#627 – Amazon Ranking Strategies

What if understanding Amazon’s A9 algorithm could transform your Amazon-selling game? Join us in a captivating conversation with Brian Johnson, Co-Founder and CPO at DeepM AI, as we unravel the secrets to mastering Amazon’s search rankings. Brian shares the essential strategies sellers need for maintaining and regaining their positions in Amazon’s fiercely competitive marketplace. Discover how data-driven approaches can offer powerful insights into tackling ranking challenges.

Explore the nuanced world of Amazon’s A9 algorithm and the myriad of factors that shape product search rankings. From sales velocity and inventory issues to the surprising influence of TikTok-driven search term trends, we cover it all. Brian provides a deep dive into the phenomenon of search term bleed and how emerging platforms shift consumer behavior. Learn how to leverage these insights to stay ahead of competitors and adapt to shifting marketplace dynamics.

Finally, we discuss practical tactics for optimizing your Amazon listings and advertisements to boost sales and profitability. Understand the critical metrics—like click-through and conversion rates—that drive success. With a focus on competitive analysis and innovative metrics like “tacos sauce,” we highlight how to comprehensively monitor and enhance your e-commerce performance. Whether you’re a seasoned seller or just starting, these insights will empower you to optimize your strategies and thrive on Amazon.

(Time Stamps) – 

In episode 627 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie, Kevin, and Brian discuss:

• 00:00 – Ranking on Amazon Algorithm Strategies
• 02:39 – Decoding the A9 Algorithm
• 06:31 – Improving Amazon Search Rank Control
• 09:36 – Factors Affecting Amazon Search Rank
• 11:46 – Influencer Impact on Search Terminology
• 14:02 – Amazon Search Rank Factors Analysis
• 15:45 – Understanding A9 Algorithm Factors
• 21:47 – Amazon Ranking Algorithm and Conversion Rate
• 25:28 – Amazon Search Ranking Optimization Strategies
• 28:59 – Product Profitability Analysis Strategy
• 33:54 – Commitment Required for Amazon Success
• 38:37 – Analyzing Past Ad Performance for ROI
• 40:21 – Competitor Monitoring and Metric Analysis
• 42:29 – ACoS Sauce Concept and Visibility 

Transcript

Kevin King:

We’ve got some great stuff for you today. The person coming on to speak with you is someone that I’ve known. I think I met him early on when I started doing private label. I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2001. But in 2015 is when I actually started doing this whole private label thing that most of us know now and what we teach in the Freedom Ticket. And right around that time there’s this guy that had this. He was doing this like PPC stuff and he was posting online about how to do PPC, and back then PPC was pretty simple. It was like just put an ad up and let it go. It wasn’t complicated like it is now, but people were still complaining back then about losing money on PPC, back when it was still like five cents a click instead of $3 a click and he kind of was figuring it out. So he ended up developing a software tool that automated this whole kind of process to an extent, and he was in a mastermind group that we had formed. It was a private mastermind group, not for pay, and every Tuesday I think it was we would get together for a couple hours and just shoot the bull for a couple hours about different things and got to know him, he’s one of the smartest guys in the space. He ended up developing that PPC software, ended up turning into an agency and that agency ended up being one of the biggest agencies in the PPC space. He exited that agency just recently and prior to exiting it, he was starting to work on his next project and now he’s full time on this next project. It’s called DeepM. You might have heard it. You heard him on AM PM podcast I guess it was about a month ago or so where he was talking about it, and this guy is someone he geeks out on the data. So, when it comes to the A9 algorithm and, by the way, there is no such thing as an A10. You hear some people online say there’s an A10. Anybody that tells you an A10, run as fast as you can away from them. There is no such thing as an A10. It’s the A9 algorithm. But he’s devoting his time and his energy and his money right now, along with a partner, to figuring out exactly how does the A9 algorithm work. Nobody knows the exact secret sauce Only a few people in that division do but they’ve figured out some of the things that can move the needle, so he’s going to be sharing some of that with you today, so I think you’re going to really enjoy this with Mr. Brian Johnson.

