us understand now which have recently been released, in fact, as early as this year, SEM Guru.
So they’ve got a keyword research tool that tells us the volume, estimated volume, and then there’s another established product called Helium10, which also gives us an understanding of the volumes as well. They’re probably the two that I would trust at the moment.
There are other products that I don’t trust or tools.
So to answer your question, I think the money is probably in the US. But there is also money here in Australia, but it’s a great place to learn and not sort of burned get too burnt. You can lose your shirt in the US if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Bringing products from the Amazon US to Amazon Australia as Strategy
Ilana:
Yeah, totally. I know some people really have a look at what’s doing well in the US and then bring it here. Bring it into Australia and different marketplaces. How viable do you think that strategy is?
Chris Thomas:
Very viable, very viable. So that’s actually the approach that my brother and I’ve taken in Europe. And so in India, we’ve taken extremely successful products in the US, we’ve got in touch with that brand owner or that product owner, and asked if it’s okay for us to sell their product exclusively in these other marketplaces, which, and I mean, obviously, we’re doing the same thing in Australia. And it has just turned into an absolute Money Making Machine. And that’s just one product.
So obviously, right, we’re on the hunt for more of those sorts of products to basically do sort of an international wholesaling, or to some extent, arbitrage, I suppose, but take those products, and, you know, that are just being sorted by marketplace. And that definitely works here in Australia.
Ilana:
I mean, though, what’s stopping that particular brand from just doing it themselves and putting them in the other marketplaces?
Chris Thomas:
Nothing’s stopping them from doing that. It’s just a headache. And you know, they’re doing very well in my marketplace.
Things like taxes, like in the US sales tax is really just not a big issue. Amazon collects all the sales tax for the seller, generally now. So but to go into the United Kingdom, or into Europe, the VAT requirements there, you know, you’ve got quarterly, basically the same thing as a best year in Australia with the GST.
And yeah, there’s just a lot of compliance that exists elsewhere, compared to say, the United States, particularly for business. So a lot of sellers just in the US are United States citizens that sell in the US just go, is it too hard? Yeah, I’m just not going to bother. So leave it to someone who knows what’s going on over there. You know, that makes sense.
Biggest mistakes people are making in terms of creating their products
Ilana:
I’m mindful, I really want to talk to you about the Amazon PPC platform and this sponsored stuff. But before we do, like, I’ve, you know, I’ve been dealing with traffic for a very, very long time, I kind of often say to people, it’s like, the PPC world is like dog years.
So I’ve been in the game for a very long time. And I know that you know, success with any kind of advertising online hinges on having a product that is that sells that people want.
Or, you know, as we said before, you know, an offer that converts, so you can send the best traffic in the world.
But if people don’t want your products, it’s like you often say to people, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig, right?
So I just want to kind of ask you, before we get into that traffic stuff. What is the biggest mistake that you see people make when it comes to creating their products?
Chris Thomas:
When it comes to Amazon, in particular, or just generally?
Certainly, certainly on Amazon, the biggest mistake I see sellers make enough. And I have coaching students come to me and they’ve already selected a product, they’ve already sent their product into Amazon.
And their mindset is, they’ve seen the ad revenue, the tools tell us, you know, like the Helium10 senses, I’m curious, like, yeah, this product, you know, there’s a whole bunch of products on page one of them is on their water bottles, for example, making, you know, turn $1,000 a month, they will be like 25,000 reviews, and they’re all five stars or four stars, and it’s just all they think to themselves.
If I could just get a small slice of that very big pie. You’re just you’re gonna, you’re gonna you’re gonna lose your shirt straight away.
Ilana:
Why? Why do you think that is?
Chris Thomas:
Because Well, can you imagine? Well, first of all, trying to rank on those keywords is almost next to impossible. The keyword volumes are huge, but the established sellers are really put there. They’ve just stamped it.
They’ve been around for years, they’ve got millions of reviews. And let’s say that you popped up in the middle of page one on Amazon.com for the search term, water bottle. Looking for that small slice of a big pie.
And the only way that you’re going to get on page one is an enormous amount of money spent on PPC and or a massive what’s called a rebated or giveaway launch.
So you need to basically match the amount of sales that those other competitors are getting in order to try and secure that position for that keyword.
