Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder and managing director here at BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of brands. And we do exactly that we network in our share together to stay on top of newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be. Over the past five years, we've probably hosted close to 1000 of these virtual events. This year alone, we do close to 100 in person events as well. I put in the chat there, if anybody likes to check out any upcoming events, we're primarily focused on the digital landscape as a whole, I spend the majority of my time advising brands that start up the fortune 100, we'd love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today, if you ever have any questions around strategies, or pain points, or what's happening across digital, or if you're looking for service providers, don't hesitate to reach out we've got a shortlist that come recommended from the brands in the network that are constantly vetting and bringing those those key service providers to the top couple housekeeping items to get started today. Number one, we're starting three to four minutes after the hour, we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go as well, we're gonna give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other is we want this to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have a question, don't hesitate to drop it in the chat or the q&a. Or you can always email me at aaron@bwgconnect.com. And that's that's my email. Literally, it could be an hour from now tomorrow next week, you ever have a question or want to set up time to chat, just shoot me an email. And with that, let's jump into this conversation today around how to create winning content. As a whole, I think what's really become well known over the past like three to four years is the importance of content. And it doesn't matter how much paid media you have, and the dollars you're spending if the content isn't great, it's not going to convert, and you pretty much flushing money down the drain. And so we've got some great friends, partners, supporters to the network, been around been partners for a lot of brands, for as long as we've been around for the past five years. Over at Media.Monks. And, you know, they agreed to kind of jump on the light of day and kind of walk us through how they view this. They're helping a ton of brands out in this space, and just are all around digital experts. And so, you know, Andrew, I'll kick it over to you. First, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and media bones, that'd be awesome. You can kick it over to Matthew. And then we kind of kick off the cover of conversation. Sounds good.

Andrew Lorence  2:40  

Sounds great. Yeah. And I appreciate you guys having us on here. Great to be back on the call. And obviously, thanks for all the brands and people joining here today as well. So as we all know, Amazon is getting more and more competitive. You know, content is one of the pillars that we really focus on here at Media.Monks, and extremely important. As you start looking at, it's kind of the foundation of your business. So wanted to join here, myself, I'm the Senior Director of Sales here at Media.Monks within the eCommerce division. I've been with the agency for a little bit over four years now doing everything from working on the delivery side, working on strategizing and, you know, looking at potential clients to bring into the fold here as well looking at their strategy, looking at their content, and so forth. So really excited to be on the phone call here today. I'll let Matthew give a quick introduction here, as well as Matthew if you want to do that. And then I'll give a quick introduction just on medium monks as a whole and kind of our division what we focus on. 

Matthew Boardman  3:38  

Perfect. Thank you, Andrew. So as Andrew said, my name is Matthew, I'm the director of content here at Media.Monks. I dabbled in a lot of different areas in eCommerce and within Amazon. I've done product design and product creation, applicant product packaging and copywriting are the actual listings themselves of an influencer marketing, social media marketing, email. And that's all kind of culminated into me joining the Media.Monks company and leading the content team. So we're the folks that are writing the product detail pages, those product pages that you're looking for, when you shop on Amazon. 

Aaron Conant  4:20  

Awesome. So to kind of kick it off here, just a reminder to everybody you have questions along the way, drop into the chat the q&a or email them to me, Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. And then, you know, just people send in some questions ahead of time we'll tackle those as appropriate. But yeah, just feel free to ask questions as we go. And to kind of kick it over to you if you want to walk through.

Andrew Lorence  4:44  

Yeah, so I figured I'd at least are kind of a little bit of background about Media.Monks. I know a lot of people are kind of repeat people that have been on here before so I apologize. You've heard this before for all the new people just want to give you at least a little context of where we're coming from as well. So we've been working with brands on the platform for Little over 13 years now. And so that's on Seller Central vendor Central, we really take a holistic approach, as we talked about, what we're talking about today is one pillar of what we're looking at, within content, but operations advertising, you know, strategic consulting data and analytics is are some of the other areas that we're looking at as well. But as you guys all know, they all tie in together. Our office is located a couple blocks away from the Amazon campus, which is strategically placed not only for building relationships with Amazon, but also we have a nice talent pool that we can pull from as well. So you'll see about half of our employees come directly from Amazon or our experts in the space, just based on our location here as well. One of the nice things that we do have strong relationships with Amazon directly. We are an advanced partner on the advertising side, that brands has an open API to their DSP platform, there's a number of exclusive access pieces that we have right now, within the DSP platform as well, that only urgency has that availability to so we're really one of those at the forefront of new and beta programs launching as well. So if there's any questions about that, obviously, probably not the topic for today. But we can kind of talk through that as well on future calls. The other piece here is really our clients that we focus on, they can really range from very well-established brands to just launching on Amazon. The nice thing is that we have strategies that fit each each, you know, brand or company and where they are in that path on Amazon. So today, obviously, we're focusing on the content piece here on Amazon, specifically, we also do focus on other eCommerce platforms as well, again, not the focus today, but something that we can obviously talk with people about after or at a later date there. But yeah, I'm just really excited to kind of jump into this. And so we'll jump right into the deck here and kind of go through but as Aaron mentioned, we really want this to be, you know, a conversation. So there's questions. You know, people want to bring up a, you know, example of what they're doing, or some struggles you guys are having or challenges. Happy to talk through those as we go through the slide here.

