As a seller on Amazon, it’s only natural to spend time thinking about how to run your Amazon ad campaign and make your PDPs engaging. After all, these are key ways to increase Amazon SEO and sales. While both of these strategies are super important, there’s another way to boost your sales without doing anything on Amazon itself: offsite traffic. This type of traffic comes from sources outside of Amazon, like your website, an email list, or social media channels.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what offsite traffic is and how to use it to drive sales and increase conversions. We’ll also show you some of the best platforms and strategies, so you can make your plan and increase your earnings ASAP. The good news is that you may already be doing the things that drive this sort of traffic, in which case we can simply help you retarget your efforts and help you see the impact of your efforts.
Offsite traffic is simple and yet still complicated at the same time–let’s break it down to make sure we’ve drilled down into the heart of it.
In this Amazon-specific case, offsite traffic is any traffic on Amazon that does not originate from Amazon’s domain. This includes visitors who arrive from external sources, such as search engine results, social media posts, influencer marketing campaigns, email campaigns, and paid advertisements.
Here are some more specific examples of offsite traffic:
You may be wondering how exactly this kind of traffic directly benefits you on Amazon, or why you should invest in it. It takes a lot of effort to create content for so many different channels, but we’ve personally witnessed the results that can happen when you make time to reach customers through offsite channels.
At a very basic level, this sort of traffic opens up new opportunities for visibility, not just on Amazon but across the entire internet. At the same time, it increased visibility for your presence on Amazon, as these types of traffic inevitably lead back to where the product is sold on Amazon. Some consumers might trust Google more than Amazon search.
Others don’t use either Google or Amazon to search for products – they only use social media. In this case, those offsite traffic sources are a chance to reach a customer base that you otherwise couldn’t. And Amazon won’t penalize you for this; in fact, they encourage it. We’ll get into this next.
When you drive traffic to your PDPs and Amazon storefronts, Amazon’s traffic increases, their conversions increase, and they make more money. Why wouldn’t they want to incentivize brands to take advantage of this?
It all comes back to the original purpose of Amazon Attribution, which is to incentivize Amazon sellers to send more traffic to Amazon via other channels like paid search. Amazon has even been open about how they will give products a boost in Amazon SEO if the seller is driving offsite traffic.
When a seller wins, Amazon also wins, and that’s why the system works.
This last one isn’t directly related to driving traffic to Amazon, but it still has an impact. Amazon has a limited amount of widgets and ways for you to interact with the customer, whereas your own site or Google might offer a few additional ways to engage to convince the consumer to buy your product. Videos, blog posts, and social media easily demonstrate firsthand experience with a product and might catch a consumer’s eye more than lines of text. They also allow for more of a deep dive, and all of this builds trust with potential customers, ultimately leading to more purchases.
What does it look like to generate offsite traffic? How do you work with each medium in just the right way? Let’s talk about the different offsite traffic genres to get you started.
Paid ad campaigns are one of the most popular ways to drum up external traffic. Google ad campaigns are the most popular among paid ad options with a more developed, longstanding platform, and consequently, more people who have written about how to succeed on the platform. Generally, you might need to spend a bit more with less return in the beginning to create awareness for your product, although there is a point where you can spend too much.
The specific campaign that will keep your ACOS low and ROAS high will depend on your individual situation, but that’s where our experts can come in. We can also help you track your performance closely with our proprietary software and decide what the next best move is.
Videos are another powerful way to drive offsite traffic. Offering diversity in subject matter, videos can be tutorials, product reviews, promotional advertisements, instructional guides, and more, all of which have the potential to draw viewers away from YouTube and directly onto your store pages on Amazon. Additionally, videos can be embedded into blog posts or shared through various social channels, giving you even more opportunities for exposure on top of other offsite traffic sources.
By creating educational content around topics related to your niche, you can garner interest from consumers who might not have found you otherwise. Blogs usually consist of succinct text that is easy to read and has a few images here and there, making it simple for the consumer to take in the information that will help build trust with your brand and increase conversion down the line. Sometimes you can even sneak in a product link or two, but you definitely want to keep that to a minimum so that your reader doesn’t feel like you’re just selling them something!
With Instagram and Tik Tok’s unprecedented growth over the past few years, social media has become one of the most effective channels for driving leads offsite and onto your store pages on Amazon. Many savvy marketers manage multiple accounts across platforms like Twitter and Facebook simultaneously as part of their digital marketing strategy.
Some of this effort looks like paid ads that show up in the users’ feed while other parts of the effort are just consistently posting content on the brand page to build a presence. Posts that feature user-generated content highlighting customers’ satisfaction with products/services have even gone viral and led consumers to purchase the same product en masse.
Influencer marketing works a little differently than regular social media, but it can be pretty lucrative if you can get the right influencer to promote your product. This can also be another way to have your product go viral.
However, depending on the size of your brand, you might not be able to get in touch with Kim Kardashian; you may need to start with smaller celebrities who have fewer brands reaching out to them to promote a product. Many times big influencers will have a fee you have to pay them to promote something, but the smaller influencers are more willing to drive traffic just for the price of receiving your product for free.
Finally, email campaigns can be effective ways to stay in touch with consumers. They usually involve periodic messages with information about sales and exclusive offers for those who sign up for an account with your brand. It helps you develop a relationship with your consumer while also making sure they know as soon as your store is stocked for the new season or if a favorite product is on sale.
