The Amazon Click-Through-Rate 2024 Ultimate Guide (CTR)

More traffic, more conversion... MORE TRAFFIC... MORE CONVERSION.

Hold it:

Rewind: ..ahh, yes, our 2 favorite words in the Amazon seller community. Traffic and Conversion. The two magic concepts representing what every Amazon seller wants.

Touted as the only 2 concepts that matter to a seller. If a seller has one but not the other.. dead in the water. Got the other without the one? You're done.

...but find a way to master BOTH traffic to your amazon listing and conversion of that traffic to purchases? Well- you've won good sir and I tip my hat to you...

...or have you....?

Look closer grasshopper, and you will see that in between traffic and conversion there is a small step wedged in between there. A little step so teeny that we completely ignore it in the Amazon seller community. And yet this teensy little baby step is the leverage point that for the past year has literally separated the 8 and 9 figure Amazon brands from the brands that cap out at $10k/mo.

It is.. the click.

The Click

Amazon sellers are rightfully obsessed with conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate is the percentage of viewers of your listing that actually end up buying your product. So naturally, since we sellers pay Jeff Bezos top dollar to drive new shoppers to our listings (using Amazon PPC), we want as much of that traffic as possible to convert to real sales.

You can send all the traffic in the world for as cheap as you can get it, be it PPC traffic or organic ranking traffic. If you don't win the click you never get a chance to convert in the first place.

I would know. My team and I have managed over 2,300 product launches on Amazon, and have boosted conversions or click through rates for over 800 brands.

The click is the bridge between getting people seeing your product and getting people purchasing your product.

Your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on your product listing thumbnail out of everyone who saw the thumbnail. Listing thumbnails are what you see when you scroll through search results on Amazon. Once you click or tap a particular thumbnail, now you are looking at the listing and can decide whether or not to buy.

Increasing your click through rate should be your goal even before you focus on increasing your conversion rate. Because if they don't click, they can't ever convert.

The reason sellers don't talk about this is that until recently, there wasn't too much you could do about increasing your CTR. But all that has changed. With a number of new capabilities that only became available to most sellers this past year, you can now have a dramatic effect on click through rate by stacking 4 to 5 strategies at once or more.

This article is LONG and it's NOT meant to be skimmed. BUT those of you sellers who do read and digest the whole thing will have your lives changed permanently. Not joking. My promise to you is that if you make it through this entire article, and you implement at least 3 of the strategies, you will increase your CTR permanently and for free. That means more sessions on your listing every day from this day forward, without spending another dime on PPC traffic to your listing. Think of it as a permanent, free, new daily flow of traffic to your listing.

Sold? Good. Let's dig in.

The Game of Increasing CTR

We all love to obsess over outranking the competition. No one talks about outcapturing them once we are ranked.

Whether or not you are aware of it, you are playing the game of 'win the click' with your competitors on Pg 1 every day. Some of your competitors are unknowingly playing the game, and some of them are intentionally playing it to win. Completing this article will transform you into the MVP of your niche's win-the-click game. Pray that your competitor doesn't read it first.

Some of the biggest brands in our space, and in fact THE biggest exit in our space ($600m, more on that later) was built in part from many of the concepts I reveal below.

There are a few major categories of ways to increase the click through rate of your listing thumbnail. I will start with the most obvious then move on to the more advanced tactics that border on unfair.

Some of these tactics may actually sound silly to you. We will be talking about size bumping and employing brilliant coloring, and filling white space. You might find yourself asking: why are we acting like we're selling to a bunch of 6 year olds? Because we are.

Not just 6 years olds in fact. More like drunk 6 year olds. The average amount of time a shopper has to evaluate whether or not to tap on your listing thumbnail is 3/5ths of a second or less while browsing on mobile (75% of traffic on Amazon is now mobile).

This means there is no time (ZERO) to read words, or to rationally assess the thumbnails. Meaning we are looking to communicate directly with the amygdala here. The snap judgement section of the brain. No frontal lobe (the 'adult" part of the brain) involvement whatsoever. And the amygdala speaks a very different language. The language of vibe, feeling, impulse. Not words. Not rationality. The below guide is a full dictionary of this language and how to speak it best.

Primary Image

The primary image is one of the most straightforward ways to win the click. I know dozens of 8 and 9 figure businesses have been built off the back of the simple concept of optimizing for clicks on the primary image.