Aaron Conant  7:02  

Awesome. 

Andrew Lorence  7:09  

Matthew, I'll kick this over to you to kind of talk through the Amazon shopping experience, the path to purchase and kind of what the path is that these customers are taking on the Amazon platform here. 

Matthew Boardman  7:19  

Yeah, thank you, Andrew. So really, what I want to highlight here is going to be three pieces. The first is just how Amazon differs from other shopping platforms or other search engines. Amazon is much closer to the purchasing decision than say Google. And so one of the things left a comment or phrase you're going to hear me talk about today is the importance of skim ability, the content that you're writing, has to be able to communicate quickly to shoppers. Some of the stats when we kind of break this down by the numbers, and you'll see this on the subsequent slides is that around 70% of shoppers aren't even clicking past that first page of the search results. One of the key things to get you onto the page one for those search results. Is your content strategy. Is that keyword research and implementation into your listings, not the only criteria add to play a role, seller agent history, number of customer reviews, sales velocity, there's a lot that goes into it that we'll touch on. That's key to keep in mind. Is that that skim ability piece just because the Amazon shopper is going to differ from someone who's just browsing on Google doing more product research or just research in general. 

Aaron Conant  8:35  

Do you want to just highlight really quick because, you know, that comes up a lot is if you look back like three, four years ago, people were just taking the same content and putting it in all the different platforms. But you know, how does that Amazon customer journey? How do you see it differ from other channels that are out there? 

Matthew Boardman  8:53  

Yeah, I would say that, because shoppers on Amazon, you know, Amazon has over 200 million Prime members globally. The reason that people are willing to pay that 120 bucks a year is because it has such a wealth of products. And there's a lot of there's a good assortment on there, right. And that kind of queues send the number of prime members is important as it continues to grow because it shows us Amazon just has an increasing hold on digital shopping. When we look at shoppers search for product couldn't do Google, we're typically seeing them in a research phase. They're trying to figure out, what do I want, they might be watching videos or reading reviews from influencers or bloggers. But when they get to Amazon, that's when they've kind of done enough research. They've decided I want to buy a product like this. Now I'm deciding which product they're going to add to cart. And so the importance of highlighting the different programs that your brand's involved in. Some of that is going to be extraneous to the product detail page really needs to be concise. That goes back to what I said about skim ability. Same thing with your images. One of the mistakes we often see is having way too much text in product images on those infographics. And same thing with a plus content. Too often we're seeing too much text there. And that's just not adding value from a conversion standpoint, we'll touch on some of the discoverability the traffic benefits of that with SEO. But that's kind of the biggest difference, I'd say between the Amazon experience and others, is just how close the bottom of purchasing funnel we are.

Aaron Conant  10:34  

Yeah, I mean, no, it makes sense, right? Because, you know, Father's Day comes around, I go to Google for best Father's Day gifts. And if the result ends up being best dad mug, I go to Amazon, I type in best dad mug, and I purchase it there. They would have it anyways. Awesome. No love it. 

Matthew Boardman  10:55  

Yeah. Two things I'd add, before we move on. One is that we're kind of going to be approaching this whole conversation in the lens of the shopper journey. So we'll be looking at what is the experience on the search engine results page or search once they're into the product detail page, and then the brand store and talking about organic and paid marketing lovers for each of those stages. The other thing I want to highlight here is that we often approach content from like three pillars. That's SEO, search engine optimization, this is writing for the algorithm. This is how you bring traffic into your product page. The other is CRO conversion rate optimization. This is writing for humans writing copy that is persuasive to human person who's reading this looking at your images. And then the last is protecting your brand to setting accurate expectations. One of the most common reasons we see her product returns and negative customer reviews is a shopper got something different than what they were expecting. And they're upset about that. And so it's really important for content to proactively set accurate expectations about what is the size, what is the capacity, what is the texture, the quality, and really trying to nip that in the bud before we get those product returns that are costly for you, or before we get those negative customer reviews that can cost future sales. With that, let's go ahead and jump into that assert. Andrew, kind of teed you up here. So when you're looking at a brand or a product page on Amazon, what are some of the pieces you're looking at to direct the customer and the journey you want them to follow?

Andrew Lorence  12:50  

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot that can go into this, as well. And so I think content is a big one of those, because I think that determines kind of where you're showing up what keywords are showing up for. But as we all know, the platform has changed a lot. So it used to be that, you know, SEO and keywords drove a lot of that your relevancy, your sales, and so forth. Now, it's really turned into, as we probably talked about in previous calls a pay to play platform. What that results in is that there's a lot of places here where advertising is dictating kind of where your products are showing up, how they're showing up, and so forth. So that's coming into play more and more, you start looking at, you know, the sponsored product ads that are coming up in search, and you want to look at kind of which products you're featuring there. Is that your newest product that you're launching? Because it doesn't have the relevancy? Or is it your evergreen product that is your best seller because you want that top and center. Also looking at sponsored brand ads, as they deliver to the brand store category pages as well, that's a nice way that you can send people directly into the brand store. If they're more top of funnel doing maybe they are going out the Amazon for some of their research. So that's definitely one way that we can kind of control where people are coming in and looking at these products and what types of products. And then it's really important that we have the content that backs it up. So organically, they're also showing up in those placements as well. 

