Unlocking Growth Through Optimisation-Led Creative

Curtis Ritchie: Hi everyone, we'll get started in a minute or two once a few more people join. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to one of our Toucan Talks webinars. We're super excited to have you all join us today. If you don't know me, I'm Curtis, our marketing lead here at Toucan, and we have Ben, Toucan's senior creative partner, who'll be talking about how you can unlock growth through optimisation-led creative. The session will run for around 30 minutes with a live Q&A at the end - please type any questions for Ben into the Q&A section at any time and I'll collect them while he's presenting. Over to Ben.

Ben Levart: Cool, thanks Curtis. When I first joined Toucan back in 2018, content was in a much different state to where it is now, and I've been on a mission along with our senior leadership team to change that ever since, which brings me here today to talk through how to unlock growth through optimisation-led creative.

Ben Levart: To understand why this matters, it helps to look at how Amazon has evolved. About ten years ago, most listings were purely functional - a product image, a title, a few bullet points, and that was enough. Competition was lower and shoppers didn't expect much content. Today that's completely changed: the brands that win treat their listings like conversion assets, with rich visuals, infographics, lifestyle imagery and clear messaging designed to remove friction to purchase. In other words, content isn't just there to inform any more, it's there to convert.

Ben Levart: One of the most common challenges we see is what we call the growth ceiling problem. At first, things look great - you increase ad spend, traffic goes up, revenue follows. Then something breaks: traffic keeps rising but conversion rate plateaus, ad costs rise but efficiency drops, and despite spending more, your listings don't actually improve, while competitors with stronger content start taking market share. The key takeaway is simple: ads drive traffic, but creative converts it. If you want to break through the growth ceiling, the answer isn't to spend more, it's better creative that actually turns traffic into customers.

Ben Levart: That's what optimisation-led creative is: designing Amazon content using real performance data, testing insights and shopper behaviour, all with one goal - maximising conversion. Traffic comes in, hits your content, which drives conversion and revenue. Most brands focus heavily on traffic, but the real leverage point is the content, and doing that well comes down to four things: making data-driven creative decisions, continuously testing and iterating, aligning every touchpoint, and designing specifically for how shoppers on Amazon actually behave. Creative stops being subjective and starts becoming a performance system.

Ben Levart: On Amazon, conversion is built across multiple touchpoints, not one asset. It starts with the main image, which wins the click. Then listing images take over, explaining the product and persuading the shopper. Your brand store builds trust and allows deeper exploration, and A+ Content reinforces value and removes remaining doubt. Each plays a different role, but together they drive conversion, and if one breaks down you often lose the sale.

Ben Levart: Starting with the main image, arguably the most important touchpoint: it's the first thing a shopper sees in search, competing with 20 or more other products at the same time, so it's not just about looking good, it's about standing out instantly. It directly influences click-through rate and conversion, because it sets expectations before the shopper even lands on your page - if you don't win the click, nothing else matters. We analysed one original main image and found several issues: the product was too small, lacking presence in search and on mobile; it felt less vibrant than the product in real life; it appeared to float with no shadow or grounding; and the angle looked slightly downward, reducing prominence. We made intentional updates - increasing product size within Amazon's guidelines, increasing vibrancy and sharpness, and introducing a premium top-shelf angle with proper shadowing - and the result was a 124% uplift in glance views, meaning far more shoppers chose this product over competing listings in search. Importantly, that uplift didn't come from more media spend, it came from improving the creative fundamentals - scale, clarity, vibrancy, visual grounding and angle - and those same levers are transferable across SKUs, categories and other brands.

Ben Levart: Once you've won the click, listing images need to help the shopper understand and decide. The highest-performing image sets follow a clear structure, not a random order: main image to stop the scroll and win the click, then a key visual, then key features broken down simply, then an in-use image to help shoppers visualise the product in a real scenario, then a range image to expand choice, and finally guidelines and trust-building content. Every image answers a specific shopper question and moves them progressively toward purchase, which dramatically reduces the time it takes someone to buy.

Ben Levart: We applied this structure directly to a Felix pet food listing image set. The main image maximised stopping power in search with a prominent 120-pack callout communicating scale and value. The second image moved straight into flavour variety, since flavour choice is one of the fastest decision levers for pet owners, using scannable circular flavour icons. The third image answered 'is this good for my cat' with claims like 100% natural, balanced meals and no added colourants. The fourth went deeper into nutrients, vitamins and omega content to reinforce health credibility. The fifth introduced the wider Felix range for cross-sell and repeat purchase. And the sixth closed with feeding guidelines to remove any last hesitation around usage. The original set had the right ingredients but the wrong structure - key decision-driving visuals like flavour and nutrition weren't positioned early enough, and there was no dedicated range visual at all. Restructuring the same assets around the natural questions a pet owner asks - what is it, what flavours, is it healthy, how much do I feed, what else is available - delivered a 1,540% return on investment on a £250 investment in the listing image set, translating to a 4.3% uplift in weekly sales over five weeks, purely from improving content structure and sequencing, not from increasing ad spend.

