When you send traffic to your Amazon product listing, it’s important you control each part of your customer’s journey. That means not just the start and finish points, but how your customer gets there.
In this case, we’re talking about your link. A smart URL will make big improvements to your funnel, in a handful of ways. Your link can help you attract more traffic, grow your brand, and allow you to gain more insights from your campaigns.
It’s not just about getting someone from point A to point B.
Keep reading to find out why URL shortening and link management are so important for Amazon sellers.
What’s Wrong With Amazon URLs?
We love Amazon, but their URLs are U-G-L-Y.
For most websites, making URLs that are easy to read and follow is simple. E.g. “https://www.onnit.com/primal-bells/” or “https://landingcube.com/traffic”.
It’s easy because you have control over the backend of your website, so you can choose your exact URL structure.
Also, you’ll usually have a low enough number of pages that it’s easy to make sure each page has a clean, unique URL.
Now, when you sell on the Amazon marketplace, you don’t have control over the link structure. Plus, it’s a massive site, with millions and millions of individual pages, so that means URLs must be generated with a bunch of weird parameters.
The result is something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Crossing-New-Horizons-Nintendo-Switch/dp/B07SL6ZXBL/ref=zg_bsnr_videogames_home_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=T31GC4BEAZGVAW005WGP
When you’re linking to your product from an email or social media post, this is not ideal.
It doesn’t look professional, and it’s not inviting people to click.
At this stage, you’ve carefully crafted your customer’s journey with great email copy or beautiful ad creative. Then showing this link is like showing them the man behind the curtain.
You can cut it down and have it still work, sure. We can remove some of the fluff:
https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Crossing-New-Horizons-Nintendo-Switch/dp/B07SL6ZXBL/
Or even down to just the ASIN:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SL6ZXBL/
But this is still cold and not consistent with your branding.
Plus, if you use something like a 2-step URL, you need all the extra bits and pieces in the URL, so cutting it down is not an option.
This is why you should use an Amazon link shortening tool. This way you can show your customers a clean, branded URL, while keeping the final destination (including parameters like keywords and tracking tags intact).
Amazon URL Shortener Use Cases
There’s just about no end to the potential use cases for a URL shortener for Amazon.
Whenever you display a link to your product, it befits you to track clicks on that link, and customize it to something that looks good (and fits in line with your branding).
Custom links also allow you to build retargeting audiences based on specific link clicks, which will level up your ad targeting game several times over.
Now let’s elaborate on when and why to use a URL shortener.
Create branded links
For private label sellers, you should be focusing on branding in every step of your sales funnel. This includes your links.
Consider a social media post that carefully crafts the ideal message and image of your brand. This starts to fall away when your post links to amazon.com/xxxxx?/YYYY&qid=189341841.
Creating a brand that sticks in your target customer’s mind takes time and effort. It takes repetition – multiple touchpoints.
People need to see your brand name and be reminded of it over and over.
That’s why a lot of big brands use custom branded short links, so that they can be the first thing in their someone’s mind when it’s time to make a purchase.
For example, Starbucks uses the short domain sbux.co:
While Mercedes-AMG uses a truncated domain amg4.me:
These are examples of big companies paying close attention to their branding at each step of a potential customer’s journey.
Links that are easy to type/remember
In many cases, you’ll want use links that are easy for people to type in themselves.
For example, a great way to collect email subscribers is to use links on product inserts.
You put a link on a card inside your product’s packaging which leads to a landing page with an offer for something like a discount code on their next purchase, or a warranty (which the customer has to provide their email to receive).
If the URL is too long, most people aren’t going to bother typing it in. You’ve got to cut it down and reduce friction as much as possible.
The same thing goes for promotions. It’s in your best interest to make links that are easy for people to share.
This is especially true for mobile, where copying & pasting isn’t so easy.
Many people (like myself) prefer making purchases on desktop. So if this person sees your promo link come up on mobile, you want to make it easy for them to type it into another browser.
Short links are also great for video/audio content. Things like YouTube videos, video ads, podcasts.
When you share a call-to-action, you’ll get more traffic if you share a link that’s easy to remember and easy to type.
You can of course direct people to click a link in the video description, but this is another step and another chance for people to drop out of your funnel.
Linking to keyword-targeted URLs
Keyword-targeted super URLs are great for sellers looking to rank higher in Amazon search.
Things like 2-step URLs and search-find-buy allow you to drive traffic while simulating organic searches for high-volume keywords.
The problem is, these URLs are unsightly, which doesn’t help to attract clickthroughs. A URL like this is not share-friendly, and doesn’t help your branding:
https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-asin=B07NXYCNQN&keywords=omega+3+fish+oil&ie=UTF8&rh=i:aps,ssx:relevance
You can massively improve the performance of your marketing campaigns by shortening your 2-step URL to something short and branded.
Adding tracking to your links
Analytics is vital for any marketing campaign. You need to know how your campaign is performing, from campaigns as big as a product launch to a simple Facebook post. That means seeing how many people clicked your link, and what kind of results you come from your link.
When you share a direct link to Amazon, you can’t add any kind of analytics or tracking.
However, if you use a custom link tool, you can embed tracking code such as the Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics, and get the lowdown on how your campaigns are really performing.
Retargeting link clicks
Continuing on the previous point, the Facebook Pixel gives you the means to create powerful retargeting audiences from people who clicked your links. A link click from a blog post or an email is an expression of interest, differentiating people at different stages in your funnel.
Tailoring your marketing specifically to the funnel stage of your customers is incredibly powerful, which is what makes retargeting ads so effective.
The Best Tool For Amazon… LandingCube’s Link Shortener
We’ve gone over why link shortening and link management is important – now here’s the tool you want to use.
LandingCube’s link shortener is a tool made specifically for Amazon sellers, to create short, branded links to products on Amazon.
Watch this short video for an introduction, and read more about the key features below.
Vanity URLs for Amazon Sellers
With our tool you can integrate with your own domain, in order to link to your products using branded links.
As well as adding your brand’s domain to your links, you can create short, share-friendly links and vanity URL slugs.
If you don’t have your own domain, you can also use our default, share-friendly domain, lncb.me.
Link Management for Amazon Sellers
Track the links used in your external marketing campaigns, in order to monitor and compare the traffic coming through each channel.
By creating unique links for different use cases you can get a better idea of which channels are performing and which are not.
Retargeting Using Pixel Links
Any good sales funnel makes use of retargeting. Whether it’s the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, or any other tracking code, building audiences based on specific link clicks is a brilliant way to approach ad targeting, and in most cases will reduce your ad spend dramatically.
Powerful 2-step Super URLs
Make product launches, re-launches and targeted ranking campaigns more effective with keyword-loaded 2-step URLs. LandingCube links make it easy to set up 2-step URLs, as well as adding rotating keywords that target multiple search terms.
Click below to learn more about our tool.
Using an Amazon Link Shortener: In Summary
URL shortening, link management and vanity URLs are necessary tools in any Amazon seller’s external marketing toolkit.
If you’re serious about building a brand with name recognition, you want to take every opportunity to put your branding in front of your customers.
Along with this, share-friendly URLs, deep linking, analytics and retargeting are just a few more golden reasons to start using an Amazon link shortener right now.
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