Matthew Boardman  14:18  

Yeah, that's great. And I think the the relationship of content and advertising is one that we often see overlooked. When you're optimizing for keywords and choosing which keywords to bid on your ad campaigns, and you're choosing which keywords to incorporate into your product page on the front end, or on the back end, those should line up. Because if you're bidding on a keyword, you also want to be ranking for it organically. That's going to help your bid, win those auctions. And then as that bid brings in more traffic phrase, it's going to kind of boost your organic rank as well. And so having a close relationship between content and advertising is really, really key. The other thing I want to highlight with this image here that we're looking at, you see all those red areas represent sponsored listings. Amazon has grown its advertising business tremendously over the last 5 10 years. And it like Andrew said, it's become this pay to play marketplace. And when you're having higher competition for your ads, you need any advantage you can to give you a leg up on the competition to help you increase the efficiency of your ads and their profitability. And so that's where that content advertising synergy really comes into play. You want your ads to be effective, we need them to complement each other. And those ads are then driving traffic into product page. And so as Aaron said at the start, if your content on that product page isn't primed to convert, you're wasting money, you're putting the cart before the horse, so you really need content to be ready to go before you start at to really maximize the profitability, you're gonna get out of those. 

Aaron Conant  16:05  

So a couple of points. And then I want to ask you a quick question about, you know, what factors are most important for organic search rank? But it's interesting, because Amazon really wants its ad platform what why does it work so well, most people, like the average consumer, will just click on these and they don't even realize they're clicking on an ad. When you look at the lotion, one or the detergent one, the phone charger, if they're not even going to page two, that means every, like, almost everything that gets bought from a search on detergent, gets attributed to, you know, an advertising campaign and goes right into row ads, right? Like, it's interesting how they've almost gamed the system you want. I mean, it all plays into content and for it to show up there and it has to convert, but even looking at cereal here, their ads performed so well, because they're putting the content in front and that content, they're all ads, and then people click on it and they buy it. I think it's I think it's fascinating.

Matthew Boardman  17:09  

Yeah, it can be a real eye opener for a lot of people to see just how much landscape or real estate, the ads of own own these days. Yeah,

Aaron Conant  17:20  

yeah, it's, it's awesome. So what question that comes in what factors impact organic search ranking the most,

Matthew Boardman  17:28  

 I can take this one. And then Andrew, if there's anything else you want to add to it. There's a lot that goes into it. This is not an exhaustive list. But of course, we're talking content. And so one of the big things is keyword selection, and keyword density. And so that's going to be, you need to pick keywords that bring in a lot of High search volume, but also are really relevant to your product doesn't matter if you show, if you try to go after a term that is totally irrelevant to your product, shoppers aren't going to click on it, and Amazon's algorithm is not going to place you for it because it's gonna see the gun, no sales velocity, no traction for that term. But there's more to it. So seller age, and seller history can play a role. Your sales velocity, which is kind of the aggregate of how much traffic your listings are bringing in that traffic is going to be driven by organic and paid attention to using Amazon associates or even tapping into like influencer marketing, to increase that traffic from off site. You're also going to be looking at, let me pull up my notes, return rate and exit rate. So return rate is the product returns, Amazon wants to provide shoppers a quality experience that hold customers sessions built into their business model. And so if they see that your products have a really high return rate, that's going to be a mark against you. And the ranking. Same thing with exit rate if you have a lot of traffic coming into a listing, but then it immediately bounces that's going to penalize you as well in Amazon's eyes because there's interpreting or inferring that. That means this is not a quality listing. And that's another reason that your content should be primed, before you start dumping a bunch of money into driving traffic through paid ads, right. Number and average customer views are going to be a factor. But there's a lot it's a laundry list. It's never a black and white situation. 

Andrew Lorence  19:28  

Yeah, and I think the other thing I'd I'd add on on there is looking at as we talk about search ranking organic rank, it's also thinking about this, we have to think about this on an individual keyword level. So you might rank highly for a longtail keyword but you might not rank well for the keyword of cereal cereal is probably you know the top keyword, very expensive, very competitive. So I think it's also important to be realistic about kind of where you are as a business and what we're going to focus on. And that's what I said initially we work with brands that are new to Amazon all the way up to the very well-established. So you're very well-established household brand, you've got a large marketing budget, we should be, you know, competing on the top keyword for that category. Because that makes sense. You have the budget to compete there, you have the relevancy to compete there, you have the product quality to compete there. If you're new to Amazon, competing on like a keyword like cereal, it's going to almost be cost prohibitive in the sense that you're gonna spend so much competing on there. That's just not realistic. So we need to think about what's realistic. So let's look at those longtail keywords, look at what differentiates your product. And we'll build that into the content as well. But I think as those pair up with advertising, we need to be realistic about what type of keywords do we want to be placing on. And then as you grow and build momentum, then you can start focusing on some of those, those different keywords there as well. So that's where I think the content piece really ties into the advertising piece. Because a lot of those keywords that we're going after, and how we're positioning the product, content wise, is going to make an impact organically. But then, on the sponsor side, we need to make sure that those those campaigns and strategies are matching up. 

