Welcome to Amazing At Home’s blog where we cover the best strategies to help you grow in e-commerce.
Today I’m going to answer this important question, “Traffic or Reviews first?”
I am also going to share the best strategy for setting up your PPC for maximum conversions during your product launch. During this month’s segment on product launch, we’re going to cover our winning formula for product launches.
Last week, we covered the three phases of launching on Amazon to help you set up your product for maximum success when it comes to sales and conversions.
In review, here are the three phases of product launch:
Phase one is page visits and reviews.
Phase two is traffic and conversions.
Phase three is ongoing sales and profitability
This week, I’d like to focus on phase one, page visits and reviews. We are going to do a deep dive together in each of these phases and I would appreciate it if you stayed on until the end of this article as I am going to explain how you know when it’s time to run that auto campaign that you’ve been dying to start during your launch. One of the biggest questions I always get is: “When should I start an auto campaign”?
Ergo, we are going to talk about the importance of when to start it and how to go about the process towards the end of this blog post.
Let’s do a deep dive into phase 1 of the product launch. Phase 1 starts when your listing goes live and ends after you’ve completed our phase 1 launch checklist, which I’ll get into in a moment.
Let’s talk about the goals that you’ll have during phase 1 of your product launch. The four goals that you have during this first most critical period of your product launch are:
(1) page visits, you want to get your listing to index.
(2) reviews,
(3) quality control,
(4) And you want to set up for conversions during phase two.
Let’s talk about each goal on its own. You are probably wondering what a page visit is right? Well, a page on any website is just like your Amazon listing is a web page. And that web page is indexed by a search engine. Amazon is a search engine, so what you want to do is inform that search engine regarding exactly what your page is relevant for when you first create your product listing. This should be done before you get page visits, so people visit your page by either clicking your ad, visiting it organically or maybe coming from off of Amazon. This traffic could also come from your posts on Facebook and they visit your listing that way.
Every time someone visits your page, you get a little indexing boost from the search engine. So you want to make sure that you get these page visits. To make this happen you can create traffic to your listing so that you get lots of page visits then tell Amazon what you are relevant for.
If you started an auto campaign, before you actually have had many page visits, your listing won’t be indexed for all of those relevant keywords. And your auto campaign won’t be as effective because this search engine doesn’t know what you’re relevant for.
I have seen the results of auto campaigns and what I usually do is reverse search a listing after they’ve launched with only an auto campaign. Often we see so many keywords that they’ve indexed for that are just not relevant. And then they’re not indexing for those keywords that are so important to them. And so it’s really, really important that you get this right during phase 1, get those page visits!
You must then create targeted PPC campaigns with an exact match to those keywords that you want to tell the search engine that you’re super relevant for, send some traffic from off of Amazon, to send them to your listing just to get those page visits, you can always use a two-step URL that can be a whole nother topic. But if you use Helium 10 GEMs that can give you an idea of what a two-step URL is.
However, the bottom line is you want to get those page visits, you want to get indexed for those page visits. Alright, the second thing that you want to do during phase one is you want to get reviews. Reviews are really really important! Now, am I telling you to cheat and you know, go pay a bunch of people to leave you reviews? No, But I do need you to get one or two reviews during this phase because it’s so important before you unleash the rest of the traffic for you to have actual reviews on your listing.
There are many ways for you to get reviews, we can do another segment, we can talk more about that in our Facebook group in the discussions we already do. But it’s important that you set up a few reviews. In the very beginning, maybe you have a launch list of people who are just raving fans waiting for your product to launch and they’re happy to be there, you’re already in contact with them, they’re already in your email list, they’re happy to go out on Amazon and buy this product. Maybe you have a lunch coupon for them. And they’re going to give their honest feedback on your listing, that’s fine. But what I want you to do is, for those folks that you have contact with, I want you to have them give you a personal quality control check on your product.
So when you send that product out to them, and you already have them via email, and they’ve already agreed to give you feedback then you reach out to them and ask how the unboxing experience went, if the packaging was damaged or if the product was damaged.
Basically, what you want to hear from them is any reason any other customer wouldn’t leave you a five-star review. Because if they see any reason and they’re in contact with you now, for someone else not to leave a five-star review, the chances of you not getting a five-star review from someone that you don’t know, who buys on Amazon is pretty high. Therefore, it’s important that you make sure that you’re getting quality control feedback on your products early on while you’re getting those page visits and the first few reviews. And all of that is going to set you up for conversions during phase two.
Which brings us to another question, “How do you know when phase one is over and you can actually move on to phase two?”
Well, I have a checklist for that. So let’s get into the checklist.
You want to make sure that you can find your listing in search for its longtail keywords. Remember how we were saying you need page visits, you need to get indexed? Right! Well, I want you to look for your longtail keywords. If you’re selling a blue water bottle with a straw, then you should be able to find your listing in search for a medium to long-tail keyword like that, right? So make sure that you can find your listing in search. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on page one. But it should be between page one, page two, and page three, for that medium to long-tail keyword. The reason being you want to avoid starting an auto campaign for an irrelevant listing.
This leads us back to that critical question that I talked about in the beginning, if you start your auto campaign before you know if your listing is found in search for those medium to long-tail keywords, it might not be relevant for that. And then you’re going to get indexed for all those keywords that maybe aren’t as relevant to your product. It’s going to end up having to pay for clicks that aren’t going to convert, and you’re going to get bad campaign data in those campaigns.
The next thing in the checklist is that you have at least one review posted. You don’t need 16 reviews or anything like that. But you do need at least one review before you unleash a whole bunch more traffic. Therefore make sure that you review strategies and that you are ready to go with a review, with at least one review is posted to your listing.
And then finally, along with that, now that your product has passed the quality control check that we talked about. You definitely want to make sure that there’s no reason that someone else isn’t going to leave you a five-star review. And that way when we ramp up the sales during phase 2 in those conversions, and we ramp up the traffic, and we start those auto campaigns, and there’s the answer to that important question. During phase 2, that’s you can start those auto campaigns. However, once we do that, you’re not going to have a slew of bad reviews come in, and then all of a sudden your listing is tanked. Those are the things that you were supposed to take care of during phase 1. And that’s how you know when phase 1 is over.
That’s it for today’s segment on how to launch and launch phase one. I hope you have learned a lot from this. If you have anything to add to the discussion, please leave a comment. If you have any questions for me, please leave a comment. And don’t forget to join us in our Facebook group where we have lots of awesome discussions about topics just like this and you can ask any additional questions that you have.
Alright, thanks for reading everyone.
Take care
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