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#660 – Amazon Search Query Performance & Split Testing Workshop

What if a slight tweak could skyrocket your Amazon sales? Join us as we unpack the transformative potential of Amazon’s Search Query Performance data with our special guest, Destaney Wishon of BTRmedia. Together, we shed light on the often-overlooked metrics like conversion and click-through rates (CTR) that can dramatically boost revenue when optimized. Picture this: a mere 4% increase in conversion rate translates into an additional $1,200 in sales for a $30 product. These insights are as vital as traditional PPC, keyword research, and AI advancements in scaling your Amazon-selling success.

Ever wondered how powerful your product images can be in driving sales? We dissect a fascinating case study on a hemp pain cream to reveal how various images impact click rates. By leveraging tools like Helium 10 Audience, powered by PickFu, we gather audience feedback and discuss the importance of regularly updating images to cater to the preferences of specific customer segments. The results highlight the critical role of understanding your target audience and tailoring product presentations to meet their needs for improved market performance.

Unlock the secrets of optimizing your product’s visibility with search query analysis, even if you don’t have access to advanced tools like Helium 10’s Search Query Analyzer tool. We guide you through using Amazon’s Seller Central to access valuable sales data and discuss strategic optimization of keywords and conversion rates. A real-life example illustrates how focusing on specific keywords, such as “CBD roll on,” and boosting ad placements can increase sales. By understanding the relationship between organic rankings and ads, you can make informed decisions that enhance your product’s profitability.

In episode 660 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

  • 00:00 – Leveraging Amazon Data for Sales Growth
  • 00:29 – Amazon Search Query Performance Strategy
  • 06:45 – Optimizing Amazon Images for Increased Sales
  • 08:01 – Impact of Listing Images on Conversion Rate
  • 11:26 – Search Query Performance and Product Optimization
  • 11:50 – Analyzing Amazon Data for Optimization
  • 15:06 – Helium 10 Search Query Analyzer Tool
  • 19:55 – Amazon Search Data Insights
  • 23:19 – Maximizing Amazon Search Query Data
  • 25:00 – Search Grid Performances
  • 30:14 – Keyword Rankings and Sales Optimization
  • 33:03 – Improving Sales Through Search Query Analysis
  • 35:40 – The Power of Organic Ranking
  • 38:51 – Enhancing Product Images for Sales

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we go deep into how leveraging Amazon’s best data points search query performance can help increase your sales, as well as how split testing could mean thousands of dollars of extra revenue for you. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and today’s a special episode as it’s a recording of what we just did live. Destaney and I talking about search query performance from Amazon, whether you use it inside of Helium 10 or whether you use it in Amazon Seller Central. How should you be using it? Because, let me just tell you guys, it is the single best data point that Amazon has ever released. That’s arguable, but for the research side keyword research side I think it’s the single best data point that Amazon has ever released, and we’re going to go learn the ins and outs of how you can leverage it in order to increase sales, even showing you an example of what you know, how we’ve been able to increase sales based on it. The other thing that we’re going to be going over today is split testing. You know like just a little bit of conversion rate increase, click-through rate increase can have ripple effects that mean thousands of dollars extra of sales, and so these are two very critical things that will help you this year with your Amazon business. So let’s go ahead and hop into it.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s say that you sell 200 items a month. All right, it’s like seven a day, 200 items a month. And let’s say your conversion rate is 10%. Your conversion rate is 10% and you sell 200 items. So that means, if your conversion rate is 10%, that means that or actually we should go back to 100, because that’ll just make it easier. That means you had a thousand page clicks, right, a thousand page clicks for one product, and you had a 10% conversion rate. Do this with your calculators, guys. You sold a hundred products because you had a 10% conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now what if you could increase your conversion rate not like double it or anything like that, not like increase it by 20% or some astronomical thing. What if you could just increase it by 4%? All right, so those 1000 page clicks, let’s just say nothing else changes. Now, with a 14% conversion rate, that’s 140 sales a month, or you can consider a day. You know some of you guys are selling a hundred units a day.

Bradley Sutton:

I was trying to pick something super conservative here. That’s 40 extra sales. Let’s say you’ve got a coffin shelf and that’s a $30 product. That means just by increasing your conversion rate by 4%, you are increasing your sales by $1,200 per month. If you were selling a hundred units a day, that’s $1,200 per day. That means let’s split that in half, let’s say 600. Well, you would have only had to increase your conversion rate by 2%.

