As a search marketer, you know that showing ads that are relevant to your users’ search query is absolutely crucial in our line of business. If you’re an old school advertiser who’s been running campaigns on Google AdWords (now Google Ads) for years, you know how important relevancy is to Google – it’s even worked into their Quality Score metric, and you’ve needed to make sure that both your ad and landing page are tied in closely with your keyword set to get high rankings in the auction.

The same concept can be applied to your Amazon Sponsored Product ads.

Like Google, Amazon wants to make sure they are serving the right ads to their searchers based what they are actually searching for, and as an advertiser, this should be important to you too.

If you’re running Amazon Sponsored Product ads, you have a lot of options for increasing your relevancy, from launch all the way through optimization and refinement.

Kicking off a Campaign:

While you’ll want to educate yourself on commonly searched terms relevant to your products by using Google’s auto-suggest, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool and other keyword tools for Amazon, instead of relying solely on third-party data, the best way to get keywords for your campaigns is to add in keywords based on real data. Also, you’re not just looking for keywords, but rather the relationship of keywords to particular SKUs.

When launching a new campaign, consider creating a general catalog campaign (using Auto-Targeting) for your Sponsored Products. The campaign should include all your SKUS, with each SKU broken out into an individual ad group. By structuring your campaigns this way, you can gather and evaluate data on all your products, and the relationship of the keyword to a given product.

If you structure your campaigns this way, you’ll want to let them run for 1-2 weeks, depending on volume. You’re looking for actionable data, so you’ll want to have a decent number of impressions, clicks and purchases. If you’ve got that, move onto the next step.

Expanding Ad Groups with New Keywords:

One way to ensure you are being relevant is by running Search Term reports for your campaigns. To get started, under Ad Reports in your Amazon campaign, select a Search Terms report and a given date range. You’ll be able to download the report and structure it a few different ways in Excel to understand which keywords are performing best.

(Image Credit: Amazon.com)

If you’re having trouble figuring out what’s working, try sorting your data by keywords that have the highest CTRs (click-through rates), Conversion Rates, or Revenue.

Keywords that look like winners should be added to the given ad group and given their own specific bid. If you’re not seeing anything of particular excitement in your report just yet, we recommend waiting another week, and increasing your bids to ensure your ads are getting enough traction on Amazon.

Narrowing Campaigns with Negative Keywords:

If you’ve already downloaded your Search Terms report, you might notice some odd things that snuck in there. That can definitely happen when we are letting Amazon decide our keywords based on our product catalog, but it is our job to make sure that we negate these from our account.

Search for keywords that have a high spend and no return, or a high volume of impressions and low clicks. Look for keywords that just don’t seem to fit your product. These keywords should be put aside to be added to your negative keywords, to restrict your ads from showing on them.

Organizing Keywords by Product:

Maybe you have some great keywords outlined in your report, but you’ve noticed that they are triggering the wrong products, or, not the best products. This is common for both Amazon Sponsored Products and Google Shopping. There are a few ways to rectify this. First, add the search term as a negative in the ad group it is currently showing in. Next, add the same keyword into the ad group it should be serving in. Lastly, do a review of your feed to ensure your product descriptions contain keywords performing well for your account, and that they are “assigned” to the proper product.

Conclusion:

Though Amazon doesn’t appear to have nearly as many options as Google Ads (yet, anyway), there are still some basic building blocks that you can carry over. Similarly to Google Ads, optimizing for relevancy on Amazon is one of the most important actions you can take to having a profitable advertising campaign.

Need help navigating Amazon? Reach out to our team of experts who are happy to help!