Affiliate Marketing with the Most Powerful Analytics Tools

June 17, 2020

Meet The Speakers

Jim Winn

co-founder of Rpple Analytics

Listen to the podcast

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Why Rpple Analytics was founded and how it has evolved to where it is today
How Jim Winn created Rpple Analytics to outmaneuver the competition
What happens when brands and publishers join the Rpple marketplace
Jim discusses how brands can support publishers in promoting their products
The lifecycle of an email blast or publication in driving traffic and converting sales, and the best strategies for driving consistent traffic
Jim shares his thoughts on working with influencers and monetizing on TikTok
Jim’s advice to brands on how to increase their odds of getting into the Amazon editorial recommendation posts
Successes brands have seen from using the Rpple Analytics tool on Amazon
How to get in touch with Jim Winn

In this episode…

Although the Amazon marketplace has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of years, not every product search is done directly on this channel. A wide range of traffic is directed to Amazon from email blasts and referrals from other websites and blogs.

In an effort to leverage the traffic coming from these external publishers and influencers, Jim Winn co-founded Rpple Analytics, an Amazon specific influencer marketing tool. Rpple provides brands with a user-friendly platform for Amazon influencer discovery, management, and performance based ads, helping them grow their traffic to new heights.

Jim Winn joins Eric Stopper in this episode of Buy Box Experts to talk about why he created Rpple Analytics, how it works, and the best strategies for using it. He also discusses Amazon celebrity stores and monetizing Tik Tok. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.

Buy Box prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.

Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:09
Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast where we bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

Eric Stopper 0:18
Hey and welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast. This is Eric Stopper. This episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. We have a team of consultants come reach out to us there’s lots and lots of issues having to do with Amazon whether it’s shipping or fulfillment or buy box issues or sales or advertising doesn’t matter. Come and talk to us. We’d love to help go to buyboxexperts.com click on the free analysis button and you’ll be connected with me or a member of my team.

Today, I am pleased to be joined by Jim Winn, co-founder of Rpple Analytics. It’s an Amazon specific influencer marketing tool that provides a dashboard to affiliates and influencers, who then work with brands to create and push content meant to drive Amazon sales. Jim’s an enthusiastic tinkerer, a husband, a father, and the founder of a seven figure business called Kentucky Home Brands that has several brands that you’ve probably purchased from. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Winn 1:22
Hey, thanks for having me on. Excited to be here.

Eric Stopper 1:25
So lots and lots of questions, the kind of external driving traffic to Amazon business model has become a lot more popular in recent months. And I just kind of wanted to get a flavor for how Rpple evolved into what it is right now. And where the Genesis was like what was the main pain that you guys were addressing that got you to where you are today?

Jim Winn 1:51
Yeah, so you mentioned earlier that your own and found a few different physical product companies and you know, way in the early days, pre Rpple, we saw the importance of outside traffic we saw we did a few promoted posts with a few bloggers and influencers and the response is really good. And we can see the impact that our products had with BSR. You know, once the Amazon algorithm saw that outside traffic coming in responded really well, but it only lasted you know, for a day or two until the impact of that email blast or whatever, that pay promotion we’re off. And so we decided to really double down on that and like that was back when Pay Per Click within Amazon was getting just wildly expensive and competitive. So we’re looking for other ways to kind of outmaneuver our competition and a few really competitive categories. So we started going out and contacting every single website that came up in the first couple pages of a Google search for our particular product or category of products and, you know, talking to them to get them to you know, link to our products or to somebody else’s and kind of steal that that SEO real estate and that was really effective for us, but just on godly, time consuming and just labor is so You know, over time, as we did more and more of that we internally kind of built a platform that enabled us to automate those relationships and keep track of, you know, who sold what, and then compensate them for that. And then over the last couple years that eventually evolved through a small VC round and some self funding into what is today rep was kind of more of a public facing ad platform where publishers and advertisers you know, Amazon specific brands can connect and drive traffic and revenue.

Eric Stopper 3:30
So give me kind of an example of the workflow that a brand or publisher would engage with while using Rpple right, I get the idea of leveraging the followers that I have for something, but I log into Rpple. And what’s the What do I do from there?