Bradley Sutton:

Conversely, let’s say conversion rate doesn’t change, but it’s your click-through rate, right? So it’s the same thing when we’re talking about click-through rate, like how somebody sees you in the search results and if they click on it, you’re not going to convert anybody or everybody at any, you know, regardless of what you do, there’s nothing you can do that would make every single person who goes to your page buy. But let’s say you don’t even do anything with your conversion rate. You’re only changing your click-through rate and having more people hit your item from search results or from ads etc. It’s a very similar effect you potentially could have when you increase your click-through rate by a certain percentage as well.

Bradley Sutton:

So these kind of things are, I think, sometimes sellers. We sleep on it. We think about the hot, sexy things like PPC and advertising, which is very important. Keyword research and now a lot of people are thinking about AI related things. It probably doesn’t impact as much as keywords, or definitely does not impact as much as keywords does, but these are the things we rightfully think about when we’re thinking about optimizing and doing research. But optimizing for click-through rate, optimizing for conversion rate, is just as important. Destaney, can you talk about that a little bit, even from general standpoint, as well as advertising, about why CTR, CVR are so important?

Destaney:

Absolutely. I mean, driving traffic’s the easy part. Amazon’s driving all the traffic for you. They’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting from an algorithm perspective. With PPC, all you do is select a few keywords. The traffic is the easy part, but it’s getting people to convert. So who all has looked at your Amazon advertising keywords and you found a keyword that had 30 clicks and zero orders or something along those lines. At the end of the day, the PPC did its job. It drove the traffic to your listing. You need to stop and ask why are people clicking on my listing? They’re obviously interested in your product, so why are they interested in my listing but not checking out? And that’s where the conversion rate aspect really comes into play.

Destaney:

Bradley and I spoke on a webinar with Amazon a few weeks ago and there was a mason jar on the table and it really got me thinking. A mason jar. What are the top keywords for mason jar? Everyone was like mason jar, glass, things like that. It’s really like you can’t differentiate it that much, can you? But then we started chatting about there’s two different ways to brand a mason jar.

Destaney:

You can sell it to a homesteading canning community who’s looking for pressurized jars, or you could sell it to something like a wedding planner who is looking for barn decor. Now think about the difference, in that you can make a listing trying to serve all of the audiences, making it as generic as possible, which is oftentimes what we see people do. They get caught up in all the traffic and the volume opportunity and want to target everyone, thus creating a poor listing that doesn’t convert anyone. On the flip side, you can really niche down and figure out that specific audience that is actually going to convert. This is incredibly, incredibly important. If you decide to create a listing for a specific audience and you can change your conversion rate from the 10% to the 14%, it’s a small tweak, but you created a product to solve a need and that’s going to give you such a big competitive advantage. The traffic sites easy again, Amazon’s doing the heavy lifting, PPC is doing the heavy lifting. It’s getting people to not only click but also buy. That can be rather difficult.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, absolutely. All right. So, with that in mind, before we get into the search group performance, the reason why I started with this is because we’re going to do a live split test with an audience about some new creatives on an actual account. Destaney is going to be talking about this very account. It’s an actual product on Amazon. It’s this hemp pain cream account. But I did one last night and let me show you guys the results. All right, they have some new graphics that they got from AMZOneStep this company, this exact company. Let me share it here.

Bradley Sutton:

And so I did a Helium to an audience which is, powered by PickFu. I had done this here. I said, hey, if you searched on Amazon for a hemp pain cream, which of these images would most make you want to click on it if it came up in the search results? Okay, and so we had these three options, and then this is the one that was picked, and actually this is part of the old one, and I already know what I’m going to do with this one. I’m going to run this through again, but I want to run this versus a version that has both of these, with the hemp leaf and this, whatever the heck this dirt is I guess that has to do with hemp somehow in the background and then really make sure, is this the best image? But this is what you do because, like again, we might think, hey, this is a great picture and this is the one I want to go with, and we maybe only even have one option when we launch a product right, or when we’re redoing our photography for a listing and we just like, no, no, you know, I’m just going to show the picture and that’s good to go.

Bradley Sutton:

But sometimes just slight changes can have huge impact. I mean, you could see, even these three are all storing the same product. They’re all white background images and look how different it is. The score 54 to 32 to 14. So there’s clearly a preference here. Doesn’t mean that if somebody saw this, oh for sure they’re not going to click on it and definitely not buy it, because this is the ugliest one. But is the conversion rate going to go down? Is the click through rate going to go down? Potentially, based on this, absolutely, and remember, 1% up or down, 2%, 3%, percentage points going up or down, it has a big effect on your bottom line and so the reason I did this also was to get insight into why customers were picking this.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, because, like, for example, somebody said here, I chose C because I think it’s more useful to see the product, or even if it’s a box than a generic looking graphic of leaves, so, like, maybe I’m overestimating how much the leaves are important. All right. This person says I like B’s large closeup of the main item. It’s good to see exactly what I’ll be getting. All right, so this was one of their products. This is the actual product, is a real product.