Brian:

So I’ll make you a deal as far as today. So I’m not going to be teaching about product launches or PPC tactics or moving to TikTok, or even going deep into the intricate details of data science and deep learning and how the A9 algorithm works. What I am going to do is I want to help you fight your way out of the corner that many of you have gotten into as far as being able to lose search ranking on search terms that matter to you. You don’t feel like you have the ability to take them back. It’s too expensive. You don’t exactly know how to get it back. I’m going to share with you on some of the strategies that I use in order to figure out the source of the problem as far as losing search rank to someone else, and I want to help you solve that. Just a little bit of background for those of you who don’t know me I’ve been in e-commerce for about 17 years. Amazon space for 10 years. I’ve worked on visibility, engagement conversion and most who know my history know that I was. I did a lot in the sponsored ads space software training agency, blah, blah, blah. Don’t care, because where I’m at right now is where I want to be because and I absolutely love it Every single day I get to work on this, and that is not simply taking the experience that I have from growing brands on Amazon by over $3 billion in order to figure out exactly what the next step is as far as organic search ranking. Going back to what I was talking about before is that we kind of do need to acknowledge that, as a community, our situational awareness sucks. We need better data. We need more data, and we need it to be able to tell us what’s the source of the problem. How do we then fix it, and then how do we keep what we’ve actually worked in order to get back right. So I already mentioned, I’ve been in the space a while. I’ve been able to build systems that simplify, collected or automated data so that I and those using my systems knew what was happening around them better than anyone else. In the case of organic search ranking on Amazon, the reality is that you are going to there’s no way to like absolutely prevent it, lock it in permanently right. There’s always going to be pressure one way or another, because we’re in a competitive marketplace. Anytime you take somebody else’s search rank, they’re going to try to get it back. They may play fair, they may play dirty, but I want you to at least be able to be able to go on the attack and to be able to defend the position that you’ve gained. So I’m going to teach you today, as far as like, what my framework is for getting out of that corner, fighting back, winning at organic search ranking. The way that we’re going to do this is, first and foremost, is we need to diagnose what’s going on. Right. How do we end up here? Then we can look as far as like once we understand the causes that got us here and there’s usually some very there’s just a handful of key causes that happen most of the time We’ll go through as far as what some of those are, so that we can actually start fixing that, and then we can get to the point where we can actually develop a sustainable strategy where we can actually hold that rank once we get up there. I am a firm believer is that I have the ability to rank a product for most of the important search terms that they want to go after and be able to hold that against their competition. I realize that comes off pretty cocky, but I’ve got access to hundreds of millions of data points now and I’m using it to my advantage. So let’s start in with just diagnosing. How do we get here? How do we lose search rank on Amazon? Understanding some of the common causes. Now some of you, of course, are going to look at these and say it’s like, well, yeah, duh, you know, I was like. I already knew that You’re not telling me anything new, Brian, yeah, that’s kind of the point. We’re going to start out and talk about some of the back-to-basics that many brands simply overlook. They make the assumption that it is something that they don’t have any over, any control over, when in fact, they really have a lot of control. They just haven’t been taught what that is, nor given the tools in order to be able to do anything about it, or simply just knew where to look in the first place. So let’s start with that. So, the search rank, the organic search rank. So this is going to be just kind of for a quick definition. Organic search rank is generally what we consider. Organic is not actually technically the right terminology for this. So you’ve got paid search results. So sponsored ads, sponsored brands, sponsored videos some of these things you see in the search results. But that of course is paid search. You put ad dollars in, your ad gets shown. Hopefully you get some ad sales out of that. The natural, the other listings that are not sponsored to come up. Those are what we consider to be the search results. Right, and if you get a sale on, you know if somebody clicks through on your product listing that’s not sponsored and you get a sale, that of course we search sales. Now, all the other pages product detail pages, catalog pages, store pages, all that kind of stuff is kind of grouped into this thing that we vaguely call other sales. Right, it’s not technically, it’s not search, but we do kind of classify it as organic sales. So, for the sake of this argument, what I’m referring to specifically is the ability for your product to show up in the search results for search terms that you’re intending to show up for in search results. Right, I’m ignoring all the product detail pages, stores, sponsored, all that kind of stuff. This is the organic search