Amazon Stores give brands the ability to maintain their brand identity on the world’s largest online marketplace. All of those benefits alone are enough reason to invest in Amazon Stores.
If you haven’t thought about investing in Amazon Stores, it’s time. But if you haven’t even started with Amazon A+ or EBC Content, take care of that first.
You now have the choice of adding text overlays to images. This capability lets you add descriptive text to images—with customizable location, size, alignment, and color—to better describe products or selections you want to showcase. And the text on images can improve the Store’s search engine optimization (SEO), which may increase traffic to the Store from third-party search engines. Amazon Store Insights is fairly new (not to mention a bit confusing, especially at first). Luckily, Amazon has answered a variety of common questions and concerns about the new platform:
You can add these products to product grid tiles and other page sections of your store.
What is an Amazon Store?
As seen in the example below, each Amazon Store can have multiple levels with several pages at each level:
There are 4 traffic sources that Amazon measures including:
- Capitalizing on internal and external traffic sources
- Potential to boost organic ranking on Amazon and increase sales volume
- Ability to promote new products to preexisting customers
- Opportunity to introduce your brand to new audiences
- Giving users a better mobile experience with your brand on Amazon
Q5. I am using Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores. My campaign reporting shows different performance for my ads than what is reported in Stores insights. Why? Source: Amazon
Amazon Stores Offer Multi Pages
If you’re already selling and registered on Amazon, then you can open your own store at no additional cost.
Brands Can Use Rich Media and Content to Stand Out
– Hiram Cruz, Creative Director at Tinuiti You can always reach out to us for help with setting up your Amazon Store. Pro-tip: You can access analytics from the store builder, or from the Stores main page.
Amazon Store Example
Page Manager: Used to create, select, move and delete pages from the Amazon Store
Stores insights shows the impact a traffic source has on your store page views and attributes sales based on those views. Amazon ad campaign reporting shows you the impact of the campaign itself on the audience that was exposed to it, whether or not the audience reached your store.
Amazon uses a last discovery methodology to attribute sales and units sold to pages and to sources.
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- Marquee
- Highlight
- Product Grid
Once you’ve established your store homepage, it’s time to build out additional pages based on your catalog categories, best-selling products, deals, and more.
The Amazon Store Manager has four sections including:
Amazon Stores elevate the shopping experience by:
Before you can begin creating beautiful Amazon Store content (or even EBC, A+, and Sponsored Product Ads), you’ll need to register your brand using Amazon’s Brand Registry.
Source: Citizen Watch Store on Amazon In January 2019, Amazon added six additional metrics including:
Amazon Store Features
More information about custom source tags – Custom source tags were originally limited to reporting of the top 30 source tags with some threshold of visits. Now Amazon can show the top 100 source tags and will allow users to export all source tags that meet the new relaxed data threshold.
1. Shoppable Collection Images
– Hiram Cruz, Creative Director at Tinuiti
So what are the benefits, and how can Amazon Stores work for you? We’ll cover that below.
Q4. If I use Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores, will I see my Stores performance data in Campaign Management?
Q4. If I use Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores, will I see my Stores performance data in Campaign Management?
How to Create Your Amazon Store
1. Register Your Brand With Amazon
“The Store insights also allow us to tag external traffic so we can finally get more information around the effectiveness of external advertising campaigns that we route to our Stores. With Amazon Store Insights, we can see how many customers convert organically from the store, which is groundbreaking.” You’ll want to build out your pages much in the same way as you would your own ecommerce website; make sure that navigation is simple enough for customers to easily find what they’re looking for. There are four different Store themes available:
- A registered trademark for your brand that appears on your products or packaging.
- The ability to verify yourself as the rights owner or the authorized agent for the trademark.
- An Amazon account. You can use an existing Amazon account (credentials associated with Vendor or Seller Central) or create a new one for free.
2. Create Your Store Homepage & Select Template
Instead of uploading products individually, you can now upload products in bulk to your product grids and featured-deals tiles. You can also opt to automatically hide any products that are out of stock, optimizing the shopping experience for customers. Pro-tip: It’s important to note that Amazon display sales data in Stores insights based on the date of the visit, not the date of the sale itself.