Jim Winn 3:48
Yeah, so as a publisher, when brands join, they bring their product catalog into the Rpple marketplace. So those are you know, as a brand, you can control what products show in the marketplace might dump but as a public Once they log in, they might go to the marketplace. And as they are creating new content, let’s say, you know, I’m in the, you know, the Paleo space, and I drive a lot of traffic to Amazon, I’m an affiliate, you know, kind of Amazon affiliate based site. And that’s where a lot of my revenue comes from, you know, I will go log into my beautiful account, go to the marketplace, and I can kind of narrow down so you know, what collagen or paleo related companies or brands are in the Rpple catalog. And so if I’m going to make an affiliate link, or, you know, make it a link to a product on Amazon, I can choose just a random product that I find on Amazon and get paid, you know, Amazon’s, you know, whatever that affiliate commission is for that category. Or I can go into the Rpple marketplace and work directly with a brand and you know, make a link to that product instead. And once I do that, through Rpple, tracking any sales that my link now makes, I’m still linking to Amazon audiences still going through the same kind of user experience. They’re reading content or clicking links on the Amazon page of Nothing changes from the readers’ perspective. But behind the scenes Rpple is tracking that link that click, and we’re able to attribute that sale of that product to that particular publisher. So now the brand can compensate the publisher for the sales they drove. And the publisher is making more money because they’re able to work directly with that brand instead of kind of getting that passive affiliate income. Now they’re able to take control that that steering wheel and actually get paid for the amount of impact they have on that Amazon space.

Eric Stopper 5:31
Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And, and I’m wondering, for the brands who already have, like a war chest of emails is is this something that they can leverage to drive additional traffic should they use a different tool is Rpple the right fit for them because it sounds like it’s or these big publishers to drive traffic for a handful of Have curated products. That’s, that’s what I’m hearing.

Jim Winn 6:04
To an extent, we’re broadening our catalog. So we have so many publishers in different categories, it’s impossible for us to perfectly curate every product, every publisher, so we’re expanding that catalog quite a bit. But if you’re if you’re a brand and you have your own email list, like, you know, customers within that brand, then you know, it would be it would be reckless not to use that in every way you could, you know, it might be beneficial to, you know, in the case of Rpple, it’s more connecting you as a brand with publishers already have that that audience if you already have that internally in house as a brand, then Rpple probably wouldn’t perform much impact because you already can, you know, email those people send it to Amazon and you know, kind of where that traffic is coming from but if you are not currently leveraging outside traffic for your Amazon brand, you know, other people’s traffic now, that’s where we really come in, like we our purpose in life as a company is to bridge that connection between brands on Amazon and publishers. That one To make more money from driving traffic to those brands, on Amazon Go ahead. Oh, no, say what, you know, if you think about it, like, if you’re an off Amazon brand, you there’s a lot of levers, there’s a lot of tools you can pull right? to, to increase your traffic to build brand awareness to get more customers, you know, I can go out and find a large affiliate and compensate them to, you know, email and promote my product, I can, you know, do promoted posts, stuff like that. But in the Amazon, Amazon ecosystem, you’re so locked in, you have pay per click. And you’re kind of stuck with that because you’re so isolated. So what Rpple does is enables you to use all those same off Amazon tools that you would typically use to grow your brand. If you were a Shopify site or WooCommerce store. Now you can kind of take that same playbook and apply it to your Amazon sales as well. And especially if you’re, you know, like a channel manager, like a Buy Box Expert or somebody like that, that you know, might be performance based and you’re looking for new tools that haven’t been tapped so you can grow you know, your clients. sales. This fits right into that.

Eric Stopper 8:03
Man I have so many questions. So how does a brand make the cut? In the curation process? How do I become one of these published brands that that gets to leverage the cool platform, right and to be in the marketplace?

