Enhanced Brand Content is a topic on everyone’s minds since Amazon has just released it to the masses. For those of you not familiar, EBC is essentially A+ Lite for third-party sellers.
See, once upon a time only vendors were allowed to enhanced their listings with something called A+ content, which essentially enabled them to add full banners, high resolution images and a lot more information about their brand and products. EBC offers a slightly less robust option for brand registered third-party sellers. It offers a number of different layouts, but all provide plenty of space for brand images as well as detailed copy.
enhanced brand content template options
Now I want to discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages one may encounter with EBC.
The Good
Enhanced brand content definitely looks prettier. There can be no denying that the inclusion of great photography, sub-headlines and neatly spaced content most certainly offers aesthetic appeal.The idea is that it offers your listing a more professional look and, ideally, will increase conversions.
From a branding perspective, this is definitely a smart play. Regardless of what benefits EBC does or does not bestow, if you are looking for brand continuity (an important aspect of branding) across all catalogs and platforms, adding branded content where you can is important.
The Bad
Unfortunately, as of this writing no one has produced any hard numbers showing a significant increase (or even a moderate increase) in conversion rates. I can also attest to not having seen a boost in my own conversions since switching to EBC. Furthermore, the rules are rather stringent, it can take up to a week for the changes to be implemented and GCID issues can cause hiccups.
Rumor also has it that EBC is only free for a limited time and, like lightning deals, will cost in the near future.
The Ugly
Now let’s talk about the REAL issue with EBC. The most glaring problem is, enhanced brand content is NOT INDEXED! You may recall in a recent post we discovered that keyword rich bullets and descriptions were not only indexed, but appeared to play a part in ranking.
But as you can see, that ability is stripped from EBC:
EBC for listing https://www.amazon.com/Mo-Kitchen-Multi-Bottle-Opener/dp/B010PHUAZW/. Highlighted section was used for search.
In the above image, you see some enhanced brand content. I took a sentence from the text and searched for it on Amazon. Here are the results.
Search yielded no results for that brand.
As you can see, that brand’s products appear nowhere for the long-tail search term.
Here’s another one.
EBC for listing https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J3NQ3YQ. Another sentence highlighted and searched.
And again, search results yield nothing for the brand.
No results for brand.
Now contrast that with REGULAR product descriptions.
Product description for listing https://www.amazon.com/Fit-Simplify-Resistance-Exercise-Instructional/dp/B01AVDVHTI/
When a sentence is searched from a normal description, this is what happens….
The brand listing is the number one result.
BOOM! Number one result. But let’s try that again, in case it was a glitch.
Product description for listing https://www.amazon.com/TTLIFE-BBQ-Grilling-Cooking-Gloves/dp/B01B4H02W8/
And again with the search of a sentence from the text.
Listing is number one result again.
Well I’ll be… look at that. The number one result is the listing the sentence was pulled from.
BUT WAIT!
What about A+ content? Maybe all listings with heavy images in the description are crawled differently. Let’s see, shall we?
A+ description for https://www.amazon.com/Polaroid-Instant-Digital-Printing-Technology/dp/B01LWV127J/. Highlighted text sentence searched.
And the results are, drumroll please, brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrb (my attempt at typing out a drumroll)…
A+ listing number one in search.
The listing is number one in search. This is despite the fact that the searched for sentence isn’t highlighted or italicized where it normally would be in search results.
One more time.
A+ description for https://www.amazon.com/Yuneec-Breeze-Flying-Camera-Definition/dp/B01LANE77M/
And the results.
Listing number one in search results.
To EBC or Not To EBC
This still begs the question, should we take advantage of enhanced brand content or not? Well, this is surely a decision that must be made by the individual brand owner. Just remember to always test. Don’t switch over all of your products at once. Look at the impact one at a time.
And if you do decide to enhance your listing with EBC, remember to invest in great photography and graphic elements. The whole point is to look professional and to stand out. Homemade, subpar graphics won’t cut it here.
I’ve noticed nothing. Actually a drop in sessions. No additional orders. I think it is just a way for their site to look better, but giving us no advantage in keywords. Abandoned.
I’ve definitely seen a detrimental effect on my product ranking since switching it over to EBC. Right away, I could tell something funny was going on, and my first instinct was exactly what you’re talking about in your article.
The issue now is that I want to de-activate EBC, but there seems to be no way to do that! I’ve contacted Seller Support but it’s been weeks and they still haven’t provided a solution for how to de-activate my EBC. It’s extremely frustrating to see my listing’s ranking get hammered while nobody at Seller Support can tell me how to simply de-activate the EBC.
We’ve noticed the same negative effects – tried it on a couple products and while they look nice, they’re underperforming quite significantly. We’ve gone back to the ‘ol HTML for the time being.
My understanding is that you leave the original description in place and then Amazon continues to index your original description and bullet points, though it does not index description and text in your EBC. Could this be the problem?
I’m curious, because I’m about to invest in EBC across my product range.
Thanks in advance.