The single biggest shift in growing your business on Amazon is that the platform now actively rewards you for driving your own traffic. For years, we thought of Amazon as a closed ecosystem, but that's changed. The A9 algorithm has evolved to favor products that get high-converting traffic from outside sources. As Liran Hirshkorn explained on The Smartest Amazon Seller, this means external traffic is no longer just about making an extra sale. It’s a powerful signal to Amazon that your product has real demand, which in turn boosts your organic visibility and keyword ranking, creating a profitable flywheel effect.
This change makes relying solely on Amazon PPC an increasingly expensive and risky strategy. The old method of blindly pointing a Facebook ad at your product listing and hoping for the best is dead. In fact, sending a lot of low-quality, low-converting traffic can actually hurt your listing's performance. The new playbook is about being strategic and building an audience you can direct to Amazon in a thoughtful way.
The most effective way to start is by building an audience you own, and you can begin right inside your Amazon packaging. On the Actualize Freedom podcast, Paul Easton laid out a brilliant three-step process: start with product inserts. Don't just ask for a review. Instead, use the insert to offer a warranty activation or a free gift. This leads customers to a simple landing page where they enter their email address to claim the offer. With that, you've started building your own customer list, turning a one-time Amazon buyer into a long-term relationship.
Once you have that email list, you control the traffic. You can announce new products, run promotions during slow periods, and drive repeat purchases without paying Amazon's ad tax on every single transaction.
When it comes to paid external traffic from channels like Google Ads for Amazon or social media, the destination is key. David Schomer and Ken Wilson of Firing The Man stressed that you should almost never send cold traffic directly to a product detail page. Instead, you're better off driving traffic to a storefront landing page. This lets you curate the experience, show off your brand and full product line, and warm up the customer before they look at a specific product. This simple change nearly always results in a higher conversion rate, sending a much stronger signal to Amazon's algorithm.
Finally, none of this works if you can't measure it. Tools like Amazon Attribution have changed the game. As Andrew Maffettone discussed on the Amazon Legends podcast, you can now connect your external marketing efforts directly to sales, calculating a real return on ad spend (ROAS). This allows you to stop guessing and start investing intelligently in the channels, whether it's influencer marketing or TikTok campaigns as Kevin King mentioned on My Wife Quit Her Job, that are actually growing your business.