Bradley Sutton:

On Amazon, you could see the existing image. This is the winner, right so far, but we’re trying to see can this be even improved on? This is a product that’s been on Amazon for years. This is not just something you guys need to be doing when you have a brand new product, but you know, like this person had the same image for years. You always should be making sure that it’s still the best image.

Bradley Sutton:

So what I did was I created a new one. Hopefully, you guys can see this here. This is a different product that they have. This is a roll-on like, not a cream, All right, and then so the same thing in this one. We actually Photoshopped it into the search results so it looks even more like hey, this is how it’s going to look in the search results.

Bradley Sutton:

I like B, B, okay, B, um, B, okay, we’ll see. Like I wouldn’t have picked the one that won here. This is why we do this. Guys, like you, don’t do stuff that you think you is the best. You do stuff that customers think is the best. But here’s the thing. Let me show you something I did so I can make sure that I am super hyper focused on this, and this is something that you guys need to do. Go into your brand analytics inside of Seller Central. This has nothing to do with Helium 10. Guys, go into your Brand Analytics inside of Seller Central. This has nothing to do with Helium 10. Guys, go into your Brand Analytics and go to consumer behavior analytics and then go to demographics.

Bradley Sutton:

What I did was I wanted to look at a whole quarter for this brand. What is the demographic makeup of my target audience? And unfortunately, this now it shows up. Last night this was not showing up at all. I had to download an Excel file for even this to work, but you see how it’s broken down in age and there’s also stuff like income and education. Most of this stuff was pretty even, like male, female was fairly even. But I noticed a big demographic here. I don’t know if you guys can see 65 plus and 55 to 64 and 45. So 45 all the way up to 80s is like way more than 50% of this whole market, like there’s a whole bunch that you don’t know. We don’t know the age of the people, but like this is like 80% of the people who we know the age and so with that, I’m like I want to just not just like ask random people I meet on the street who might not even be my target customer, but I went in and I said, using Helium 10 audience is.

Bradley Sutton:

I went and I think I did. Did I do it? Custom audience there we go. I can actually choose. Do I want to talk to our prime members or not? And then the age range of who is in this group, all right. So this helps you get more accurate results by targeting exactly who you are going to be putting this poll in front of. So let’s go ahead. I’m going to go ahead and start this and we’re going to let this run and hopefully by the end of this we’re going to see the results and see. I think most people were picking A and then B was like kind of like a second choice. So let’s see if you guys were right. But, Destaney, why don’t you start from the beginning about search query performance, what it is? Because this is the other thing. Like conversion rate is great, click-through rate is great, but if you’re not even indexed or ranking for the keywords that people will use to find it, the conversion rate and click-through rate is meaningless because there’s nobody even finding your product.

Destaney:

Yeah, I’ll kind of start high level here and how this ties into everything we’re talking about today. A lot of what Bradley and I teach is combining analytics and speaking to the algorithm, using data and also just understanding your audience. And now that things like search query performance report are available through the API, it makes it much, much easier because now we have the first party data to say this is how I am performing compared to the category. That part is really important because, as Bradley mentioned, all of us are typically way too close to the products we’re managing. I see this a lot during conversations with the CEO and with the brand owner. No one thinks their products can be improved upon or is any better. So when we’re able to access things like search query performance report, we’re actually able to see hey, this is my conversion rate compared to the category for this term. This is really important.

Destaney:

There’s a lot of variables that influence our conversion rate. It was asked earlier. You know, is a four point improvement a lot? That’s a 40% increase in conversion rate sounds like a lot. At the end of the day, it really depends on your category. So how many people know their category conversionary? Again, first party data is kind of my preferred data. So that’s usually what I’m referencing in this regard.

Destaney:

But within Amazon Advertising Console, you can pull your overall category conversion rate you can also use Helium 10 ads for this and what it allows you to see is your conversion rate in the total category compared to the category median. So why this is powerful is if you are converting worse than the category, if you’re not doing as well as your competitors, you are going to need to improve your conversion rate, because you’re getting the same amount of clicks potentially as someone else, but they’re going to be getting that conversion rate, because you’re getting the same amount clicks potentially as someone else, but they’re going to be getting that conversion rate. So if you don’t know where this is, you can open up advertising console. You can go to insights and planning in the left hand corner, and then you can click on brand metrics and then, once you open up brand metrics, you’re going to see a small link that says view details or something along those lines, and it’s going to allow you to see how you are converting. Now this is not just advertising data. This is retail data and advertising data You’re going to be able to see hey, you know, for my products supplements for example a good conversion rate is typically around 40 percent. So an increase to 43% isn’t too much. On the flip side, if you’re in apparel, we’ve seen good conversion rates be anywhere from four to seven percent. So you’re going to open that up. And you’re gonna compare. Are you converting better than the category?

