Amazon PPC - Negative Keywords

hi guys this is Jelena from Amazonia PPC I am going to explain to you everything about negative keywords in today's video negative keywords are one of the most commonly misunderstood features of the seller central platform advertising platform and their common usages are often misunderstood so this is one of really hot topics that we wanted to talk to you about debunk the mysteries and how everything works and just explain the whole process of how we select certain search terms to become negative keywords we are going to cover what negative keywords are in general how they work what their main match types are some limitations that are attached to them what on what level you can use them whether that is a campaign level a group level and which one is applicable when and also we are going to cover how do you determine which keyword is a negative keyword even though it's a it sounds like a relevant keyword but when actually this keyword is hurt in your account so these are the common topics that we're going to cover in this video so stay tuned basically let's dive right into it what negative keywords are in general negative keyword is a phrase or a couple of words or or one word that you will use to add to your account and say this it to the system basically tell the system this is the type of keyword that we do not want to show up for we don't want to pay for anything that's related to this phrase or we don't want to pay for anything that for any type of search that comes in this exact phrase so what do you achieve this way this way you will achieve that your account is going to be protected from irrelevant traffic or from relevant traffic that is consisted of so-called tire kickers which means users who just are browsing through less things without making a purchase there are very efficient ways to identify these folks so we're going to share our process around it with a real-life example I have prepared a document that is persistent of real data without any name of the client or anything and I also use just a random listing that to show you how this whole process looks like and just provide more clarity around this great big topic called negative keywords so now that we know that negative keywords are something that you basically tell the system we don't want to show up for this we are not paying for this type of phrase and that way you have you you are able to see in some cases even thousands of dollars from not spending on irrelevant traffic and users who know we're not going to purchase so negative keywords come in two match types which means there are two possible match types that you can use to add negative keywords to the account one of them is exact match which means you will basically tell the system this is it the exact match type in which I don't want to show up for it this is the kind of phrase in this order not been before or after it I do not want to show up for but this specific search terms a specific phrase the whole phrase is something I don't want to show up for that would be exact match when it comes to adding negative keywords and phrase match which is another match type option for negative keywords then this would mean I do not want to show up for this phrase or anything that's related to it whether that would come before this phrase or after this phrase but there's phrase in this order and anything that's before or after it I don't want to show up for simply because it's that irrelevant or furthering my account that much that I don't want anything related to it there are many cases where you can use but usually the best possible results are achieved when you are utilizing the best option the both options basically both phrasing exact match when used properly can create the synergy of effects that will guide your listing to higher profitability so it's very much advised to use both of the match types but also understand really well the cases in which each one should be used which is usually best achieved by practice the more you practice and the more you're familiar with your own account your product and your audience and people who are typing in certain types of search terms the better you will be able to determine which which ones are good candidates to be negatives in the first place and then the second step would be to determine what their level of whether the level of the match that would be for you to use so we're going to try and bring this whole topic a little closer with the real-life example that I have prepared for you so I mentioned also that negative keywords are something that can be used on both a group and campaign level which means you can protect your traffic your campaign your whole campaign from bad traffic but you can also protect a certain portion of its which is called ad group you're probably familiar with that so if a one ad group is targeting a certain product and the other one is targeting another product they're advertising different products so basically you might want to choose the only ads certain negatives on a group level if you have one campaign that's dedicated to one product only and then you have multiple ad groups that are split by match types different keyword match types then maybe it would might might make sense and save you time to add negatives on a campaign level and the whole campaign then will be protected from bad traffic in both of these cases and there are many different campaign structures that could be applied to an account so these two examples that I've just mentioned are not hundred percent exclusive it's just something that I've given as an example before you would do any type of negative keyword exclusions it's very crucial for you to understand what the data is telling you so one of the crucial things that are we have found while negative while analyzing search term reports day after day and with multiple accounts is that it's much more important for you to look at the numbers than to look at the keyword relevancy in terms of search their relevancy so relevancy it still matters it's absolutely important but it's only the second step after you are unsure about what the numbers are telling you most of the cases numbers will