How To Write Amazon Product Titles: Using Surveys To Improve Your Product Listings On Amazon

For Amazon sellers, trying to work out the best title text can be overwhelming. You know that you should include keywords in your title but how much information should you put in?

Amazon allows you a maximum of 200 characters in your title. Should you try and use all of these?

There are other conditions you have to follow too. Namely:

• You cannot put promotional phrases such as “free shipping” or “100% quality guaranteed” in your title.
• You cannot add different characters such as ~!*$?_{}#<>|; in your title.
• Plus, your title must identify the type of product that you’re selling.
  

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Other Title Tips From Amazon

If you read the title tips on Seller Central, you’ll notice that Amazon suggests keeping your titles short as long titles will lose the customers’ attention. It’s recommended to keep your titles to 80 characters or less.

Here are some other suggested tips:

• Never use ALL CAPS in your title.
• Make sure to capitalize the first letter of each word except prepositions and conjunctions like “in, on, over, with, and, or, for”.
• You should use numerals instead of spelling out the number – so 3 instead of three.
• It’s best not to use advertising type slogans such as “best seller” or “hot item”.
• You can also abbreviate measurements like oz, lb, in, ft.

So, this gives you a good starting point for crafting the perfect Amazon product title for your new listings. But, have you ever wondered what customers actually think?

Thanks to the surveys on Helpfull, it’s now possible to find out.

Test Number 1: Two Variations Of Product Title

I decided to give this a test run so that I can show you exactly how it works.

I took an existing product bundle that we have on Amazon. I added the title already showing on Amazon currently and a variation.

The parameters I selected for the test were:

• 100 respondents
• General audience
• “Please choose the title text you like the best”.
• “This is for an Amazon product title. Please explain why you prefer this option. Include the option number and what it is that you prefer with this option. Can you suggest ways to make it better?”

Here are the results for the 2 product titles I entered:

From this it appears that Option 1 is the clear winner. This is the product title currently showing on Amazon and is the longer of the two. Option 1 is 130 characters long and Option 2 is 108 characters long.

So, why did people prefer Option 1?

• The inclusion of “strength 2.5”.
• More detailed
• Makes it clear what you get in the bundle
• Easier to understand
• The inclusion of parenthesis

It’s interesting to note that more people preferred a more detailed and lengthy Amazon product title. And, the people that chose Option 2, primarily chose it because it was shorter.

Test Number 2: Number 1’s Winner Plus A More Detailed Title

I decided to run another test using the winner from the first test and adding an even longer title with more information as the second option.

Here are the results:

As you can see, the longer title is again, the clear winner. It appears that people like as much product information as possible in the title. This seems to go against the suggestion that shorter Amazon product titles are better.

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Here’s a compilation of what people liked about the Option 2 Amazon product title:

• The mention of the “apple blossom fragrance”.
• The product title is more detailed.
• Use of commas and punctuation
• The use of “10 count” rather then “box of 10”.
• Use of parenthesis

I found it interesting when reading some of the comments, that people suggested using bullet points. Clearly, they did not read the instructions well enough to understand that these are Amazon product titles and not a complete description of the product.

I think in future tests, I will make this a little clearer so there can be no confusion.

Test Number 3: Number 2’s Winner Plus A Really Short Title

I decided to run one last test for this product title. I wanted to see whether a really short title would get more votes.

Once again, I ran the test with 100 respondents and a general audience. I also changed the additional information to:

“This is for an Amazon product TITLE only. It's not the full description of the product. Please explain why you prefer this option. Include the option number and what it is that you prefer with this option. Can you suggest ways to make it better?”  

Here’s the response I received:

Once again, the longer title wins favor by over half of the respondents. The main reasons that people preferred this Amazon product title:

• More details
• Respondents like that there are size details for all the products.
• Seeing what’s included without having to scroll down to the description
• It alludes to customers that they’re getting a lot for their money.

On the other hand, the people that preferred Option 2 liked it because it was shorter and less wordy. This just goes to show that it’s really hard to please everyone.

Therefore, we have to go with what the majority thinks. And, the consensus is that longer, more detailed titles are definitely favored by more consumers.

Final Thoughts

This was an interesting exercise to determine whether people preferred long, detailed Amazon product titles or short, succinct ones. I discovered that, contrary to what Amazon suggests, more people prefer longer product titles.

What impressed me with these tests is the speed at which the results came back. It only took 26 minutes to get the full survey results on the 3rd and final test.

After testing several sets of different titles, there is one thing we've found one thing we've decided our titles must have - a chance to be tested in front of our audiences.

All in all, this is a great way to test different product titles that you may be considering for your Amazon listings. Testing our Amazon product titles is one of the best practices we can incorporate into our selling process; not only do the titles resonate more strongly with our audiences and stick in their minds - our improved Amazon product titles are going to appear more often in our customer's search results, thereby netting us more sales in the process.

What Helpfull Does Best

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With Helpfull’s open-ended survey design, users can design visually-striking, multi-question surveys for any occasion!

A simple survey could be all that stands between your company and the renewed success of it’s online marketing efforts.

An intuitive user-interface, coupled with the ability to gather hundreds of consumer responses in just minutes, are just a few of the features that make Helpfull the ultimate tool for any artist, designer, marketer, or inquisitive spirit.

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