The category I’m selling in has become pretty saturated in the last few months. Impressions have gotten lower and lower however I’m bidding competitively, so thinking it’s saturated and there’s sellers with bigger ad budgets so I’m just getting beat. Many of the keywords that used to be easy to rank in are now quite difficult.
I’m thinking about going and finding keywords with lower volume and easier to rank in and hammering those to try and carve out a corner of the market there, and lowering my bids on the more competitive keywords.
Focusing on lower-volume, easier-to-rank keywords while reducing bids on highly competitive ones is a smart strategy to carve out a niche and optimize your ad spend in a saturated market. It can help you maintain a more cost-effective advertising approach.
Everyone that is using software to determine the “keywords” will have the same results. So, what makes yours different, nothing…The other issue is the ads placed on sites outside of the amazon.com domain are generating clicks that are more than likely fraudulent.
All you are doing is making some bloggers/others with monetized websites rich. If amazon would limit your ad to only show on the amazon.com website you would actually sell some product. As it stands, being naive about how the CPC model works is making others rich at your expense.
I agree with @skeeter. In addition, many of these tools are defective and are unable to give you valid data. When looking up my own best selling private label items, they are showing as products with no BSR and no ranking whatsoever.
I am assuming that you will only see data when reviewing some over-crowded listings and niches on Amazon, where there are dozens of competing sellers who all use the same tools.
Maybe @TarrantToolbox will be able to provide further insight.
@Kika Just curious, are any of those best sellers you have suppressed listings? I know that my software tools I use for RA are mostly correct when analyzing data, but I haven’t done much PPC. I’ve heard it can be oversaturated depending the software.
@Jacob12 As I’m more of an RA seller, I don’t have much experience with PPC, but I have heard it is getting highly saturated using some software for keywords. I’m not sure what you are selling, but are you able to create bundles with it? If you are unfamiliar with creating listings to bundle your products, I don’t mind helping you through it. Our services cover this task as well but we have a minimum monthly subscription of 10 hours suited for many listing tasks needed.
Am I correct to assume you are not using any 3P services for your engagement with amazon.
My suspicion has always been those sites are harvesting data from other sources and not amazon.
What you just said would make one believe none of the data actually comes directly from amazon. If it did yours would be included. Now the conspiracy theory, maybe the software provider is ghosting your items so you cannot verify for fact the actual numbers sold… I know that I would never let sales data leave our custody and pretty sure amazon would treat it the same way.
Hey there @skeeter. I’d like to know your thoughts on keepa. Most every seller you run in to says keepa is their number one go to tool. The scanning apps I use base their info off of keepa. If the conspiracy is correct, and keepa is flawed, then so will a lot more tools that use their info.
So do you not believe keepa pulls data from Amazon? Asking this because you’re the first person in 8 years to put it like that, and I want to go to keepa directly to find these answers out.
Highly doubt they are getting an actual feed from amazon, they might be interpolating and extrapolating from BSR rankings. We did that many years ago.
Back then we had several items in top 10 of our category, plenty of sales volume and we were the only ones on the detail page. So what I used was close enough for what we needed.
If they tell you they get the data from amazon you need to drill deeper and question, EXACTLY what data, more generally would it be server side or public facing data. Highly doubt you will get an honest answer because so many are selling 3P seller data and that might be used too.
The real value would be if they had server side data, pretty sure Bezo would have been given the boot by the BoD many years ago if he allowed real and accurate sales data out the door.
Now I’ll have to find out. Or at least try! Many 7 and some 8 figure sellers I have been in a private group with for several years all swear by keepa. That’s what we followed to get to 7 figures as well. About 200 members in there.
So far they say they use bots to data scrape amazons website. I know that’s how repricers work as well, and those companies have to get permission from Amazon.
I do know the amount of times Amazon allows a company to scrape their data per hour is limited, and some companies are approved for more scraping than others. I do not own a software that scrapes so I am unfamiliar with the process of communicating with Amazon about limitations.
Here is a clip from a forum I go to sometimes for tech subjects.
It has always been so strange to me, because the majority of my friends from the Amazon space are using these tools and softwares. Whenever I wanted to show off my best sellers, they would laugh and pointing out to their stats showing no BSR and no sales ever received on the ASINs.
At least, there is one advantage - I don’t need to be concerned about competitors. No one is going to try and fight with me when the listings appear miserable.
I had my LVA look into that one and he said there is missing data on the backend. Said Amazon isn’t record the sales data properly. He says that happens sometimes and not much you can do about it. That’s a great thing for you if it’s selling that well!!
With RA we scan so much it’s best to just go off the data we do get. If this one doesn’t show up with bsr it’s a hard pass for me as I’m scanning hundreds of items out there a day when sourcing. I will find enough with my tools to trust to buy, and it works for us. I’m a big believer in whatever works for you, do that!
You do realize you can do the exact same with some Python code.
Also, cannot believe amazon is not blocking them from scraping. That is a huge bandwidth hog plus some other inherent issue associated with the scrape.
Oh my, maybe amazon wants that so they can fluff the stats for the stupid investors that don’t even know where the ethernet jack is located… How about all the money that is being burned by sellers chasing the dream. Hoping those paid ads are going to turn into the pot of gold at the base of a rainbow. Much more going on with that.
Pretty good suspicion (not factual at all) ebay started to crack down on that, our pages viewed would go from several million down to several hundred thousand. It looks like they tried to block IPs and the scrapers just found different IPs to work out of along with different user agents, fake finger prints and macs.