strictly be very very clear in terms of whether this keyword the search term that users are typing in is a good candidate to be added as a targeted keyword or as a negative keyword so you're whether you're going to take in account the relevancy factor of the search term it really comes down to your understanding around the product your understanding of the audience if you have a niche then basically understanding about the douche and also understanding of the whole Amazon traffic in general it's very important to understand that Amazon is a platform is very different from other platforms such as Google that also uses keyword targeting like who will use this keyword targeting but we know for sure that on Google users come from various types of search tents which means somebody is going to come looking for a video well to watch someone's looking for images then there's a third person coming for an informational search they need more information around thing and then there's a sport one who came there to purchase or just research on products that they will purchase at their later later hour of their buying cycles so that being said like for example Google also uses keyword targeting it's not going to be a very effective platform in terms of purchasing content whereas on Amazon everyone is there to make a purchase so sooner or later they will make a purchase but everyone almost everyone is there with a very high purchasing intent which is a very important piece of information when you are making your decision in terms of search terms simply because not always you're going to leave a keyword running simply because it's relevant sometimes you're just going to have to remove it even though it's relevant because you can see that there is a certain threshold that this keyword has passed without generating any type of revenue which is basically looking at the numbers first and then we're looking at the keyword relevancy as a secondary factor of determining whether this search term is a good candidate to be added to mellitus so to sum it up negative keywords are a way to for you to protect your traffic protect your account from negative traffic then keywords negative keywords come in to match types which is phrase and exact that's exact being more specific and phrase being more restrictive negative keywords are used on an outlet level and a campaign level and in which level you're going to add them it simply depends on the type of keyword and type of product that you're selling and basically there are various types of negatives that we can identify that I'm going to show you different examples so let's dive right into the this example that I have prepared so the product that we are going to analyze stands for is yacon syrup which is a sugar substitute a very clean one with low GI index so this is a very hot and trending product right now on Amazon very similar to maple syrup but um cleaner than that and even healthier and more safe than that so we are basically advertising for a sugar substitute called yacon syrup and there is a keyword list that we want to analyze there's a search term of this that we want to analyze for this product so here in this list you can see that there is a campaign name a group name targeting this is a search term report and we're going to identify what these what of these search terms are going to be edited as negatives here in this report we've downloaded the report for the last 90 days so it's obviously a large list we have probably around 233 search terms some of them will be reviewed so let's dive right into it there's a high probability that we won't find a lot of good suggestions to add the negatives which is usually the best case in area if you have something to add to the account then you will obviously add it so when you have a lot of search terms that you need to analyze and you don't have a lot of time then obviously you're going to use filters so we're going to add filters to this excel file and then I'm going to sort them out by certain criteria first what we want to know is how many of them haven't sold any udin units at all in the last three months why is this important first of all we want to know which products have sold haven't sold any units in a last three months obviously if there's a product that spends any amount of money without bringing you sales that's an obviously bad search term and should be probably added to negatives so what I'm going to do here is use another filter which is the number of clicks we want to have all search terms aside from the ones that someone is accidentally clicked on it wants simply because this is something that we want to make sure that it has repeated more than twice once as a matter of fact I'm going to also exclude the ones that someone's quit down twice to just make sure that we have only the bad ones so here now we have narrowed down the lists down to what 19 search terms which is a lot more manageable especially if you're tight on schedule so for example now we have all the search terms that users have clicked on more than three times three times in more and haven't purchased yet so this is something that's obviously going to be for some reason irrelevant to our list like for example here we have not sure what this is monkford sweetener I know that these two yacon syrup and yacon syrup organic fewer search terms they are obviously being clicked on and not purchased on but for some reason that they're still relevant so they do reflect what the product is so when it comes to analyzing these search terms performance they don't perform well but as a second step I'm going to analyze their relevancy and they are still kind of relevant so we might be able to use them either alike add them to an account in a different match type or we're going to add it like for example here we can see that this keyword has triggered its with the same search terms so I might want to add this to a list of our exact match keywords and test that in a different match site for example this other keyword yacon syrup Organic has triggered the atmosphere of organic pure search there which is a longtail version of it and has a significant amount of impressions so I'm going to consider not