Sales Metrics and Events BSR, Conversion Rate

Once you have a grip on your the account level metrics, its time to go down to the product level metrics for our top sellers. These metrics give us a very granular view on what is happening to a product, and are especially useful for analyzing top sellers.

As opposed to the average product in a portfolio, top sellers require a closer look at the metrics. Instead of just trying to index and rank for additional keywords, these products are most likely ranking in the top spots for multiple keywords and need to trade up to larger, more competitive keywords while monitoring sales throughout the process. Lets take a look at the datapoints available and how you can use them to better manage your best sellers.

BSR - A product's BSR or best seller rank is available on every product listing page. Most understand this to be an exact rank order of the best selling products in a BSR category as #1 and lower selling products at higher numbers. Based on the available data, this is not exactly right. The algorithm that determines what a BSR is does not perfectly correlate with the relative sales volume of the product and there may be other factors that Amazon's algorithm takes into account to benefit some products over others. When a product reaches the BSR #1 position on any given BSR category, the product will have an Orange "Best Seller" tag on it on the search results page for all results it shows up for. This tag greatly increases the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the product.

Unit Sales - The number of units sold of a given product during a time period, this is the most basic of the sales metrics and a great place to start as it is not affected by pricing fluctuations of a product.

Impressions - The impressions metric captures the number of customers who viewed your product page on Amazon in a given time period. This gives you a good idea on how much visibility your product is getting. This number includes paid media or PPC that you send to that product, and will also include any offsite traffic like links from your website to your Amazon product page.

Conversion Rate - Conversion rate is calculated by taking the number of Unit Sales divided by the Impressions during the same time period. This gives you the useful insight of: "If 100 people visit my product page, how many products do I sell?" This can be a great metric for optimizing your product content, ensuring it provides an easy glide path towards buying your product. BEWARE, a dropping conversion rate is not always a bad thing. Whenever a product gets a boost in traffic (impressions) this can naturally bring along a lower conversion rate because some of the traffic may be lower quality, less qualified customers. Its for this reason that Conversion Rate and Impressions should be analyzed together to get to the bottom of what is happening.

What Metric is Most Important and How Can I Improve It?

If you have to pick a single metric to focus on for long term growth and profitability, Conversion Rate is a great place to start. This is because when Amazon is choosing which products to place on the top of the search results for any given customer search, their algorithm is trying to answer the question: "Which product can I should which has the highest chance of causing a sale?" and to a lesser extent "Which product can I show which will result in longterm customer satisfaction?" Its clear then that products that have a very high conversion rate relative to their peers are a good place to look for Amazon's profit maximizing algorithm. If Amazon starts sending your product traffic and it fails to sell, naturally the algorithm is going to direct customers towards other products.

So What Can I do to Improve Conversion Rate?

Product Images - Make sure the hero image and secondary images help to answer all of the main questions that customers need to answer to purchase. Use the classic framework to audit your images: What is is? Is it for me? How do I use it?

Title/Parent Titles - Experiment with different parent titles and see which ones lead to the highest conversion rate. If your product is eligible, use Amazon's built in "Manage My Experiments" option to split-test many different titles at once. The AutoMato platform generates 10 unique, quality titles for easy experimentation.

Check your PPC - Pay Per Click advertising or PPC on Amazon is a great way to increase the traffic to your listings and get momentum moving for products to help improve their sales velocity to generate sustainable lift in your product sales. But not all PPC is helpful. If your PPC campaigns are sending low relevancy, low conversion rate traffic to your listings, this traffic could be lowering your overall conversion rate and hurting your product's overall desirability to the algorithm. For this reason, its a good practice to check your best selling products' advertising campaigns and ensure that the ad campaigns conversion rates are higher than your products overall conversion rate. That way you can be sure that your advertising is only boosting your conversion rate rather than hurting it. For products that are ranking further down the page and are not currently ranking well on keywords, this matters less and sometimes getting cheap traffic gives a sales boost which is worth the hit to conversion rate.