Matthew Boardman  21:07  

Yeah, that's such an important point, Andrew, I want to reiterate it. Every search query has a unique search, search and search engine result page. Every query has a unique results page. And so you need to pick your battles, which keywords longtail keywords are you going to fight for?

Aaron Conant  21:28  

So quick question comes in. So most traffic is going to go to promoted products and organic will account for a smaller percentage. What split of revenue from paid versus organic should brands shoot for? And how has that changed over time? Hmm. 

Andrew Lorence  21:45  

I can I can take first stab at that may be more of one of those questions, honestly, just to bring in some of our advertising experts as well. It really honestly depends on the product type and where it is in the lifecycle. So if you're looking at you know, well-established product, evergreen product and on the you know, the site for awhile has great reviews, sales, velocity, and so forth. You might be looking at like a 70-30 60-40 split, the first being organic, the second being sponsored. But if you're new with it coming out with a new product, you might start out day one 100% of those sales are based on the sponsored, you know, efforts that you have there. So, you know, I think the goal is with each product to get it into a healthier, you know, 6040 7030 split. But again, it's going to depend, it's also going to depend on how competitive the landscape is there. So honestly, we're looking at as a product by product basis, and then also category as well, it's going to come into play there.

Aaron Conant  22:43  

Awesome. Love it. All right, great.

Matthew Boardman  22:52  

 Okay. So one of the things I want to pick up here is the last time that we saw the SERP right, and first thing you're seeing on the surface of wall of images, that image is one of the most important things that we're going to be talking about the product detail page, if you have poor quality imagery, or non spiring, stimulating imagery, that's going to impact the click through rate to your listings. And so that is something that anytime we work with a new client, we want to ask them what sort of existing imagery video creative assets do you have? That's so key when a shopper can inspect the product in person, that you have good collateral to show them in that digital format. So they see an image, hopefully it strikes a chord with them, they click into it to explore that page more. And then what factors do you need to be considering to impact that conversion rate that CRO as well as the the traffic, the search engine optimization or the SEO? And so this is all going to tie into your title to the bullet points, the media gallery, the product description, and just kind of going through each of those, and making sure they answer the most important questions for the shoppers. That's kind of a vague statement, I realized. So what does that actually mean? Like how do you apply that? It's going to depend on the product, every single product is going to have different considerations. So do I care about if I'm selling a paper bag? I can't. How durable is gonna hold a lot of weight is, for example, if it's like a food services delivery bag, that's something I dealt with recently. So it's top of mine that we want to show like how many units are you going to get? So we want an image of the stack. We want to show its durability and quality. And we might have some lifestyle photography and because of this the target audience here is food services. No, we want to make sure that We're looking at models of the appropriate age, gender. And we can find some of that information in Seller Central. Actually, if you go into brand analytics, there's a demographics portal. And we can look at what your customers have been in an aggregate over the past day, week, month, or quarter. And use that to inform what sort of photography or imagery we should use on the listing with the bullets? Well, I think Andrew will be pulling up a example here that we can kind of talk through as well. But we don't want to assume the shopper is going to look at just the images or just the bullets. So those should tell a very similar story. Oftentimes, we see that the bullets call out something great, but images fail to relay that. And so that's another good self check process to go through. Here, let me kick it over to Andrew, I've been rambling for a while.

Andrew Lorence  26:03  

Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that we asked people in a survey is kind of where their specifications we want to kind of take a quick look at, unfortunately, don't have time to do a full run through of all the ASINs. But we appreciate everyone that submitted those. So we picked a couple, we really appreciate the people that said that they were okay with us kind of picking on them a little bit today, by no means is to say that things are bad. I think a lot of days since we actually got we're looking through them yesterday and the day before they look really good. So some of these things are a little bit nitpicky. But as we talk about the importance of content, I think the main thing is here is that you are up against competitors that are checking all the boxes, they're doing all the right things. So again, to you know, get those conversions to make sure advertising is well spent, we really need to focus on kind of all aspects there. So I will pull up a quick one right here. So one of the people from PRX performance was nice enough to send over this ascender. So just add a couple of quick call outs. As you know, we're kind of talking through like the images and so forth. I think one of the important things here is that how your customers are actually engaging with the content. So think about all you people on the call, how do you shop on Amazon, it's, my guess would be as if you're not shopping at work, you're on your mobile device. So you're like, hey, I need this, or hey, I saw this, you know, just thought about that, I'm going to check on my phone. What that means here is that all these bullet points that are right here calling out all these key features, benefits of your product are pushed down to the bottom. And what they're really saying at the top is the title, they're seeing the reviews, and they're seeing these images. And so it's extremely important to call out some of these features and benefits in these images. And so you'll see that with text overlays icon overlays infographic type layout, specifically on this one, you know, we start looking at this a space saving. So dimensions in here, we're actually putting the dimensions of the product, again, great lifestyle imagery showing the product being used put together. There's some great videos here, but it's really kind of looking at again, you know, what are some of the key pieces here, pulling those in here, because some people aren't going to get past. If they're on your mobile device, they might not get past. You know, those images, they might not scroll down into the a plus content. So this is the seat key things that we noticed specifically with this one here. And Matthew, I don't know if you had anything else to add on to this one specifically.