Now, where so that’s a really expensive exercise, I can tell you, and then when you actually get there and you’ve launched and you’ve spent you’re spending less money on PPC and trying to get people onto your listing, one of the things that you’re that Amazon’s algorithm is looking at is the easy conversion rate.
And with no reviews, or very few reviews compared to everybody else, your conversion rate is not going to be anywhere near as good as anybody as the other sellers there. And within a day or two or a week or so you will just disappear on page one and into oblivion having spent a lot of money still left with tons of inventory.
You’ve spent 1000s more launching or on set, you know, PPC then you’re so far in the hole that your head is spinning and I’ve seen that happen.
Ilana:
Interesting. So you’d say the biggest mistake would be they’ve got like one massive competitor that’s just a behemoth that they can’t compete with.
Chris Thomas:
I would even just say that the entire one and page one and two of Amazon are completely saturated. So often it comes down to keyword selection.
And you know, we know Both of us that product differentiation is the most important thing. And so and that’s where keyword and long tail search terms and the niches I was talking about, that’s where the money is on Amazon.
And I think that’s, that’s probably the, that’s where I see a lot of sellers do well, because they were able to differentiate their product and do something really different to it.
And you know, not just go straight to Alibaba and pick a product off the shelf like a garlic press and put it in a box with their own brand label on it.
And it’s the same garlic presses all the others that are on Amazon, you know, that classic Alibaba Amazon private label, which just better rebrand, you know, that stuff doesn’t really work, you need to spend a bit of time and thought you got to think about how can I make the product better, you can look at reviews that are on current products, understanding where, you know, if there’s a common sort of set of issues that all the products on page one of Amazon, you know, suffer from, and I like a plastic clip that keeps breaking.
So if you go to the manufacturer, say, can you change that plastic clip on this product to a metal one, for example, it’s much more robust, it’s probably, you know, and then you call that any listing? And that’s, it’s just that sort of stuff that you need to think about and do in order to and that’s a really small example. But yeah, that’s, um, that’s sort of level you need to get to.
Ilana:
Yeah, cool. Okay. Are there any other classic mistakes people make? Or that’s pretty much it?
Chris Thomas:
Oh, this is just so many I’d be here all day. Not understanding this, the the PPC side of it, the sponsored advertising, which we’re going to talk about next. Yeah, that’s it. That’s a big one. A lot of people burn through tons of cash on that.
Helicopter View on Amazon PPC Platform
Ilana:
And yeah, Alrighty. Well, that sounds like a good segue into the PPC world. Do you want to give us the sort of helicopter view about the Amazon PPC platform? I think a lot of our listeners are very well aware of the Google Ad platform. And is it sort of very similar or what are the…how is it different?
Chris Thomas:
Well, it’s Google AdWords, probably 2012, maybe even before that. So it’s an absolute doddle for anybody that’s got an ounce of experience using AdWords.
I mean, I think you pretty much need a university degree at the moment to run AdWords. I had one of the first AdWords accounts here in Australia, way back in 2002, when it was first launched here.
Back then, that we didn’t even have a match types, like it was just, yeah, it was so easy. Yeah, and I do run a little bit of low level PPC for my own businesses, but not much sure, I would say so I’m a little bit rusty. And I’m not that good at it. But I’ve been out of that.
But certainly for Amazon PPC to give you the helicopter view there, there are effectively Look, it depends. So there are a few levels here, but they’re effectively as a new seller, which isn’t brand registered.
So that means that if you don’t have a trademark, you don’t get access to additional advertising, benefits and goodies sort of you know, levels that you can use, such as sponsored display, and retargeting, for example, which only available to brands that take the trouble to spend the money to get a trademark and then tell Amazon about their trademark.
And then I can unlock those extra advertising goodies. But for most sellers who are not brand registered, don’t have a trademark, there are effectively three different types of ads that you can run.
One of them is called an automatic campaign, the most simplest thing, and that’s basically done for you. So you tell Amazon what product you want to advertise. So you just select a product out of your inventory. And you say I want to advertise this product.
Let’s say it’s a garlic press, Amazon sort of scan through the listing and looks at the keywords in your listing. And then it tries to show your product for those keywords that are that it thinks are related to your product.
