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Brand Analytics for Amazon sellers
What is Brand Analytics?
Amazon Brand Analytics is a data tool provided by Amazon. It gives inside analytics on keywords in an understandable format.
Brand Analytics started in Amazon USA and has now been rolled out to the UK and European Amazon Seller Accounts.
Before Amazon Brand Analytics was on a Mystery URL – now it’s available in Amazon Seller Central, the dashboard for Amazon sellers.
You can find it on Seller Central under the “Reports” dropdown menu.
Who is Danny McMillan?
Danny McMillan is an Amazon Seller, the host of Seller Sessions Podcast, and a public speaker at Amazon conferences and events.
Danny is also soon to be host of a major UK Amazon Conference on June 1st this year in London, England.
Danny is the guest in today’s podcast and the source of most of the majority of information on this detail (I’ve added some details and a little extra research – Michael Veazey).
For other interviews we have done with Danny McMillan, click here.
What info do we get in Brand Analytics?
We get word Search ranking from Amazon themselves.
We can see click share and conversion share (which we’ll discuss shortly).
You can set different date ranges as well.
Sellers should be wary of Amazon metrics
Amazon has recently boosted its revenue from advertising by a massive percentage.
More details on Amazon’s revenue from advertising here
Therefore it’s not in Amazon’s interest to make the return on ad spend too clear; it very much wants us as sellers to spend our money on advertising.
Amazon sharing data with us doesn’t make so much sense in that context.
So in this context, why has Amazon launched Brand Analytics and apparently shared so much more data with sellers?
Why Amazon has launched Brand Analytics
Firstly, brand analytics is trying to avoid Anti Trust legislation in the USA, which is basically is basically designed to prevent monopolies from emerging. Sharing more data in brand analytics is part of them trying to show open behaviour to the US authorities.
Secondly, Amazon has been trying to placate the Indian authorities, who were resisting Amazon selling there as Amazon competes as a seller on its own market place. Amazon as a seller can obviously take advantage of insider data from Amazon as the marketplace provider. Brand analytics is part of apparently redressing this imbalance.
Amazon Marketing Group and Brand Analytics
The third reason for introducing Brand analytics is that Amazon now has AMG – Amazon Marketing Group. This is aiming to attract big High Street brands in the USA to come to Amazon. Ultimately Amazon wants these big sellers to shift some of the advertising revenue from traditional ad agencies in Madison Avenue, who run things like TV ads, to Amazon’s advertising platforms.
These are companies that will spend $30-50K in advertising per product line at the “top of the funnel”, so including Google, TV, Facebook and Amazon ads.
These brands are used to Google and Facebook, which are the other huge online advertising platforms. Both of these companies give precise and generous data about many things to advertisers.
If you compare google ads and Facebook data, Amazon is taking baby steps in that direction with Brand Analytics.
How to get Brand Analytics on your Amazon Account
Brand Registry 2.0 is required (this is also true for Enhanced Brand Content, an additional set of enhancements, primarily extra images and text, that Amazon offers on product listings).
This primarily means getting your trademark registered.
Trademarks and Brand Analytics
The good news is that getting a UK or EU trademark is way faster than in the USA.
In addition, in most cases, this trademark should also enable an Amazon seller to get brand registry in Amazon USA.
The reason for doing this is that in the USA, it can take up to 8 months to get a Trademark.
However, you need to confirm with Amazon Seller Support first. This is important because – as in so many things – Amazon is not always consistent in their response.
Michael spoke to two members of the 10K Collective mastermind recently at one of the mastermind meetings. Both sellers have UK Companies and both registered a brand trademark in the UK and then applied for Brand Registry in Amazon USA. One got accepted for Brand Registry; the other was rejected.
Maximizing the chances of getting your trademark accepted first time
The key is to have a name that is unlikely to be controversial.
For example, if you are going to sell goods in a market niche or category like sports and outdoors, calling your company/brand “Sports and outdoors Inc” is likely to cause it be rejected. That’s because it’s obviously a generic term (ie not company or brand specific) that could be used by anyone to refer to this niche.
But “John Smith sports” is unlikely to cause any confusion, unless there happens
The moral of the story is: Don’t make up a name after the name of a vertical (or a niche market).
Trademarks, Brand Names and Niche Market Names
Richard Koch (Star Principle) also advises against naming a brand after the vertical/market/niche you are trying to dominate – it’s going to confuse your consumers if you do this.
