If you confuse, you lose.
Donald Miller
Donald is the CEO of StoryBrand, a company focused on helping other businesses clarify their brand message & grow.
When you’re optimizing your Amazon product titles, you’re most likely prioritizing organic search traffic. You want your product to show up in as many organic search results as possible, so you stuff it with two or three relevant keyphrases.
Since Amazon continually prioritizes their paid ads, you can’t afford to ONLY optimize for organic traffic. In this post, we’ll explore how to optimize titles for the best of both worlds—organic ranking and paid traffic!
The issue with Amazon product titles
Most Amazon sellers don’t explicitly write their product titles for Amazon PPC. Instead, they write product titles to optimize for organic search, and then they run ads to those listings without ever considering whether those titles are optimized for PPC as well.
Here are some reasons why need to consider PPC when it comes to optimizing Amazon product titles:
- Your title gets cut off in the ad because there’s less space
- Your product is shown on a related product’s page (which may not even be the same type of product, so it needs to explain itself a bit more)
- With less space, you have less room for multiple use cases and keywords so you have to prioritize the order of words
- You need to include engaging, click-worthy copy that wins traffic
How to prioritize Amazon PPC clickthroughs without sacrificing SEO
So if you know you need to improve your product titles for PPC, but you don’t want to sacrifice search traffic, what do you do?
You need to include keywords in your product titles, but not so many that you are committing “keyword stuffing.”
You don’t have to attempt to stick all your keywords in your product titles.
You can also include keyphrases in your bullet point product descriptions and the backend search terms. Use a tool like MerchantWords to help you identify your top 15 keyphrases, and only include the top one or two in your product title.
When it comes to PPC, keywords aren’t the only factor that matters. You need to optimize for clicks. We’ll learn more about this in the coming sections of this post.
The basics of Amazon Product title optimization
There are basic best practices that every Amazon product title should follow. Your product title should include:
- Brand name
- Product line (if applicable)
- Material or key feature
- Product type (your target keyphrase)
- Color (only if you offer multiple color options for the same item)
- Size (if there are multiple size options on the market)
- Packaging/Quantity (if applicable)
Amazon also makes the following recommendations:
- Always capitalize the first letter of each word, but don’t capitalize each letter
- Spell out measurements such as Ounce or Pound
- All numbers should be numerals (not spelled out)
- Ampersands symbols (&) should not be used in titles unless they are part of the brand name
- Don’t include promotional information in titles or misleading objective copy like “Best selling”
When it comes to increasing PPC clickthrough rates, however, we need to go above and beyond the basic recommendations for product titles. We need to make our titles clickable by using psychological copywriting best practices.
To really win with Amazon PPC, you should also include what makes your product special. What is the differentiator? It might be a material that helps prevent wear and tear, or a style that most products don’t achieve.
You should do customer and competitor research to find out what is the “X” factor for your product, and then include it in your title. Check out the examples below for inspiration!
What about character count?
While your Amazon product title can be 120 characters or even longer, only about 65 characters will show up in sponsored product ads. That’s why your most important keyphrases, adjectives, and use cases must appear as early in the title as possible.
You only have about 65 characters in your sponsored product ads, so make them count.
Three different Amazon product title examples
Here are three different examples of great Amazon product titles for PPC. Each of these was found in the “Sponsored products related to this item” section on similar product pages:
Synonym usage examples
In this example, the title includes the words “vase,” “planter,” and “pot,” but because these are short words and they are listed in an easy-to-read way using comments, they aren’t gharish or overwhelming like most keyword stuffing offenders.
If there are multiple synonyms for your product, use this as a template:
Keyphrase Descriptive Adjective + 2 – 3 Synonyms + Unique Selling Proposition + Additional Descriptive Adjectives
Search term adjective example
This product title kicks things off with an important keyphrase “coated outdoor furniture” which doubles as a unique selling proposition. This is a value add because the product will not deteriorate as much over time. Because they offer multiple sizes and colors, they include the relevant sizing and color of this product.
Here’s the template you can copy:
USP + Keyphrase + Size + Color
Multiple use case example
Beyond multiple synonyms…what if your product has multiple use cases? This folding table can be used for wine, champagne, or an entire picnic. They do a great job of including adjectives that portray a likeable, positive brand.
Let’s turn this example into a template, shall we?
Brand Name + Keyphrase + Additional Use Cases + Descriptive, On-Brand Adjectives
A note on images for Amazon PPC
Of course, images are a really important component for increasing Amazon PPC clickthrough rates as well.
The vast majority of well performing campaigns use one of two image types:
- The product against a plain white background
- A contextualized (but simplistic) image of the product in use
If you’re not sure which to use as your main image, you should always default on the plain white background. These images are easy for shoppers to see and scroll through.
However, there are some products that will confuse shoppers if they are not contextualized. This planter box is a great example of a product that needs to be contextualized:
Without the outdoor patio surroundings and without the dirt and plants, this white planter box would be just a white box. Clickthrough rates would suffer, and a portion of the clickthroughs would be irrelevant—some shoppers might have thought they were clicking on an office file box or a toy box.
If your product isn’t clear without contextualization, you should absolutely choose a contextualized product image for your main image. But if it is clear, you should most likely use a simpler image.
Key takeaways
In essence, optimizing your Amazon product titles for PPC clickthroughs requires you to include more engaging copy with better unique selling propositions and to be mindful of how you order the words in your titles. Just as important, you need to watch out for keyword stuffing that will be an overwhelming turnoff to buyers.
One of the best marketing quotes of all time is “If you confuse, you lose.” This is absolutely true in your Amazon product titles, so aim for clarity at all times.
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get to know the author
Dayana Mayfield
Dayana helps tech companies get more customers with super strategic copy.
Her process is rooted in clarity, desire, emotions, psychology, analytical insight, straight-up problem solving and a whole lot of other good stuff.
