Introduction to Keyword Harvesting

How to systemize your keyword research and grow your PPC account

Introduction

One of the major challenges with selling on Amazon is finding news ways to cost-effectively drive traffic to your listings. Amazon now monetizing the first 9 listings of a search results page making it increasingly more challenging to win through organic sales alone so sellers are being forced to find another way.

This is where PPC comes into play. If you aren’t going to be able to drive meaningful sales through organic traffic, the best place to start your advertising is with PPC. These are customers who are actively raising their hand and telling you that they are a qualified lead for a purchase. In this article, we are going to introduce to a method of optimization call “Keyword Harvesting” which will show you how to systemize your keyword discovery and optimizations process.

Keyword Research

To understand keyword harvesting we first need to start with keyword research. Simply put, keyword research is the process of identifying relevant keywords and product to advertise against that have a high probability of resulting in a purchase.

There are two general ways to undertake keyword research — the first is manual research through Amazon’s brand analytics or a 3rd party tool such as Jungle Scout or Helium 10 to find the keywords that your competitors are using to drive traffic to their listings.

The other and more scalable method of keyword research is to systemize your discovery through keyword harvesting. Essentially you are leveraging Amazon’s targeting and match type capabilities to identify new keyword and targets to advertise against to ensure that you continue to build your PPC portfolio over time.

Welcome to Keyword Harvesting

Keyword harvesting consists of two distinct aspects. The firs is keyword discovered which is the processes used to identify new targets and the second is optimizations which ensure that you have the proper bid on each keyword or target to avoid inefficient spend. I will walk you through each step of the process and have included a graphic below for reference.

Build Your Campaigns and Ad Groups

The first step in keyword harvesting is setting up the proper account structure. If you do not build the campaign structure properly it will be a challenge to effectively migrate and optimize your targets.

1. First thing that you need to do is set up an automatic targeting campaign with an associated ad group.¹ Automatic targeting is when you allow Amazon’s advertising algorithm to match your product against whatever keywords and product targets the algorithm deems to be relevant.

2. Build a keyword targeting campaign with each a broad match and exact match ad group.

3. Build a product targeting campaign with a single ad group that will contain all targets.

This structure will ensure you that you are able to quickly eliminate any inefficient spend and control your targets in the most granular manner possible.

Analyze Your Automatic Campaign Results

To start harvesting keywords, you will need to go into your Automatic campaign and pull a ‘search term’ report². This report will show you all of the keywords and product targets that have generated a click over a given time period.

Now it is time to analyze the data. Our best practices are listed below³.

1. Review any target with 20 or more clicks. In my experience 20 clicks is enough data to have confidence when making a decision on the effectiveness of the target.

2. Anything with more than 3 orders will be migrated. Keywords will be moved to the Keyword Campaign - Broad Ad Group, Products will be moved to the Product Campaign. Add all of the moved keywords as a negative target for the automatic campaign.

3. Any target with 20 or more clicks and less than 3 orders should be added to your negative targets list.

After migrating these targets, you will next further refine the keyword segmentation to start driving efficiencies.

Further Refining Your Targets

Once you have started to generate new keyword and product targets from your Automatic campaigns, it’s now time to start refining your keyword list and optimizing the performance of your campaigns.

This is where you can make a sizable impact on your business. These new keywords and targets will be a major revenue driver for your brand and can be dialed up or down to control demand in an instant. Let’s now get into the final leg of the process and review the performance of your broad match keyword and product targeting campaigns.

1. Analyze both the broad match keyword performance, as well as the search time report for the broad match ad group and migrate the top performing keywords to the exact match ad group.⁴ Add the migrated keywords as negative targets to the board match ad group.

2. Review the performance of the product targeting campaign. Increase bids on your top performing targets and ruthlessly eliminate⁵ inefficient targets.

3. Rinse and repeat on a weekly basis.

Now that you have the process up and running you should go through this optimization process on a weekly basis. Additionally, over time the efficiency of your automatic targeting will start to fall as you have already harvested the most profitable targets, but it is important to continue to fund the campaign as it is a key component of the strategy.

Conclusion

The beauty of keyword harvesting is the simplicity of the strategy. Nothing that we went through is inherently complicated, it’s just hard and certainly a process that you can follow to improve your performance.

You will be tempted to act quickly and start migrating keywords quickly, but this can set you up for failure. One of the biggest mistakes that I see clients make is making decisions on insufficient data. I cannot stress this enough — you need to have patience and let the data bake before making any decisions.

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1. I strongly recommend you building a campaign for each parent ASIN.

2. Search term reports are pulled at the ad group level.

3. We sell in a competitive category so our click thresholds are relatively high. If there is lower search volume for your category, feel free to lower hurdles.

4. Anything with a conversion rate >25% should be moved to the exact match type ad group.

5. Either by pausing the target or adding it as a negative to the ad group.