Developing an Effective Amazon Advertising Keyword Strategy
Developing an effective keyword strategy for your sponsored ads is essential for maximizing visibility and sales on Amazon. The right keywords can help potential customers find your products, understand their features and benefits, and make a purchase.
Unfortunately, many brands are overwhelmed by the prospect of managing all their sponsored ad keywords, and some don’t even know where to start. Throughout this blog, we will dive into the fundamentals of how brands should identify and implement their Amazon advertising keywords. It’s important to remember that the information we share below is just one slice of the entire keyword pie – it’s up to you to determine the right keyword strategy based on your goals and budget available and to continue optimizing and testing once your keywords are in place.
With that said, let’s get started.
What keywords do I target?
To find the right keywords for your brand, Amazon recommends launching auto campaigns to identify top-performing terms, making use of your brand name so people who are looking for you can find you, and repurposing keywords already linked to your product detail pages (source).
Those are great recommendations to get started, but GO takes it a bit further by using the following tools to identify quality keywords for our clients:
3rd Party Search Volume Tools – Find platforms such as Jungle Scout that can identify search volume for terms relevant to your brand. This helps you understand the amount of consumer interest as well as the potential traffic you can anticipate for certain keywords.
As you review search volume, be aware of the timeframes in which you compare keywords. Many keywords have seasonal peaks and valleys, so don’t take the metrics as year-round gospel if you are, say, a costume brand that is looking at search volume for both “red Santa hat” and “witch Halloween outfit” in December. Anything Halloween-related usually can’t compete with something Christmas-related during the holidays, so be sure to keep that in mind or perhaps even consider choosing a more neutral month, like April, to compare those two terms.
If you don’t have access to tools that look at search volume, turn to…
Amazon’s Search Frequency Rank (SFR) Report – This tool allows you to see the most trafficked keywords within your category and among your competitors for different periods of time. There are two ways we recommend using the report:
Input a keyword to see the search volume for that term as well as the three products that have the highest conversion and click share for that keyword.
Input an ASIN to see which keywords are related to that product.
Both approaches will help you understand the terms you and your competitors are already showing up for and ranking against, providing the insights necessary to strategically build your keyword lists.
How specific should my keywords be?
The answer to this question depends on your goals. If your objective is to bring in new consumers, you’ll want to implement as many generic keywords that are still related to your category as possible. On the flip side, if you want to seal the deal and reach individuals already shopping for your products, utilize more branded keywords (source).
Additionally, the specificity of your keywords may alter depending on the time of year. For instance, if your product is extremely giftable and the perfect present for a holiday like Mother’s Day, incorporate seasonal terms into your keyword lists to increase the likelihood of your item converting during that time period (source).
What are keyword match types and which types should I use?
Keyword match types determine how close a user’s search query must be to your keyword for the campaign to populate for that user. There are 3 main match types:
Broad Match – Searches that relate to your keyword
Phrase Match – Searches that include your keyword’s meaning
Exact Match – Searches that are your keyword
E.g., if your keyword is “hockey stick”, here’s what shoppers could search for to trigger that keyword from match type to match type:
Broad Match – “hockey helmet for women”
Phrase Match – “hockey stick for men”
Exact Match – “hockey stick”
Additionally, if your keyword is causing you to appear in results you don’t want to show up for, you can institute a negative keyword match type to keep your campaign from popping up for unwanted terms.
While there are several ways to approach match types, GO's marketing specialists rely mostly on exact and phrase match keywords because they enable you to better control the traffic you are driving. Though broad match terms can drive higher scale and may introduce you to incremental, longer-tail terms that weren’t on your radar before, they can pull in irrelevant traffic and are typically the least efficient match type. If you are a brand that mainly focuses on profitability, steer clear of broad match keywords.
How do I keep my keywords organized?
Our GO team strongly believes that the most effective way to organize campaigns is by keyword objective, separating them by auto campaigns, brand terms, category terms, and competitor terms.
Auto Campaigns
Auto campaigns serve ads across category keywords, competitor keywords, and competitive placements. They typically drive more efficient traffic than manually managed campaigns, meaning they are an excellent option for brands with lower budgets. You can also discover new keywords via your auto campaigns by going to Amazon’s Search Term Report, identifying impactful terms from your auto campaigns, and adding them to your manual campaigns.
Another auto campaign strategy our GO team likes to implement is negatively targeting brand keywords and ASINs. We've experienced great success when using this campaign type as a new-to-brand discovery vehicle, so we make sure we focus our clients' spend on low-cost category and competitor placements.
Auto campaign traffic can be more varied in comparison to other campaign types, so be sure to continuously use the Search Term Report to negatively target irrelevant terms.
Brand Keyword Campaigns
These campaigns achieve the objective of driving purchases at the bottom of the marketing funnel and consist of general brand terms as well as more specific brand terms that are related to products within your portfolio. To ensure you drive only brand-related searches, optimize terms regularly via the SFR report and negative target competitor or category keywords that may come in on a phrase match.
Quick tip: Brand keyword campaigns can be a significant driver of incrementality. This is accomplished through a brand’s “aisle” on Amazon. – featuring new or emerging ASINs within top-of-search ad placements like Sponsored Brand, Sponsored Products, and Sponsored Brand Video can drive traffic and product discoverability amongst your already-existing brand shoppers.
Category & Competitor Keyword Campaigns
The purpose of both these campaign segmentations is to drive consideration, reaching customers who are shopping and browsing within your category but have yet to make a purchase.
Something that GO has found to be very effective with category and competitor targeting is to use what we call a “tiered” approach to campaign segmentation:
Tier 1: Category & competitor campaigns where general, highly trafficked keywords are stored.
Tier 2: Category & competitor campaigns where longer-tail keywords that may see a higher conversion at a lower cost are stored.
We suggest siloing keywords this way because generic terms tend to be more expensive and, if kept in the same campaign as the more specific keywords, they can eat up the majority of your ad budget. This approach allows you to mindfully allocate dollars to each campaign tier depending on your objectives.
How do I optimize my keyword strategy?
The key to success when implementing new keywords is testing and learning as well as ongoing optimization. Here are a few ways to put this into action:
Shop your brand and category aisles on Amazon to see where you are placing relative to your bids and performance. If you aren’t showing up where you want to be, consider pivoting your budget allocation or keyword strategy.
Utilize Amazon’s Search Term Report to identify exactly where traffic is coming from, determine how to negatively target out irrelevant traffic, and add successful, long-tail terms to your keyword lists.
Look at your share of voice by keyword or set of keywords and track your product’s organic rank in comparison to competitors for a specific keyword to see if you’re performing at your desired level. To accomplish this, GO uses a third-party tool called Downstream.
As a rule of thumb, pause keywords that have 10 or more clicks and no conversions. If you sell in a more expensive category where customers need more time to browse and educate themselves prior to purchasing, you can set that click number higher.
Keep in mind that keyword campaigns are only relevant for certain sponsored ad tools. While these ad placements can be extremely beneficial for brands that are just starting on Amazon or have a limited budget, the most successful brands employ sponsored ads alongside upper funnel tactics such as DSP, Streaming TV, and Online Video to reach and make the most impact on consumers throughout their buying journey.
IT'S GO TIME
It’s not enough to create a list of keywords, launch them, and say “hey, we did our job”. Brands must constantly optimize their terms, uproot the ones that aren’t performing well, and continue to look for new keywords to add to their mix.
Not sure you can manage it all? Our team can help. Schedule a meeting with us.