only not excluding these two negatives but testing them out as targeted keywords and this all depends your decision upon these relevant keywords really depends on how much money you're willing to spend your advertising if you have money to test if you have like an extra budget that you can use for testing purposes then I almost certainly advise you to test everything's focused around testing and usually PPC works best the more tests you do or you know about this whole traffic and type of audience that you're targeting I chose this product to analyze the account syrup simply because it's a very good example of showing how we have a very defined audience like obviously you have in your audience members people who are aware about their health who are athletes for example young moms with kids people on a diet for allergic to gluten and stuff like that so we know that for example we know the types of search terms that these this audience would type in which is very helpful in helping you decide if there is a keyword that's really good to be an edit so here concert and yacon syrup organic pure I'm going to even go ahead and remove for this list simply because we are not going to focus on the targeted keywords now the focus of this video is going to be only on additives and otherwise I would just add into a separate list for me to know what to do with them like in this example they would be added to their exact match tax for and now we want to see what the month will sweetener is we know what yacon syrup is and we know that the month will is something possibly similar whenever you're not sure about what a match that what a certain search term means best advice I can give you just do a search on Amazon and then you'll know for sure okay so this is something that's this is a product that it's definitely not a syrup it is some type of a sweetener so it's definitely targeting the same people who are in market for our type of product but definitely a very different pitch so I'm going to go ahead and exclude this search step I've used filters to help me out understand if there are any search terms that are very very bad in terms of you know just like in general are bad for this product that I'm selling and don't represent it exactly and I'm going to add in another factor there are two factors that I've introduced to you today the first one is products with zero sales in the last 90 days and a second of it being products with more than with zero sales and three and more clicks with no sales which means something to pay attention to now since adding negatives is a pretty big move on the account and you have to have strong understanding what you're actually doing what possible consequences of your actions would be then if you have additional information to serve you then by all means to use it like that this third factor that I'm going to show you is the spent if you are very serious about wanting to exclude a certain search term from the you know that you should take into consideration how many how much money it has spent so far on your account we have search terms specific search thank was over the course of 90 days spent $6 with no sales and why is this very important this is very important because if you're unsure whether a search term should be excluded then by all means use calculations you will know for each specific part of it yourself what is the type of a profit margin that you can count on so for example here if we have a product that costs $15 and out of these 15 dollars let's say an average profit margin would be 30% then that would make $5 so that's how much you are basically allowed to spend on on one purchase without going into losing profitability your you're not going to be profitable if you spend $5 and then get gather one sale but if you spend $6 and generate this one sale for this one product then you're going to even lose money lose $1 over all these clicks that you have paid for so the calculation would say the trash hold of a spent of a certain search term that you can allow to run in your account for a while would be with equal the amount of your profit margin so if your profit margin for example at a 30 percent rate would be $5 per product like in this example over here then this is the maximum amount of money that you're allowed to spend on a certain search term with no sales this means that a search there that's this bad it has spent six dollars and seven clicks and 500 impressions and no sale for you no sale for the yacon syrup then definitely it's going to be something that you would want so to make sure that you understand me really well basically this type of a search term is something that your audience is typing in the definitely users who are relevant in market who are purchasing for these types of product very similar to the one that you are selling they're tapping it in and it is relevant and they are relevant but we're still going to exclude the search term simply because it's not performing well it's not working for your account for your specific product and this specific campaign this is something that I will definitely go ahead and exclude in the let's say negative phrase match on a campaign level simply because we know for sure that this is something that's not working aside from this one search there we also have another one that's called Batra suite I think that this is the way how it's pronounced brought to sweet or ibaka suite let's look it up let's see what this means we have the same criteria here you can you can see 16 clicks almost 10 dollars spent like double from what we can afford to advertise for and no sales zero sales for the Baka suite search there now we want to learn what this is we have tested this keywords it has been a keyword in our account but after continuous testing we know for sure that after three months it hasn't sold a single item so this is something that we want to go ahead and consider excluding you can see for Bacchus weed you can also get various types of results which is also sugar replacement and mostly coming in a powdered shape so basically now that we have gone through a couple of search terms we noticed that there's this one common thing for them we are selling a syrup