THE EXPERIMENT

To prove to you the power of optimizing your primary image for clicks, we're going to run an experiment- right here- right now. And you are the subject. I'm going to show you how easily YOU yourself are influenced by the primary image, using a simple exercise.

The link below will open a tab on your browser with a blank white screen. Don't click it yet. Finish reading these instructions first.

Once you've clicked the link and opened to the blank screen, wait and watch as 4 full seconds will pass and then an image of four listing thumbnails, side by side, will flash on your screen for a fraction of a second.

All I want you to do is tell me which of the 4 listing thumbnails stuck out most to you. Which one caught your eye.

We'll label the leftmost thumbnail number 1, the second to the leftmost thumbnail number 2, etc. with the rightmost final thumbnail being thumbnail 4.

When you're ready, click the link below and remember which stood out the most. Was it Thumbnail 1, Thumbnail 2, Thumbnail 3, or Thumbnail 4?

No cheating! You have one shot. Don't blink or you might miss it:

CLICK HERE WHEN YOU'RE READY AND HAVE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS

Did you catch that? Got a thumbnail in mind? Good. In a second I'm going to read your mind.

The time on screen of the thumbnails in this experiment is precisely timed to mimic that of a scrolling shopper on Amazon. It leaves no time at all for reading titles, prices, reviews, or anything else. Instead, your brain will revert to what Malcolm Gladwell calls a "snap judgement" or "gut feeling" made entirely by your subconscious mind.

Now, get ready for me to blow your mind. I'm going to tell you which listing stood out to you.

The listing thumbnail that most stood out to you is: Thumbnail 3.

This particular listing thumbnail belongs to a brand of pet stain remover called Angry Orange. Thrasio, the largest Amazon brand aggregator in the world, famously bought this company and 20x'd its revenue in large part by optimizing the click through rate. That's right. 20x.

They bought the brand and immediately changed the packaging specifically to optimize it for clicks on the Amazon thumbnail image.

They changed the packaging shape so that it would take up more of the space available in the thumbnail image. They changed the color to a bright neon orange that immediately captures the eye. And they changed the text on the packaging to huge font that you can read without even clicking into the listing, highlighting the primary benefit of the product not the brand name of the product.

Search this brand on Amazon and you will see that the (readable) text on the packaging in the primary image does not say "ANGRY ORANGE"... No, instead it says "ODOR ELIMINATOR". Precisely the keyword being searched to find the product and precisely addressing the problem the shopper is looking to solve. All without them having to look at a single word of text on the title or bullets of the listing.

Click? Won.

Instantly, the brand skyrocketed and became one of Thrasio's top success stories as they turned a 7 figure brand into an 8 figure brand overnight.

Changing the color of your packaging,

changing the shape of your packaging or product image to take up more of the thumbnail white space, and

changing the words on your packaging to describe the solution or reflect the top search term

are the best ways to optimize your main image for clicks. But they are not the only ways.

Although Amazon's guidelines specify that the primary image should be the product on its own against a white background, many, if not most, niches routinely do not adhere to this. Adding the customer avatar into the image, adding the primary use case to the primary image, adding a visual representation of the ingredients to the primary image, and showing the product alongside the packaging, are all ways thousands of brands win more clicks. Search "toy blocks" on Amazon and you will see what I mean. However, tread lightly when adding anything to the primary image that is not explicitly within Amazon's primary image guidelines. Although thousands of brands get away with this, it is usually not a good idea to step outside of Amazon's guidelines, even if it works.

But even without stretching your interpretation of Amazon's guidelines, I guarantee there is space for you to optimize your primary image.

Now, I'm going to take a pause here and reality check. Remember that brand I talked about earlier that exited for $600m? It's called Zesty Paws. GUESS how many of the strategies we've gone over so far they employ. If you guessed ALL OF THEM, you would be right:

Fills the white space? Check. Primary solution is the biggest readable text on packaging? Check. Eye-grabbing color? Check.

Your task now is to identify the top 3 changes you think would make the biggest impact on the CTR of your primary image in your category in particular, execute the changes, and measure the result.

Click X-Factors:

Here's where it gets really interesting. Through a combination of badges, pricing options, listing settings, and formatting, you can have a dramatic impact on the CTR of your listing. Each of the hacks and tactics below support one of 2 key goals:

1. Catch the eye of peripheral shoppers through color, messaging, and design that sets you apart from the other results while scrolling.
2. Increase the actual physical size of your listing thumbnail through size-bumping hacks that cause your thumbnail to physically take up more space in mobile search results :O

Yes, you read that right. Many of the tactics we are about to review will actually increase the size of your listing thumbnail in mobile search results. And not by a little. When combined these tactics can increase the size of your listing thumbnail by a huge margin up to 70%. We discovered this inside Sophie Society last summer and playfully named the strategy "Size-Bumping", adding it to the curriculum of our popular Profitable PPC Challenge.