Destaney:

If the answer is no, you have a listing problem that you need to figure out. Is your price point much higher than everyone else’s? Is your listing not that great? Do you have less reviews? That’s kind of the first step in identifying where you have a problem, and I like to start at the category level. It’s much higher. It’s a better view. James, to your point, it’s supplements is typically a category median of 40% conversion rate. I can showcase some of the data later on if we’re able to pull it up, but that’s a category where people have a lot of brand loyalty and you typically see it skewed by that. Again, flip side apparel, maybe high price point products you’re going to see a really big difference in conversion rate.

Destaney:

Now, the second thing you can see in that dashboard is detailed page views. So that’s another thing we like to dive into. Am I getting a lot of detailed page views compared to the rest of the category, yes or no. Once I understand those two answers, it’s really easy to say okay, here’s where I’m going to make my next step of optimization. I personally like to open up the search query performance report. So if you haven’t played around with Search Query Analyzer in Helium 10, it’s fantastic. It’s relatively new, because search query performance has not been available in the API until just recently. But what I love SQP for is it takes all of the broad category data we just talked about your conversion rate, your click-through rate and breaks it down onto the keyword level. Now you can also see that we do have a summary. Once you upload an ASIN, it does give me a summary of total search volume for this ASIN. It gives me my impression share for this ASIN. So how many impressions out of all the impressions in this category am I winning? My click share, my purchase share and the variance and conversion rate and click-through rate for my product. So, as you can see here, I have the variance in conversion rate and click-through rate for my product. So, as you can see here, I have a slightly lower click-through rate than what’s normal in this category and I have a pretty aggressive drop off in conversion rate, which makes sense because that’s what Bradley’s working on right now. Now, that’s just the summary.

Destaney:

Let’s say I want to drill down a little bit further. This is the viewpoint we have now. Again, I want to highlight that this is first party insights. This has never been available. Historically, first party brands or companies, like what we do at Helium 10 had to pull a lot of this data and kind of build their own algorithm behind it. Now that a lot of it’s directly available, it makes it a lot more efficient for all of us to access it. So, looking at search query, if you’re in an account or in a category that has hundreds of thousands of searches a day, you’re going to have a ton of data. This is a category that’s oftentimes restricted. Once you get into CBD hemp, things get a little bit tricky. But, as you can see here, we’re able for any ASIN to pull all the associated queries that are tied to that ASIN.

Destaney:

I can then see search volume. I can see my search query, search query score, which is how relevant these search terms are to my product my organic rank, my sponsored rank, impression share, click share, click-through rate, market click-through rate, conversion rate market conversion rate, purchase share. In my opinion, two of the most valuable views here are what is my click-through rate compared to the market? What is my conversion rate compared to the market? There’s about 70 different ways that we can view this data, but a lot of what I like to start with is going top down by search volume, because that’s going to be my biggest opportunity for growth, and then looking for differences in click-through rate. If I have a much higher click-through rate than my competitors, that means my main image is doing through rate. If I have a much higher click through rate than my competitors, that means you know my main image is doing something well. If I have a much higher conversion rate than my competitors, that’s a huge opportunity for me to expand on and grow my market share. On the flip side, if my conversion rate is much less than the category and again we don’t have a ton of data right now for this account, it’s a smaller account and a restricted category. But if we want to play around with things like conversion rate compared to category and see if there’s any opportunities or outliers, then we can dive in and figure out.

Destaney:

Okay, everything, as you can see right now that I’m converting really well on is branded. That means I have good brand recognition off platform. But I maybe need to focus more on non-branded traffic. Right, I can see that when we start looking into things that are non-branded, I don’t have as much data behind it. And that’s where it gets really fun, because if I can identify those opportunities, you can immediately make improvements directly within your advertising console. That’s why this data is so powerful.

Destaney:

If you find opportunities where you’re converting better than the category, you can immediately increase your PPC traffic on that term. So I noticed CBD cream is a big gap in the market. I can create a campaign to win this number one placement within 10 minutes. That’s really easy to do. Just bid really high, exact match, top of search focus and then I’m going to be able to start collecting more data on that term, which is going to help me analyze am I still converting better than the category at top of search? That’s really important, because everyone’s goal here is to improve their organic rank. Right, that’s the number one value of being on Amazon is getting all of the traffic and visibility once you improve your organic rank. So being able to work directly with Search Query Analyzer to make these improvements and implement them directly in ads is really, really powerful.

