In our recent white paper, Converting Amazon traffic into Amazon Sales, we covered everything brand managers need to know about driving both traffic and conversion on Amazon. For now though, we’ll take a deeper dive into the winners (and losers) in search ranking, content, and ratings & reviews for computer monitors - one of the most common search terms in one of the most competitive categories in ecommerce.
Computer Monitor Amazon Search Winners:
Consumer Electronics is one of the most mature categories in digital retail and the big CE brands have been operating here in for years longer than the brand leaders in just about every other category. Unsurprisingly, pages here are plastered with slick, image-heavy content and the first page of results is plastered with sponsored banners, sponsored ads, and special tags. It takes multiple scrolls to get to the first un-sponsored, un-tagged organic listing. The point is, in a category/search term as established and popular as CE and computer monitors, it’s almost impossible to land any above-the-fold real estate without investing in sponsored ads.
As for the actual winners, Sceptre controlled the top 100 with 25 ASINs. Next was AOC with eight ASINs, followed by LG, HP, and Viotek with three each. AOC, however, dominated the all-important top 20 with all 8 of its listings landing on the first page. LG and Sceptre tie for second, while Viotek and HP also place in the top 20.
There were a few interesting twists and turns in the data, especially compared with how the results page looks today. For example, the biggest thing we found surprising was the fact that Sceptre was so far in front in total search results - in a search term and category as competitive as computer monitors and CE, I would have expected the leaders to be neck and neck (which they were, aside from Sceptre).
We were also caught off guard by the pervasiveness of brands other than the big names in the category, especially the accessories brands. Air Mat, BC Master, InfoGuard Tobavco, Atollo Desk, Elec-Link, and Amazon Basics all have a relatively strong presence in the top 100 and even top 20. Even more surprising, though, was Acer’s poor performance - the Taiwanese giant currently owns a huge proportion of search real estate for computer monitors, controlling ten ASINs on the first three pages of results alone.
In The U.K.
In the UK, the search results look just about as sleek and shiny as in the US, but there’s only one banner ad (for Amazon Basics accessories) and the top two sponsored listings are both for privacy screen covers. So there’s far fewer banners, sponsored listings and special tags on Amazon.co.uk, and one of those is for Amazon’s private brand. In general it seems far less trafficked and populated than in the US (which is surprising in and of itself, since CE is a long-established category in the European market as well).
As for the winners, Samsung, BenQ, and AOC all lead the way with 12 top 100 ASINs, while Dell follows closely with 11, ASUS with 9, and LG with 8 ASINs. Samsung also controls the first page with five top 20 ASINs, while BenQ follows with three, and AOC, LG, ASUS, and Dell each have two.
Based on our data it seems that UK consumers are purchasing more from well known brands, while in the US discount/accessories brands (like Air Mat privacy screens) are popular enough to have a relatively strong presence in both the top 100 and top 20 search results.
Conclusion:
When we pulled our data, Sceptre had a substantial lead in the top-100 US results, although that didn’t translate to first-page success nor did it translate to the UK, and it’s certainly not the case now. Beyond Sceptre though, our data showed that computer monitors is an incredibly competitive category on both sides of the Atlantic. Certainly, Scepter as a brand seems to adhere to a lot of our recommended best practices - its product pages are clean, full of high quality images, and descriptions are search optimized and it’s active in interacting with user-generated content. However in a space as competitive as CE, most brands are doing the same (unlike cereals), so it’s not clear if this is their competitive advantage. Perhaps their ASINs got bumped up because several of its competitors had stock issues, or it could be that Sceptre was coming off a paid advertising push, and its ASINs were in the process of falling back to the norm after a temporary boost.
Meanwhile our UK data was notable for being pretty straightforward. Unlike the US top 100, which was full of accessories brands, amazon.co.uk’s top 100 computer monitors results was competitive, even, and made up of the CE big brands. The only minor surprise was that the results page and brands’ PDP’s weren’t quite as sleek and shiny as those in the US, and there were far fewer paid ads. It felt a bit like a store that is slightly outdated.
To go more in depth on how to succeed in this crucial space, download our whitepaper “Turning Amazon traffic into Amazon sales” here, or give our on-demand webinar “Driving Traffic and Conversion with Paid Advertising” a listen here, and check out the rest of this blog series, and all of our expert insights here.
