Brian Johnson of Sponsored Products Academy
Today we have Brian Johnson of Sponsored Product Academy (& PPC Scope) to talk to us about PPC and the REAL reason for the end of Amazon incentivized reviews.
This is a guy that has been in ecommerce industry for years. He started out selling banking equipment on eBay for seven years before a friend pulled him into Amazon. He began launching his own private label products. This was about three years ago when Amazing Selling Machine launched.
Soon after that he got in touch with a large company that was struggling on the Amazon platform and needed help. Brian slowly shifted into doing more consulting work once he saw the demand there. He found that the greatest need came down to visibility.
He needed to do more marketing which meant Pay-per-click Amazon ads. Once he began researching Amazon PPC, he found that there simply wasn’t enough information out there. He decided he had to teach himself. Like many entrepreneurs, his success came about solving the problems he faced.
End of Amazon Incentivized Reviews
In October of 2016, Amazon announced the end of Amazon incentivized reviews. Sellers could no longer give products away in exchanged for a review. This was a major change because, until that point, incentivized reviews was the biggest ways for Amazon sellers to launch new products. In their press release, Amazon cited the reasons as wanting to improve the user experience. Which makes sense because so many reviews were fake.
This started a bit of a frenzy among Amazon sellers. No one really knew where to go from there. It soon became clear that the best way forward was to focus on Amazon PPC. Sellers began to turn their attention, and their sole attention, to Amazon ads in order to drive traffic. It didn’t take long for Amazon PPC costs to begin to rise. Brian did some research and realized that the cost increase began about a week after Amazon’s announcement. It became quite clear that this was the new norm and not simply temporary spike. Amazon sellers began seeing advertising costs increased by as much as 5-10%.
For Free video training from Brian, click on the video image below:
Amazon’s Benefit
It may have not been Amazon’s main intention for the end of Amazon incentivized reviews, but they did see a major increase in profit because of it. In the course of his research Brian saw that you were still able to use Amazon Vine. This is Amazon’s programme for paid reviews. Instead of using a third party option, you could pay to use Amazon’s program which starts at $2500 a product. Brain also found that Amazon makes a lot of money from PPC. Over a billions dollars a year. With PPC costs rising by 5-10%, that’s a lot of money Amazon made by eliminating Amazon incentivized reviews.
How to Sell in a Post-Incentivized Review World
You don’t want to get swept up in the Amazon PPC craze. Everyone is moving to PPC, they are flooding the market, and driving up costs. You need to figure out how to sell in a 2017 Amazon.
Don’t Do List
Don’t listen to seller support. One of the biggest mistakes Brian is seeing is following the wrong advice. They call up Seller Support which tells them to run one campaign and increase their bid. These reps are not trained property and they simply give bad advice. They don’t understand how the platform works.
This works well for Amazon. They make more money and can quickly clear out their support tickets. It doesn’t work well for sellers that can afford to waste a lot of money by throwing it away in Amazon ads.
Click here for video training on this.
Best Practices
Amazon PPC is a complex system. There is not one size fits all. Each product is different. They have different customers, different click through rates, so you have to run a solid PPC campaign.
Not only does Amazon look at your products, but they also look at the customers. Sometimes they will show your ads to audiences that are related to your prod...
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