that ideally if you’re there, you’re not paying a premium to Amazon in order to be there. Right, it’s a lot more profitable. That’s where I want you to be. The internal factors there’s going to be internal and external factors that are going to affect as far as whether or not you rank. There’s a very long list that can go into this, but let me tell you. You’re probably familiar with some of the obvious ones here. Content updates, titles, descriptions, anything that changes as far as how the A9 algorithm views your product listing as being relevant to whatever a shopper is searching for Promotion adjustments. I’m running PPC on a keyword, the ACoS is too high, I reduce the bid. I shut off a campaign, maybe I was running a coupon for 30 days and now that ended. All of these things that may be contributed to some of the things that are important, some of the search rank factors that are important to Amazon’s A9 algorithm, like sales velocity. That is certainly going to. You know, anytime you have a promotion that stops, or you adjust it or you kill it or somebody else promotes more aggressively, you’re going to get affected by the sales velocity is going to be affected and that, of course, is going to affect how A9 views your product for each search term you’re going after. You can also have things as far as inventory issues. You know you run out of stock. You maybe that causes something like a suppressed bundle geo stock. So geo ranking, which many of you have heard of, that is, do you happen to have stock in the warehouse that’s closest to either where the customer is, or whatever tool it is that is judging as far as what your search rank is? Unfortunately, there’s no perfect system out there in order to measure organic search rank on Amazon. There’s too many factors and those are only going to get worse as Amazon rolls out some of the new AI dynamic technology that they’ve been announcing. External factors these are the things that maybe changes that are outside of your control. Competitor actions they change their content, they make their title more relevant, they drop their price. Maybe there’s a marketplace shift. You could have seasonality you got peak season and valley seasons throughout the year. Have seasonality you got peak season and valley seasons throughout the year. There could be trending search terms. In other words, you could have search terms that change because some influencer out there who has 100 million followers decides that they want to call a product by some other name because if their audience says, like, like, like, oh, my favorite influencer is using this search term or this terminology to describe this product, nobody’s talking about it. Well, of course, nobody’s talking about it, because they made it up so that they could resonate and be endeared with their followers and make it look like they’re in the know and they’re the only ones who are talking about this search term. So they get pretty creative as far as creating these search terms. Well, when that happens I don’t know if any of you are out there trying to track a hundred thousand different influencers and the little search terminology they use. Somebody says like oh, you know what, let me see if that’s on Amazon and they use a different search terminology than what we maybe research inside of a keyword research tool, including Helium 10, which I do like the tool. But the problem is that keyword research tools oftentimes look for like the tried and true. This is more reliable. This is how you set up your product listing on these keywords, because that’s most likely going to get you a search. It’s going to get you visibility and if you’re well optimized for it, you’re going to get ranked for it. But then every once in a while, some influencer comes in and they call it something else and you get this little spike, and sometimes you may have seen this where you had a product that just one, one or two days, just randomly you have no idea where it came from and all of a sudden just spiked up in sales. You had massive sales and two days later it was all gone. Probably a media mention, probably an influencer mention, right, and they probably used search terminology that happened to bring back your product listing. We also get search term bleed. Now we’re obviously in the age most of us are fully aware that TikTok is coming in and taking, you know, is doing a bang up job of trying to take market share from Amazon and it’s working. I know, certainly in working with brands we have directly seen where a brand, where their search volume on Amazon they can. They can see it’s like it was flat for years and then the last year it’s just been falling, falling, falling, falling. We go over and we start looking over at TikTok. We look at some of the search volume tools over on tick tock or other social media platforms and we see it going up and up and up and up and what ends up happening is a brand is doing really well on Amazon. All of a sudden they’ve got this competitor selling basically the same product, except they have a much bigger, younger, more active audience on TikTok and it’s siphoning away the search volume and the sales away from Amazon. If you haven’t checked on some of the other social media platforms, the other marketplaces, to see if there is a growing competitor out there who’s competing directly for you, they may be siphoning some of your traffic away from Amazon. Amazon’s not so big that it can’t fall. And then, finally, we have other external factors that include things like Amazon adjustments, including things like algorithm updates, bot suppressions. I’m sure every