Don’t Make This Amazon Keyword Harvesting Mistake: How to Do It Right

Your Amazon PPC campaigns aren’t converting like they used to. You’re trying to find new, profitable keywords, but the process feels like a shot in the dark. You’re probably keyword harvesting all wrong.

Most Amazon sellers make a critical mistake when trying to find new keywords. They just dump every search term with a sale into their campaigns, hoping for the best. This clogs up your campaigns with irrelevant keywords, driving up your ACOS and wasting ad spend.

In this article, we’ll break down the right way to harvest keywords, so you can find those hidden gems without tanking your profitability. Let’s dive in.

The Wrong Way to Harvest Keywords on Amazon

Here’s what’s happening: Most sellers look at their search term reports, see a keyword with a sale, and immediately add it as a broad match keyword to their auto or broad match campaigns.

The problem is, this approach ignores context. Just because a keyword resulted in a sale once doesn’t mean it’s consistently profitable or even relevant to your product.

Let’s look at a real example. A seller of “blue dog collars” sees that someone bought their collar after searching for “puppy supplies.” They then add “puppy supplies” as a broad match keyword. While it might generate some sales, it’s also going to attract a ton of irrelevant traffic from people looking for puppy food, toys, or training classes.

Why Context Matters for Profitable Keyword Harvesting

The reality is, relevancy is king on Amazon. The more relevant your keywords are to your product, the higher your conversion rate will be, and the lower your ACOS will be.

Think of it this way: Amazon rewards you for showing the right product to the right customer. When you target irrelevant keywords, you’re telling Amazon that you don’t know your target audience.

Here’s why that matters: Amazon’s algorithm will penalize you by lowering your ad rank and increasing your bids, ultimately costing you more money for fewer sales.

The Right Way to Harvest Keywords (Step-by-Step)

So, how do you harvest keywords the right way? It’s all about being strategic and focusing on intent.

Here’s a step-by-step process:

1. Analyze your search term reports: Don’t just look for keywords with sales. Look for patterns and trends. Which keywords are consistently generating sales?
2. Identify the buyer intent: What is the customer really looking for when they search for that keyword? Is it directly related to your product, or is it more general?
3. Assess the keyword’s relevance: How closely does the keyword match your product’s features and benefits? Does it accurately describe what you’re selling?
4. Group similar keywords: Cluster keywords with similar intent into tightly themed ad groups. This allows you to write more relevant ad copy and improve your conversion rates.
5. Add keywords as exact match: Only add keywords as exact match to your campaigns. Let me break this down. This gives you maximum control over your bids and ensures that you’re only showing your ads to the most relevant customers.
6. Continuously monitor performance: Track the ACOS, conversion rate, and click-through rate of your new keywords. If they’re not performing well, pause them.

Example: Turning “Dog Leash” into a Keyword Goldmine

Let’s say you sell “retractable dog leashes.” You find the search term “dog leash” in your search term report with a few sales.

Here’s how to harvest it the right way:

• Intent: The buyer is looking for a dog leash.
• Relevance: Highly relevant if you sell dog leashes.
• Action: Instead of just adding “dog leash” as a broad match keyword, create a new exact match campaign specifically for that keyword.
• Further optimization: You can further optimize by creating separate ad groups for “red dog leash,” “blue dog leash,” and “heavy duty dog leash,” if those are variations you sell.

This targeted approach ensures that you’re only showing your ads to people who are specifically looking for what you sell, resulting in higher conversion rates and lower ACOS.

Using AdLabs to Streamline Keyword Harvesting

AdLabs can make this process even easier. With our search term analysis tool, you can quickly identify high-potential keywords, assess their relevance, and add them to your campaigns with just a few clicks.

Most sellers don’t realize they can use AdLabs to create custom rules that automatically negate poorly performing search terms, preventing wasted ad spend and ensuring that your campaigns are always optimized for maximum profitability.

Don’t Forget Negative Keywords

Here’s the thing: Keyword harvesting isn’t just about finding new keywords. It’s also about identifying irrelevant keywords and adding them as negative keywords.

For example, if you sell premium dog collars, you might want to add “cheap” or “discount” as negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing up to bargain hunters.

Stop Wasting Money on Irrelevant Keywords

The key takeaway is this: Don’t just blindly add every keyword with a sale to your campaigns. Take the time to analyze the intent, assess the relevance, and group similar keywords into tightly themed ad groups. This strategic approach will help you find those hidden gems without tanking your profitability.

Ready to start harvesting keywords the right way?

Key Discussion Points from the Episode

Here are some of the most valuable insights Andrew and Stephen shared during the full episode discussion:

Alexa, play that Amazon ads podcast. Which one would you like to hear? The best one.

OK, now playing that Amazon ads podcast. This is not everything else. These gentlemen are completely changing their game.

After listening to that Amazon ads podcast, my ads are finally profitable. I also heard they’re pretty cute. All right, you might be asking why does this topic even matter?

You guys already covered keyword harvesting in another video. What more is to be said? Now, the reason why we’re making this video is because we see that most people in the Amazon space are doing this wrong.

And there’s one common mistake that most people are getting completely wrong when it comes to harvesting. It’s that they’re over harvesting. They’re harvesting way too many keywords.

They’ll basically take a look at their search report and they’ll look for anything with one order. And they’ll say, that’s got an order. That’s relevant for my product.

We need to harvest it into keyword status. We need to be targeting that directly in manual campaigns. There’s a few reasons why this is wrong.

And this is ineffective and it’s not really necessary to be harvesting every single thing that gets an order in your Amazon campaigns. Number one is that a lot of times if a keyword only has one order on it, you don’t know the volume. A lot of times you’ll see orders on keywords that are very low volume.

If you were to go search up the search volume on helium 10, day to day, or wherever, you’ll see that that doesn’t even register in most indexes for getting a lot of search volume. You’ll see things that get one impression, one click and one order. These are just one off sales.

That typically only happen every once in a while. These are things that only get searched pretty and infrequently. So the problem with what Andrew just described of over harvesting and particularly in this first issue with low volume search shows a low volume keywords is that after you pull in all these items with one order that perhaps only had one impression or one click, you end up having way too many keywords in your campaigns or ad groups, which from the previous episode or an episode a few weeks ago, it’s not that having too many keywords is a problem per se, but when it’s a lot of low volume keywords, it can tend to result in the death by 1000 cuts scenario in which your most people’s bidding systems are always going to be increasing bids on low visibility terms.

You just increase it over and over and over again. And pretty soon you’re up to $1 or $2 bids on all these low visibility items where the problem was never the fact that you weren’t bidding high enough, you’re just never going to get enough clicks on those because they just don’t get enough search volume in the first place. And so you just end up having on average a lot of keywords that are averaging a higher CPC than what you can usually afford.

And that is the primary reason for how you end up with thousands of one click keywords with no sales that is basically like a vampire just draining the life out of your PPC account. And while there are some tools,

This article is based on Episode 83 of That Amazon Ads Podcast. Subscribe for weekly Amazon PPC strategies.