Bradley Sutton:

This is super important because I want to triple down on what she’s already said doubly, which about is for how important first party data is. Of course, there’s always a place for Helium 10 data and estimations and things, because Amazon doesn’t give information. But an estimation is just that, an estimation. It’s pretty accurate. A lot give the information, but an estimation is just that, an estimation. You know it’s like pretty accurate. You know a lot of the times, but you know like there’s always kind of like doubt by some people, like, oh, I’m not sure if, if, how close this is to what’s actually happening. But when Amazon makes available that’s what we mean when we say first party when Amazon makes something available that tells you, hey, this is the number of clicks, this is the number of purchases, it’s like this is the Bible, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, here’s one caveat, though, is it’s not like all encompassing, all right, this data. You might look at your own data and like, wait a minute. I added up all the purchases I had over last week. It said there’s only a hundred and I sold like 250 items, like what’s going on. Well, first of all, remember this is what comes from search. Not only that, it’s usually about like 30% of like the whole entire picture. And the reason is because it’s limited in that it’s only showing what comes from an actual search, from a keyword. You know, and not all sales come from keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Like sometimes people just click around, they hit at, they hit sponsored brand ads from a search that that’s not counted in here. They click back on their browser, then they buy something else. Well, that’s not going to be now, all of a sudden, that’s not going to be counted here. But it’s a great apples to apples comparison you versus your own products versus your competitors products. In that like scenario of a purchase happening within 24 hours, of a search without outside clicks and other things happening, how are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

And again what she said, first party data this is straight from the horse’s mouth data coming from Amazon that I personally never in a million years would have thought Amazon would give, like it would tell us how many clicks a keyword had and what percentage even my competitors of the clicks they have, and how many purchases and how many add to carts. That happened over, you know, for a whole keyword. Like never would I have thought that, even for like vendors, Amazon would release this data. And they did, you know sure enough, two years ago.

Destaney:

Again, I start high level because it can be overwhelming to dive into this level of granularity. I mean, on the search term level, being able to see click share, conversion rate, impression share, things like that. That’s why I think it’s really powerful to start first with the brand metrics, insights and planning. That’s one of the most seamless ways to just what is my conversion rate to category, what is my detailed page view to category. Once that’s done and I know what I want to dive into next, that’s where the Search Query Analyzer comes into play. All I have to do is type in my ASIN type in the date range I want to look at, and I can immediately see the highest volume in the category. And then, as you can see, it takes a little manipulation of the data and I can start identifying opportunities. Now let’s say again I look at conversion rate or I look at the impressions and I see a major opportunity to grow the impressions and I see a major opportunity to grow. It’s super simple to then open up that keyword directly into your campaigns and that’s powerful because, as we all know, there’s a direct correlation between Amazon advertising and organic positioning on the page. So when you’re able to do something as simple as open up the campaign and launch it from one dashboard. That’s really, really powerful.

Destaney:

Now someone asked about I think CPCs was the question being shown directly in this dashboard or bid Hector. I would say the one downside I would have for that is you got to think the market sets the bid or suggested bids. So one day a suggested bid could be 40 cents, one day it could be $3. It’s depending on the rate that the market is setting. So that’s why it’s really important to do your own bid management or build a set your own rules or rely on an algorithm and not just see the CPC or bid that was related to that keyword, that search term. You can always launch low and if it doesn’t get impressions increase as needed. So we typically like caution, staying away from suggested bids anyways, because it is just an average on the page.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So how can you start getting this data? Let’s say you don’t have Helium 10. How can you get this data? All right, let me show you guys. I was already in that demographic section of brands. So everybody, go ahead and do this right now. Who’s in your seller central account if you’ve never done this before.

Bradley Sutton:

You go here to the left side, you hit brands and then you hit brand analytics and then from here, you hit the search analytics and then search query performance, okay, and then you can look at the brand view or the ASIN view. Now, the ASIN view, you can only do one at a time. There it is right there. So I could like say, hey, look, let me see all of the sales I got in the month of March that happened from search. So I just do that right there. I can generate this download. Or if I can just look at here and I can sort by my ASIN count of purchases, all right. And so here this is showing me all of the sales that we got in March of these keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