single one of you have or will get falsely accused of a content violation or this or that, and they suppress your ads or they suspend your listing or suspend your entire account, and it can take you weeks in order to get it back, simply because some bot automation had a false positive and it screwed you up. And, of course, that is directly going to affect your search rank on Amazon. To make it even worse, now Amazon courses rolling out things like new AI tools. We’re all pretty familiar with Rufus. You’ve got things like Cosmos if you use with Cosmos, and you’ve got image translation to text. Now your images make a difference, okay. So now how do I actually, you know, check to see? Okay, are my images relevant to the text content of my product listing. Here’s a pro tip. I don’t have it in my slides, but here’s a pro tip. If you have access to ChatGPT or one of the language models that supports this, pop in your all of your images in there and say describe to me what this image is and see. Does it come back and tell you? Does it describe your main image and your secondary images and your A plus images? Does it describe that image with the same terminology that you’re targeting to reach your audience? Okay, when we are looking to try to troubleshoot. Okay, what is it that is causing damage to my search ranking? What is it about a9? The a9 wants, in order to that I can actually leverage and I can actually go in and research. Now here’s a couple of key things here. Now,  I know because the technology that our team built does we pull in 30 to 40 million data points now for every product niche that we analyze, and so we’ve got a lot more data than is typically available. But that data gives us a unique viewpoint of how A9 treats all the product listings for every single search term within a product category. Now, what we find on this is there are over 40 different what we call search rank factors that influence the A9 algorithm for organic search, and so these can be compiled down into three main groups. Those are going to be including relative conversion rate, so we’re to figure out as far as what the conversion rate advantage is. So, relative conversion rate, that’s one of the big ones, right? One of the big five? Relative sales velocity, in other words, how many units are you moving right? Again, no surprise there. And the relative content, SEO, or the content relevance right, are you optimized for the search terms you’re going after? None of these three should be any surprise, because they’ve been echoed many times for years. As far as like, hey, here’s the things you focus on. The problem that we’ve had up until we started doing a big data analysis is knowing. Okay, what do you actually do about it? Experts will say it’s like okay, you need to optimize your listing. Oh, you don’t know how to optimize your listing. Cool, I’ve got an agency that will actually optimize your listing and create new images and do photography and everything. I co-founded one of those right, and there is a lot of expertise in some of these houses, but the general advice to the brand, to sellers in general, is very vague, right, and so what we don’t have is what’s the next level of detail that we really know, and what we didn’t know previously, before we did the research, is each subcategory, each product niche, I should say, has a different profile that A9 looks at. We didn’t know that until we started doing hundreds of millions of data points and analyzing using deep learning models and blah, blah, blah, right, what we found out is, while these three conversion rate, sales velocity, title content, you know, title optimization those are the big three that we commonly see in the top five out of these 40+ search rank factors that we’ve now identified, but they change in sequence and impact on how much each one of these influences A9. If we look on the right hand side, here I’ve got the green, blue, pink chart. Here you can see some of the sample search rank factors. I’ve got the green, blue, pink chart. Here you can see some of the sample search rank factors. I didn’t have the space to list them all, so I just listed some of the more common ones that influence A9 some product niche. So one product niche may value having perfect title optimization and it actually may have a 20 impact on the A9 algorithm, while another product niche may actually consider price to be one of the most important factors. Right? A commodity, as an example, toilet paper, for instance, heavily driven by price. So if you’re selling toilet paper in a commodity, sub product niche, then what you’ll find is if, when we do the analysis on commodities, what we find is they’re primarily price driven, the primary value price driven, and so price is going to be very dominant. As far as. Ok, I need to make sure that I’ve got a competitive price, otherwise I’m going to get penalized. I’m going to be not as competitive as everybody else who’s selling toilet paper right Now. If I’m selling a luxury watch, for instance, price is not even in the top 10. It’s not even on the top 15, right, even though it may be $200,000, $500,000, price does not seem to influence A9. It doesn’t seem to influence the conversion rate much, right, based on our analysis. It’s counterintuitive but what matters most on that is what Amazon, what a9 is observing shoppers are doing and with something like luxury watch, they’re observing it’s like. You know what shoppers consistently go through and they take the time to check the review ratings and read through the reviews and actually spend time reading through the reviews and looking at some of the, the