Matthew Boardman  28:35  

Yeah, I would say that their dimensions are listed in the product specs and in their bullet points. And it's also listed in their A plus content. So we're like Andrew said, We're nitpicking here. But again, because that difference in the mobile consideration, we want to mu critical information and they that fitness station, that would be dimensions are going to be a huge factor. And so we should make sure that is included in the first images that they're going to be seen. Now the importance of mobile versus desktop optimization will vary by product or by product category. And so you can find that information within business reports. And you can go look at that breakout of your sessions and see how important you should be favoring or mobile versus desktop. But in most cases, in most categories, we are seeing that mobile continues to gain importance and so we want to be optimizing for mobile first. Other things that might call out again, kind of piggy capitals, all caps in the bullet points is not compliant with Amazon. Now that said, Amazon doesn't enforce this super strictly, but it's something that you should be aware of. If you are going to put all caps in your bullet points you are creating In a suppression risk, Amazon at some point become like your listing no longer appears in the search your sales drop off, and could just be as simple as you have all caps. And that's a violation of their product detail page policy, that used to be fine. It used to be best practice. Now it's a risk. And so there's little things like that, I could also call out the length of the bullets. We've seen that the first 500 characters total of your bullet points are indexed by the algorithm, anything beyond that doesn't get indexed from the bullet points. And so you can have longer bullets, but you just need to make sure any keywords that you're going after should be implemented within the first 500 characters. Again, these are kind of nitpicky things, but we got some really high quality Asus take a look at so we're going into the weeds with that.

Aaron Conant  30:54  

So it really quick couple questions to come in. One is around the importance of videos. I mean, everybody right now is struggling with the cost of producing content. And videos are more cost but but if they convert, so any commentary on videos and the performance of those on the detail page.

Matthew Boardman  31:13  

Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. And then anything else that you want to add Andrew, videos do tend to improve conversion rate. That said they should be quick, we don't want to see two minute videos, we just don't expect the Amazon shopper to have intention span that long. If it's a more expensive product, you might get some more grace, but really comes back to that skim ability. We have shoppers that are used to things like Instagram real and tic TOCs is really bite sized rapid content. And so you need to convey the most important information as quickly as possible. Some more affordable ways to produce videos, that can kind of double dip is if you're doing marketing off of Amazon, let's say social media marketing, you might be hiring influencers to promote your product. If you get influencers who can produce a high enough quality video, you could reuse that on your Amazon page and you get more mileage out of it, you can reused on your website, social multiple times. So it's really about thinking smarter. And trying to maximize the mileage you get out of every resource you're tapping into. Amazon should fit within your holistic marketing strategy. It should not be siloed, it should not operate in a box. It should tie in with everything else you're doing. And that includes in resource sharing.

Aaron Conant  32:35  

Awesome. Next one is What do you think of Amazon's implementation of them taking images of our products, this is happening to us and they misrepresented our products. And we had to go through our SPS to update. So any thoughts on Amazon taking images of products

Matthew Boardman  32:53  

it's a risk as you found out it's a it's a very neat idea from Amazon, because that is a need for the online space can inspect in person, so you need those assets. However, there are agencies that exist that perform that service. For good reason, there's a lot that goes into executing that well. And so I would I'm sorry to hear you got burned a bit by this experience with Amazon. But I kind of anticipate that is going to be a running or ongoing concern. Just because every product is going to be different. And if they're using a templatized out of the box copy paste solution, there's going to be mishaps.

Aaron Conant  33:40  

And there's a couple questions that come in around AV testing, but also just you know, one, you know what, what are some of the most content? Where do most of the content issues come from when you evaluate a page? So we evaluated these but in a standard when normal brand, you guys are dealing with tons of brands, right? Like what is the normal content issues look like if the people are going to do the quick checklist of you know, you know, title should be this long bullet points, you know, no caps short and build the first 500 I love those are there? Where do people normally mess up?

Andrew Lorence  34:18  

Yeah, can take kind of a quick, higher level. And then Matthew, I'm sure you can get a little bit deeper on this as well. You know, a lot of things that we'll see kind of when we start working with someone is that they don't have that seamless consumer or customer journey. So as Matthew was saying, like you're reading social events up on your website, you've got stuff on Amazon. The idea here is that they're following a similar path and experience in all of those. So making sure that what you know they're seeing on your social and your website matches what you have on Amazon. But then also when you're in Amazon, looking at your product detail page, the upper portion there where you've got titles, bullet points or descriptions, images videos, but then we scroll down to a plus content, making sure that matches as well. And then when you go into your brand store, so I think being on brand is extremely important. I think the other piece here is that, you know, a lot of people will look at their competitors are like, Oh, this is beautiful, or you know, somebody will come into our agency, and they're like, Oh, this is amazing. I looked at, you know, Reebok, for example. I love their brand store. That's so great. Can you create one for me? And it's like, yeah, but we need, you need to have the assets available. And so I think that's a big thing there, as well as like, you know, we can build it, we can work on the strategy, we can make recommendations on images and videos, things like that. But at the end of the day, what we can do is rely on on the assets that we receive. And so I think that's another piece I think the other piece is just We already touched on it. But the mobile piece there as well. You know, I think people don't truly you know, we're all sitting at our desktops probably right now, or laptops. And you're used to looking at a full screen, when you're looking at these products and detail pages. So a lot of people when they're doing the work or looking at it on their desktop, or their laptops, and they're not going in there on to that view, and then switching it over to a mobile view to make sure things are legible. So if you do have text, right, kind of relate to others legible to the scale, you know, are we implementing kind of our top, you know, call out into those, those images. So people see those, first and foremost. So I think those are some of the main things that I at least see on my side. But Matthew, I don't know, if you have anything else to ask about one.

