Amazon ads can boost visibility – but if your listing isn’t converting, you’re just paying for more people to say “no.” In this episode, I explain how to assess whether your product page is ready for traffic, what to fix first, and how to use ads strategically (and profitably) when the time is right.
You’ll learn:
What Amazon ads can and can’t do
Why ads don’t solve deeper listing problems
Key signs your listing needs improvement before you spend on traffi
A checklist to help you prepare for effective advertising
My membership, Amazon Made Easy is now open.
It’s a membership for people who are selling on Amazon (or planning to) and want regular access to support, somewhere to ask questions and talk things through, and a bit of structure and accountability as they grow.
Inside, there are live Q&A calls, optional co-working sessions and a small, supportive community.
Find out more:
https://vickiweinberg.com/membership
Welcome to the Bring your PRODUCT Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.
I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.
Speaker B:
Hello and welcome to BRING your product idea to Life. So today's episode is going to be slightly different. It's going to be a really, really short one.
I don't know if that's good news or bad news for you, hopefully a bit of both.
And it's going to be answering a question that was put to me by one of my Amazon Made Easy members recently that I thought I would share with all of you because I think it's interesting and something that's hopefully going to be useful for you to hear if you've had same question. So the question I was asked is should I run ads if my listings aren't converting?
So this was asked me by somebody who has is already set up on Amazon. They're already there, they have product listings and they're not selling as well as expected.
And they wanted to know my thoughts on whether running ads would help would help improve things.
And my really probably quite blunt answer is no because a no and no because running ads might get more traffic to your listing, it might help with sales, but actually it's not going to address the underlying issue. So if your listing isn't converting, there, there is possibly a reason. Now it might be, it might just be visibility.
So it might just be the only reason that you're not, you're not converting is that you're just, you know, you're not showing up in search, nobody's finding you. However, you can look at your reports and see, and see this.
If you're looking at your reports and you can see that you're from product is showing up in search, you can see people are looking at your listings, they're clicking through. And remember, you can get all of this from your business reports.
If you can see the customers are clicking through to your listing and then they're not buying, then that tells me that there is another problem and visibility isn't it? And even if visibility is the issue, the first thing I would look at is my keywords and overall SEO before thinking about running ads.
Because obviously yes, paid traffic is good and paid traffic gets people to your listing. But actually if you can improve your organic SEO, that's going to help you out more in the long term as well. So that's the first thing.
If you're, if you're not getting visibility, if you're not getting the conversions that you'd like and you're getting traffic, there will, there will be a reason. Amazon ads, as you know, are designed to drive traffic to your product listing. That's what they're all about.
However, unless you're converting that traffic into sales, there is no point running ads.
And there's nothing to suggest that traffic that comes via ads is going to sell more than traffic that comes organically if you already have that traffic. So as I say, if you're not getting any traffic to your listings at all, ads might be good.
But first of all, I would look at your organic SEO and check that, you know, you've got all the keywords and everything in your listing that you should have. And then I would still look at all of the things I'm going to suggest you do now for your listing.
Because I never like to run ads to listings unless I am 100 sure they're as good as they can be. Because obviously ads cost money. The better your listings are, the higher the chance they have making it into a sale.
And I don't want you spending lots, lots of money on ads and then not get any sales from them. Nobody wants that. I want you to, you know, want your ad money to give you a good return.
So if you are getting traffic to your listings, you can see you're getting the traffic. And by the way, if you're not sure whether to, how to how and where to find out if you're getting traffic to your listing, let me know.
I can show you how to do that. But so you'll get traffic to your listing, but you're not getting any sales. Don't turn on ads before you've done these things.
First of all, check that your listing is fully optimized. So it's optimized for search. You're using all the fields that you should be. And you've got great, you've got great, you've got great images.
You're talking about the benefits of your product, not the features. You're talking about the USP and what makes your product different.
I've just done a whole series of episodes recently on writing product listings that convert what to do if your product listing isn't selling. And I've also done an episode on Amazon ads. I'm going to link to all of these in the show notes. Notes.
I think they're going to be really useful for you. So is your product listing answering your customers questions? Does it explain usp? Do you have some great images?
All of these are things to consider and if you're saying, well, no, or maybe not any of these, that's definitely the first thing to go and have a look at. The other thing is do you have any reviews?
And I spoke about this a few weeks ago in my episode about why your product listing might not, might not be selling. If you don't have any reviews, it's going to be a lot harder to convert. And I never recommend turning on ads without reviews.
So if this is you and you're listening and you haven't got any reviews, I would work on getting reviews first and then potentially switch on ads. If you're confident that your product listing is, is great.
So that, so when you have some reviews and you've got a great product listing and you're really happy that your product listings are high quality, it can be. You've got reviews, you've got some social proof that can be a really good time to switch on Amazon ads.
When you do do this, I just want to say I would start small so don't spend tons of money on your ads initially. Do lots of testing. So make sure you're reviewing your ads every couple of days. You're trying different things.
You're keeping an eye on the metrics, you're pausing things that aren't working, you're adding new things in, you're actually spending some time on your ads. And by the way, I have done a whole episode on this. I'm going to link to and, and yeah, so hopefully that answers the question.
So overall, should you, should you turn on ads if your listings aren't converting? No. Unless you are really confident that your product listing is as good it can be and you've got some reviews. So those are the, those are my caveats.
So hopefully, as I hope that's helped answer your question, as I said, this is a very quick episode. I wanted to answer that question because I thought it was an interesting one and I thought my take on it might be useful for you.
I'm finally going to mention that as part of my membership, Amazon Made Easy, we spend quite a lot of time looking at Amazon ads and existing ad campaigns and figuring out, you know, how to optimize them to get better results. And if that's something you're interested in, you can come and join me at any time.
Just go to vickyweinberg.com membership or via the link in the show notes. So have a lovely rest of the week. I'll be back with another interview on Friday and then another Amazon Made Easy bonus episode next Tuesday.
Speaker B:
Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode. Do remember that you can get the Fullback catalogue and lots of free visitors sources on my website vickywineberg. Com.
Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.