But this is not necessarily that actionable. Like  what you would need to do if you don’t have Helium 10 is you would download this. All right, download this. Go back, take February’s download, January download, December download, November, and keep going back and what you want to do is then add them all together using pivot table and V, look up If you’re an Excel whiz, and then look at hey, what are all the keywords that brought me sales? This is the number one, the first thing. If you have never done anything in search career performance, take a look at the last nine months for some of your top products and what were the keywords that brought you sales. And then this is just one product, so like I would do another product. So I just said I would do nine downloads. Well, I have another hemp product. One is the cream, one’s the roll-on. Do the same thing. All right, it’s tedious, but this is what everybody until last month has had to do. Who has ever used Search Grid Performances? You just have to download a bunch of Excel files, but it’s valuable information. You’re going to find keywords that just randomly gave you a sale. Perhaps that you didn’t even realize, like marijuana roll-on like some pothead here I guess was looking at was typing marijuana roll-on, thinking that you could buy that on Amazon, which I don’t think that’s allowed, and somehow I don’t know what, in an auto campaign or something, my product came up and we got a sale from it. Right, like I might not have known that, even though that’s a forbidden keyword marijuana, I’m obviously indexed for it. If I got a sale for it, I can actually target that in PPC. And so, instead of it just being a random where I just showed up randomly in search results, now I want to get sales from marijuana roll on, or green lady hemp roll on, whatever the heck. That is all right. So this is how valuable the data is.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, for those of you who have the Helium 10 Diamond Plan, this is what you are going to want to do the very first thing. Everybody, go ahead and hop it up. I know a lot of you have the Diamond Plan. Pop it open right now. Let’s take a look at the results so far. I think we have like half the results and, wow, look at that. 17 people have chosen A. So far, five people have chosen Destany’s here B and only one person has chosen C, and I’ve already seen the things why. So it looks like whoever voted A is going to win this, perhaps, but this is still going on. Okay, so everybody who’s got it.

Bradley Sutton:

Search Query Analyzer in Helium 10, what I want you to do is go into your account and select month of and then just select the last I don’t know, eight months or so from August, all right. And then the one other advantage of being able to select multiple months and not having to do Excel files is you can select multiple products, and I literally just did this because actually the main product in this account ran out of stock about a month ago due to supply chain issues and selling too fast and and they’re just going to get back in stock and so this other product that doesn’t sell a lot at all. I was like man, I don’t want the sales for this account to go to zero. What can we do where I can just shoot them up to the top of the search results for the less popular product and hopefully get some sales? And because of that I was able to 400 X the sales on the product that barely sold any like we’re not talking big numbers here like it was selling like maybe like two a day, and so we went up to like eight a day or something like that, right. But it helped me because I was able to target specifically the keywords that was driving sales to the other one, which is the product that we want to have the sales.

Bradley Sutton:

But this was just a temporary fix, all right. So I selected this product and I selected these top two products and then hit apply filters and then all of the data is going to come up here Now. If you just like connect your token to Helium 10 right now, you might not be able to get all this data right away. It might take a few days. You’ll get this message that says, all right, hey, load this data or come back in a day or two. Mine is already loaded because I’ve had this connected for like two months, but right now I can now do a advanced setting and do minimum my purchases, minimum one. What does that mean? I’m saying hey for these top two products. I have for all of these eight months, from August all the way to last month, what were the keywords that brought me sales? And instantly 115 keywords, 115 different keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

This is not a big account, like Destaney said, guys, 115 different keyword driving sales and the top ones, if I just sort it by my purchase. Of course it’s going to be the keywords I knew about, like CBD roll on and some branded search terms here, et cetera, in motion hemp pain roll on, hemp pain relief roll on. But as you start going down this list, you’re going to start seeing keywords that you’re like oh, here’s a misspelling, cbc roll on instead of CBD roll on, and here’s some branded keywords from others. Like usually, you can’t, you know, steal keyword sales from other brands, but it looks like that’s what’s happening here Sunstate hemp somebody searched for, but multiple months they ended up buying one of these in motion products. And so look at that here 115 money making keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, every single one of these keywords, or most of them, would have come up potentially in like a Cerebro search. Right, if I said, hey, show me where this product anytime in the last seven months was ranking high, but would you have been guaranteed that they drove you sales? Just because you were ranking highly at a certain month, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get sales. This is first party data, saying these were the actual keywords that drove sales, and you could probably times this number by like two, like wherever sales is showing here, because, again, like I said, it’s a very limited amount of situations that they’re showing the sale. So that’s the first thing that anybody who has search grade performance should do. And then what you do is you look at this data and some of these keywords. Maybe you didn’t have many impressions, all right, so that that’s what I like to do, like I had like look at this one CBD gummies for pain.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t think this is going to be a big time conversion keyword for me, but how you read this search query performance when it says search volume, this is not the helium 10 search volume, this is how many people searched a keyword. And then it counts it like multiple times that helium 10 doesn’t like. For example, if they click on page two of the results, that counts as one search. If they hit a product and then they click back on their browser, that’s another search. So each search that Helium 10 counts is kind of like one. Like search performance is kind of counting it like four or five times. But it’s just. It’s still good at apples to apples comparison, but anyways, look at this 9,000 searches, but my impressions for these two products was 214.