It's like the matrix, once you've seen it you can't un-see it and you'll start to notice that some of your competitors have already caught on to some of this. But thankfully, a vast majority still haven't.

Implementing these tactics will put you in the elite group of top clicked listing thumbnails in your niche. Boosting your sessions, boosting your sales, and boosting your rank. Psyched yet? Let's get after it.

X-factors and Hacks: Badges & Coupons

Climate Pledge Friendly Badge

The Climate Pledge Friendly Badge just became widely available to Amazon sellers this past year. It adds a badge to your listing thumbnail, as well as to the listing itself.

The Climate Pledge Friendly Badge helps you sell more in 4 main ways

1. It increases your click-through-rate by adding a colorful and sustainability-minded green badge to your listing thumbnail that naturally catches the eye and attracts eco-conscious individuals (see image below for example).

2. It increases conversion through adding a badge to your listing itself (see below example), as well as giving you space for additional sustainability information on your listing.

3. It may increase sessions by ranking you on Pg. 1 of search results in a whole new section on page 1 that looks like this (not guaranteed):

4. And finally, it increases click-through-rate by increasing the size of your listing thumbnail by between 6% and 12%.

This badge captures the eye with a green color logo featuring the icon of an hourglass with wings, adding to the probability of you catching the peripherals of the scrolling shopper. But the hidden value comes in it's ability to Size-Bump your listing, crowding out other listings in mobile search results.

How to get the Climate Pledge Friendly Badge:

To get the Climate Pledge Friendly badge you must match the requirements of either:

1. Amazon's own "Compact by Design" program OR
2. One or more of the qualifying external 3rd party sustainability certifications.

If you qualify, the Compact by Design program is the easiest (and free-est) way to get the badge. Unfortunately, many brands will not qualify as this program is currently limited to certain categories.

The good news is that if you do not qualify for Amazon's own Compact by Design program, you can still get the badge by qualifying with one of the many 3rd party sustainability certifications Amazon has available to sellers. Check the link above to look through the programs. You can check out their websites to see what the application process looks like and whether or not you apply. While Amazon's own Compact by Design program is free to enroll in, the 3rd party certificates are not. But it wont run you dry- most of them will cost between a couple hundred to a couple thousand $$.

I know it's overwhelming as there are dozens of these certifying bodies. If you'd like a list of my favorites with links to their applications shoot me an email with subject "Climate Pledge Certifications" and I'll shoot them to you: [email protected].

Once you have gotten your certification, you can go to Seller Support > Products, Listings, and Inventory > Climate Pledge Friendly

And if that doesn't work, there is actually a special Amazon email you can use to get the climate pledge friendly badge. This is it:

[email protected]

Remember that to get the badge you will first need to choose which of the qualifying programs you apply for. So don't bother sending an email to this address until you've handled your certification.

Next!

Small Business Badge

The Small Business Badge just came out last year. It looks like this:

Similar to the climate pledge friendly badge, the Small Business badge helps you attract the click in multiple ways.

It attracts the eye of the the shopper with an icon graphic.

It builds trust with the shopper letting them know you are not a giant faceless corporation.

And, again, most importantly, it increases the size of your listing thumbnail in mobile search results (size-bumping).

In addition to helping you win the click, it also contributes to your listing conversion equation by adding a section to the listing itself letting shoppers know that they are supporting a small business.

Now you can start to see how, just like in Mortal Combat, these strategies can be stacked and combined to KO your competitors.

How to get the Small Business Badge

The small business badge is available to sellers doing who are doing under $50m/yr in revenue AND who have less than 100 employees. You also must be brand registered.

That is literally it. If you fit these two requirements you can get the badge by simply contacting seller support, requesting the badge, mentioning that you meet the requirements above, and providing the following information:

• Business brand and company name
• Business address
• Merchant token ID

When you stack this badge with the Climate Pledge Friendly badge, you begin to get a picture of how these strategies stack up and start providing meaningful expansions to the size of your listing thumbnail:

Onward we go!