Ben Levart: The next evolution is the shift from standard A+ Content to Premium A+. Standard A+ gives brands a solid baseline of up to five modules to communicate product benefits and add storytelling beyond the listing images, but it's relatively static, with a capped number of modules and no video, hotspots or richer comparison experiences. Premium A+ unlocks additional modules, more flexible layouts, video, hotspots and richer comparisons, and separate desktop and mobile experiences, making the journey feel less like reading a product page and more like exploring a branded experience. For a brand like Quality Street, where emotional value matters as much as functional value, that richer storytelling is especially powerful - it transforms the page from a product information page into a truly branded experience, with less friction and more confidence to purchase.

Ben Levart: For Quality Street specifically, we expanded the key visual across two larger banners for a stronger emotional brand moment, introduced scrollable modules to fit multi-pack variants and seasonal packs without overwhelming the shopper, added hotspots so shoppers could explore specific packs in more detail, and introduced comparison charts bringing together pricing, reviews and attributes to help shoppers pick the right format for gifting, sharing or personal treats. The large number of modules and flexible layouts let us feature multiple products and sub-ranges within a single brand-led story, turning the page into a branded discovery experience rather than a single-SKU listing - powerful for cross-sell, trade-up and basket expansion.

Ben Levart: One of Premium A+'s biggest advantages is designing specifically for mobile versus desktop, since they're fundamentally different browsing environments. On mobile, design needs to be highly scannable and immediate - larger, bolder typography, the hero visual prioritised early, and key claims landing in the first few seconds of scroll, since most Amazon browsing happens on mobile. On desktop, we can lean into larger hero storytelling and wider compositions for richer visual immersion, which works especially well for emotional brands like Quality Street where occasion and gifting matter as much as the product. This removes the compromise of one-size-fits-all design - less pinching, less zooming, less mis-messaging - so brands can preserve the richness of the desktop brand story without sacrificing mobile speed and clarity.

Ben Levart: The final piece is the brand store - where shoppers go to explore, compare and build confidence. A strong brand store builds trust, shows how products fit together, supports your ad traffic, and increases average order value, but many brands treat their store like a catalogue - just a grid of products with no real structure. The best brands treat it like a guided experience. At Toucan we follow a five-step process: audit, analysing what's holding conversion back; insights, using click-through rate, conversion and shopper behaviour data to understand what's actually driving performance; create, building new assets based on those insights; test, validating through AB testing and continuous iteration; and scale, rolling out what works. That turns creative into a continuous optimisation loop rather than guesswork.

Ben Levart: In the research and discovery phase, we look at competitive research - how other brands in the category structure their stories and where the white space is - review of existing live content to find what's already working and what quick wins exist, and discovery beyond Amazon, looking at DTC websites, campaign creative and social channels, since some of the strongest brand moments already exist outside the marketplace. From there we move into wireframing, focused on hierarchy, flow and commercial intent rather than visual design yet, then implementation, where the brand's visual identity - logos, colour systems, campaign visuals, typography and hero imagery - gets introduced with purpose. And finally, data analysis once the store is live, understanding how shoppers are actually interacting with it and where the next optimisation opportunities are. Just like Premium A+, brand store design is built around mobile and desktop optimisation from the very beginning, since most store traffic now comes through mobile and needs to prioritise speed of understanding.

Ben Levart: To recap: the main image wins the click, listing imagery explains and persuades, A+ reinforces value, and the brand store deepens consideration and purchase intent. The creative principles that drive conversion are simple and proven: lead with benefits, design for mobile first, always champion storytelling, and make the product dominant. If there's one final takeaway, it's that creative is never cosmetic - it's one of the most powerful drivers of performance on Amazon today.

Curtis Ritchie: Thanks so much for that, Ben. Great to see how creative plays such an important role and how each element works together. First question: what role does AI play in optimisation-led creative?

Ben Levart: Good question. For us at Toucan, AI helps not just from a visually creative standpoint, but also in understanding shopper intent and which questions shoppers might have within different categories. For the Felix example, we used AI to help understand what questions a consumer might have when browsing that category on Amazon, which informed our design decisions and how we ordered the listing images to build purchase intent rather than risk someone dropping off midway through the set.

Curtis Ritchie: That's great. Another question: where should a brand start if they can only optimise one thing first?

Ben Levart: I'd say the main image, because it's the first touchpoint a consumer sees on the search page, or even if they've navigated in via an ad. It's important to set the consumer journey up well by making sure the main image is fully optimised before any other content introduces itself.

Curtis Ritchie: Thanks, Ben. We've run slightly over, so we'll wrap up there, but I want to say a massive thanks to everyone for joining our Toucan Talks webinar today. If you'd like to get in touch with Ben about today's session, or see how Toucan can help optimise your creative, email ben@toucanecommerce.com. Thanks again, and we hope to see you at another Toucan Talks event soon.