How do you choose your keywords, how do you construct your initial pay-per-click campaign? Are you going for “broad” are you going for “phrase” or “exact match”

“Just wondering if you have some best practices or some protocols for choosing the keywords that you made into your title, particularly one you’re trying to start a new listing and get the preferred Amazon URL and then you’ll how do you choose your keywords for your pay per click.

In addition to how you choose your keywords, how do you construct your initial pay-per-click campaign?

Are you going for “broad” are you going for “phrase” or “exact match”

How do you monitor it, how often do you monitor it, what are your goals what’s an optimal ACOS

do you eliminate words do you switch some terms to “exact match” at some point?

And what do you do to find new keywords”

Answer:

Thank you so much for the excellent question Bruce, and thank you again for using the Q A Selling Online Voice message again.

Starting from the beginning, the top keyword chosen for the title.

This is a very great question and something most people don’t really think of, as much as they should!

Picking the top keyword per search volume is very easy, and that is what most people will do.

They will use tools to see what the most searched keyword is (related to their product) and use it.

But in reality it’s not that simple.

Most of the highest searched keywords, you will not be able to rank for, on the top page (depending on the product and niche).

Lets image you are selling a Bluetooth speaker, more than likely you top keyword would be exactly that “Bluetooth Speaker” but Sony, Panasonic, LG, and the $50 million dollar a year private labelers that have been targeting that keyword for the last 5 years, will not allow you to climb to the first page (let’s not fool ourselves here)

So in this case I would pick a slightly easier keyword to try to outrank everyone.

Let’s say “Wire Free Speaker” (and I just guessed this, I didn’t do any research on it, so if you have Bluetooth speakers don’t blindly take it). But that 3 word keyword should be easier to rank than “Bluetooth Speaker”

But, at the same time, you will also have the words Speaker and Bluetooth in your title, because you will need them to rank for other searches, like: Wireless Bluetooth Sound, or Yellow Bluetooth Speaker, or Wire Free Sound Speaker, and anything else the visitor may search for that includes your terms.

Pay per click keywords choosing

2 campaigns

I Monitor campaigns  daily but I don’t change daily, I only change after a 4 or 5 days or  depending of the number of impressions, since some keywords can get 10000 impressions per day while others will get 10. So I let each keyword get at least 500 impressions before I decide to change anything.

Now how to find those keywords

I start with a discovery campaign!

This is a automatic campaign turned on with a high PPC value during the launch.

During the launch phase I will not look at ACOS because it will scare the crap out of you (it can be 200 or 300%) but it doesn’t matter because it is buying me information and at the same time it’s buying my way in to the top ranks of that keyword. (ACOS stands for Advertising Cost Of Sales – percentage of much you had to spend in ads to get each sale)

wrong order color

High ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales

After about a week, I pull the report for that campaign and open it on a excel sheet, where I manually will look at all the search terms people used to find my listing, and even compare how many of those actually bought it, and what keywords people used that didn’t result in a single sale.

Then I start a second campaign where I add the good keywords I found on the automatic campaign, and I bring them in as a broad search.

The ones that did not generate sales after 10 or 15 click, I try to imagine the reason why (sometimes is very obvious) and in that case I will add them to the campaign as negative keywords.

Here is an example: If you are selling a magnetic phone holder for the car. “Car” will be one of your keywords, but “Car Seat” is not! (Unless you sell car seats)

“Magnet for Phone” is a keyword but “Phone Case” is not

But sometimes you will have a good keyword that does not generate sales and you need to find out why.

Example: you sell magnetic phone holders, and that same keyword has been searched and clicked 20 times but nobody bought it. This means the problem may be your images or reviews!

As for ACOS there are 2 ways to look at it.

At the campaign level:  this will always be higher because you are looking at the combined ACOS of all keywords

Or at the keyword level – this is when you will look at each individual keyword and see what their ACOS is. (here you can see what keywords are making you bleed, and decide to lower the bid for it)

Quin Amorim, Host of Amazon FBA Selling Online Podcast