Jim Winn 8:17
Well, the first step is typically to be to work with an agency like a Buy Box Experts or somebody like that. We try, there’s always exceptions to the rule, but we try not to work one on one. Like, you know, if a brand wants to contact us and wants to work with us, like, we’re super excited to do that. But typically, brands that are working with a channel manager, they’re usually better at managing their inventory. They’re better at all the other Amazon skill sets like pay per click and all of that, and they just have a lot more support. And so those are all things if it’s a larger tier one publisher that drives an enormous amount of Amazon sales. They kind of want to work with somebody that’s maybe more robust as a business and working with brands that are inside of a channel manager usually is a better fit. That’s a, you know, like I said, there’s always exceptions to the rules we have, we do have individual brands that are just on replicas when they’re either super interesting, or they’re really large. And we’re always glad to work with them.

Eric Stopper 9:19
So without giving too much of the farm away, I want to try to pull back the veil a little bit on exactly what happens, right? So I’m a publisher, and I create an article that goes out to an email list, right? That’s the first step in that, in that piece of content, I have inserted links that go to Amazon pages. And then once the customer, the viewer, the email recipient, touches the link, right what is going on, right, you’re able to track all this stuff and give them a really actionable report of how people engaged with that specific email.

Jim Winn 10:01
Is it a facebook pixel? Is it something else that you’ve that you’ve been able to create proprietary like what’s what’s kind of the process? Once somebody hits the button, the button hits the link that machinery behind the scene? Yeah. So again, without without giving the farm away, so you know what, once you click that link, we’re able to we use some some tools that are available to us, as a media partner with within Amazon that, you know, we’re able to track how many clicks that link has had, we’re able to track how many visits came to that, you know, to that page, and then how many of those converted, so we’re able to look at that conversion rate. And we’re able to combine that with a lot of our publishers data. So they’re obviously tracking their own analytics and their own demographic information on who their readers are, who’s clicking and going to different parts of the site or to different advertisers. So we, we kind of take that that data and put it together internally through you know, like I said, a prototype proprietary process, and that gives both the brand reporting on you know, as they’re making sales, who’s driving the sales was the conversion rate on those sales on the publisher side, they’re able to get a lot more information, you know, what are the best performing products as they’re linking to products, what are generating them the most revenue so they can better optimize what products I link to what content they create, and kind of focus down, you know, from a greatest principle 8020 approach and where the most bang for their buck is. And that’s particularly important now, as of this week, you know, with the big change within the Amazon Associates program, you know, there are a lot of affiliates. Some of these people drive an enormous amount of their revenue from Amazon’s Commission’s You know, they’re the Commission’s Amazon’s paying those big cuts, you know, half or even more. So that’s, that’s a problem in their world. You know, one of the existential threats to an Amazon associate or a large publisher that makes money off Amazon affiliate links is like a seller, you’re kind of at the mercy of Amazon’s ecosystem, right? So it’s difficult for them to kind of have that level of control. So again, the pain point we try to solve for both those sellers and the publishers is you’re still kind of following the same workflow, right? You’re still taking viewers readers and sending them to Amazon, where they’re comfortable buying where they’re familiar, you’re not changing much. But now you have a direct relationship with each other within the Amazon ecosystem, so you can work together to increase your revenue, you have more control. So whereas, you know, you might make, you know, one to 5%, as an Amazon associate, or brands are typically paying a 15% commission or more to these publishers. So it’s an opportunity for them to increase their revenue on the publisher side, and have that direct relationship with the brand.

Eric Stopper 12:35
So I wonder as the brand, how can I support the publisher who is pushing out my content? Does it make sense for me to go and, you know, obviously, I’m going to post Hey, we were featured in this article, but is there anything else that somebody can do to make the power of a publication more, generate more traffic and more sales for them from the brands perspective?

Jim Winn 13:00
From the brand side, the number one thing you can do is not run out of inventory.

Unknown Speaker 13:05
Okay?