and people who are looking for products that mostly come in a powder shape are not making a purchase so this would come to a conclusion that if this repeats a lot and we might be able to isolate a phrase how they're just the world powder excluded in a in an additive phase match on a campaign level that protects your whole campaign from anyone who's looking for a powder simply because you're not selling a powder so that's one common thing and a conclusion that I've driven from our analysis here so another one to exclude using the same logic you can go ahead and just like go through all of them some of them you will have to exclude because they are being irrelevant like for example hero food is something that's just too wide in order for us to target unless you have unless you have something that a lot of budget at the test and you want to have a like a discovery campaign where you would use this campaign to expand the reach of your account of reach of your products and you want to invest an extra amount of money for customer acquisition then it makes sense but if you're a very tight on budget you have certain eCos goals to hit then it would not make a lot of sense to continue this keyword so since this was targeted in the account and it's turned out to be very impossible already eight dollars spent and this is something to exclude from the account and definitely pause in your targeted keyword list then for example so this is going to be an example where a keyword is not only performing badly but is also irrelevant for the account then you have viewers that are spenders without sales like they are relevance let's try and find such a so example we don't have that kind of example here but for example if you find a keyword that's mentions yacon syrup and has spent a huge amount of money without sales then this would be a case where you have to exclude a relevant keyword simply because it's not performing well relevant search them is not performing well you have to add it as a negative because it doesn't generate you any cells then the third level of keywords that you want to search terms that you want to exclude as negatives would be high spenders with very expensive sales like if you have an a cost target of let's say 30% is your target and this that's how much you can spend on acquiring one that one sale then you have a search term that has spent something that's already a hundred percent of the price of the product like a product price for example is fifteen dollars like we had in that example before and you have already had a search term that is spent $15 then and then after these 15 spent dollars it has generated one sale then this means your a costs going to be a hundred percent and this is something that if it doesn't improve in the future then still it would have to be eliminated simply because it's damaging your account a lot more than its helping so there will be high spenders with high a cost types of candidates for negatives then we also have a situation where in the search term report you will get some kind of results where you have for example competitors a since instead of a search term so I wouldn't exactly use all of these to like just go ahead and exclude them there are cases when for example this one is very frequent 54 impressions so it would definitely drive my attentions I would want to check what this listing is how do you decide what to do with these search tears that come as a since not not just regular search term that will give you information what a customer typed in but you instead of that you received a nascent what how to decide what to do with it basically you will still not look at the numbers here in this case we don't have a lot of money spent on this search there and not a lot of impressions if this was 500 impressions instead of 44 for the four that we have here 50 for that we have here then we would have to really seriously think about it because also the spend would be high that in a case where this kind of a sand is hurt in your account in terms of spending a lot without generating sales then what you can do in this case is not add the a sand as a negative but instead of that find what this competitor is brand name is and use that as a phrase match negative in your account so if this competitor is called swear sweetener Baker's then this is what you're going to use as your negative so that's what you do with competitors bases that come instead of search terms also there are cases where in the search term report you will receive something that's 100% relevant but still excluded from for some very specific reasons like for example you are running a campaign and this campaign has three are groups one of them is broad the other one is phrase third one is exact and each one of them covers only their own match types so basically if you ran a broad match and we'll just the generate new suggestions then you will new keyword suggestions that would be like an automated keyword research then you would exclude the relevant search terms from this a group on a group level simply because you want to tell the system this is something I've already harvested now keep looking for other examples be looking for more suggestions for me so this would be also like an interesting way to understand car negatives are being used and what all the features of negative keywords actually are and you can go really creative about using negatives in the account for various reasons this being one of them so definitely it's very important to understand what the goal of this specific campaign is what the goal of your ad groups is to be able to effectively use my negative keywords match types and negative keyword levels of usage properly in your account so this is extremely important that being said I've showed you a couple of example here you can definitely use all this information try at replicated in your account I hope you find it useful and if you have any questions feel free to ask us in the comment section comment section and also subscribe if you find this content relevant and we'll make sure we do our best to past on a regular basis post at least once a week so until next week thank you for watching and talk to you that bye bye