A+ images and watching the videos and that kind of stuff. It’s a whole different set of elements and search rank factors then toilet paper, then than pet beds, than any other product, right? So my point on this is the search rank factors that matter to A9 change from some product niche to product niche or browse node to browse node, or subcategory to subcategory, depending on what terminology you’re familiar with. And it’s important to understand is that unless you do a big data analysis like what we’re doing, you’re not actually going to be able to figure out what those are. That’s not a pitch for me. I’m just stating a fact is, if you really want to get down and figure out precisely where you need to put your effort as far as which specific like in my particular product subcategory, I need to work on unit sales velocity, not order sales velocity. I need to work on a bullet point optimization, not title optimization I need to work on I don’t know what are some of the other ones here. Sponsored ads, not coupons, in other words, those can make a difference. A lot of times we shotgun out our effort, we spend money and time on everything, but if we knew exactly what are the Top 5, the Top 10 that matter to our particular product, we’re going to spend our time and our money much differently. Now, in the meantime, here’s what you can do currently. We’ve already looked at many product niches and, as I mentioned, the big three that consistently come up that you do have control over and often have high impact on the ranking algorithm is gonna be conversion rate, sales velocity and content optimization, especially title optimization. Title is a big one, if we look. One of the things that I specifically want you to do and you can take a screenshot of this if you want, but that formula right in there below conversion rate advantage, the ORCA principle is simply just going into brand analytics, going into the search query performance, going in and creating a search query performance report for every ASIN within my catalog or a client’s catalog, and we go through every single search term and we determine what is the relative advantage when it comes to click-through rate, when it comes to conversion rate. Conversion rate is the first thing we look at every single time. I’m going after these five search terms, let’s say. But if I go in and I look at search query performance, which is going to be a mix of ads, and go in and I look at search query performance, which is going to be a mix of ads and or organic search as well as ads, and it’s complicated mess that Amazon can’t even explain themselves, as most Amazon reporting is. We can see, we can calculate the difference between where the search term for our product, what its conversion rate is relative to, what kind of like the middle of the pack for my competitors who are generally competing, we usually find that it’s probably the Top 20, 30, maybe 40 competitors within a product niche. When we do an analysis, we go 300 deep, right? As far as number of ASINs that come back, number of competitors, but generally what we find is, when it comes to organic search rank, most of the time you’re only competing with 20 or 30 direct competitors. So it’s good to know what is the average conversion rate. Do you have on individual search terms that you’re going after? For every search term you’re going after, do this calculation check. Do I have a positive advantage over the average conversion rate of my competitors or do I have a disadvantage? Because if you have a positive conversion rate advantage in other words you’re you’ve got a higher conversion rate than the 50th percentile of your competition then you stand a much better chance of moving more units, being more profitable in advertising, having a lot of your promotions working a lot better. Lean into that. Invest more heavily into those search terms, to the point where I will actually tell you later on here, is shift your ad budget away from those search terms where you have a disadvantage in conversion rate and shift it over to those where you have an advantage in conversion rate. You may feel like, oh, I’m losing, I’m leaving some money on the table because I’m not advertising for everything. That’s fine. Go for profitability. Go for higher, more density across your product. As far as conversion rate, when Amazon sees, when A9 sees, that you are actually converting more frequently on the terms where you have a higher conversion rate, it’ll start widening the view and start getting your product lifted up into the organic search results for other terms, even though you’re not advertising on that particular term, even though you may not have that search term directly in your title or your bullet points, which I do recommend one or the other, not both but focus your efforts and your ad spend and your time into those where you already have a competitive advantage when it comes to conversion rate. Second, I would also look at the comparative click-through rate. That helps in order to get engagement better, which leads to higher conversion as well. Unit sales velocity as far as unit sales velocity, now Amazon actually A9 actually considers things like unit sales velocity different than order sales velocity. I can discuss that later in Q&A. Sales velocity generally, you can look to see, as far as you know, which of your products in business report, for instance, you can look at the conversion rate. There you can also look as far as, obviously, the number of units that you’re selling. Again, you want to take a look at where are you actually getting the units through, both your