Jim Winn 13:06
If a publication is going to link to you, they want to make money. And typically, if they’re on Rpple, they’re a type of publication that drives impact. So if they link to your product, and then you know, you stock out, you know, a few hours later, then that that’s a loss of revenue for them, you know, they start getting complaints from their readers, hey, you recommended this, this is the featured item or this is the number one item in that, you know, top five things on Amazon this week, you know, in that listicle and people are clicking and they’re not able to buy so that that’s a negative experience for their readers, and it’s a lost revenue opportunity for them. So and again, that’s why we typically try to work with brands that are within kind of a channel manager because it that’s one of the main questions we get from our larger publishers is are these are these products of high quality are they well managed, is it a robust like tier one type of company and so if they’re already inside a channel manager, it It eliminates a lot of those objections up front when it comes to liking to products?

Eric Stopper 14:03
And I mean, like, how much inventory is typically needed for the lifecycle of one publication? Right? If I get one of these big guys to write a banger, how long is that great article actually going to be driving me some, some traffic isn’t always? Is there a pretty clear diminishing marginal return on a cliff that everybody hits at some point? Does that

Jim Winn 14:28
does? It’s a very good question. So there’s two types. So there’s kind of that immediate blast. So if it’s somebody that you know, has a large email list, and they might send, you know, bi weekly emails or something like that, then that’s kind of more of an initial blast and there’s kind of a die off. You’ll see over the next year, typically, five to seven days people open their emails, and after a week, they haven’t opened it. That’s not going to happen. So you see kind of diminishing returns from that point. So that’s a little more like, immediate impact, lots of volume, you know, reasonably quick dial. The flip side is Again, if you were to Google

Unknown Speaker 15:05
collagen,

Jim Winn 15:07
right, paleo athletes, something like that, you know, whatever site, and I don’t know who that is, I haven’t googled that. But whoever the number one site is for that search result, they probably are getting consistent, stable monthly traffic. So if you were to go to that blog post, and they were to change their link from, say, vital proteins to your collagen, then, you know, that’s consistent monthly sales as people read that content. They’re trying to build their lifestyle around the Paleo. The Paleo approach, you know, they’re looking for stuff like that. They go to that, that they do that search result, every day, every month. And then there’s consistent traffic from that. So that’s a little more stable, and it’s not as much of an immediate impact once they change their link. So some publishers, they’ll go through if they have a product that’s on Rpple, they’ve already got content that performs well and generates revenue. they’d much rather generate revenue to products on Rpple versus not. So a lot of them will go back and optimize a little look at what are our top performing blog posts that generate affiliate revenue? Let’s swap out some of these links for products that are in Rpple , so we can generate more from what we’ve got. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. So that’s a little longer, more sustained. And then there’s always, you know, creating new content, you know, they’re always putting more stuff out there. And so that, that’s more of a collaborative relationship, you know, if you as a brand are helping them see how people are using a product in their lifestyle, you’re giving them content ideas, and you know, you’re kind of moving that dialogue through the Rpple platform, then that helps them find ways to, again, produce more content for their audience.

Eric Stopper 16:39
You know, I would, I would trust a larger publication to be able to craft something that gives me as much SEO exposure as possible. But do the brands ever get to weigh in and give them little phrases that they know their customers are searching for that they can kind of supplant into the article? Or is that still kind of this divide between Know the publisher is gonna make what they make you don’t have any say over how it’s written? Or are they able to, like contribute some, some search terms that they think are relevant?

Jim Winn 17:10
Yeah, yeah, you get a little bit of both. But you know, the ideal and the best performance situation is when there’s kind of that collaborative approach, especially if it’s more of a kind of a blast type of thing. If they’re emailing and dropping very intentional traffic, then you definitely want to collaborate so that you get the most out of that experience. But, you know, sometimes, you know, especially some larger publications, you know, they’ve got an intern, and their job is to come up with four blog posts for that day. So they’re just going into the marketplace and they’re looking for products. So they may or may not, you know, engage in some dialogue about how to best promote that they’re just taking that and putting it in a, you know, top 10 listicle of some kind. But one of the one of the things we’re in the process of rolling out within Rpple is kind of more brand content. So as a publisher goes to that product or looks at that brand overview page, you know, the brands are able to kind of give some pointers, you know, here’s, you know how people Use this in their real day to day life. Here are some key talking points. If you’re looking to make content that resonates with an audience and you’re wanting to out SEO, your competition, here are some points that people who would use this product would want to know about. So that again, kind of helps that collaborative, more curated relationship that we try to nurture and incentivize platform.

