Whether you are a seasoned Amazon seller or are just starting, finding external traffic sources and funneling that traffic into your listings is important to scaling your ecommerce brand. A solid external traffic strategy lets you reach a wider audience, attract more sales, and boost brand awareness outside of the Amazon marketplace.
In this article, we’ll talk all about how to drive external traffic to your Amazon listing, which external traffic sources are the best for an ecommerce business, and what the best practices are to make sure your marketing efforts lead to a significant sales boost.
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External traffic is essentially any traffic coming into your Amazon listing from outside of Amazon. This includes people clicking on ads that you’ve set up on Google or site visitors who clicked through your blog post or social media promo.
Internal traffic, which involves optimizing your Amazon listing to make it more attractive to the Amazon search algorithm, is still integral to any ecommerce brand, but external traffic, that is, finding traffic sources outside of Amazon, is becoming increasingly important.
Also note that external traffic that isn’t paid for is organic traffic, which makes it an effective way of improving your ranking and performance on Amazon without spending thousands of dollars in advertising.
Driving external traffic to your Amazon listings has short-term and long-term benefits. It can increase visibility for your products, brand awareness, and, of course, sales. Having reliable external traffic sources also means you rely a lot less on Amazon and thus makes your ecommerce business more sustainable and easier to expand.
Let’s take a look at some key benefits of external traffic to an Amazon business.
An effective marketing strategy within the Amazon ecosystem can work wonders for your ecommerce business, but you can bet that millions of other sellers are doing that, too.
Finding external traffic sources and sending visitors from outside of Amazon to your Amazon listing will help you engage customers that your competitors won’t be able to. Nurturing these leads will not only get more eyeballs on your product on Amazon, it can also improve brand awareness in the long run—and of course, the more visible your brand and products are, the more conversions.
Amazon customers are not your customers—they are Amazon’s. This, coupled with the fact that Amazon has historically given its products a competitive advantage (like awarding its brands the Buy Box) over those of third-party sellers, means that it’s all the more important to have a loyal customer base outside of the Amazon marketplace.
External traffic can help you funnel these customers into your listings and build a customer base independent of Amazon—that means you get to manage customer data and grow your email list for future marketing campaigns.
A little-known benefit to driving external traffic to your Amazon listings is that it can help you rank better on Amazon. The Amazon algorithm rewards sellers who bring more people into the Amazon marketplace since Amazon itself also benefits from the boost in traffic.
A concrete example of this would be Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus program, under which Amazon gives you bonuses applied against future referral fees for qualifying purchases from traffic from your off-Amazon advertisements. Consequently, being a driver of traffic to Amazon could mean that your listings get displayed when potential Amazon shoppers search for products on Bing or Google.
Depending on which source you are trying to tap into, external traffic is absolutely free or way cheaper than paying for ad placements on Amazon. This is particularly useful, considering that Amazon ad prices are soaring and the marketplace is becoming more and more pay-to-play.
There’s a plethora of external traffic sources that you can tap into as an e-commerce seller. We take a look at each one below.
One of the best strategies not only for generating external traffic but also for dominating your niche is to optimize your own website and blog—or build one if you haven’t already.
Creating killer content for your ecommerce website and linking to your Amazon listing is an easy way to funnel potential customers from the web into Amazon. After all, customers find it immensely useful to be able to click through to a product after having read relevant information about it on your content site.
That being said, keep in mind that you don’t just want to write tons of articles showcasing your products. What you want to create are solid landing pages. These are pages designed not only to advertise your product but also to capture leads, that is, capture your audience’s contact information, which you can then use for upselling or future marketing campaigns. Some authority blogs also run ads on their sites to engage more customers.
Editorial Recommendations From Authority BlogsEditorial Recommendations are essentially product review articles by third-party publishers. They enable your product to be displayed more prominently on a search results page and also feature your product on their external website. Having your products featured in Editorial Recommendations is a powerful way to drive external traffic to your Amazon listing, as it helps you dominate certain keywords in your niche. Seller Rocket can help you reach out to these authority blogs and have your products featured and recommended. You can also greatly improve your chances of being featured in an Editorial Recommendations article by optimizing your Amazon listing and making sure you have solid product reviews. |
Another important external traffic source is social media.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are just some social media platforms where you can start posting regularly to promote your brand and products and connect with customers who aren’t already browsing for products on Amazon. Catching eyeballs with trendy posts and relevant hashtags and then providing the appropriate link to your Amazon listing is the name of the game for generating external traffic on social media.
As with blog sites, you can also run paid advertisements on social media platforms (Facebook is one of the biggest advertising platforms for e-commerce alongside Google and Amazon itself). Furthermore, consistently posting on social media helps you generate user-generated content, or UGC, or content created by online users that talk and promote your Amazon product.
