Ad spend doesn’t buy rank

Say you’ve raised the ad budget a couple of times. Ad sales went up, but your organic position didn’t move.

That’s normal, because Amazon doesn’t rank products on how much they spend. Spend gets you traffic. Rank depends on what your product does with that traffic compared with the products already at the top.

What Amazon looks at

For every search, Amazon wants to show the products people are most likely to buy. The number that tells it that is conversion rate: how many of the people who click on your product end up buying.

If your product converts better than the products around it, Amazon moves it up. If it converts worse, sending more traffic won’t help much.

We start with the benchmark

Before we spend anything on ranking, we look up the conversion rate of the best products in the category, on the searches we want to rank for. Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer shows the conversion rate for each search, so we know what the top products are getting.

That’s the number your product has to beat.

Then we spend to test

The ranking budget is there to send enough shoppers to the product, on those searches, so we can see how it does against the benchmark. We’re not judging it on sales or ACoS at this stage. We just want to know if it can win.

What the test tells you

• It beats the benchmark. Amazon sees your product converting better than the others and starts moving it up, usually within about a month. As organic sales pick up, the ranking budget comes down.
• It falls short. People click but don’t buy. The fix is on the product page: the images, the price compared with the products next to it, the reviews, the delivery date.

Then we pause the ranking spend, fix the listing and test again. Spending more before the listing is fixed just costs money without moving rank.