Amazon is an enormous online platform which provides access to millions of customers with high purchase intent – yet sometimes this is not enough to generate sufficient sales and product views.
Exploring new avenues and adding external traffic will help you to learn more about your customers whilst also boosting your online presence.
Why is external traffic important?
Anything which generates more traffic to your products on Amazon is overall a good thing. It’s one of the most fundamental ways of maintaining a strong position within Amazon and building your profits.
In addition, keeping a close watch over your external traffic will help to grow the presence of your brand beyond the limitations of Amazon. While it’s one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms, building visibility on other channels is a positive step for your brand.
Sometimes organic traffic can be generated to your product pages, but it is important to also work on boosting your presence elsewhere and drive traffic through your own marketing activities.
Generating external traffic will help you to:
Gain Amazon rewards
Amazon is often regarded as rewarding customers who find ways to generate external traffic to listings. The veracity of this claim is not known, but it is reasonable to expect that Amazon wants as much traffic as possible to its platform – and if that leads to sales, then all the better!
Drive traffic
Making sales is the prime aim of investing in Amazon ads, adding in external traffic can only help brands achieve that goal. Using external ads can raise brand profile, visibility and recall, which in turn helps to improve your rankings.
This will be particularly appealing to anyone who is struggling with ranking highly on Amazon using the tools within the platform itself. It’s a wise strategy to look into sourcing exterior traffic, with particular emphasis around the time of product launches and other key times for sales success.
For those who have already gained a strong foothold on Amazon, it is still important to seek other sources of traffic to generate leads and make sales. Looking outside of Amazon for traffic will help you gain far more control over the source of your sales, all while improving your performance on the platform itself.
Boost brand awareness
Many Amazon brands experience great success on the platform thanks to the large, global audience and the platform’s key role in product discovery. To really stand out though, your brand must be easily distinguishable from competitor brands.
It is worth noting that Amazon visibility, much like top Google search results, can be very hard to attain. It’s also difficult to differentiate your brand via Amazon listings alone as they must follow certain set formats and restrictions. Flouting those rules to stand out could have devastating consequences. There is a certain uniformity to selling something on the Amazon platform, which ensures consistent quality. However, it also restricts your ability to think outside the box, with attempts to do so generally looked on unfavourably.
Advertising elsewhere can sometimes offer a chance to get a little more creative, and show off more of the positive aspects about your brand – generating more interest and brand awareness in the process.
Improve keyword ranking
The more traffic you have, the more chances there are to improve your sales numbers. If you’re trying to find new ways to improve your Best Sellers Rank (BSR) then an increase in traffic could be the ideal way to achieve this goal.
Consider external traffic as supplementary to Amazon’s own organic traffic and any marketing activities carried out on Amazon itself. All activities which help to give your traffic more of a boost will also allow you to improve your standing on Amazon.
This is a much better strategy than simply relying only on Amazon itself, or thinking that buyers will find you regardless of whether you are carrying out any exterior marketing. It’s helpful to view your marketing efforts as a way to bridge gaps between you and your target market.
Beat the competition
If you’re selling a product people want, then it’s likely you’ll have plenty of competition. Overall, this competition is a positive thing, as it allows you to find new ways of excelling. You can certainly make great strides towards improving your Amazon listings for organic sales, but be aware that each of your competitors has the same idea.
To stay ahead of your competition, you’ll need to think more creatively. Keep in mind that your competitors are not only eager to outdo you in organic search, but will be buying ads which help them get their listings higher in the rankings too.
Competitors can even purchase listings on your products on Amazon, but looking for new ways to generate traffic outside of the platform will help you get a stronger presence online. Look to other sites where you can get your products and brand in front of interested customers, including everything from videos and blogs to PR, contenbt marketing, influencer relationships and social media platforms.
All of these methods will help to overcome the effects of competitors seeking to monopolise your products on Amazon itself.
Find new audiences
Amazon has plenty of incredible tools which will help you to find new customers – and appeal to them in a way which prompts a sale. Yet remember that a customer who finds you through Amazon and buys from you on Amazon is their customer, rather than purely your customer. When selling your goods on Amazon, this is always going to be a factor – but there are ways to gain a little more control.
The most powerful tool of all is to begin advertising off the platform, where you are more likely to be the first point of contact, leading to an Amazon sale.
An effective business model will allow you to sell your products and build a more powerful brand both on and off the platform, rather than limiting yourself solely to Amazon sales. To achieve this, you really do need to generate traffic for yourself. This can be achieved by making the most of the many external advertising platforms at your disposal.
How to drive external traffic
Amazon product listings can generate either internal traffic (via Amazon) or external traffic (outside of Amazon). Yet to drive external marketing, you will need to think carefully. A few key ways to drive more custom to your listings using exterior sources include:
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- YouTube
- Affiliate marketing
- Promotions
- Blogger outreach
Each of these sources will be suited to varying industries and intended outcomes, so research carefully and consider how they relate to your brand and audience.
The importance of landing pages
Despite the importance of generating external traffic to your Amazon products, there are still a few mistakes which should be avoided at all costs. The most important one to avoid is simply driving your traffic to product listings, as it can have a dramatically negative effect on your Amazon marketing activities.
We recommend that you focus on using your external traffic to build a stronger relationship with these new customers, and if all they do is buy a product and then leave, it will probably remain a one-sale relationship.
You will also miss out on the chance to capture other information from your buyers, including their preferences, age and contact details. All of these can then be used to help generate insights and fuel more effective targeting, but if all your traffic generation generates is a sale, then these insights are lost before they’ve even begun.
In addition, sending traffic to product listings will not be a positive step for Amazon rankings. External traffic can prompt lower conversion rates than traffic which is already on Amazon, as Amazon users typically have a high purchase intent. As a result, external traffic which reaches product pages may boost your views, but it could have a negative impact on your conversion rates.
Landing pages can help immensely in this area. They act as a buffer between you and people who are not interested enough to make a purchase. This filtering system encourages shoppers who have a true interest in your product to provide you with details. In addition, the data they provide is an important part of your product marketing and can be used in future projects.
The landing pages you use will vary depending on your intended outcomes. For boosting ranking and sales, Amazon landing pages are the best option.
Summary
Many brands do incredibly well on Amazon without ever branching out further. Despite this, such a reliance on just one platform is also fraught with risk. It is a much wiser strategy to be more diverse and establish multiple channels of communication between you and your target audience.
This, in turn, will result in a deeper and more positive relationship between the brand and your customers.