The classic bad example is the “Palm Pilot” company in the late 1990s. They pioneered a computer you could hold in your palm. Thus the natural generic name (name for the new market niche or vertical) was a palm computer. But their brand name was also “Palm”.
So when consumers spoke of “palm computers”, it was hard to know whether they meant the brand itself or just a similar type of device.
A better example of how to do it is the iPhone. iPhone is a classic super strong brand. It also created a new category of product (or vertical) which came to be called “smart phones”, in which category it was the dominant force for about a decade. But there was a clear difference in terminology when consumers discussed smart phones as opposed to the dominant brand, iPhone.
DIY Trademarks
You can get a trademark within about 8 weeks in the UK across 2 classes.
It will take just 20 minutes to submit it yourself, which is what Danny advises.
You can submit what’s called an “image mark” – usually a logo of some kind – and a “word mark”, which is exactly what it sounds like, basically your brand name.
Of course you can use a lawyer, but you can always do that if you don’t have success doing it yourself. This is the approach Danny favours.
Be clear on the reason for trademarking
The traditional reason for trademarking is to get legal Protection. For Danny, this is secondary to the need to get access to Amazon’s better tools through Brand registry.
Those tools being of course Enhanced Brand Content and Brand Analytics
Trademark Classes
There are about 40 of them (actually 45 at last count –ed.), and you can choose which ones you want to go for.
Here’s the UK Government’s guide to trademark classifications.
Just choose 1 or 2 classes that seem most relevant to your products.
Remember that it doesn’t matter if John Smith is a trademark in the class of “Beer and brewery products” (in class 32) if you are wanting to trademark “John Smith” in for example athletic clothing (Class 25).
This is a useful quick guide to which class your trademark would fit into
How Brand Analytics works
You’ll see an interface
“Amazon search terms”
You can also set report frequency – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly.
Search frequency on Brand Analytics
Example:
.amazon.co.uk – no. 1 search term in Brand Analytics in the UK is wireless headphones as of today (19 April 2019)
It’s NOT telling you number of searches, ie search volume; it’s just the search rank.
2nd is “headphones”
3rd is “bluetooth headphones”
4th is “Easter eggs”
Amazon does not officially give away search volume in Brand Analytics (or anywhere else, indeed).
However, there are a lot of tools out there.
It’s worth noting that none of the search tools now use live Amazon data.
There was a hack in AMS for them to grab search term data for about a year.
On Dec 19 2018, Amazon closed down that loophole.
Now all the big tools use the data from 19 Dec 2018 and run an algorithm
They have a 12 month period of actual data to work with, so they are probably not too far off the mark. They are all flawed in terms of revenue and sales velocity (units sold per day or per month) but basically all in the same position.
There are 250,000 rows of data in Brand Analytics.
But there is a search box, which helps you work through the data.
Filtering by Department in Brand Analytics
You can filter down by dept eg baby – hit “Apply”
Example: UK on 19 April 2019
There are only 191 rows of results in the “Baby” category
Top search terms are:
- “Potty”
- “Baby walker”
- “Baby buff”
In “Electronics”, there are 1,800 rows of results – it’s a much larger category
The top search terms are:
- “TV”
- “Wireless headphones”
- “Headphones”
- “iPhone charger cable”
What data do you get in Brand Analytics?
For each of these columns you get this data:
- Click share
- Conversion Share
- 3 top performing ASINs on that keyword
Example of top performing ASINs in Brand Analytics
“Baby monitor”
1st ASIN – Motorola MBP8 baby monitor
Analysis of listing:
- Bullet points pretty poor
- Only 5 images
- Product description mediocre
- But it’s a huge brand
2nd ASIN – BT Digital Audio baby monitor
- Bullets poor
- Poor images, no lifestyle images
- It’s also a huge brand
Search terms are based on Frequency in order of searches on Amazon in Brand Analytics.
Again, this is not to be confused with search volume (Amazon does not provide this)
Example of Brand Analytics Click share
Click-share in Brand Analytics is the just percentage of the total clicks that the ASIN received as compared to all other ASINs in organic search results.
That is not the same as the CTR (Click Through Rate) we are used to seeing in Amazon Sponsored Ads campaigns.
Example
Motorola baby monitor 16% (position 1)
no. 2 (BT monitor) gets 12%
no. 3 gets 8.5%
In most search engines, the top 3 take the bulk of the clicks.