Matthew Boardman  36:24  

 You've covered all the main pieces, we want to get really in the weeds, making sure that your images are uploaded with alt text, you can find that out really quick by right clicking and inspecting them. If we're looking at the titles, one thing to keep in mind is again, those mobile shoppers, the first 60 to 80 characters are going to be visible depending on the mobile device. And as well as if they enabled the zoom feature further screen size. So when you're writing that copy, the title could hold 120 or 200 characters. But if your keyword stuffing, or you've gotten the order of your terms out of place, it might not make any sense if you just see only the first 60 characters. And so we always recommend, make sure that the product and its main value can be understood in that first 60 to 80 characters. And then we can try to get some more keywords in there to improve index ability or the traffic beyond that.

Aaron Conant  37:28  

Awesome. Love it, we have a bunch more questions that have come through, but I want to make sure I'm not sure how many slides you have on the stack. But I want to make sure that we get through this as well.

Andrew Lorence  37:38  

I mean, we have a couple more slides, and they all kind of tie in to the Amazon content. So we're gonna talk about a plus content and the brand store. But we can take some more questions here. I think a lot of things we're talking about honestly apply to all sections of content. So happy to kind of jump through some of these additional questions. And we can kind of move through the deck here as well as we're answering some of those.

Aaron Conant  37:59  

Okay, cool. Let's jump into Is there any way? So AV testing is kind of the topic that comes through on a couple different questions. You know, this is not only on Amazon, but off Amazon, people are constantly trying to figure out, you know, does this image look better than the other one? Is it? You know, what's the best one to use? Is there any way to AV test the images that you use, for example, running two versions of the same six images side by side? The next one is what are all the pieces of content? You can a B test? And do you have to be running paid advertising campaigns to do this? So a b testing of images?

Matthew Boardman  38:33  

Yeah, so Amazon natively has a new as of last year, split testing tools with a called split test, which is just a B testing. You can test the title, the main image, which is the very first image but as we see in this example, here on screen, its product on a solid white background, nothing else no words. It's only what you get. And a plus content. So title, main image, and a plus content all have split testing as a they can all be selected for split testing within Amazon. There are third party tools out there that you can use to test additional elements like the bullet points or product descriptions. But really, if we're if we're focused on what you can do for free within Amazon, it's going to be the title, the main image, and that a plus content. So to that question about all six images, no, you won't be able to do that you'll have to pick your hero image and try those out. A plus content is kind of a good way to test out bigger changes. But I always want to caveat, a test or an AB test is only useful if you're testing one element at a time. If you're trying to test too many changes. You don't know which change is driving the difference in performance. So I would never run a test on a title. At the same time that I'm running on image back. I'm not sure if Amazon even allows you Run a split test on the same accident, like multiple split tests on the same Mason for that reason, you just have to be really methodical about it, make a list of all the elements that you want to try split testing against each other, and then prioritize that list because you're gonna have to go through them one by one. Awesome.

Andrew Lorence  40:22  

The other piece that add in there real quick is that there's so much that goes on with Amazon, it's such a dynamic platform, it's really hard to do testing, because, again, you know, we're, we're full service. So we're doing stuff on content. At the same time, we're making adjustments on operations. At the same time, we're making adjustments on advertising. So you start thinking about how much advertising has an effect on placements and organic rank and things like that. It is hard to pinpoint, you know, a one week versus second week, I think the split testing that Amazon has available is probably going to get us the best, but it's somewhat limited. There's also technologies that we utilize where we can track the conversions and performance of content. But again, it's looking at it in a very siloed, you know, space, it's not taking into consideration, you know, advertising. So that's where I think like, you know, working with a team like ours, we can actually dive into it and say, Okay, well, here's the test that we did. And here's the other factors that were coming into play here. And here's how they might have affected it. So we can really drill down the data and make sense of it. Because I think sometimes you look at the data and you're like, oh, great, that this change, you know, presented a better conversion rate. And it's like, well, yeah, but if you look at, you know, we increased our ad spend during that week as well. So, you know, there's a lot of factors that come into play. So I think it's breaking down all those pieces, making sense of the data is extremely important, versus just looking at the data at face value. 

Matthew Boardman  41:49  

Yeah, that's a great point, Andrew communication across your teams, or any partners are working with is key for these tests and make to be something you can make a decision off of, because you need to know all the different variables that were at play at the same time. 

Aaron Conant  42:06  

Awesome, just in regards to tech tools, could you recommend a good tool to help find keywords? like Amazon? 