One thing to remember with social media is to determine the most effective platform for your e-commerce brand. For instance, if you’re selling in playful product niches, TikTok can be an effective marketing tool, while picture-worthy products like handicrafts could turn heads on platforms like Instagram or Pinterest.
Speaking of user-generated content, working with influencers and Amazon affiliates is also an effective way of generating external traffic to your Amazon listing—and the best part is it usually comes at no cost to you.
How it works: engaging influencers essentially means entering into mutually beneficial relationships with social media personalities or bloggers who have a considerable following and can give your product a nice boost by recommending your product to their audience (Note that micro-influencers are usually the better choice if your brand is not yet that well-known). Generally, influencers will charge promotion fees or accept freebies in exchange for their product reviews. Positive product reviews from influencers within your niche will not only boost your conversions by sending more people to your Amazon listing, they also help establish your brand’s authority and credibility.
The most important thing in working with influencers is to identify whether they are the right fit for your product, which is why you want to find people with ample social media following and whose content revolves around your chosen niche.
As mentioned earlier, Amazon shoppers are technically Amazon’s customers, not yours. This is why it’s important to capture customer data through killer landing pages on your off-Amazon assets. This will help you grow a list of previous and potential customers that have interacted with your brand, the goal being to easily remarket your products or even run targeted marketing campaigns exclusively for this list.
Email marketing is still a big driver of conversions for e-commerce brands, and there are tons of email marketing tools that help you craft eye-catching subject lines and value-packed emails, and segment your list according to their specific needs or purchase histories.
Google and Facebook Ads. Running paid ads on Google or Facebook is a surefire way to drive external traffic to your Amazon listing. This also helps you rank for keywords relevant to your product, but the downside of paid ads is just that: they are paid, and advertising on Google, Facebook, and Amazon has become increasingly more costly over the years.
YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Much like social media, you can set up your own YouTube channel and create killer content about your product, from which your viewers and subscribers can click through to eventually purchase your products on Amazon.
Google Shopping. Having a Google Shopping account also helps you generate external traffic to your Amazon listing. Essentially, when people search for particular products on Google, it can display the offerings from online sellers that have a catalog on its shopping platform.
Before you even begin to think about mounting an off-Amazon campaign, it is important to make sure that your Amazon listing is optimized to the tee. You want people who arrive at your Amazon listing to be impressed by what they find, so make sure to eliminate any poor imagery and unintelligible bullet points in your product page. Negative reviews are also a big no-no, so make sure that your product has great reviews and a high star rating before sending potential customers from outside Amazon into your listing.
Whether it’s a content site or a social media post, make sure that the content you are generating for your Amazon product is two things: engaging and relevant.
Engaging content helps attract customers and motivates them to read more, while relevant content makes sure that your blog or social media posts solve a problem for them. These are the biggest factors for customers before making the ultimate decision to click through to your Amazon listing and buy your product.
Although this is a bit counterintuitive, a content strategy that focuses on selling products is often ineffective. Instead, your off-Amazon marketing strategy should focus on informing and adding value to potential customers. After all, these are actual human beings looking for actual products and solutions online, so you’ll want to talk to them like you would talk to someone over beers.
Customers are more likely to purchase after seeing detailed product photos on your social media or reading a well-written and informative blog post about your product. In contrast, customers don’t respond well to overly salesy posts that don’t get to the point—or whose point is none other than to shove products down people’s throats.
The adage “What gets measured gets managed” is an important guiding principle in driving external traffic to your Amazon listing.
Always measure engagement and performance of your off-Amazon campaigns, from staying on top of analytics for your blog site to keeping track of click and open rates for your email marketing campaigns, measuring performance will help you keep track of your progress and adjust your approach as needed.
Sellers who are enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry have access to Amazon Attribution, which is a nifty tool that helps you determine which off-Amazon marketing channels are working best for your Amazon business.
Driving external traffic to your Amazon listing is an effective way of staying ahead of the competition as the Amazon marketplace becomes more and more saturated. If you determine and nurture the right external traffic sources, you can grow a loyal customer base without relying on Amazon and drive more sales.
These sources can include running a content site about your product niche, leveraging social media, and growing an email list of previous and potential customers.
How is your external traffic strategy coming along? Let us know in the comments below!
Additional Resources
If you’re ready to dive deeper into driving external traffic to your Amazon listing, check out EcomCrew Premium’s full-length course on Sending External Traffic to Amazon, where we cover things like crafting killer landing pages, starting authority blogs from scratch, little-known secrets to Google SEO, and a whole lot more.
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