Bradley Sutton:

What does that mean? That means like 90% of the time I am not showing up on page one or on the top half of page one, right? So if I got sales for this keyword and my conversion rate was good, how can this help? Well, I’ll be like, oh shoot, I’m only showing up like 5% of the time. Let me bid for top of search, let me try and boost my organic rank, because if I show up constantly at the top of the page, how much more can I increase the sales? And that’s the way that you can look at this.

Bradley Sutton:

For example, on the flip side here, here is a keyword right here CBC roll on. All right, cbc roll on. The search volume was 3000. My impressions was 4000. Now you might be like how in the world can you have more impressions than search one? Well, first of all, I had two products here. But even if it was just one product, it’s possible. And the reason is if I have a sponsored product ad showing up in like the top four or eight positions plus, my organic rank was towards the top. It means a lot of the times that somebody is searching for the keyword my product is showing up, not once, twice, meaning I get two impressions.

Bradley Sutton:

So, on your your best keywords, the ones that you show have a really good potential for sales and you have a better conversion rate than your competition. You want to be at the top of the page, maybe even twice, like let’s take a look at this one CBC Roll on here we go. It says my conversion rate is 10% and market conversion rate is 6.78%. So what does that mean, guys? That means that I know that if I can, I just need to be visible and I am converting at a better rate than the market overall and I want to double down. If this was switched, if my conversion rate, Destaney was only 6% and the market conversion rate was 10% and maybe I was on the borderline of maybe not even being profitable in advertising, would that be a keyword you double down on or would you pull back?

Destaney:

I would probably pull back or identify an opportunity to improve my listing. I would look and be like okay, is that relevant? Maybe people don’t understand it’s a roll on, so they’re not checking out and I can maybe do a better job of showing utility in my listing like that’s where this is incredibly powerful is you can start seeing the audiences that are related to each product.

Bradley Sutton:

Exactly, Exactly. It’s not like if I had a worse conversion rate for my main key in my products like Coffin Shelf. Right, I sell Coffin Shelf. If Coffin Shelf I had a really bad conversion rate, so let me just pull back all my spend. My conversion rate’s not as good.

Bradley Sutton:

No, like I got to figure out why is my conversion rate, you know bad, but let me show you guys a real life example of what I did from last year. Obviously, I didn’t, before Helium 10, ever had this. In September I was looking for this very thing, all right, so I’m just kind of reenacting it right here. Here is the month of September for the hemp roll on cream, and then I saw a keyword here that it wasn’t like oh my goodness, this is like the best keyword in the history of mankind, but it was CBD roll on, and I see a lot of people are asking like how in the world can you be even ranking for CBD related keywords? CBD is a forbidden keyword. It is. I do not have CBD anywhere.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s a separate training where I’ve talked about how I can exactly a separate conversation about how you can be indexed for a forbidden keywords, but anyways, that’s not the topic here. CBD, roll on in the month of September, brought me how many sales? Three sales, all right, nothing to write home about, all right. So I figured it probably brought me how many sales. Three sales, all right, nothing to write home about, all right. So I figured it probably brought me like six or seven, if you include the traffic of people clicking back and forth in their browser and stuff. But then I looked here and my conversion rate was 13%. You guys see that here 14, if we round up 14% and the market conversion rate at the time was 11%. So, as you can see from this column, this is what Helium 10, time was 11%. So, as you can see from this column, this is what Helium 10, you don’t have this in search query performance, but Helium 10 makes this calculation. I had a two and a half percent better conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

But then here is what really stuck out to me. Look at my search volume with impressions. So this was a keyword that I had better conversion rate, but there was 4,000 searches, about 3,700. My impressions from sponsored product and just organic was only 1,400. So less than half of the time that somebody searched for this keyword, I was showing up at the top. In other words, more than half of the time I was not showing up, I was never seen, there was no impression, more than half of the time somebody searched this keyword. So what did I do? I went in and I doubled down on this keyword. I’m like let me increase my bid, let me get that top of search placement and hopefully my organic rank would improve.

Bradley Sutton:

And then what happened? When I look back in January? So here’s January. You know I worked for a couple of months at working on this keyword. And take a look at that exact keyword here CBD, roll on. The first thing I’m going to show you is the impressions. You guys see the difference 3,800 search volumes. So the search volume stayed about the same for the month, but look at my impressions 5,000. Why? Because I was showing up at the top of the page now in sponsored and in organic placements, not only every single time that somebody ever searched for this keyword. I was showing one, sometimes two times. And then what did my sales go up from, even though the search volume didn’t improve it? Okay, this is not like. Oh, my goodness, this is like a game changing million dollar trick here. It went from three to 10. That’s still like over a 300% increase. That’s all right on this small keyword.

