Negative keywords and product targets have the power to transform unprofitable Amazon campaigns into profitable ones. By adequately utilizing negative keywords and product targets, Amazon sellers can improve efficiency, ranking, ad placement, and overall sales for their products. In this episode, we cover negative keywords, product targets, and how to use them.
In the Amazon world, a few negatives can definitely lead to a positive. Negatives can be used to produce positive performance with Amazon ad campaigns by allowing us to eliminate unproductive spend and focus on productive spend. This allocation allows for more of your ad spend to move to keywords and product targets that produce sales.
We suggest being proactive with adding negatives to your auto campaigns by reviewing your search term report and finding search terms or themes that do not produce impressions. These search terms or product targets should be added as negative exact since this is the only controlled way to manage poor performers in your auto campaigns.
When moving keywords down the funnel between our auto campaigns to manual campaigns, if we have a keyword that converts and is a strong performer, we set these keywords as a negative phrase or exact in the auto campaigns. This forces Amazon to show our keyword in the manual campaign, where we have a lot more control than in the auto campaign.
So, what about moving keywords down the funnel in manual campaigns? Well, we tend to do the opposite. E.g., when moving a keyword from phrase to exact campaigns, we won't set these keywords as negatives in the phrase campaigns since this can really affect the keyword's history and relevancy. This, in return, may drive up the cost per click or drastically lower impressions for that keyword. In a perfect world, we would do full isolation. However, due to Amazon's relevancy factor, we instead allow Amazon to decide how best to show these keywords where we'll further adjust bids to improve overall performance.
What are negative keywords and product targets and what controls do we have? [01:47]
How to set negatives to improve overall performance? [05:10]
Client story: how not using negatives properly can wipe out impressions [07:57]
When to use negative exact in your campaigns? [09:43]
When to not use negatives in your campaigns? [13:16]
Negative product targets and why use them [14:37]
Setting negatives: Keyword isolation between Auto campaigns and Manual campaigns [17:10]
Setting Negatives between campaigns in manual campaigns [18:47]
Podcast Summary [21:22]