Amazon Advertising Strategy • Boosting Sales With An Organic-First Approach

As a family-owned and -operated import and wholesale business since 2004, Maxwood Furniture specializes in the design, production and distribution of high-quality furniture, manufacturing three distinct brands and serving as a factory-direct shipping partner to retailers. Yet, after two years of highly successful growth fueled by the ecommerce boom of the early 2020s, Maxwood faced slowing demand and rising cost-per-click in the kid’s furniture category—which meant their low-funnel advertising approach was no longer working. So in January 2022, we joined forces with Maxwood Furniture to boost brand awareness and drive incremental sales by restructuring the brand’s Amazon advertising strategy.

Working as an extension of Maxwood’s internal team, we began with an extensive audit of the brand’s account and advertising strategy—reviewing all keywords, content, product listings, top-performing ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers, the unique identifiers assigned to products by Amazon.com and its partners) and past performance. We found that on high-volume search terms, Maxwood products had zero visibility in the top two rows of organic search results, and had earned only two Amazon’s Choice badges—an important designation given to products that best match target keywords—across non-branded keywords. We quickly determined that advertising efforts were spread too thin across a considerable number of keywords, products and match types resulting not only in low organic ranking and declining traffic on Amazon, but also fluctuating sales. We knew that by focusing more time and resources on fewer products—helping customers find a strategic set of products on Amazon—we could profoundly improve Maxwood’s short-term results while driving longer-term, sustainable growth.

In March 2022, we implemented our award-winning organic-first approach that began with focusing more time and resources on a core list of 10 ASINs. Our philosophy is that as organic rank and page visibility improves, brands will experience a sales lift across their entire product catalog. To optimize Maxwood’s advertising strategy, we dialed in the focus by categorizing advertised products into three individual tiers with defined goals: 

• Tier 1: Drive sales through keyword segmentation to ensure high-volume keywords were not taking up all of the budget and that rank was improving across both high- and low-volume search terms.
• Tier 2: Identify additional ASINs that could move up to Tier 1
• Tier 3: Increase visibility on recently launched products

For Maxwood, the lift was immediate. Within the first month, branded searches increased by 41% and by the end of the campaign we’d tripled the number of Maxwood product listings that ranked organically on Amazon, translating to more traffic and customers for the brand.