Destaney:

That’s incredible. I mean even just pausing. Think about this across multiple keywords. You can see the power and the part that people don’t always remember is that is going to drive an improvement in your organic rank, and you’re going to have to. As your organic rank improves, you can pull back on ads and you’re going to still maintain visibility and impressions. That’s the relationship I think people forget about. You can invest in ads, improve your organic positioning on the page so customers are more likely to see you. Without ads. You could slowly pull back and you’re still going to get visibility and sales, thus improving your profitability. But you have to get there first. Everyone forgets that they have to get there first.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s 100% accurate. But, guys, this was just one small real life example and this account has many more. That was just the one I thought was really great to show the power of search query performance and how you could see what happens when you increase your impressions compared to the search volume. And you had a good conversion rate. I was able to triple the sales. I lost seven sales. You know this is a $40 product. It’s like 200 bucks, 250 bucks.

Bradley Sutton:

But now, like Destaney said, what if you could do that with 10 keywords a month? You know, double the sales or triple your sales. And what if it wasn’t a small account like this one? What if you were selling a hundred units a day? All right, that 10 or that three would have been 30. Maybe now that 10 is going to be a hundred, so you would have gotten 70 extra sales on one keyword. And this is like what I’ve been trying to like. I’m about like I said to you guys I’m going to Poland this week, I’m going to Bulgaria. This is part of my speeches. Is this is not hypothetical research, right?

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of people want to talk about what you know AI can do for you and AI can do stuff for you. Like I optimize my listings for Rufus, but do I have data that shows that people are buying my products because I was able to answer a question? I don’t have any data. As a matter of fact, I have data that says that people aren’t even looking at them. I still do it because I think it’s best practice, like, if Rufus is asking a question that my listing is not answering, I want to answer that this is not like, oh, maybe it’s going to help down the road, or who knows how many people are using Rufus. This is literally the number of people who are searching this. Amazon is telling us a number of people who are clicking. Amazon is telling us the number of purchases we get and how much is increasing. Amazon is telling us this is the kind of thing, guys, you need to focus on right now. You know like sometimes we’re distracted by all this fancy AI stuff that we might see in people talk about, but this is still king, guy king. Keywords are king, and because Amazon is giving so much data. So in the meantime, I’m going to throw up that poll to see where we are at. All, right, let’s hit load 16 responses. We’re almost. I said I would get 50. And I think, look, we’re already at 39 out of 50. And I just started this, like what? 30 minutes ago. And let’s see the slow roll up here. Oh yeah, option a is running away with it right here. 27 have chosen it.

Bradley Sutton:

And then some of the reasons like what I like seeing the bottle and box in the image and probably be most likely to choose this one. I like seeing both the packaging and the product. It makes me think they have nothing to hide. Interesting. I like how the box that it comes plus the product together, side by side. It’s more informative. That way gives you a better idea of what will be sent to you.

Bradley Sutton:

These are things that maybe I didn’t think were important to the common customer. I like option A. It shows the packaging and the roll-on tube so I can get a better idea of how large the roll-on surface is. Very good point. You see, the original roll-on product. We didn’t have this. I also liked that the box is pictured so I can get an idea of how this will be protected when it ships.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing I didn’t realize would be kind of like important to some people, but you see, this is that roll-on thing that they were talking about. This is the surface that you put on your skin and so, yeah, now it makes sense now that I read that that somebody might. If you just look at this box, you would have no idea. Hey, what’s the part that’s actually going on my skin here? So again, what tool did I use on this is Helium 10 Audience powered by PickFu. Anybody on this call, even people who have a free Helium 10 account, can use this because it’s a pay-per-use thing, but you guys can. This product is out of stock right now, but it’s the brand new packaging and everything is coming in next week.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m going to be relaunching it with this image now, based on this exact thing that I just did, and I’m going to be checking my conversion rate, because who knows my click-through rate at least my click-through rate is probably gonna be better than when I just had I forgot. I don’t even know what. What image I have on now. It’s none of these. These are all new images but there we have it. We’ll keep this going just for a little bit more. I think you guys can see clear why we put both of these together and what kind of impact they can have on your business. You know, optimizing your images as well as optimizing your your keywords. So, Destaney, thank you so much for coming on here and thanks to everybody else there on this call for attending, and a few of you guys. I’ll see you in Poland and Bulgaria in a few days.

Destaney:

Thank you.


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VP of Education and Strategy

Bradley is the VP of Education and Strategy for Helium 10 as well as the host of the most listened to podcast in the world for Amazon sellers, the Serious Sellers Podcast. He has been involved in e-commerce for over 20 years, and before joining Helium 10, launched over 400 products as a consultant for Amazon Sellers.

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