If you’ve ever built a website, you’ll already know that there’s a big difference between traffic and sales. Even though many people are visiting your website, there’s no guarantee that these people will become paying customers. They may not convert.
This often happens when businesses focus all their attention on off-site marketing and SEO – activities that drive traffic – but fail to design an on-site experience that delights.
Sadly, the same thing can happen to Amazon sellers. You can have great products and impressive page views but low conversions and poor sales. The good news is that conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can help you turn things around.
Do You Have an Amazon PPC Conversion Rate Problem?
Don’t fix what isn’t broken. It may be that your conversion rate is good and that the expected percentage of users who view your listings are taking the action you want them to: making a purchase. But you could also find you’re falling a bit below average.
The first step should always be to find out what your Amazon conversion rate is. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in seller tool that works this out for you. But there is a simple calculation that you can do to determine how well your listings are performing:
Total Order Items / Total Product Sessions = Conversion Rate
It’s easy to find the details you need for the calculation in your seller account:
Reports > Business Reports > Detail Pages Sales and Traffic by Parent Item.
Here, you can see total orders per product and total sessions per product. Remember to use sessions rather than page views. They seem similar on the surface, but sessions refer to the number of unique visits, while page views refer to all views regardless of user. It’s much better to use total sessions to work out your Amazon conversion rate.
So, just what is a good conversion rate? That’s a difficult question to answer. What’s considered to be ‘good’ varies between categories and between price points, too. For example, users may be happy to convert easily on lower-priced products but might take a little more convincing when making a higher value purchase.
Data from previous Prime Day events suggests that the average Amazon conversion rate falls somewhere between 11.2% and 13.5% across all users. However, it is widely believed that conversion rates are significantly higher amongst Amazon Prime users.
What Causes a Poor Conversion Rate?
It’s often easy to blame a poor Amazon conversion rate on aspects like the product itself or its pricing. However, these are elements that are – in most cases – clearly visible to users in the search results. In addition, users can see basic product information such as price and pictures before clicking through to the listing. Therefore, it is much more likely that a poor conversion rate is down to on-page issues that need addressing.
Four common reasons for a low conversion rate are:
1. Content
If users are clicking through to your listings but failing to convert, they may see something in your on-page content that they don’t particularly like or that doesn’t speak to them. Content may be off-putting, inaccurate, or doesn’t meet shopper needs.
2. Keywords
Keywords are often discussed in terms of improving visibility in Amazon’s search results, but they play a significant role on listing pages, too. Failing to use keywords that audiences are scanning your listing for can make a product appear irrelevant to the user’s search.
3. Reviews
Globally, more than one-third of internet users read online reviews specifically to help them make a purchasing decision. Reviews can be the deciding factor, so listings with negative reviews, no reviews, or unaddressed reviews can be detrimental.
4. Checkout
The final big reason for a low conversion rate is that customers are deterred at the checkout stage as they see more detailed information about a product that isn’t especially obvious through the search results, such as delivery charges and lead times.
However, a poor conversion rate isn’t something you have to put up with. By using strategic Amazon CRO techniques, it’s possible to boost conversions and increase sales.
What is Amazon CRO?
Conversion rate optimisation is a strategy that helps Amazon sellers to optimise their listings and address the most common causes of a low conversion rate to create product listing pages that inspire, encourage and motivate visitors to make a purchase.
There are many possible ways to optimise for improved conversions, such as:
Optimising Your Keyword Strategy
Along with carefully considering the keywords you use in your titles and your advertising (if you’re choosing to use Amazon’s integrated PPC tools), it’s important to think in-depth about the keywords you’ll use within your product description and across your listing. Keywords must be relevant to the customer’s needs, and it’s important to use terms that the user is expecting to see. Matching keywords to user expectations provides the customer with confirmation that this product is what they’re looking for.
Optimising Your Listing
Your images and text can be optimised to better influence the customer’s decision-making process and help guide them through the buyer journey. Along with basic product pictures, consider adding photography that shows the product in use, giving the user a feel for how the product will fit into their lifestyle. Any text that you use should ensure it accurately represents and reflects the product in question, and don’t forget to proofread, too. A simple spelling error can put people off!
Optimising Your Content Strategy
Amazon sellers may often think of ‘content’ as their product descriptions. But there’s much more to ‘content’ than meets the eye. Absolutely everything on a product listing page is considered content, including peer-generated content such as questions and reviews. Building up your review profile and encouraging customers to leave reviews can help to boost conversions, as can responding promptly to any questions asked and negative reviews.
Optimising Your Logistics
Suppose checkout is where you’re losing the most potential customers. In that case, you can optimise your logistics to make shipping and delivery more cost-effective and efficient for your customers, making your product a more attractive choice than competing products. The best way to do this is to sign up for the Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) programme. When an order is placed, this involves sending an agreed shipment to an Amazon warehouse, which automatically dispatches the goods – often at zero cost to customers.
Does CRO Really Work?
There’s a straightforward and highly effective way to determine if your Amazon CRO efforts are succeeding in boosting conversions. You can also use this same method to identify which changes have had the most significant impact: A/B testing.
A/B testing is a technique that allows you to measure the impact of two different approaches, making it easy to see which optimisation tactics work and which don’t.
Amazon offers a built-in tool that allows you to A/B test your A+ content, product images, and product titles. It’s called ‘Manage Your Experiments’, and it’s currently available to brand registered sellers operating across Europe and the United States.
During an ‘experiment’, Amazon randomly assigns either listing A or listing B to shoppers viewing your product page. With minor differences between the two versions (such as a different main image or title), sellers can see which version of the product page results in more sales.
What Else Can Help?
Along with these classic Amazon CRO strategies, a few additional aspects can help improve your conversion rate. Some techniques to try out include:
Advertising
By leveraging built-in ad campaign options like Sponsored Products, sellers can increase the chance of their products being displayed in Amazon search results, driving more traffic to product pages and subsequently boosting conversion possibilities
Boosting Sales Rank
Along with advertising, a superior sales rank can help to improve product visibility, resulting in more opportunities for conversion. A better sales rank can be achieved by taking measures to compete against products in the same category
Achieving Badges
There are two badges that sellers can add to their product listings to improve customer confidence: Best Seller and Amazon’s Choice. Working to earn one or both of these badges can help motivate users to take action and convert.
Why CRO on Amazon Is Important
Why does conversion rate really matter? Because, as a platform, Amazon is expanding, growing and developing all the time. It’s continuously rolling out more features for sellers to promote their products and get their offerings in front of the right eyes at the right time. As a result, Amazon is increasingly an awareness platform.
However, none of that matters if your awareness and promotional efforts aren’t driving results in the form of sales. By tracking your conversion rate, optimising for success, and uncovering what works – and what doesn’t – you’re taking the essential steps towards ensuring everything you do on Amazon delivers exceptional value.
If you need help with your Amazon campaigns get in touch with us.
