One of the more commonly asked questions we get at fbasellingguide is “do product giveaways still work on Amazon?”. We’ve heard it so many times that we thought we’d put this article together to answer the question for everybody who’s unsure.
In general, we usually say no, they don’t make any significant impact to rank. However, we’ve been testing out a few theories over the last few months where they have actually had a slight impact. Both theories are explored below.
Can Discounted Product Giveaways Still Work?
In the first instance, the answer really is: it depends.
As this is one of our snappier articles, we’ll assume you’re one of our general clients and try to answer the question based on conversations we’ve had more regularly.
What Is A Discounted Product Giveaway?
It’s pretty self explanatory. However, some sellers do things differently so its good to start with a definition regarding what a discounted product giveaway really is. To most, on Amazon, it’s where a seller gives away a product at a heavily discounted rate. The rate changes but it usually starts at 50%. They do this to increase sales for the product. Usually, the seller will use a coupon or promotion to let people know about the giveaway. It all depends which platform you’re using. The strategy become incredible popular over time.
Do They Still Work?
Not in the same way that they used to before. Back in 2015 and 2016, a seller on Amazon could launch a product, invest heavily in Amazon giveaways and then rank in the top five for your primary keywords in whichever category you’d targeted. It would, of course, generate huge sales through organic searches in the aftermath. Those sales would keep the product ranked and in place leading to a huge and highly profitable business created in the space of around 4 months. Easy. Unfortunately, Amazon caught onto this and nowadays, discounted sales have a reduced impact on rank compared to full price sales, which has heavily reduced the results from this strategy.
Sellers still do this though. Even sellers who have been around for a huge amount of time. They’ll offer giveaways and heavily discounted products in the hope of replicating the above. It’s often due to a lack of knowledge around Amazon’s algorithm and ranking procedure. In short, it’s a huge waste of money which would be better spent in other areas. Plus, there’s a much better way.
There are other reasons to be doing a giveaway. Your brand will get loads of exposure, you’ll receive more customer reviews and you’ll get your product into more households or businesses. These results pay real dividends, but you need to be expecting these results, not to magically rank in your keywords.
We’ll say it again: regarding organic rankings in Amazon, a heavily discounted product and purchases as a result of a discounted product no longer affect your organic ranking position with enough significance to be a viable strategy.
It does still impact your BSR, which is why there are still some companies out there trying to get you to do giveaways and they’ll use BSR as proof it’s working, even though most of the sales contributing to your BSR were generated by them.
Discounted products and Reviews
A legitimate use of discounted products is to use them to garner more reviews. The problem here is that although it can still work, Amazon is getting stricter all the time on their review procedure. They’ll even try to publicise incentivised reviews, so be really careful in how you approach this one.
There are a lot of ways in which you can integrate your discounted product strategy into the complete marketing campaign. We don’t recommend you do this on its own because as we’ve said, it doesn’t affect ranking too much when looking at those high level keywords, but used for medium impact competition terms, it can rank your product quite well.
The New Way: How We Make It Work
Look at the organic keyword search function when implementing sales focused on discounted product keywords. Sounds a bit complicated, but in reality all it means is that a purchaser won’t get sent straight to the product page, instead they’ll search via a keyword linked to your product and click to purchase it.
Many Amazon FBA agencies will call this a Keyword Search Completion. It’s a super powerful tool used to drive sales.
If you also use on page optimisation, discounted keyword focused sales will really improve your organic ranking. This is what still really works. (Next is a client example which i’m not sure you have so I won’t write about it…? Don’t want to copy your bosses example)
We’ve seen clients go from outside the top 350 results to top seven in around three weeks, which as you know is a pretty huge increase.
This isn’t even anything special. We’ve seen this happen for our clients time and time again, if done properly and with care. We have other success stories you can check out too.
Be Careful: These strategies should only be short term designed to get you off the ground. If you mess it up, you can completely ruin your brand. People may start to associate your product with heavily discounted items, meaning they won’t buy from you when you go back to your usual selling rate. At the same time, your product and price point need to be great. If they’re not you’ll tumble right back down the rankings once your discount product giveaway is over.
Don’t think this will answer all of your problems. Discount product giveaways is a great tool to use selectively. It won’t do everything you need in relation to ranking. It’s just one tool in your box to bring out.
If you wanted help with your product on amazon, please reach out and contact us for a proposal to see how we can grow your business like we have for hundreds of others.
We hope the article was informative!
Team FBA