Amazon editorial recommendations may not be something you have implemented in your Amazon business just yet, but you should look into them to help increase your visibility and conversions on the Amazon platform.

Competition within e-commerce rises each year, and as it rises, sellers have to find and learn new approaches to stay ahead of their competition. A common approach to increase product visibility is affiliate marketing – marketing that involves an advertiser or advocate recommending your product and in turn, receiving commissions. 

Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase brand awareness and drive external traffic to Amazon listings. However, many sellers have difficulty finding affiliates, especially if their products are in categories that are simply less likely to receive recommendations by nature. 

One of the best affiliate marketing approaches, which is surprisingly easy to access, is affiliate marketing directly on Amazon – named Amazon Editorial Recommendations.  

These recommendations post directly to Amazon and render on specific keywords, and they come from members of the Amazon Onsite Associates Program. 

Amazon Editorial Recommendations not only provide brand awareness but have a lot of unique benefits because they’re posted directly onto Amazon. 

This includes improvements in: 

• PPC efficiencies
• SEO performance
• Share-of-voice
• Organic rank
• Conversions

Let’s Break Down the Best Lamp Recommendation

This Best Lamp recommendation renders on the keyword “lamp” on Amazon. Though it renders on the keyword, it doesn’t render 100% of the time. Most Editorial Recommendations render 25% of the time, meaning this specific Editorial Recommendation will show on the search page 1 in 4 times when a customer is shopping.

Each recommendation contains at least three products, with most containing five total, but some include as many as 8. The first product – the LED desk lamp – performs 30-40% better than the other two products shown. The products after the arrow receive a very slight, if any, boost in sales. Because of this, Seller Rocket – an agency that gets products into Editorial Recommendations – only considers the first three placements to be a success.

Every product placed in the recommendations is given an awarding title and description. There’s also an entire article written about the products, which can be seen on the left side. The article for this specific recommendation can be found here. 

The vast majority of buyers never click the full article and base their buying decision solely on the first three products. 

Breaking Down the Benefits

As stated before, Amazon Editorial recommendations have unique effects that other types of affiliate marketing don’t have, such as search page visibility, improved PPC, SEO, SOV – all driving new sales. 

Once an Editorial Recommendation goes live, the products included receive a boost in front-page visibility, which increases the chance of a sale. Seeing a product multiple times increases the likelihood of purchase, so it’s important to maximize your front-page visibility. 

Additionally, when that product is recommended from an external source rather than from a sponsored ad run by the Amazon seller, it increases the likelihood that the consumer will trust the product. Consumers naturally trust a recommendation from someone else rather than from the seller directly.

The PPC efficiency improvements are one of the greatest benefits of Amazon Editorial Recommendations, and they happen for a couple of reasons. The first is what I mentioned before – the more someone sees a product, the more likely they are to buy it. This effect is named the “mere-exposure effect” or the familiarity principle and has been used for years in advertising. This increased exposure increases the chances that ads will be clicked and leads to higher rates of conversion. 

The second reason PPC improves is that once a product is in Editorial Recommendations, the exact share of voice for that recommendation can be tracked. Once you know which keywords the recommendation is rendering on, you can redirect your PPC towards those pages, increasing visibility on that page and redirecting from less successful pages. This again increases conversions and can decrease total ad spend.  

Graph 1 shows results from a Seller Rocket study after one month in Amazon Editorial Recommendations. After a month, there was a 41% improvement in sales, with only 8% of that being directly attributable to the recommendation – the other 33% came through improvements in PPC and organic channels.

Since Amazon Editorial Recommendations are based on SEO, and the greatest lift is in PPC and organic rank, it takes some time to see results. Though results are seen after the first month, the best results come with time, with results really improving after three or four months.  

Requirements For Amazon Editorial Recommendations

Amazon Editorial Recommendations have a few requirements to ensure that the recommendations are actually for quality products. 

The requirements for Amazon Editorial Recommendations include: 

• 100+ reviews
• 4+ rating
• Sufficient and well-managed inventory to handle high demand
• High-performance on some keywords 
• No relation to religion, sex, or drugs
• No medical claims

How to Access Amazon Editorial Recommendations

Seller Rocket is an agency that specializes in product recommendations from reputable sources. They partner with more than 100 Amazon Onsite Associates (there are 200 total), screen products to ensure they meet the publisher’s qualifications, then tactically match the products with the best publisher to write the recommendation. 

Seller Rocket was formed specifically to better the seller-to-publisher contact process for the Onsite Associate’s Program and has now expanded to offer more services. When the Onsite Associate’s program was formed, sellers had little to no success contacting the publishers. Publishers were receiving a flood of emails from sellers wanting them to try their products; it was inefficient on both sides. Now Seller Rocket provides a bridge to ease the process.

How Much Does Seller Rocket Cost?

Editorial Recommendation pricing has three pieces: 

• An initial upfront fee to get the products into the system 
• A percentage of directly attributable revenue (based on 24-hour last-click attribution) 
• A monthly maintenance fee

This pricing changes with ASIN count, with breakpoints at 10, 50, and 100+ products. 

Once a product is in the system, it’s in there for as long as your contract is valid. The only payment you’ll make to receive additional placements outside of the first is the monthly maintenance fee. That maintenance fee also ensures that Seller Rocket can meet with you as frequently as you’d like to review the Editorial Recommendation performance. Additionally, if you happen to not get into a recommendation, you won’t be charged.

Once an article is in a recommendation, pricing is based on directly attributable revenue. That’s revenue coming from the article, not from PPC and organic channels. If you look to graph 2 again, that’s only taking a small percentage of the 8%

Closing Thoughts

Amazon Editorial Recommendations are a great way to get and stay ahead of your competition. The program continues to expand, with a likely future of recommendations appearing on every search term. If competitors act on Amazon Editorial Recommendations before you, you may lose sales to them on keywords you’re performing well on. 

Editorial Recommendations can serve as an offensive strategy – but really, they’re more of a defensive one intended to keep you ranking high and push your conversions ahead. 

To access Editorial Recommendations, fill out this form!