As well as it also shows your products on other people’s product pages or other competitors product pages too. And so there’s no match types, no nothing, you just sit there. And what you can do is create negative keywords. If you see Amazon messing up, then you can tell them to stop bidding on a keyword or indeed someone else’s product if it’s totally unrelated to your garlic press.
Ilana:
Did you set your bids as well for that day?
Chris Thomas:
Yeah, but it’s a blanket bid. So you don’t get a lot of control. You basically, you know, you set it maybe 75 cents or $1.
And you don’t always pay that slot like AdWords, you know, it’s all about the auction. So, you just tell Amazon what is the maximum that you want to spend per click and let them do the rest.
The other type, sorry, this is turning into a detailed conversation about a helicopter view. Sorry about this Ilana (chuckles).
And then the other type, of course is the manual keyword and ad targeting which is and there’s a couple of nuances in here which I’ll discuss but where you you’ve got match types, you’ve got keywords, you’ve done your keyword research, you’re pretty confident that garlic press and garlic press for garlic and all these different keywords that you’ve you’ve found in your pre keyword research.
You can throw those in and have granular bids on each of those keywords. And you can also set match types and you’ve got ad groups. You’ve got campaigns and ad groups and that sort of thing to say you can break out your ad groups into right This is my exact match ad group, my phrase match ad group, my broad match ad group, so on and so forth. And the very last thing you can do is, you can actually deliberately select people’s products to show your products on to. So you can actually bid to show up on people’s products. And often what we do in our world is that we look at our automatic campaign when we first start launching a product.
And we look to see whether we’ve received conversions on other people’s products. Okay, and if we have, then we bring those products into a product targeting campaign, targeting keywords, we just want to tell Amazon to show our ad or our product on these other people’s products. Of course, you want to negative that out of your automatic campaign, so that you’re not bidding against yourself within two campaigns. And then and then you can sort of granularly set the bid for each individual product the targeting.
Ilana:
So what you’re implying is that you use your automatic campaign or your discovery campaign, like Amazon go away and find me traffic go away and find the products that are similar to this or where you think it should my ad should be, and keywords that people are using, and get the data associated with that, in order to then replicate into manual campaigns.
Chris Thomas:
Spot on, yeah, and then you just get that much more control at bid levels, so that you can, you know, you might have products or keywords that sort of perform well, in the automatic campaign for whatever reason, they’re not doing particularly well on the in the manual campaign.
And you can just lower the bids down to 20 cents, or you’ve got a product or a keyword that’s really going off, and you can throw the bids out, because you know that you’re still making money.
Ilana:
What about that is the long term view with that strategy, the idea that you’re ultimately going to be turning off that auto campaign? Or is the view that you will always keep that auto campaign running, and will just feed your manual campaigns?
Chris Thomas:
Yeah, that’s right. So I think, generally speaking, what I do after about a month of discovery is, you know, to your point earlier, which is really well expressed, is to not actually ever turn off the automatic campaign.
But what I do is I run it at super low bids. So occasionally, I get any auction, and super low bids, I mean, probably about 15 to 20 cents US. So I’m not getting a lot of traffic or impressions, indeed, but they just seem to perform quite well.
And the, you know, Amazon’s reporting is pretty quite primitive, as well, we’ve just got ROAS. Whereas before, they had their own system called advertising cost of sales, where it was expressed as a percentage of, you know, like, if you spent $100, and you made $1,000.
In year, a cost was 10%. Whereas Yeah, we’ve row edited by the inverse of that conversion rate data, it’s really something you have to work out yourself to some extent. So you don’t get a lot of conversion rate information by so. But getting back to your original question, yeah, the automatic campaigns, I just run them very low. I was getting going. Once I’ve got the data, that’s it.
Ideal conversion rate of a product page
Ilana:
What would you say is a typical conversion rate of a product page? And it was, I guess my question is more in the context of, is there a minimum conversion rate of your product page, which it needs to be at in order for PPC to be successful? And if it’s lower that number, should you fix your listing first, before you start PPC? That kind of makes sense?
Chris Thomas:
It does. Yeah. I think PPC would be extremely difficult to make profitable if you had a conversion rate lower than 10%. So ideally, you would have a conversion rate of around anywhere between 15 to 30. Anything above 30, I’ve seen it and I’ve got products that do that. But it’s, you know, it’s rare, but it’s a great place to be.