Matthew Boardman  42:17  

Yeah, there's a lot of them out there. If you just type in, if you just Google it, you'll find a laundry list of pages to sort through some of the bigger names in the market, you're going to find something like, like Jungle Scout data Hawk, Helium 10. There's one that has seller something, there's a lot of them out there. There's also plenty of reviews comparing those tools. So if you, I would just suggest doing your research, Washington, some of those review videos, and maybe doing some demos. And just seeing what suits your needs. They all have their pros and cons. And they all have different pricing. 

Aaron Conant  42:55  

Awesome. Oh, more questions that come in. One is in regards to the brand store, how important is the brand store? So

Andrew Lorence  43:06  

what why don't we Why don't we touch on a plus content that leads into the brand store. So I know we've got about 10 minutes here. So let's quickly kind of run through a plus content, because that's kind of the other important piece here. And then brands are obviously very important here as well. So let's let's touch on this. And then we can kind of talk about the importance of the brand store and how important that is as well.

Matthew Boardman  43:30  

Yeah, great. So I'll kick us off here. What are the main things to be looking out for with your a plus one really low hanging fruit is that Amazon created a new module or a plus content. So your basic your historic A plus content was just called enhanced product description. They've now added a module that goes above it, called a brand story. It's free, you can create it. It's a kind of a carousel. So it's full width across the screen. And it can contain textboxes. It's all projected over a background image. I think one of the example ASINs that we'll be looking at, has it I'm not sure if this one does, yes, awesome. And so you can see this text, these text boxes are crawlable. And that just means that if you click your cursor and drag it across the words on the screen, they'll highlight it's not a image. And this just means that in theory, search engines can index this text. Now, there is debate within the Amazon SEO community about whether a plus content does get indexed. But there's a general consensus that Google will index it even if Amazon doesn't. And so that's always a plus. In my mind, is that you ranking on Google, even if it's not impacted, Amazon could still bring in more traffic that sort of benefit your Amazon page. And if it does, Pack Amazon directly as well, that's wonderful. Other things that we have listed here is the lifestyle imagery. So this is really just a way to highlight how professional your brand is, or to present yourself in a professional life. Make use make you look like a legitimate, well developed brand with a high quality. And you also want to call out any key features. A plus is a great space to explain product usage, if you have a more complex product, if it takes multiple steps to set up, where there's a lot of features, it's just kind of hard to communicate within the images, you can do that within a class. Last basic thing that we call out here is that comparison module that appears on the bottom it's comparison chart, that can link to other ASINs. That consistently leads to a halo effect of increased sales, because you're exposing more of your product catalog to shoppers. Anything that you'd add there, Andrew, 

Andrew Lorence  46:02  

because of the main pieces there, I think the main piece that and we can just kind of dive into this as one of the examples. And so one of the other brands that kind of sent in one of their ASINs, as you can see, has great content, great imagery, you know, call out things like that. But they're in a space where there's some restrictions. So obviously, with with pet and human, Amazon puts a lot of restrictions in there. So what we noticed as we scroll down, you can see they do have the brand story, which is great. But unfortunately, there's no A plus content here below. And so our assumption here without obviously talking to this brand, or having a you know, insight into their account there is that it could have possibly been taken down to it due to a claim. And so within your A plus content, you need to be very well aware of what you can and cannot say. And if you can say it, how you need to state it. So we see this a lot in the supplement space in the pet space, where people will make claims. We actually notice in the imagery, they did a great job with some of those claims a stadia. So it kind of skirts that line. But what we noticed is that, you know, our assumption here is based on the level of content from this brand, that there's probably a suppression issue with the request content. So this is something that obviously we're tracking, if we're managing, but it's something to keep an eye on here as well to make sure that especially if you're in a space like this, that you guys are identifying if something is getting, you know, taken down or if there's a you know, an issue with the the copier content that you're putting in there. Yeah. 

Aaron Conant  47:42  

Awesome. Question here? How do you measure if the content if content updates drive conversion?

Matthew Boardman  47:50  

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. Because again, there's a lot, there's many more variables that are at play, it's not operating and I ideally be one variable changes, and you can compare them apples to apples, that's not the case, time is going to change. You might have seasonality, you might have inventory issues, a new competitor might crop up, you might have an ad campaign that runs out of budget or you increase the budget. So it's really important to be aware of all the variables that happen during the periods that you're looking at. Now, that said, if you're tracking those, those variables, those factors, one of the simplest things to do is you look at conversion rates. Specifically, I'd suggest four to eight weeks before the updates and then four to eight weeks after the updates compare, has there been a change a lift in conversion rate, during that period, if all other variables remain the same? way, if you're doing a larger edit, to the product detail page, I would call out, you should expect to see dip, and traffic. So you're going flat, you implement the change, and there's going to be a lot of value in there. And that's because when you change make a lot of changes to the copy. Amazon has to reindex your listing, it has to say alright, new keywords, which of these are relevant, which of these do we want to start ranking this asin for? And so that takes time. And so you're gonna see a likely see a dip in traffic if you do have more substantial update, but after a couple of weeks, it should be higher than where it was beforehand. And that's where we know that the there was a successful improvement to that impact. So if you do see initial dip, don't panic needs time, Amazon has to kind of collect data and reindex the listing. Another thing that we can look at is some tools will show you how many keywords and for which keywords are ranking, your organic rank is and so ideally, the number of keywords that you're ranking on the first page for would increase or that terms are ranking for are more relevant after update. And the terms that you're ranking for have a higher monthly search volume kind of circles back to what we touched at the top of the hour. You need to pick your battles. Every search query has its own results. And so you should focus on keeping any ground you've already won. And then expanding to new ground, because as you bring in more traffic, you can go from competing for smaller volume terms to mid volume terms to high volume terms, and you can work your way up but it is a process.

