Amazon Product Listings

Having a well-baked advertising strategy on Amazon can do wonders for driving growth and gaining an edge on your competition. While having a healthy budget, strong keyword coverage, and regularly optimizing your ad campaigns are all necessary to achieve that growth, having a well-structured product listing page is just as important. 

Auto targeting campaigns especially rely on this. Since auto campaigns are not built leveraging specific keyword targets, your visibility is dependent on those product pages having keywords, and information, that the shopper is searching for.

So what makes a strong product listing page? Let’s go over some best practices that are not only beneficial to support advertising but are best practices in general, specifically around:

  • Product Titles
  • Feature Bullets
  • Winning the Buy Box

Product Titles

Let’s start with product titles. Well-optimized product titles follow a consistent structure. A simple name of the product itself isn’t necessarily enough, and Amazon allows you a fair amount of space to play with to really add more to your titles to make them stand out. 

That said, Amazon will limit how much is shown depending on where it is shown, such as the search results page. While your product listing can allow for up to 200 characters, the results page caps at 50, so think about what you want within your titles to be visible in all areas of search on Amazon. 

In terms of the structure itself, a best practice to follow with all of your product titles would be to have them contain the following:

  • Brand name
  • Variant information such as color or flavor
  • Size or weight information
  • 1-2 additional keywords
    • For these keywords, consider what is important about the product from a customer’s perspective

You could structure the titles themselves to flow in the same order: Brand > Variant > Size > 1-2 additional keywords.

Feature Bullets

Next, let’s talk feature bullets. If you are a third-party seller, you have up to five feature bullets at your disposal. First-party sellers can actually request to have more available, up to as much as ten. 

Feature bullets are essential to not only help sell your customer on the product, but also to help your product get visibility. Each bullet has a 500 character limit, so you have plenty of room to really emphasize the key elements of your product. 

Let’s list out some of the best practices in this area:

  • Start with proper capitalization, and keep it consistent 
  • Do not end in punctuation
  • Avoid keeping it policy-focused; keep it focused on product features as much as possible
  • Treat this section as a hierarchy of features, starting with the most benefit-driven or interesting, and work down
  • Provide as many details in each one as you can while keeping them coherent
  • Avoid keyword stuffing for the sake of keyword stuffing

Winning The Buy Box

Now let’s move on to an issue that is arguably the most crucial to your advertising strategy, winning the Buy Box. 

If you are the only seller of this product, this will probably not be as important, but many sellers out there compete with others listing the same product. Some of those might have better pricing, faster delivery, or be Prime eligible. All of which will help them win that Buy Box. If one of those other sellers is Amazon, however, it’s almost a sure thing they will be the consistent winner of the Buy Box.

But there are ways to try and compete here:

  • Run repricing to match, or beat, competitor pricing. This approach may help you beat Amazon temporarily, but as Amazon reprices intra-day, be prepared for that Buy Box win to be short-lived unless you can do the same and afford it 
  • Roll your shipping cost into your advertised price to allow for a “Free Shipping” tag
  • Improve your fulfillment promises and narrow the window where possible

Remember, if you are not winning the Buy Box, your ads will not be eligible to serve, and you will have “Not in Buy Box” flagged for that particular SKU in the ads console. Other reasons why winning the Buy Box is important:

  • The winner of the Buy Box is the first seller that the customer will see; prominent placement compared to additional sellers
  • Sales fluctuations on heavily competing listings can often be attributed to fluctuations in Buy Box ownership

Takeaways

If your sponsored ads aren’t performing as you’d like them to, chances are you can blame mistakes in one of these three areas. 

So make sure that you’re taking full advantage of optimized product titles and feature bullets. Check that you’re winning the Buy Box and if you’re not, make the necessary changes to win it more frequently.

These are just a few key elements about a product listing that are important to helping your advertising strategy be a successful one.  You may also need to delve into other aspects such as a plan for getting reviews or improving your images.

If you do everything you can to optimize your product listing, you should see corresponding growth in sales. If that’s not the case, is it time to assess and refine your ad strategy?

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