You’ve got a lot more advantage and a lot more leverage in terms of how much you can afford to beat obviously, because you’re making more profit generally.
But a lot of the conversion rate really, there’s a lot of things that can influence conversion rate, you could drop your price to $1, a unit and your conversion rate would go through the roof, but you will be going backwards so quickly. Not funny. So there’s a lot of things to consider and conversion rate and how to move that needle.
So yeah, fixing the listing is one option, or certainly one lever that you can pull that and pricing is another but there’s a lot of things to balance in terms of trying to maintain profitability when it comes to advertising.
Auto Campaign’s campaign structure
Ilana:
Going back to the campaign structure, which is what we’re really talking about, of you know, having an auto campaign, and I would imagine your manual campaigns are bidding higher than your auto campaigns. Do you split that out even further, and create an exact match campaign which bids the highest? And then the next layer down is a broad match campaign? Also manual and then at the bottom of that pyramid? Is your auto Do you kind of go to that level of granularity?
Chris Thomas:
Yes. And also do phrase as well. So I probably got about four levels there. So a lot of the campaign’s I’m kind of moving, do the exact Yeah, the best keywords from exact matching, discovering them in broad and phrase in auto, and then just bring them up into exact and then doing negatives out in those others and really making Amazon work hard to discover new keywords for me.
But after a while, honestly, it does become that I’m just checking my advertising once a week. Interesting, when you’ve dialed it in that much. It just depends on what you’re trying to sell. Yep. And, you know, and just setting daily budgets and things like that. So you’re not bleeding out. You know.
Ilana:
I’ve also heard of a strategy. And I’m interested in your thoughts on this on the viability of it, of people who run multiple auto campaigns at once.
Like four or five auto campaigns in conjunction, like, at the same time.
Chris Thomas:
On Amazon?
Ilana:
On Amazon.
Chris Thomas:
Okay. Wow, I haven’t heard that.
Ilana:
Oh, you haven’t heard that?
Chris Thomas:
I’m an old school, advertiser, and Amazon. So I get it. Like, there’s all sorts of things I’ve heard about like waterfalls and things like that. There’s just 1,000,001 different ways to skin the cat.
But you’re running multiple autos. Now, I’ve never heard it. Never heard of that. So it’s interesting.
Ilana:
Actually, it did not do too badly.
Chris Thomas:
Wow! I’ll just give it a try. I’m just gonna make a quick note here Ilana. In fact, about is my Facebook group and to see if anybody else has done that, and what the results have been like, that’s really cool.
Ilana:
And bid different amounts for it.
Chris Thomas:
Yeah. Sort of thinking about it, match it all up.
Ilana:
So as I said, I’ve done it. And I was quite surprised. Actually, I got a ton more traffic, and I got some extra sales that way. Anyway…
Chris Thomas:
Nice! Thank you.
Thoughts on sending external traffic to an Amazon listing
Ilana:
No worries. I want to also touch on sending external traffic to an Amazon listing. That’s something that I’ve dabbled with. But I’m really interested in your thoughts on it. Obviously, you can’t do Google Shopping, because you need to send shopping ads to your own product page, not on Amazon, but possibly Google Search Ads. If you did that, and your thoughts on it.
Chris Thomas:
Yes. So Google Ads into Amazon is a really, really good idea. And it seems to work very well in the United States.
So the reason why is because the destination URL is actually Amazon, and millions, hundreds of millions of Americans, I would say hundreds of millions, but certainly over 100 million Americans are Prime members, they have an annual subscription that they pay to get free shipping and all the other goodies that Amazon offers.
So when somebody in the US, for example, is on Google, and they see there’s, there’s a product that is on special or something and the destination URL is Amazon.com, there’s a lot of trust associated with that. And their propensity to click through and go on Amazon to buy is a really good idea.
We’re certainly very attracted to them compared to say someone else’s, you know, take your own website.
Now, the issue that we faced in the past has been around attribution. So we just don’t get a lot of we don’t get any analytics out of Amazon.
However, remember when I was talking about Brand Registry and trademarks, and that sort of stuff, if you do take that trouble, and I strongly recommend to anybody that’s serious about selling Amazon is to get a trademark. And you can use an Australian trademark to get Brand Registry in a marketplace like the US or indeed anywhere pretty much in the world.