Shoppable Collection Images are your opportunity to highlight great photography but also keep your Store creative shoppable and drive sales on a number of products.
Multi-page Amazon Stores (up to three levels deep) can be used to exclusively showcase your brand and products. Customize the experience based on what your brand needs. Any data that is a specific store metric, such as views and daily visitors to your store, will only be available in Stores insights.
3. Build Out Your Amazon Store Pages
Amazon makes this easy because you can search ASINs that you are already selling on the Marketplace.
Support for rich media and content, such as text and images, helps elevate the shopping experience. Below is an example of an Amazon Store built out for a luxury beauty brand, R+Co:
Source: Revlon Lustrous Lipstick Product Page on Amazon
4. Add Content Tiles To Each Page
Source: Revlon Lustrous Lipstick Product Page on Amazon
6. Submit Your Amazon Store For Review and Publish
“The ability to control store versions and schedule updates has changed our approach and freed us up to be more creative with temporary and fresh changes without creating a lot of issues when we need to revert back.”
Before you publish your Amazon Store, you should check for the following:
Scalable UI Overhaul- Amazon updated their UI in the following ways:
- Spelling or punctuation errors.
- All changes are included in the draft version.
- Use the mobile preview to make sure that your Amazon Store is optimized for the mobile experience.
- Check your images and videos to make sure that any text in them can be easily viewed (including on mobile).
How Much Does it Cost to Start an Amazon Store?
Once you’ve built out your pages and added in the content tiles, you can then add individual products to each category or page of your store.
An Overview of Amazon Store Insights (and How to Use It)
Separation of “Sources” from “Your tags” – Customers who use custom tags do so in order to easily categorize traffic. Providing a dedicated location to find these tags facilitates this behavior.
Source: Amazon
Stores are a significant improvement over the older brand pages, and they allow Vendors to get more creative with the design. Another super cool feature of Amazon Stores is that you can build highly customizable pages showcasing a single or small group of products, perfect for new launches. You can include videos, a slideshow of photos, text, all sorts of content to really push new products.
New help content – Amazon has also added new help topics for their Store owners, including tips for improving performance, and for optimizing Sponsored Brands ads for Stores.
Metrics Available via Amazon Store Insights
You can now publish updates at scheduled dates and times, allowing you to plan ahead and align your Store’s publishing schedule with new releases, seasonal changes, and brand updates. When you submit your updated Store for publishing, you can request a date and time at which the changes will be live to customers.
- Daily visitors: Total unique users or devices that viewed one or more pages on your store in a single day.
- Views: Number of page views during this time period. Includes repeat views.
- Sales: Estimated total sales generated by store visitors within 14 days of their last visit. Units and sales data are only available as of December 25, 2017.
- Units sold: Estimated total units purchased by store visitors within 14 days of their last visit.
- Views/Visitor: Average number of unique pages viewed by a daily visitor to your store
According to Amazon, once you have finished building your Amazon Store, you can submit it by clicking the “Submit for publishing” button. Your Amazon Store will be submitted for moderation. Keep in mind, you can’t make changes to your draft while it is being moderated.
In 2020, Amazon released new features to help advertisers showcase their brand and products with richer, more engaging content experiences (content via Amazon.com).
- Sales/Visitor
- Sales/Visit
- Orders
- Orders/Visit
- Units/Order (A measure of order size)
- Sales/Order (A measure of order value)
Once selected, you will then be prompted to follow additional steps, including selecting your homepage template.
But on an even bigger scale, more brands are excited about Stores because this means they no longer have to worry about losing their brand identity in a competitive online marketplace.
To register your brand, you’ll need:
“The new Amazon Store Insights feature gives us insight around the effectiveness of the Store and allows us to understand how an audience interacts with the pages that we create,” AJ Swamy, Creative Strategy Manager at Tinuiti said.
Preview Window: Provides a live view of the current page and can be used to select a tile to edit the Tile Manager.
- Tabbed cards: New tabbed card designs allow the user to see an overview of key metrics, but switch between metrics for more detail.
- Metric dropdowns: Dropdowns within cards allow a user to choose which metric to use for analyzing top pages, top sources, and top tags.
- Info tooltips: Info tooltips are now placed next to each individual metric and source type
Both sets of reporting provide different insights on how your campaign is performing, and as a result, the reported performance may not match between them.