You could then use a tool (such as Helium10 – note, this is an affiliate link) and look at the number of units sold, although it’s worth noting that these are predictions based on an algorithm.
Example of Brand Analytics Conversion share
Conversion share in Brand Analytics does not represent the conversions (sales) for a given search term. It’s the % of total sales that each of those ASINs received for that keyword.
Example
no. 1 Motorola monitor 15%
no. 2 BT monitor 18.6%
no. 3 6.8 %
How do we use this Brand Analytics info?
This does not replace any of the search tools!
It’s best used for Discovery of potential new product ideas.
You can download the Brand Analytics data as a CSV (spreadsheet) file.
Danny advises not to for top frequency searches (which usually have a huge volume of searches – but also massive competition).
Instead, look for medium frequency keywords, say from 4000th rank.
Click on the product – look on the search page THEN use your own research tools (such as Jungle Scout or Helium10 – affiliate links)
Brand Analytics example in the Baby category
- If you have Brand Analytics, you can work through this example flow to train yourself.
- Dig by department
- no. 1 is “baby basket”
- Let’s just look for “baby” – apply – 84 rows
- Now baby monitor #1; #3 baby wipes; baby bouncer is #11
- At #290 baby bath thermometers
-
- Click through and have a quick look
- Run a product research tool
- 2545 searches per month
- Sales by listing – £1071, £527; £113, £287 etc.
- #689 Baby shampoo
- Very small
- #179 car mirror baby rear view
-
- Pick the best seller
- You can do reverse ASIN – get some more search terms:
- Baby mirror car, car seat mirror, rear viewing mirror for baby
- Baby car mirror
- Best Listing with £4684 in revenue
Using Brand Analytics data
How you use Brand Analytics data depends on what your business model.
Let’s say your model is to manufacture in the UK – as Danny does on several product lines – and to “fly below the radar”. That is, you aim to sell just a few units per day but across multiple product lines, which means you’re not risking black hatters chasing you.
As long as you have quick turnaround in the product sourcing and reasonable MOQ (minimum order quantity) this can work well.
In this case, you want to look for opportunities to sell into markets driven by relatively long-tail keywords and
Using Brand Analytics for Product research
Checking for Seasonality with Brand Analytics
The main tool is to search by date / period
This can be used to look at the previous periods (within reason) such as Q4; and is also handy for seasonal checks on products.
Search by category, which filters the data for zooming in,
For example selling for Halloween:
- You can set a date range sept 1 to 31 Oct
- Top 10 search terms are:
- Halloween costumes for men
- Halloween costumes for women
- Halloween costumes for girls
- So put these into your search tools and get a list of search terms for Halloween
What you don’t want to do, for example, is to buy halloween cups only to find that people want to halloween costumes. Brand Analytics gives you more data to help you make that choice.
Sellers Sessions Conference in June 2019
Most conferences in the UK have 1 guest speaker and cost around £300
Danny wanted to give Amazon sellers the same selection people get in the USA.
So he is Bringing in 6 international speakers from the USA and South Africa.
1st Focus: Education
In the keynote theatre – tiered arena – have a workspace in front of you.
Second focus: make sure people understand
Danny knew how to get things across to students at college
Speaker Lineup for Seller Sessions Live on June 1 2019
- Ivelin Demirov- runs Orange Hatch marketing group – one of the greatest minds in the space
- Anthony Lee (President of Six Leaf) doing ranking since 2014
- Liran Hirschkorn – great all Round Amazon seller and marketer
- Casey Gauss – from Viral Launch
- Paul Harvey – education background
- Athena Severi
- Danny McMillan himself
Higher Conference Moral Standards
This year – it’s Danny’s own money and only going to break even this year
There is no sponsorship this year. Danny walked away from lead sponsor and left £5000 on the table. The reason was that the sponsor wanted to charge an Interest rate that was 60%!
Danny couldn’t do that with a good conscience to fellow sellers.
Danny wanted to get away form the “ Ponzi scheme” type event with feel good atmosphere where sellers get overcharged at the end for an event when they are hyped up.
This is not about 3 little “pony tricks” then getting you on a desert island
Danny wanted to set a new standard for sellers./
To find out more about Seller Sessions Live click here
The location is in London in Aldgate- near Liverpool Street in the City of London, which means it’s nice and quiet on the weekend.
(Early Bird tickets are now sold out)
So tickets now cost £319.
Watch my full interview with Danny McMillan
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