Aaron Conant  50:35  

So really quick and premium versus a, you know, basic A plus is premium worth it. Another question that pops up?

Matthew Boardman  50:43  

Yeah. So premium A plus content is vendor central only, it's paid pay for it. Price is negotiated with your Amazon vendor manager. And that can range from 250k to 500k per year. So it's, you know, it's not cheap, you do gain many more capabilities with premium A plus content. And Amazon has stated that it increases conversion rate about twice 1.5 to twice that basic A plus content. So, worth checking out. Absolutely. But it is limited. Amazon chooses who gets access negotiates, and it's expensive. So it's not going to be right for everyone. But if you do have the opportunity, there are some clear benefits to it.

Aaron Conant  51:31  

And then some rapid fire ones there to come in here, just as we're getting towards the end of the hour, just in that in that vein right there. Is there any way to measure the a plus content with metrics views click through rate at a car rate from a plus content?

Matthew Boardman  51:46  

Yeah. So a plus Amazon touts that it improves your conversion rate, the range they've given has changed over the years. It's gone anywhere from 3% to 10%. Most of time, and when they present webinars, they post material, it's in that five to 10% lift in conversion rate, that's going to be the main measure of success for a plus content is as your conversion rate improved. In the period before versus a period after you can split test a B or split test the plus content using manager experiments and Amazon. If you want to test different designs.

Aaron Conant  52:26  

Awesome. Do you know a brand's stories will have measurable metrics at any point.

Matthew Boardman  52:33  

Trying to predict Amazon is a losing game.

Aaron Conant  52:39  

Does a keyword an A plus page? Do the keywords in a plus pages carry any weight or index? I know you talked about that a little bit? It's kind of a debate. 

Matthew Boardman  52:48  

Yeah. So with Google, the consensus is Yes. With Amazon, there's debate about how much if at all. But even if it is only on Google, that's still going to potentially bring in more traffic, which would then positively affect your Amazon performance. So I would generally suggest you do want to try to include keywords in a plus but make sure all of your target your focus keywords are incorporated in the title and the bullets in the product description. Also on that A plus content in Seller Central will replace the product description on the front end from what the shopper sees that product description is still indexed by the algorithm. So if you're not populating the description, because both shoppers can't see it, you're giving up some SEO to use.

Aaron Conant  53:40  

Awesome and is where I see we're getting really close to time here. You know, Andrew, I want to kick it over to you for key takeaways. Just a quick note though, thanks, everybody for sending in all the questions sorry, we couldn't quite get to them all we will have a follow up one. But a follow up webinar for sure on content, there's just been so much interest but as well as paid media with a Media.Monks team. But if you ever have any kind of pain points if you're doing any kind of service provider selection, you need recommendations, don't hesitate to reach out to anybody on our team here. We've got a short list of those top recommended partners. It's everything from Amazon related to direct to consumer to drop shipping to international expansion, never hesitate to reach out Media.Monks team is obviously on that list for the Amazon front for sure. Then, you know supporting a ton of brands in the network and come highly recommended from them. You know, Andrew, as I kick it over to you, you know, key takeaways here. And just everybody knows, like we do you know, we have like the founder for Media.Monks on the podcast and all that fun stuff. So lots of resources with them as a whole but Andrew, if you want to wrap this up with key takeaways, that'd be awesome.

Andrew Lorence  54:42  

Yeah, for sure. Ya know, appreciate everyone joining today. Yeah, obviously we we had too much to cover today content we're going to talk for the whole day on this topic. So it's extremely important obviously, in how it you know your business is performing on the platform. And so I think that we covered some of the key pieces here we're able to get to the landstar Happy to have one on one conversations with any brand. And some new people, we weren't able to get to all the agents that were submitted either. So happy to kind of set up one on one sessions to walk through those answering any additional questions. And then as Aaron, you were saying here, we can have a follow up conversation on content, because there were a lot of questions here that we got here. So really appreciate everyone's engagement today really had a fun time talking about content. As you can tell Matthew and myself are pretty passionate about this as kind of one of the main pillars you should be looking at on Amazon. So just want to thank everyone for joining and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Aaron Conant  55:31  

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Matthew, so much for your time. Today. Last question, I guess to answer can we share the deck? Can we just connect you with people to share the deck?

Andrew Lorence  55:42  

Yeah, yeah, we can share out the deck. And then obviously, there's there's a lot of context behind the slides in here. So we can definitely share that out. We'll give it to you over air and you can share that out. And then obviously, I'm assuming there's going to be context that people want with those slides as well. So

Aaron Conant  55:56  

for sure, awesome. Well, again, thanks Media.Monks team. Thanks, everybody who dialed in the great participation here. Look for a follow up email from us. We'd love to have a conversation with you, everybody. Take care. Stay safe. Look forward to having you at a future event. Alrighty, thanks again, Matthew.