advertising. So you could use things like search term, impression share or your ad reports in order to see you, obviously, what search terms are you converting on through your ads? But also remember to go into brand analytics, go into search career performance, look to see what are the search terms that are converting also in the organic search standpoint, again, double down on those investment. Make sure that those search terms are in your product listings. That’s kind of leads us down to content optimization. Tried and true, your title is probably the most critical real estate when it comes to relevance for A9. Secondary would be bullet points. Third, we’re seeing, is the A-plus content. Fourth would probably be the back-end search terms. Now, I didn’t say classic description for a reason. Classic description funny enough, sometimes it does get picked up by A9 for organic search. But classic description is actually primarily used by the ad auction. So this is not directly related to what I’m talking about here. But if you’re thinking, if you’ve got a classic description that’s hidden behind your a plus and it’s empty. Don’t do that, fill it. You know keyword stuff, it you know. So nobody’s gonna see it right? If you’re in a product category where they don’t show the classic product description, keyword stuff, that thing with everything that you’re trying to advertise for, that increases the relevance for the ad auction, you know. So it’s more likely to show your ad also. Kind of another pro tip there. All right, let me jump forward here. I want you to adopt a two-step approach to diagnostics here. So we’re kind of going to zoom out here and then cover the keyword level details. Top-down analysis is where we start at the product level and identify major outliers and metrics like conversion rate and sales trend. It’s pretty easy. You can go into business report. You can look at the list of your products. You know your child products and you can say, okay, here’s the ones that have the conversion of the, an above average conversion rate for my catalog, and here’s the ones that have the lower ones. Right, separate those two so you understand okay, this one converts better than this one. You’ve probably already done that. Hopefully although I talked to many brands that still don’t do this but hopefully you’ve also figured out what is my net margin for each product. You want to be able to measure and compare across your catalog. What is the net, the net profit contribution of each of your products to your catalog. Don’t be satisfied with a global view. How are all my ads doing across you know, like, tell me what the ROAS and the ACoS is across all my ads and that’ll tell me everything is working. Don’t be that lazy. Okay, situation lack of situational awareness right. So don’t be that lazy. Okay, situation. Lack of situational awareness right. So don’t be that lazy where you’re relying on one or two metrics for the big picture. Same thing with your products. When it comes to your cattle, you know each of your ASIN has a conversion rate. Each of your ASIN has a net profit margin. Be aware of what those are uniquely so that you can calculate this particular product is contributing this dollar amount and this percentage of my total net profit. Be aware of what that is so that you know where again to double down, where to reinvest your time and your money into where you’re going to get more profit back into where you’re going to get more profit back into. Don’t go after vanity metrics where it’s like well, my top line sales are all reliant on these two or three products. And then you go back and you finally do the math at the end of the year and you figure out. It’s like, oh, I’ve got a negative 2% net profit margin on these products that are driving 50% of my sales. I’ve been losing money this whole time. Don’t do that. Don’t rely on just a couple. Okay. The second one on this the second approach on this is to go down to the search term level. This is kind of where I was talking about. You can look at the conversion rate. You can calculate the conversion rate for your ads. You can calculate the conversion rate for your search query performance, your brand analytics, right. You can calculate click-through rate. Look at every single search term. You’ve got to figure out, map these out. This is the product that has the highest net margin and the highest conversion rate, and I’m going to pair it with the search terms that have actually convert. They convert above my average competitor, have a better click through rate than my average competitor. Those are the ones where you should be spending 80% of your time to invest further, to develop more aggressively, okay. And if that means you’re pulling ad dollars and team and time off of these products that are losing money, these search terms that don’t compete very well as far as conversion rate and click-through rate against your competitors. Do that shift over to a tighter focus, because I intentionally did not get into all those other 40 search rank factors that you can tweak and tune every single one of those. That’s a much bigger session. I gave you some causes of what is most likely causing your search rank to drop, especially that relative conversion rate on your search terms in search query, performance in ads, right. That most of you will find that the basics hadn’t been done. And if you go back and simply just focus tighter on the products where you have a net profit and a conversion advantage and the individual search terms where you have a conversion advantage, you will greatly increase not only your overall