And what that enables you to do as well as part of the advertising stuff I was talking about. But you can also set up what’s called a brand store and is basically your own, almost like an HTML store within Amazon.
So it’s like Amazon.com forward slash your brand name. And you’ve got this sort of showcase of, of, you know, videos and product pages and products and text and images and whatever you want. And it’s basically a website within Amazon.
And if you send traffic from your AdWords campaign, you can mark up the destination URL from within that that section of the of Amazon’s seller central area where you’re selling from in that install builder area you can basically mark up your traffic and create that attribution and Amazon will report back to you I got you say 100 visits from an AdWords account for your an Adwords for example, into the store and that resulted in 10 sales and it also tells you the revenue as well so then you can go back and work out what your return on investment is from your AdWords perspective.
And so that’s sort of quite a new powerful incentive by Amazon to tell us as sellers drive more external traffic into Amazon. Give us more customers.
Ilana:
They did the same in Facebook traffic?
Chris Thomas:
Yeah, same thing if you mark up the destination URL into your Amazon store with and just append it with a query string. So it basically says Facebook in the end doesn’t change the URL.
It just says the tracking tracking. You can then say then you got attribution on your Facebook, spend and year and Return on Investment on your advertise on your AdWords or your email campaigns, whatever you’re running, you know, the external traffic, Pinterest ads, whatever. You know how it goes. So, yeah, that’s, that’s been a real real boon for us. And here’s the other thing too, that a lot of, I guess people that are unfamiliar with Amazon don’t understand or don’t realize is that with Amazon advertising, it actually does influence your organic rank.
So obviously….
Ilana:
Amazon PPC?
Chris Thomas:
Amazon PPC, exactly. So if you’re sending, let’s just pack the whole sort of outside traffic in but if you’re bidding on keywords on Amazon, you know, the regular sponsor that we talked about manually, exactly. And all that stuff. And auto.
If someone buys a product through a keyword, let’s say that it’s an a garlic press mentor as a keyword, and someone sees your ad, they click it having typed in that keyword, they click your ad, they visit your product, they buy it, Amazon’s algorithm works on a when people type in this keyword, Amazon was at “garlic press mincer”.
They buy this product more than they buy any other product. And so that’s what Amazon looks at. And it doesn’t matter if that happens organically or whether it happens through an ad, Amazon will increase the rank of your product because that’s a really important concept to understand sales through keywords equals rankings for that keyword.
No matter how you get it within reason.
So now if you try, you can to some extent encourage people to use those keywords. When that is when you’re advertising.
So you can create a lot of clever advertisers, what they do is that they use the external advertising to increase their organic rank. And the way they do that is to create a competition or, or incentive for someone to type in a keyword to receive a discount or rebate.
So for example, like in a Facebook ad, you can say something like, you know, we’ve got a search find by campaign running and you know, search this keyword, find our product, buy it, and we will give you 50% off, or we will give you a rebate 50%.
Ilana:
So a bit of blackhat though?
Chris Thomas:
It’s gray, but Amazon is okay with rebates at the moment. So they and so there are a lot of these rebate services that are springing up like rebate key, I don’t advise you to use rebate key, there are many of these rebate sort of services that exist, where you can tell people you can have 100% off, just go buy my product, right.
And, and so you know, what that does is it gets the sales velocity up, which is another part of the algorithm. But um, yeah, so offering rebates and using search find buy where there’s a real organic experience that Amazon’s algorithms say where someone types in garlic press mincer, they go to Amazon, they find your product, they buy your product, they search find buy at the moment is working absolute treat.
Ilana:
Interesting. And is that against Amazon’s Terms of Service?
Chris Thomas:
No, it is not.
Ilana:
Interesting. And I guess there’s no real way of proving that they searched for it other than that they just managed to find it and didn’t provide a link for it.
Chris Thomas:
That’s great. Yeah, that big mistake a lot of people make is that they send their outside traffic straight to their listing. It’s actually better to… it’s a very difficult thing to explain verbally, we almost need to do a screen share.
But another way that you can send the outside traffic in is to with a keyword associated with it is to drive it into you. How did we do this? It’s okay to omit it’s impossible for me to explain, but there is a way to do it.
So if anybody wants to find out how I do that. Just get in touch with me after the show. I guess. I’ll take him through it. I’ll shoot a video or loom video or something.
