When operating on Amazon, sellers think about how to sell their products, while Amazon considers the overall interests of the platform and how to enable consumers to buy the products they want/good products. Only in this way can consumers and platforms form a good supply and demand relationship and establish a sense of trust.
In fact, as long as the principle is clear, the operation is simple and clear. The higher the listing weight of a product, the higher the corresponding ranking of the product, and the more traffic Amazon provides to the product. Extending from the "Matthew effect" common in the product itself, from the perspective of the overall market, the relationship between products can be aptly described as a "horse racing mechanism." Whoever runs faster has a higher weight and a higher ranking.
In our last push, we shared with you the reasons why you can’t find your products on Amazon! Have you found the reasons and solutions? Today, let’s take a deeper look at Amazon’s search principles, so that sellers can beat their competitors under the rules.
Amazon's competitive mechanism
How to prove that your product is better than others? It’s the endless data competition. The weight behind the "horse racing speed" is actually a collection of data
The value = click score + collection score + add to cart score + conversion score + refund/return score + dwell time/visit depth score, etc. The important factor that determines the weight is traffic, and there are many key factors that affect traffic.
To put it simply, it includes product weight + account weight. The detailed divisions include UV value, sales, click-through rate, conversion rate, collection and purchase rate, refund rate, active sales rate, unsalable rate, etc. But the conversion rate alone includes: display conversion, silent conversion, and advertising conversion. Among them, click-through rate and sales volume are the two dimensions that have a greater impact on current search weight.
For example, as long as your image click-through rate for a certain keyword in the search channel is better than that of your competitors, your search exposure will gradually increase. After the search, if the real-time sales volume of a certain keyword of yours is higher than that of your competitors, your search weight will surpass that of your competitors.
Amazon's operating logic is to provide corresponding weights for sellers' products based on the above multi-dimensional data analysis and comparison.
Generally speaking, the short-term traffic in a category's market is relatively stable. The cake is so big, and the higher your weight is, the more you can eat, and others will eat less accordingly. When you launch a hit product, to some extent, it will dilute the traffic and sales of your competitors in the market. On a micro level, Amazon is still in a zero-sum game state, but on a macro level, Amazon is growing every year.
Real-time update of Amazon's weight
Since Amazon’s competitive mechanism is a “data game,” is it possible to get ahead by creating “data anomalies” through some black hat tactics? For example, high click-through rate, high conversion rate, etc.
To answer this question, let’s first look at the process of an Amazon search update.
Monthly cycle
In the early days of Amazon searches, weights were based on a monthly cycle, which was relatively stable and had a longer cycle. As long as merchants make strategic losses in the early stages and are willing to lose money to boost sales, they can just sit back and count money in the later stages.
7-day cycle
Afterwards, the search was revised to update the weight every 7 days, and the search weight was improved by increasing sales, which greatly accelerated the frequency of changes in search rankings. Although sales volume increases, weight will increase. However, since the 7-day weight is not easy to stabilize, it is more important to maintain it than to get the search started.
Real-time updates
Starting from September 2018, Amazon's search was revised to real-time weight. The update frequency is in hours. In other words, the data from the previous hour directly affects the traffic in the next hour. Now, in addition to search, locations such as advertising are also affected by real-time weights.
Almost every category and every listing on Amazon needs to go through the following assembly line-like process:
The listing is put online, the page is scanned, keywords and product selling points are identified, the listing is automatically classified, keywords are assigned and tested, traffic is allocated to keywords, and based on the exposure/visit/conversion performance of the keyword traffic, it is decided whether to continue to give traffic to this word or directly cut the traffic of this word.
Using this process, Amazon repeatedly operates on this product listing and continuously selects the best listing to expose to consumers. In this way, the performance of the listing within every hour is crucial, but these "data anomaly" methods are very limited.
"Brushing orders" is one of the basic methods of creating false data. While ensuring safety, it is still effective for product rankings. However, the strength of the effect is closely related to your category and the method of brushing orders. As long as the forged data complies with positive rules, Amazon will still give you positive ranking rewards, but maintaining long-term effects still requires sellers' post-operation skills.
When sophisticated sellers can obtain the A9 data of competitors, they can directly copy other people’s high-traffic keywords and imitate the operations of competitors, but the effect is unsatisfactory under the real-time update policy.
The reason is that the seller only uses the data after Amazon has identified and processed the listing, rather than the data of the seller's listing identified by Amazon. Simply put, unless your listing has a very high overlap with this listing when it is scanned and identified by Amazon, it will be rejected.
This can also be explained based on Amazon's shelf theory. In order to enrich the diversity of customer choices and give consumers more options, Amazon tries to make the products on each page different in price and selling points.
Amazon will also compare and display “similar” products in real time based on the performance of the listings. To put it simply, the performance of a listing is still based on exposure/visits/conversions.
Therefore, the safest way for us to detect “data anomalies” is to base them on the data obtained by Amazon itself after intelligently identifying your listings and allocating traffic.
The most basic source of this data is advertising performance.
Breakthrough under Amazon's competitive mechanism
The above example also reminds us that the competition mechanism is not a single-player game. It is usually meaningless to be trapped in a single-dimensional data analysis. Even if your data is good enough, but your competitors are equally good, it will not provide any guidance. Therefore, in our daily operations and data analysis, we must not ignore the calculation and comparative analysis of competitor data, and gradually break through the main search and traffic keywords of competitors.
Channel Competition
Amazon will provide corresponding traffic tilt based on the different channel performance of products. For example, if your product has a high conversion rate on mobile devices, you will have more mobile traffic. Search is one of the channels, and the keywords under the search channel have different search combinations. For example, a title with 200 words in one line will have multiple channels for search under the permutations and combinations.
The traffic entrance under the large channel of search is keywords, so when we make a deal on a long-tail word, each root word will be weighted.
So in some cases, our product performance is not as good as that of competitors, but the keywords we choose are better than those of competitors, which will bring our product more traffic than that of competitors.
Benchmarking data with competitors
Find your competitors and conduct data analysis. First observe your own conversion rate, then estimate the channel conversion rate of your competitors. With the help of some tools, see the traffic-driving keywords and transaction keywords of your competitors, and calculate the conversion rate. If you want to know the click-through rate, you need to measure your competitors' main pictures. Remember to block your competitors.
Implementation plan
When it comes to acquiring traffic, the initial click-through rate has a higher weight than the conversion rate, so the implementation plan for creating initial traffic is to optimize the product around improving the click-through rate. For example, when placing advertisements, only place this keyword and plan the main image and detail page around this keyword.
In the short term, the traffic under a category is constant. If you want to get more traffic, you must snatch it from your competitors through the "competition mechanism". Basically, as long as the data at the entrance is better than that of your competitors, the traffic at that entrance will definitely be greater than that of your competitors. So if you want to do searches or keywords, you need to break them down one by one.
Amazon’s competitive mechanism is a game of gains and losses. There will be a big practical gap between short-term operations and long-term operations due to the different targets. During the operation process, sellers need to combine their own operating conditions and long- and short-term goals to make timely, effective and accurate strategy adjustments.