Eric Stopper 18:20
So the low hanging fruit seems to be very low,

Jim Winn 18:23
right? You’ve got these publishers who are trying to make lots of money and the affiliate program at Amazon is weird and volatile, because it’s Amazon. And so do you guys. Do you guys even mess with the influencers and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat and even LinkedIn? Do you plug into those ecosystems? Or is it just too high up on the tree, that we’re just now starting to tinker with that a little bit? There. There have been so many opportunities in that kind of email and publisher ecosystem that we’ve really focused on that but we’re able to do some, some newer attribution that takes us outside of that environment so we can do more stuff. whether it’s instagram or tik tok or something like that, so it’s not a big part of what we do mainly just not so much because we can’t just we focus on other things, but we’re to the point now we can kind of experiment with other channels, which has been super, super exciting for us.

Eric Stopper 19:14
Yeah. Do you do you use TikTok

Jim Winn 19:16
by chance? Man a little bit all my nieces and nephews do which makes me feel old.

Unknown Speaker 19:23
I’m not that old.

Jim Winn 19:24
But a little bit my wife loves TikTok.

Unknown Speaker 19:28
Have you done any dances with her? No, not Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 19:31
I’m not quite Yeah. Now. Tonight Tonight we’ll do the

Eric Stopper 19:36
face. It’s like the new Twitter you know, you can get away with

Jim Winn 19:40
You know, I have a friend of a friend who he got on tik tok like in the early days and he’s like a Tik Tok influencer. So he has like a couple hundred thousand followers and you know when his kids want some extra money, I’ll say hey, here, take the phone. Go live for a little bit and I’ll go live on Tik Tok and

Unknown Speaker 19:56
it’s just bizarre.

Eric Stopper 19:58
You know, it’s really strange. To me, you’re you know, you’re in this influencer and affiliate space. I’m trying to figure out how, like a Tik Tok would really monetize. I’ve noticed that there are a few more ads here and there. The influencers that have 10s of millions of followers, there’s one guy, he has 2.1 billion views on one video. Right? He’s this. He’s this guy that does like deep fakes. And he, yeah, I’m trying to remember his name, but I don’t see. I don’t see monetization. He doesn’t look like an advertiser to me. I don’t. I’m looking at the brands of his clothing, right? And it looks to me like he’s not leveraging his reach, mm way that I probably would as a greedy marketer. So I’m wondering like, what’s gonna be the tipping point Tick tock, when are these influencers actually going to start being able to monetize these interactions that they’re having with these people?

Unknown Speaker 20:59
Yeah, and Interesting.

Jim Winn 21:01
I just be super honest, man, I have no idea. I’m really excited to see how that I feel like it’s big enough now that you start to see some of these use cases bubble up. So it’ll be really interesting over the next six months.

Eric Stopper 21:12
I’m tracking it closely. Because I mean, even for like artists, right, it’s becoming, it’s becoming a channel for them to advertise their music through. And you see some of the top hits are becoming these main Tik Tok grabs that people are using. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about the celebrity stores and the editorial recommendations that Amazon has been leveraging as of late. They’re not, they’re not causing me to make more purchases, but that’s because I’m probably subjecting them to a bunch of scrutiny. Do you guys work with these stores and these types of publications and then how does that work and how difficult is it to get one of these kinds of things set up for an influencer in the space on Amazon.