Ilana:
Is this the storefront URL?
Chris Thomas:
It’s a storefront URL. Yeah.
Ilana:
So you and you append a search query to…
Chris Thomas:
Correct, yep. So you populate the storefront with because I was talking about Amazon stores earlier. And that’s a different kind of thing.
I didn’t want to confuse anybody about how that works. So that’s why I said again, I was going to pick it too hard to pick it because they’re different.
They’re actually two different things, even though they sound the same. But yeah, the storefront URL? That’s right, yeah. So you can kind of pre populate and search within the store for the particular product you’re trying to offer.
Ilana:
So you would recommend anyone who’s doing any kind of external traffic to your Amazon product to use that storefront URL, instead of sending straight to the product page?
Chris Thomas:
I’ll probably mix it up a bit. Look, storefront URLs were working amazingly well, about two years ago. They don’t work quite as well today, in fact, nowhere near as well as what they used to because Amazon sort of tweaked to what was going on. Yeah. But they still do work to some extent. Yeah. So it’s still worth doing.
Ilana:
Okay. Is there anything else That you would like to let our listeners know in terms of sending traffic to your Amazon listing either within the Amazon platform or off?
Chris Thomas:
No, I think that pretty much covers it. All I can say really just to sort of put the full stop on this is that Amazon loves external traffic being driven in to your product page or to your storefront, or indeed to a search find by no matter how it happens if you drive traffic into Amazon, Amazon’s algorithms now definitely rewarding products itself from external traffic.
So they want as many new customers as they can get. Never ever forget that they’re not your customers. They are Amazon’s customers. And if you want to pay for traffic to drive it in, then Amazon will reward your brand and your products with better rankings and hopefully more sales.
Ilana:
What would you guess our final sort of parting words for our listeners? What would be I guess the number one advice that you would give someone looking to sell on Amazon? Or who already is selling on Amazon?
Chris Thomas:
Look, there’s no doubt that you know some of that Brand Registry earlier. I think it’s not going to be long before you won’t be able to sell on Amazon without trademarking outright without being a legitimate brand. I’d say it’s probably…
How Brand Registry works on Amazon
Ilana:
I want to ask you something on that one. I know that there are many sellers who sell lots of different products in a number of different categories. And therefore when they should have multiple brand registries, or they just create one Brand Registry and then put all the different brands under that one?
Chris Thomas:
It’s up to them. Yeah, that’s a complex question for I think if you’re just a pure Amazon play, you’ve got some brand name that doesn’t make sense to anybody. You know, it’s wizzy. Wigan was I mean, and you’re just about, I just want to sell as much stuff on Amazon as I can.
And I want to get access to Brand Registry so that I can do the advertising for all the other stuff that we talked about storefront whatnot, and you’re really just a big department store full of weird and wonderful various categories and whatnot, go crazy. It’s fine.
I think if you’re trying to build a legitimate brand, it’s better to or brands, if you got multiple brands, in some cases, it may in fact, be better to have multiple amazon seller accounts. So you need to ask permission in order to be able to do that. But it is possible to do it and then have each brand separate as separate stores, amazon seller central accounts.
That way, if one of them really is going off, or you decide to take some money off the table, you can sell that brand, you can sell that entire store, to a new owner and the valuations on FBA businesses or Amazon businesses are through the roof right now.
So I’m doing a lot of consulting with a lot of these third-party aggregators. There’s a new one here in Australia called Owner Brands who’ve got 40 million US dollars, and they are spending it like crazy on Amazon.
I’m helping them transfer Amazon businesses from existing Australian owners to them. At the moment, yeah, for really good multiples.
Ilana:
Yeah, amazing. Cool. Well, Chris, you’ve been a wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on today’s show. And yeah, if any of our listeners want to find out more about you and what you’re up to where they can find out more information about you?
Chris Thomas:
You can contact me directly via email at chris@christhomas.com.au it’s pretty straightforward. Or wander over to my Facebook group, which is the Australian Seller Podcast Facebook group, just go to thetheaustralianseller.com/facebook and I’m in there and I’ll let you in and approve of you and you can DM me or whatever we do in the chat. Yep.
Ilana:
Sounds good. Well, thank you so much, and we’ll give us a wrap. Thanks so much.
Chris Thomas:
Hey, thanks, Ilana. All the best.