Clickable Coupon

Clickable coupons allow Amazon shoppers to get either % discounts or dollar discounts off of the listed price of the product. They show up on listing thumbnails as a bright green banner badge.

In order to redeem the coupon, buyers need to click a box once they get onto the listing.

Clickable coupons do 3 main things to increase CTR:

1. They attract the eye subconsciously with the bright green banner badge on the thumbnail.
2. They entice the shopper with the promise of savings, or getting a deal.
3. They contribute to Size-Bumping, making your mobile listing thumbnail larger in search results.

Unlike some of the other CTR hacks, this one actually has a very meaningful impact on conversion as well. This is why we utilize the clickable coupon as a launch strategy for new product launches. It gives a big boost to both clicks and conversions.

The beautiful thing about the clickable coupon is that even though you have to be willing to offer a discount to get it, not all shoppers actually redeem it. Our data shows that about 60% of shoppers actually redeem the coupon. So if you have a 10% coupon enabled on a product, the effective discount you are actually forking over is actually 6% when averaged over a number of orders.

This CTR hack can also help you with traffic as well, as Amazon may show your listing separately in a special section of the website called Amazon Coupons:

To enable a clickable coupon, just navigate to the coupons section of seller central under "advertising" in the main menu

Select the product you would like to enable the coupon for, and the amount you want to discount. You can chose either a dollar amount, or a percentage off. Dollar amount typically provides better results, unless you are selling a very inexpensive product in which the dollar amount off would sound too small and a percentage off seems more meaningful.

If you are worried about the impact on your margin, just set the coupon at the minimum allowable by Amazon. You can go as low as 5%.

Now, lets stack a few of the strategies we've reviewed together and see what happens..

One or two of these strategies might give you a small advantage crowing out other listings in mobile search results. But you can see that as you start to put a handful of them into play, the effects become more and more substantial. With just these few strategies so far, the mobile listing with the strategies employed is 27% larger than the listing without them. This is already no small matter, and we still have more to go.

On to the next.

Other Badges

There are a number of other badges that have many of the same benefits as the badges above. The Badges below I will briefly review, but won't go as deep on as these are rarer badges and you will have less direct control over your ability to get them. But for many of you, you will apply for one or more of these as well, some of which can have a huge effect on click through rate themselves.

Black Owned Business Badge

Amazon runs a program that provides meaningful benefits to black business owners selling on their platform including financial assistance, mentorship, free account management, and free advertising credits. One of the additional benefits of participating in this program is that you get the Black-Owned Business badge on your listing thumbnail.

One look at my profile picture and you'll see that I personally don't apply for this, but if I did, I would 100% do it. I play every card I'm dealt. If you apply, I would recommend doing it. You can apply and learn more here.

#1 New Release

This badge is awarded to products during their first 90 days after launch that outsell competitors that have launched near the same time window in the same sub category. It's much easier to get than the best seller badge, but it is fleeting. Sellers that are really good at driving PPC traffic and driving external traffic have a big edge here.

Best Seller

The best seller badge is a massive driver of both clicks and conversions. I'm talking anywhere from 30% to 100% more clicks and conversions when you have it. It's wild how much impact this badge has. But it also puts a target on your forehead. In my experience, having the best seller badge is an exhilarating but very stressful experience as everyone wants to knock the king off his throne and we all know there are sellers out there who play dirty.

Unlike the badges we went deep on, you don't have direct control over this one, but you can impact the probability of getting it. It's pretty simple, get higher sales velocity than the product in your subcategory who has it. Easier said than done I know.

The only other way to impact this badge is to change to a less competitive sub-category. You can do this compliantly if your product legitimately fits into another category. Just check through the other sub categories in your category, check the sales velocity of the top seller using Helium 10, and see if you think you can beat them. If you think you can and the sub category applies, you can request to change your sub category and get after it.

Amazon's Choice

Amazon's choice badge goes to what Amazon considers the best listing selection for a given search term. Every Amazon's choice badge is attached to a search term so you will see it appear on a listing like this:

'Amazon's Choice for "dog chews for small dogs"'

This badge has a significant impact on click through rate, but rather than affecting your general overall click through rate, it affects your specific click through rate for that search term. So the higher volume keyword you get the badge for, the bigger the impact.

I know sellers who claim they have gotten this badge by driving sales from Alexa purchases. Allegedly this badge is closely tied to Alexa based shopping behavior. My team and I have not used that strategy, but we have earned this badge many, many times simply by driving massive PPC traffic for specific search terms.