profitability but you’ll start seeing the A9 recognizes that you’re focused in on your target audience. Your target audience is responding well by converting and because you’ve got a narrow focus on those that are working well and you’re not distracting A9 by saying, well, I also want these 200 other words in search terms. I just want to shotgun out and just be visible everywhere. Focus on where you have the competitive advantage. That will solve probably 75% of your ranking problem right, more advanced, more competitive situations. We continue to go in deeper and we look for how do we be more aggressive with to increase sales velocity as I had mentioned back over past here, sales velocity, of course you do, you know you certainly should be testing things as far as sponsored ads, giveaways, rebates and one of the things that I’ll that I’ll tell you on this actually, let me get into the fixed part of it. Got to move forward here as far as solving the sales and ranking problems. Now that we know as far as what is likely going to create the biggest impact to organic ranking, let me start with those and say, okay, which areas do we have high impact and high control versus where do we have high impact versus low control? So, the search rank factors, those 40 that I was talking about, along with those three big ones that I was saying, start with those. You can categorize those as far as okay, what am I going to? What is a high impact, high control? That could be things like my title optimization, where I can start doing AB split testing in Amazon experiments and look for where can I increase the conversion rate of my title, where can I get some additional search terms, where I know I’ve got a conversion rate advantage into the title and that’s going to have a huge impact on A9 and A9 is going to respond over time. It does take a little bit of time. Amazon is not going to respond the next morning and say like, oh, you need to magically be in the top five. It doesn’t work that way. It works over time. They want you time on target. They want you to be committed for a minimum of six weeks. I’m going to repeat that because some of you figured out that it’s like wait a minute, I run a coupon for four weeks and it doesn’t do anything. I run a, a rebate giveaway, for one week or two week and it spikes it up and it falls right back down again because Amazon is slow playing you. They’re gonna watch to see what you do consistently for at least, at least six weeks before a nine finally says okay, you’re staying on target, you’re focusing on this audience for an extended period of time. I’m now going to reward you by starting to lift up a variety of your search terms and your products for in search rank. It’s interesting observation when you’ve got enough data to see it. There are some things that we get into where we see, let’s say, for instance, in a commodity, for instance, where price is a major driver, it creates a huge, a high impact on A9. However, while we have high control in order to change the price, we probably don’t want to, most brands I talk to it’s like well, I don’t want to change my price, my, my net margins will be affected if I drop my price. Yes, I can move more sales velocity. I’m never gonna beat this international seller who can simply, just, you know, lower their price. Don’t fall for that trap. What you need to do is you need to look at what are the other search rank factors that you can have control over, that you can, factors that you can have control over that you can adjust, that you can optimize in order to make up for not changing something like a price or not changing something like the bullet point content or whatever it is you choose to ignore or to skip over. You wanna compensate somewhere else. There’s no one magic bullet. That’s one of the reasons why, if you’ve ever done a giveaway, promotion where you’re a rebate or a coupon, discount or something like that, you can spike up in search rank temporarily, but most of the time you’re going to fall right back down again. Now the service that provided that can say is like yep, we did our job, cool, but what happened is that you did not set a good foundation, you did not build up your other search rank factors in order to make sure that if you actually do get that lift, that you stick the landing, that you actually stay there. It’s good in theory, but you can’t just do one thing. You’ve got to do multiple things, multiple optimizations across the search rank factors. There’s going to be other things where you can’t. You’re not going to have any control over. Those are going to be things. As far as what competitors are doing, you can certainly optimize your own content. You can run your ads more aggressively. You can do things to work on your conversion rate, your click-through rate, but ultimately, your competitors are also going to be moving at all times. One of the things that I will say as far as ad campaigns is a common overlooked piece on this is we fall into this trap. We’ve been taught we’re using a service, we’re using a software, our internal rule that Brian Johnson guy told me five years ago this is how you do it, that kind of stuff right. If the ACoS is too high on a keyword, reduce the bid until the ACoS gets in line. If it’s still not working, then just kill it right. It’s too you know. Just pause the campaign or reduce the ACoS, it’s too expensive, it’s running 200% ACoS. Kill it, right. The problem with that is most brands are also not looking at things like their brand analytics. They’re not looking at search query performance reports. They’re not realizing that when they were