Jim Winn 22:00
Yeah, the celebrity stores have been like, we know some people that are using it. And it hasn’t been a huge success for them. And I think again, because it’s just kind of a clunky experience just as a as a user, it just doesn’t it is usually not consistent with the workflow of like, I read this piece of content, I click this link to find this product that helped my lifestyle and boom, I end up in this giant catalog of like, you know,

Unknown Speaker 22:27
yeah, Crystal, pack press underwear, right. Yeah,

Jim Winn 22:30
right. Right. It’s just kind of, it’s just kind of wonky. So, you know, I think that’ll probably evolve and get better over time. But I think that from the people that we work with, within Rpple, the experience has been, you know, just kind of underwhelming for the most part. The flip side is the editorial recommendations. That’s super interesting. And for some of the larger publishers we work with that are some of those editorial recommendations that you see. It’s a huge, huge focus for them. Like, some of them, have teams of people focused on just that file. It’s, you know, just what I think a lot of people, especially on the brand side don’t realize is how much how important a part of the revenue stream Amazon, the Amazon Associates program is for, for publishers, both small and medium blogs and larger publishers that you know, you read both, you know, whether it’s in print or you know, just a larger just digital first type of magazine. It’s an enormous part of their focus, and they have teams and teams of people devoted to that. And so that battle probably becomes a much bigger part of the ecosystem and how as a brand, I would be laser focused on figuring out how to have my brand, be part of those recommendations, build a relationship with those publications, because it’s, it’s a big part of the future, I think.

Eric Stopper 23:52
Yeah. What, what do you encourage everybody to do today to increase the odds of their chance of getting into one of these editorial recommendation posts.

Jim Winn 24:04
Right now, it’s a, it’s kind of a, from the brand side, it’s a matter of luck. You know, a lot of these are larger publications that are reviewing products and have huge outside audiences that people, you know, people trust their recommendations. So, you know, the basic building blocks have a really good high quality product with lots of reviews. And you know, I suppose, you know, you know, four or five stars if you’re a three star product with 30 reviews that you’re just not going to make the cut. And, you know, one, probably not the right fit for Rpple, but also you’re not going to be picked up by one of these larger kinds of editorial reviews, same type of type of sites. So just kind of that brand legitimacy. And again, that’s why we typically work with kind of brands in a channel manager. capacity, that

Eric Stopper 24:53
That makes a lot of sense. So if you’re struggling to look big, a really easy thing. The thing for you to do would be to sign on Amazon management and I’m not saying you have to do it with us but with one of these partner agencies who can open these doors for you is that fair?

Jim Winn 25:12
Yeah, hundred percent. And you know, typically, the brands, you know, that are within kind of a, an agency. They’re like listing pictures are better, they’re on Amazon, SEO is better, the reviews are better, that they are, is higher. So, you know, we have one particular group of publications that that is enormous and you know, unless you’re what they call a tier one brand like they are not going to link to your product, whether it’s an intern making a list of the top five kitchen gadgets of the month or in a larger more promoted, you know, focus capacity like they are not going to link to your product. So, you know, you need to have the basics right, you need the expanded seller page without, you know, the pictures and, you know, block the text if you just got the standard generic block a text or the description, you know, that’s, they’re not gonna like that. Right? Yeah, they’re wrong with that if you if you don’t have enhanced brain content, you know, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but you’re probably not the right fit for some of these larger publications, there are some pretty clear filtering criteria that they use what are some of the other ones for like, for me to be considered a tier one brand, certain amount of volume, certain amount of reviews, certain amount of like, emotion that I feel when I hear the name of your product, like how do they measure these kinds of things, for the larger publications in their world, tier one is a product that you’re going to find at Walmart target, you no longer like major retail, so it’s, it’s a brain that you’re really familiar with on a national level, but you know, going down from there, you know, that’s, that’s a long way before most brands get to that point, right? But you know, if you’re not to that point, you know, again, the base, you just have to have the basics, solid reviews, solid presentation, good inventory. management and just, you know, kind of have your operation very buttoned up. And again, channel managers seem to do that well for a lot of our brands.

Eric Stopper 27:08
So, when you listen, you’ve got your checklist, get to the building, come and talk with us. Let’s see what we can do. If you’ve got a product that should be in Walmart, and it’s not, why isn’t in Walmart, right? Why isn’t it in there? If it’s not on target, why isn’t it there? What do you have to do to get there? There’s some, there’s some. I mean, you’ve all played video games, video games, right? There are very clear quests that you have to complete before you get to the boss. And so go out and get ready to go and grind. Right? You got it, you got a grind from level one, and it takes a while to get to level 100. And so you’ve got your checklist. So, Jim, I want to hear about the successes. Right? Like, what do we see when we use Red Bull obviously, the publishers are making more money. But does a brand care about the publisher you know, maybe when they’re making them some money But it’s kind of a chicken in the egg thing. So what kind of success do people see using the Rpple analytics tool?