Traffic Sources Available for Amazon Store Insights
Q3. How are sales and units sold attributed?
- Amazon Sponsored Brands: Traffic from Sponsored Brands ads on Amazon.
- Amazon organic traffic: Traffic from within Amazon, including from search results or brand detail page links.
- Tagged sources: Traffic being tracked with a custom source tag. You can create source tags for different traffic channels to get granular traffic tracking by source. Tagged sources data is only broken down to individual tags when it meets Amazon’s data count threshold within your selected time range. You can learn more about Tagged Sources here.
- Other: All other traffic sources not categorized.
FAQs About Amazon Store Insights
For examples of Amazon Stores, check out our recent post.
Amazon Stores are comprised of one or more pages. Each page is comprised of a header and footer surrounding a number of content tiles.
These stores provide an enhanced brand-centric shopping experience on Amazon on both desktop and mobile platforms.
Custom source tags for subpages – Creating subpage tags was a manual and error-prone process that frustrated our customers. With this release, Amazon’s made it very easy to create copy-and-paste source tag links for any page on the Store. The store owner simply selects the page they want to use as a destination, create a tag name, and generate a link.
- Units and sales data are only available as of December 25, 2017.
- Tagged sources data is broken down to individual tags when they meet Amazon’s data threshold. Amazon only provides a breakdown of the top 30 tags.
Tile Manager: Used to add, edit, move, and delete tiles from the Amazon Store.
Content tiles are content that customers can interact with on each page of your store.
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- Direct sales or units: Total sales or units purchased of products available on a store page, where the store page was viewed by the purchasing customer.
- Halo sales or units: Total sales or units purchased of products available on Amazon from your brand, where the product purchased was not available on the store page viewed by your customer.
Here’s why:
Amazon Stores Insights provides metrics by traffic source and by page including:
- Sources: Amazon attributes the sale to the last source of the customer visit, prior to their purchase.
- Pages: Amazon attributes all direct sales to the page viewed that contained the purchased product. They attribute halo sales to the last page viewed in the customer visit prior to their purchase.
An Amazon Stores is a free premium content offer on Amazon that vendors can use to exclusively showcase a curated collection of products and elevate their brand. Amazon had the option to add video but what makes this unique is that it audio plays and loops. In the past, you had to click on it, but this one just plays and it’s effective to draw attention early on so we like to leverage above the fold. We recommend you keep your video to five or six seconds and be cognizant of the loop: meaning you need to make sure you have a smooth transition. Additionally, to capture shoppers’ attention, try using it above the fold, but make sure you don’t push your products too far down the page.
For example, if you have an upcoming event such as Black Friday, you may want to edit your store to feature certain deals. You can create that version for the event and schedule a time frame so that it can temporarily update for the event and then revert back to your previous version without having to redo your store to get it back to where it was. This will allow you to get more fresh content on your store rather than just using evergreen content. Just make sure you have a version with no end date as your backup so your scheduled versions have something to revert back to!
Once your brand is registered, you can navigate to Manage Stores from within Ad Console or Seller Central to set up your first Amazon Store.
Amazon Stores also allows you to choose from 3 templates (default tiles):
Up until recently, it’s been difficult to measure the impact of creative – specifically for Amazon Stores.
Amazon has launched a new way for Amazon shoppers to discover relevant Stores. In addition to the products featured on the simple landing page of your Sponsored Brands ads, Amazon will now add your brand logo at the bottom of the page, which customers can click to go to your Store. They are also experimenting with other ways for shoppers to discover your Store on Amazon. For this reason, it is important that you upload a brand logo in the Store builder (if you haven’t already) and keep it updated.
Once you’ve established a hierarchy of pages for your customers to navigate to, it’s time to add content tiles to each page.
Amazon Stores: The Bottom Line
Q1. Why is some data in the analytics dashboard unavailable?
Status Bar: This provides the current moderation status of the Amazon Store and displays any error messages. Version control of your store is a feature that emerged in 2020. In the past, it was impossible to revert back to a previous version of your Amazon Store once you made edits. Now, not only can you save your previous version, but you can use the scheduling feature to keep content fresh.
