Launching an Amazon PPC campaign and letting it work on its own is not the entire story. You need to regularly monitor and make continuous adjustments to ensure the ad generates desired results.
Besides, you should ensure your spending is optimized so you can make the most out of your budget. If you’re not using negative keywords in your Amazon ad campaigns, you’re probably wasting your money.
This article will help you understand different types of negative keywords and optimize them to increase your advertising efficiency.
Table of Contents
A quick guide
- What are Amazon’s negative keywords?
- Different types of negative keywords on Amazon
- Regular vs negative keywords on Amazon
- Benefits of using negative keywords on Amazon
- How to find the right negative keywords
- Where to add negative keywords on Amazon
- How to add negative keywords to your campaign
- How to remove negative keywords from your campaign
- Conclusion
What are Amazon’s negative keywords?
As an advertiser, you need to figure out ways to reach only the most relevant customers. This will help you not lose money for unnecessary clicks. Amazon’s negative keywords will be of the best help for you to achieve this goal.
Negative keywords are inert, non-converting keywords that can prevent your campaign from reaching customers who are least likely to convert. The negative keywords help you tell Amazon when you don’t want your ad to appear for a specific search term.
When your campaign reaches only the customers who are most likely to convert, the conversion rate increases, and consequently the ad spend considerably reduces.
Let’s look into an example.
Imagine you advertise black winter shoes. If you choose the phrase ‘footwear’ as your keyword, all the people who search for any kind of footwear will see your ad. Most of them will click on it, only to find that your product does not match their requirement. They will leave the page without making a purchase, causing you unnecessary expenditure.
If you add negative keywords in the campaign your ad will not appear for such irrelevant search terms. In the above case, if you add “footwear” as a negative keyword, you can save money by preventing your ad from appearing every time a customer searches for different footwear like sandals.
Different types of negative keywords on Amazon
Unlike the regular keywords, you can not find a broad matching negative keyword. The only match types available for negative keywords are phrase match and exact match.
Phrase match: In the above case, we used the negative keyword “footwear.” Here, “footwear” is a phrase. Whenever customers search for a term containing this phrase, your ad will not show up. For example, if someone enters the search term, your ad will not show up unless you set “sports shoes” as a keyword.
Exact match: Exact negative keyword is an exact term that is used as the negative keyword. Consider this example. Say, you are selling winter shoes. You do not want your ad to appear for people who search for sports shoes. You need to use “sports shoes” as a negative keyword. In this case, you should add “sports shoes” under the exact keyword.
Regular vs negative keywords on Amazon
The basic purpose of keywords in Amazon ads is to help with the search results.
Here’s a quick table to show you the major differences between regular keywords and negative keywords.
| Regular | Negative |
| Includes ads in the search result | Excludes ads in the search result |
| There are three keyword match types-phrase, exact, and broad | There are only two keyword match types-phrase and exact |
Benefits of using negative keywords on Amazon
You might know what exactly a negative keyword does to your Amazon ad. Let’s look deeper into the benefits of including negative keywords in your campaigns.
Reduce ACoS
They help you curb ad expenditure by not showing your ads to irrelevant shoppers.
As you stop showing ads to irrelevant customers, you’d end up spending less money. Therefore, your ad campaign efficiency improves further and lowers your ACoS. This is the power of negative keywords.
Increase conversions
On Amazon ads, you can’t be too specific or too broad. The ideal ads are those which show up for the relevant customers. If you set negative keywords in your campaign, chances are high that your ads show up to customers who are willing to purchase your product or a similar one. This will considerably increase your conversion rate.
Improved CTR
Improving your Click Through Rate (CTR) for your campaign will naturally increase your chances of getting more sales. Nonetheless, you should ensure your listings are intact. You can improve your CTR with the help of negative keywords by excluding people who are not suitable for your product.
Improved organic ranking of the product
The organic ranking of a product improves by targeting it with the right keywords and adding negative keywords to the campaign. This improves the likelihood of customers considering the product or even purchasing it. As the traffic to the listing increases, the organic ranking also improves.
Reduces cannibalization of keywords
This is a very important aspect of using negative keywords. Cannibalization happens when two or more of your campaigns or ad groups compete with each other for the same ad space. When a customer enters the search term, both of the ads will qualify to show up.
Amazon can not show all of them in the same space. Instead, one of them will get higher visibility than the other. This will harm your entire marketing effort and will cause you losses in terms of ad spend.
When you use negative keywords in these campaigns, you are actually providing each of them with different channels to operate. This will fix cannibalization and the losses you incur just because of it.
How to find the right negative keyword?
Negative keywords are usually irrelevant keywords for each campaign or ad group. You can find these keywords by simply running an automatic campaign or you can also find negative keywords from existing campaigns.
Find the keywords with the following characteristics and set them as negative keywords. However, this is just a guideline to find the negative keywords. You can try other ways as well to find the right negative keywords for you.
- Low conversion, high click
- Low conversion, high cost per click
- Low CTR, low conversion rate
- High impressions, low clicks
Where to add negative keywords?
You can add the negative keywords at the campaign as well as the ad group level. Here is how to do it.
Adding negative keywords at the ad group level
When you add a negative keyword to an ad group, it is applicable only to that ad group. The other ad groups in a campaign will remain unaffected.
Adding negative keywords at the campaign level
You can also add negative keywords to the entire campaign. This will prevent all the ad groups in that campaign from showing up when the customers search for these keywords.
How to add negative keywords to your campaign or ad group
Follow the stamps to add negative keywords to your campaign or ad group.
- Sign in to seller central
- Select your campaign
- If you are adding keywords to your ad groups, Select the required ad groups
- Click on the negative keywords tab
- Select your match type from the drop-down menu
- Enter your negative keywords (you can add up to 1000 negative keywords)
- Click “Add keywords”
- “Save” the changes
How to remove negative keywords from your campaign
You can remove the negative keywords by archiving them.
- Sign in to the Amazon Seller Central
- Go to the campaign and click on the “Negative Keywords” tab
- Click on the keyword you wish to do away with
- Click “Archive”
- Confirm your decision to archive the keyword
You can not access the archived keyword again if you want it back in future. If you need it again, you can add it manually.
Conclusion
Targeting keywords to reach potential customers is the key part of Amazon ads. Every seller who wants to scale their business should run ads on Amazon. Add at least two or three keywords to your campaigns to ensure they run efficiently.
Incorporating negative keywords into your Amazon PPC campaign will add more value to your campaign and the products you promote. It drives your ad in the right direction.
So, no matter what, never forget to include negative keywords in your campaigns in order to make the best out of them.
Author’s Bio:
Arishekar N is the Senior Director of Marketing and Growth at SellerApp, an e-commerce data analytics solution. He is responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of marketing strategies, as well as increasing process efficiency by executing cutting-edge Search Engine Optimization strategies at SellerApp.
Arishekar has over 10 years of experience in marketing analytics and SEO. He has worked as a Digital Specialist for the tech giant IBM and most recently as the Senior Marketing Specialist for ZioTive Technologies where he enhanced their site structure by increasing website and mobile usability. Previously, he worked as a Senior SEO Analyst for Star Group where he was responsible for managing SEO Audits and analytics.