Jim Winn 28:06
Yeah. Well from from a brand side, The number one impact is honestly more organic. Right? So we were talking earlier, he used the word anointing. And that’s a good way to phrase it right? So when you have outside traffic coming into your listing Amazon’s algorithm anoints you with just exponentially better rank. And you know, once you’re ranking better, you’re getting more organic sales. So just overall, just so we look at kind of just across all the sales, all the metrics that we track, typically, we see a 20 to 30% increase in organic sales. For every outside traffic sale. That Rpple brings in

Eric Stopper 28:49
a 20 to 30% increase in organic sales. Correct for the traffic that Rpple brings to your Amazon, correct Holy smokes Yeah, that’s that’s annoying thing if I’ve ever heard of it, the basic idea here being that, of course Amazon is going to benefit the folks that are driving external traffic to them. But when you’re talking about it, I mean, that’s a changing category, right? Like you could, you could move from the second to first are from the 30th to the sixth position in a rank with that kind of organic growth. Is that what you’re seeing with folks using these tools?

Jim Winn 29:27
Yeah, on a consistent basis now, it kind of relates to you know, volume as well right so if you’re in a competitive space and you have a you know, smaller mom and pop blog link to your product, yeah, that might move two or three, you know, units a day or something like that, or you know, a week depending on size, so that’s not going to suddenly skyrocket you to page one on you know, search results for, you know, paleo collagen. But, you know, if you start putting together more and more of those smaller to medium sites, whether again, you go out and just recruit them yourselves and you’re trying to build traffic, dry style, or using Rpple to kind of do that at scale. Now that that, you know, trickle becomes a consistent way of day after day, or if you’re working with a larger publisher, now there’s a tidal wave that hits that listing all at once. And it’s not, it’s not read, right? We’re not doing a giant like 99% off giveaway. Blastema sells 500 units in an hour, you know, 100%, you know, or something like that. These are right, full price sales, which Amazon likes. It’s outside traffic, which Amazon likes. And especially if it’s somebody with, you know, well established SEO content, it’s consistent traffic over and over, you know, again, a little bit different than if you kind of do a promoted, like email blast type of thing. But that’s the kind of formula Amazon likes. And when you do that well, and it’s natural, and it’s organic, and it’s honest and authentic, then the algorithm naturally is going to respond well to that, and it makes sense. I mean, Amazon knows that BuzzFeed exists, right? Right, it’s like that. And you know, they know their data, they know people read that and click on things and buy it. So they’re naturally geared to have, you know, the algorithm. And I don’t know the details of the algorithm, but we see listings respond well to outside traffic. And we really think about kind of, the ecosystem of play makes a lot of sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. I mean, it’d be weird for it not to react that way.

Eric Stopper 31:22
I mean, the name of the brand gives away the idea, right? Like that. You’re, you’re going to cause a ripple effect for your brand if you do it right. And it’s going to organically grow you. And I I think that the offer is really compelling. So how do people get in touch? How do people get involved?

Jim Winn 31:40
Or should I send everybody a rppleanalytics.com, drop the ‘e’ because we’re techie and fancy. So rppleanalytics.com that’s our site. And once you’re there, you can kind of self select if you’re an influencer publication or a seller, and you can click the button. It’ll give you more detail kind of just about who we are how we work. for your particular situation, and then there’s a contact form at the bottom, you can kind of fill out a little bit of your info. And, you know, that usually goes to me or at one of our co founders, and we kind of carry the conversation on with you from there, whether you’re a publisher or a brand,

Eric Stopper 32:13
Excellent. rppleanalytics.com go and check it out. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show,

Unknown Speaker 32:21
as well. Thanks for having me.

Outro 32:23
Thanks for listening to the Buy Box Experts podcast. Be sure to click subscribe, check us out on the web, and we’ll see you next time.