X-factors and Hacks: Pricing & Variations

Strikethrough Price and Limited time Offers

There are a number of ways to get a strikethrough price on your listing thumbnail and listing. The strikethrough price can be a pain. But it is absolutely worth it. The impact on CTR is very significant. The impact comes in 3 major ways:

1. It adds scarcity and urgency to the buying decision, providing a perceived exclusive benefit to the shopper.

2. It adds color to the listing thumbnail and attracts the eye. The strikethrough price changes the pricing section of the listing thumbnail, adding a bright "emergency red" discounted percentage number next to the price itself.

3. It size-bumps the listing. The strikethrough price adds over 12% to the listing area due to the additional line Amazon adds in the thumbnail for the old price with the strikethrough underneath the current price.

There are a few ways to get a strikethrough price, all of them fickle. Amazon long ago removed the ability to have an evergreen strikethrough price on a listing thumbnail, recognizing that once everyone was doing it, it lost its value.

1. "Was". The "Was" price on a listing is automatically generated by Amazon when the price dips significantly below the median price over the last 90 days. Obviously you can't do this forever or you would end up at 0 eventually.

2. "List Price". The "List Price" on a listing is what you set in the list price section in the back end of your listing, before setting a sale price. Amazon used to let you put whatever you wanted in here. This is why in 2016 every single listing result was like 90% off lol! But the glory days are over. Now this only works if customers have actually bought at this price in the last 90 days.

You can get the list price strikethrough by setting the list price in the back end of the listing, then creating an FBM version of the listing with the current enabled selling price of the listing set equal to the list price you set. Once the FBM product is bought at this price, your FBA listing should show the list price with the strikethrough within a few days. This will last for the 90 day period Amazon uses to asses list prices.

Subscribe and Save

When it comes to impact on CTR, the only contribution made by enabling subscribe and save is the effect on Size-Bumping. No one is clicking on a thumbnail just because they "get" to subscribe, but the subconscious effect of the Size-Bump is real. The effect is relatively minor, but this is an ultimate guide so we must include it anyway! Obviously there are other way more compelling reasons to enable subscribe and save if you are applicable but that is a topic for another article.

Variations

If your listing has variations, you need to determine which variation has the best click through rate. This may be different for different keywords, especially if there are different sizes, colors, or use cases as variations. Many times though, a clear winner does emerge that has a generally better CTR for most keywords. To determine which this is, just create Amazon PPC campaigns for each variation and AB test which gets better CTR. When you determine which it is, focus all of your ranking and traffic and strategy on that one. Use it as the shoe in to get shoppers to click on to the listing in the first place.

The INSANE Effects of Maxing out "SIZE-Bumping"

(Increasing the actual area of your Listing Thumbnail)

I was in our internal PPC mastermind with my top PPC Strategists inside Sophie Society (my PPC management team) when we discovered this. We analyzed listings without these thumbnail increasing factors, and compared them with listings in the same niche with the size-bumping factors, and measured the actual pixels to find what percentage increase you can actually get when you combine these strategies.

All together, live, we first measured the pixel height of the listing thumbnail with none of the size bumping factors.

282 pixels.

Then, we measured the listing thumbnail with all of the size-bumping factors.

485 pixels.

My jaw literally dropped. "Holy f****** s***. That's a 70% increase in thumbnail area." I couldn't believe it. (And yes, if you haven't met any sellers from Jersey, we curse like sailors.)

The change is so dramatic that when all the size-bumping factors are combined, it literally crowds out your competitors causing them not to even display fully on screen while a shopper is viewing your thumbnail. This is unbelievably powerful.

Amazon, like the rest of the internet, is a probabilities game. A game where the currency is not dollars, but moments of attention. The sellers that win on this platform are the sellers that are better at attracting the attention of shoppers using combinations of strategies and tactics like these.

Summary

Wow! You made it to the end. Honesty I'm surprised and kinda impressed. That was long I know. Andd I'm actually not going to write a summary because i know some of you scrolled all the way to the bottom to read this first and get the TLDR. Not gonna give it to ya- HAH! Scroll back up and read bucko.

For those of you who can take action on even half of what is presented in this article, it can change everything for your brand. When you do - email me [email protected] I want to hear about it. You saw the stories above about how 8 and 9 figure brands were built off the back of some of these strategies. You're next! Get after it!

PS. If you know a brand that is truly killing it in this domain, shoot me a message I'm currently opening back up to taking on select brands on an upward trajectory to invest in / advise.