How to Test Content in Your Amazon Listings

Banter

Friday, June 9, 2023

“Have you had your coffee today? You look tired” 🙃

In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇

📦 Testing informational vs. promotional content in your Amazon listings

📦 How to improve ROAS and smash 2023 growth targets

📦 Balancing polished and brand voice in your A+ content

📦 Reserve your seat at the table to make ads that actually convert

📦 What should you have in your Amazon alt text?

Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎

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Amazon

Use All the Image Space Amazon Has to Offer

🕺 Making moves on Amazon

Welcome to another installment of DTC’s Brand Breakdown, the best source of industry insights from the biggest brands in the game. This week, we continue our journey with the Pilothouse team through the Amazon’s landscape with Manscaped!

Let’s see if Manscaped can see the forest for the trees… 🤔

🦸 I need a hero

Manscaped’s hero images are pretty good! The diagonal perspective and subtle shadows provide a grounded viewing experience. 😌

Although this approach hasn’t been applied to their whole catalog, newer products seem to follow this formula.

✏️ The ‘list’ of it all

Manscaped’s listing images are a mixed bag. The images are all very high quality, but with only one infographic to describe the product and one celebrity photo at the end, most shoppers won’t gather much from what’s on display here.

Getting a brand’s unique selling points (USPs) across through imagery is crucial, and Manscaped could definitely add some extra education.

Manscaped uses the maximum amount of images Amazon allows in their listing. We suggest all brands do the same. Brands have the option to fill this entire carousel so why wouldn’t you take advantage of it?

📹 Video

With six videos uploaded to the listing, we’ve noticed the celebrity feature isn’t in the first position. 🤔

While the product-focused video provides a lot of valuable information, the celebrity voice will catch the viewer’s attention much quicker.

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Amazon

Showcasing Your Brand’s Personality in Your Content

🎓 We’ll give you an A+, but…

This is beautifully executed A+ content; every brand should study it.

Manscaped features a product-focused video at the top and follows up with a stack of well-branded feature-focused infographics.

A few more technical features in the carousel concludes with a “what’s in the box” image to really seal the deal for consumers looking for the most value in the least amount of time. 👍

This is, without a doubt, a very well-designed A+ content stack. They’ve cleverly recreated the product’s page from their DTC site in the A+ content. We caught that slick move. 😉

Despite how nice this A+ content looks, it lacks Manscaped’s personality.

Their ads typically ride the line of appropriate and NSFW with constant euphemisms and recurring suggestive humor. This A+ content contains none of that and ends up being a highly-polished but slightly bland experience.

🛍️ What’s in store?

Their store is very well structured, with tons of pages and subpages for the consumer to browse.

Each product is proudly displayed from different angles to reinforce the narrative that Manscaped has something for everyone. “Father’s Day Gifts”, “New Releases”, “Lifestyle” – it’s all here and we love to see it. 👏

Manscaped uses all of the modules Amazon provides:

• Background videos as a way to have animated GIFs
• Shoppable images wherever possible
• Brand consistency across all of their pages
• Cross-selling of products on each page

We have the same critique of the store that we have of their A+ content. Although it’s well-designed, it doesn’t get their humorous personality across, while the brand showcases this on other ad channels.

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Amazon

Does Your Product Stand Out from the Dupes?

🕳️ Diggin’ deep in alt text

A commonly overlooked aspect of SEO is how brands can insert search terms within the alt-text of A+ content. 🤯

Manscaped utilizes this technique – a little.

Specifically, the Lawn Mower 4.0’s alt text contains: “manscaped lawn mower groin body hair trimmer.” They’re touching on some keywords here, but much more could be done to include Spanish translations or misspellings.

🎨 Artists always title their work

“Manscaped” contains a much larger volume search than any sort of “groin grooming” keyword, so pushing their brand front and center makes sense here.

Make note of how “Electric razor”, “electric shaver”, and “electric razor for men” all hold a very high value and yet, aren’t included in their title.

While we understand the direction Manscaped was going with this copy, the title seems more appropriate for a DTC site than an Amazon listing. With a little more consideration in their choice of words, they’ll have a stellar listing.

If they kept the title short and branded, we’d applaud the choice of favoring readability over SEO, but they still made it unusually long. Manscaped’s focus on features ultimately hurts readability without much benefit to SEO. 🤷

🤔 Making a point

Although they format the bullets with a heading, they’re not quite doing it for us given the vibe we expect from Manscaped.

The copy could use an infusion of personality and SEO best practices. A very generic product/feature focus is disappointing to see, with so much text left underutilized. Next time, we recommend leaning into their brand voice a bit more to elevate this content above.

💡 Final Thoughts

Manscaped’s listings are fairly well-developed as their A+ content and store pages are, but their listing images and SEO could use a few tweaks.

We hope they inject more of their signature humor and branding into their product pages down the line. This could help them stand out above the competition, who’re looking to leverage their own brand-building techniques with less expensive dupes of Manscaped’s product.

🚶The journey continues…

We’ll return next week as Pilothouse dives into Manscaped’s Amazon ads, explores why a good offense is actually a defense, and looks at the mystery of who’s trying to steal their thunder. 😱 Any brand looking to build an audience on Amazon won’t want to miss this!

Quick Hits

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🌲 Amazon announces Affirm will be their first buy now, pay later partner to integrate with Amazon Pay.

♾️ Meta to let users decide if cross-site tracking will remain active for them. This follows an announcement from Germany’s FCO after an antitrust intervention.

✏️ Meta shares the new “Performance 5” to unlock the benefits of the platform’s ad offering. These best practices were chosen to provide more insight into AI, Reels and new ad formats.

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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.

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