advertising at a 200 ACoS for a specific keyword, that after six weeks they were actually getting a bump on their organic search. That’s always kind of a great idea. It’s good in philosophy. It’s like oh, if I run a keyword targeting ad, you know, a solo campaign that has one keyword, it’s gonna magically lift up my organic search rank. Sometimes it does. But the same thing goes with what I was talking about as far as if you do a giveaway or a rebate or something like that. It’s temporary, it can be expensive and it’s certainly if you’re not measuring it, if you’re not watching to see where your search rank is going, if you’re not checking your brand analytics reports to see, hey, this search query, the search term that I am actually spending way too much on over here in my sponsored keyword ad, is actually producing four times more organic sales simply because I’m driving unit sales velocity. That’s affecting A9. A9 is lifting up my search rank for that particular keyword and therefore now I’m also collecting some of the organic search sales as a result. We’ve done this before. This is kind of an interesting exercise, but it’s cumbersome. I’ve been asked a few times like hey, can you build a tool to go back? And if I get enough interest from people who want me to build this, build a tool that will actually do a look back and look for this is you could probably go back. Actually I know you can. You can go back in the history of your brand’s advertising and look back months, years, up to two years, right, and you can see where you had ads running. It was getting conversions, but you stopped it and you never ran the ads again. You compare that keyword back over to a two-year look back inside of your search query performance and you will probably see that there was organic search sales that were occurring alongside the ads, not overlapping. Most of the time we actually don’t see that overlap in search query performance. You had additional sales and you turn it off because that keyword didn’t meet your ROAS or your ACOS parameters. And I’ve gone back into accounts and we found hundreds of keywords that were producing more organic search sales while they were advertising at a loss than they were ever spending in ad dollars and so when they turn it off, their search rank dropped a little bit or enough that they lost both the sales from the ads but also the organic search sales. We’ve found that. We’ve done that a few times now. I would like to actually automate that so that we can do it in bulk. If enough people reach out to me and say hey, Brian, can you build this? I’ll actually I’ll get to it. All right. External changes monitoring competitors there’s a number of tools that can monitor competitors. Actually, Helium 10 has the BSR graph that you can actually look at to see. Okay, if I look at this for each of my top five, top 10 competitors, I can see how has their price fluctuated over time. And assuming that you are tracking your keyword ranks with some kind of tool maybe Helium 10, maybe something else you must be tracking where your keyword ranks are. It doesn’t need to be on the hourly basis or daily basis. Every single week is fine. It doesn’t change that much. Things like things that are going to affect conversion rates. Negative reviews you can mitigate negative reviews. There’s plenty of you that have products that have one star reviews when they mention some word that is in violation of review policy that you could get removed. Doesn’t mean you have to hire a service. Just go into Seller Central and request that they check and remove this negative review because it doesn’t fit Amazon review policy. Most brands have not taken just a little bit of time in order to get those removed and they’ve been stuck with the same low conversion rate for months, if not years. The key metrics that I want you to monitor that average search rank per term and ASIN. In other words, use some kind of ranking tool for your top 10, top 20, top 50 search terms, whatever it takes that you’re actually focused on, ideally, if you’re going back and you’re looking at the relative conversion rate against your top competitors and things like search query performance, then that is a great way in order to narrow down how many keywords that you’re actually tracking and you’re really paying attention to and you’re actually using those in order to optimize your content. Also, measure if you have ad spend, whether it’s positive or negative profitability on your ad spend for an individual keyword. Make sure that you’re also comparing that to your search query performance in order to see do I also have organic search sales that I can add on to this? We actually created a metric in order to measure that. We call it TACO sauce. So we weren’t satisfied with ACOS, we weren’t satisfied with TACoS. We wanted something in the middle that measured the difference of ad spend compared to the combination of ad sales plus the search sales, and so that is what we call ACOS sauce or TACO sauce, and I just like the way that rings. So I didn’t come up with that one. One of my clients did, but I’m glad he did because I like it, because it gives us the visibility of both. My ad spend went to ad sales and you should always be looking to see what’s the secondary benefit from your search sales through search query performance. Okay, we do that automatically through our software for our clients. But absolutely you should be doing that immediately.

Kevin King:

I really appreciate you coming on, man. This has been great.

Brian:

Absolutely my pleasure.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamline