How to Optimize the PPC Campaign on Amazon

Keywords are the basis of success not only for ranking optimization but also for Amazon PPC advertising campaigns (sponsored products). Keywords lead to discoverability of your product on any platform which drives visitors to sales. If you do not advertise your products with all relevant keywords, you will not reach all potential customers and thus miss sales. If you instead advertise with a large keyword set that also contains many irrelevant keywords, you can incur high unnecessary costs that can water down the performance of campaigns or even make them unprofitable.

An important success factor for profitable Amazon advertising campaigns is, therefore, thorough research of all relevant keywords. This post shows you 4 effective approaches to research keywords for your Amazon PPC advertising campaigns.

Let Amazon do the keyword research: automatic campaigns 

If you don’t have time to do your keyword research, you can leave this work to an automatic Amazon PPC campaign instead. In automatic campaigns, Amazon decides based on the product information (e.g. title, bullet points, keywords and category) for which search queries the ads are played. The user does not have to set keywords here, only products to be advertised, daily budget and the CPC bid. Retailers can use the search term report in Seller Central to see which searches Amazon has placed the ads for.

The disadvantage of an automatic campaign is, among other things, that the advertisements can also be played for many irrelevant search queries, which cause unnecessary costs. A successful strategy is therefore to work in parallel with a manual campaign for the same ASINs. In a manual campaign, unlike an automatic campaign, keywords and match types can be fine-tuned for ad distribution. Also, the CPC bids can be optimized individually for each keyword to achieve the best profitability. If you work in parallel with a manual campaign, the best performing search queries from the automatic campaign can be transferred as keywords to the manual campaign at regular intervals to optimize them in a targeted manner. Meanwhile, the CPC automatic campaign bid can be set relatively low to reduce the cost of irrelevant clicks. In this setup, the automatic campaign takes over the keyword research, while in the manual campaign, the best sales and profits can be obtained with the keywords through optimization.

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The most effective approaches for your own Amazon PPC keyword research

Automatic campaigns take a lot of effort from sellers, but they are not the fastest way to get a good keyword set. If you prefer to do your own PPC keyword research instead to start your campaigns immediately with a well-functioning, comprehensive set of keywords (or to improve an existing campaign), there are different approaches available. In this post the 3 best options are presented:

Amazon Keyword Research Tool Sonar (free)

Keyword research is easiest with specially designed tools. With Sonar, Marketplace Analytics has developed a free keyword research tool, especially for Amazon retailers. It not only saves retailers a lot of time researching but also delivers very good results tailored precisely to Amazon. Sonar has a database of over 23 million actual searches from German Amazon customers that you can search for your keyword research. Sonar also estimates the Amazon search volume for these keywords so you can see which keywords have the greatest sales potential.

Sonar offers 3 search options for keyword research:

Keyword search: In this search mode you can enter an initial keyword and all Amazon search queries containing this keyword are displayed. For example, if you enter “exercise ball” in the search, you will receive 711 keywords that contain the “exercise ball” component. So you get results similar to Amazon AutoComplete – only with 711 instead of 10, much more results with a single search.

Advanced search: With the advanced search not only keywords with the same word stem but also related keywords for an initial keyword can be found. For the starting keyword “gymnastics ball” there are, for example, 1464 results including keywords such as “Sitzball”, “Pezziball”, “Ballstuhl”, “Yoga ball” or “Therapy ball”. As a result, you often find terms that customers use, but you would never have thought of yourself.

ASIN reverse search: With the ASIN reverse search, you only need the ASIN of a similar product to start keyword research. Enter an ASIN to see the keywords for which a particular product is ranked. This way you can find out what keywords your competitors are

Sonar’s three search options can also be combined very well for thorough keyword research. For example, you can start a backward search with a competitor product in the ASIN, and then carry out a simple or extended search with the keywords found to find other keywords.

The search results from Sonar can be exported via CSV file for evaluation in Excel. The export contains all the keyword results in one column and the associated search volume in another column. All relevant PPC keywords can be selected from the results and added to an Amazon PPC campaign or ad group via copy + paste.

If you want to take the keyword research completely into your own hands, you can also analyze your competitors directly or use the Amazon auto-completion to find keywords:

Competitive analysis

To quickly research competitors’ keywords, a search can be carried out on Amazon with key keywords for the product to be advertised. By analyzing the search results and product pages (product title, bullet points, description) of the competitors, all keywords can be collected that match your product.

For example, if you want to advertise an exercise ball again, simply start an Amazon search with this keyword. Just by evaluating the product title in the search result, you will find other keywords that describe the product.

Amazon auto-completion

The Amazon Auto-Completion offers the opportunity to use Amazon’s search data for your research. To start the keyword research, simply enter an initial keyword in the Amazon search (without starting the search). Amazon then suggests up to 10 matching searches from Amazon customers that contain this keyword. The keywords that were previously found at competitors can serve as the starting keywords. One advantage of auto-completion is that you get keywords that match the search behaviour of Amazon customers. To get even more suggestions for the same keyword, you can also add the letters A to Z to the keyword.

A thorough PPC keyword research is worthwhile and does not have to mean a lot of effort

A thorough PPC keyword research leads to higher sales and lower costs, but also means additional effort. With the keyword research methods presented in this article, Amazon retailers can determine all relevant keywords for their PPC campaigns relatively easily and save time and effort at the same time.