Mastering Amazon PPC: When and How to Use Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match Keywords

Your Amazon PPC campaigns are bleeding cash. You’re targeting the right keywords, optimizing your product listings, and still seeing a huge chunk of your ad spend disappear. You’re not alone.

The reality is that wasted ad spend is a common problem on Amazon. One of the biggest culprits is irrelevant search terms triggering your ads. The solution? Negative keywords. In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to use negative keywords to eliminate wasted ad spend and boost your Amazon PPC profitability. Let’s dive in.

Why Negative Keywords are Essential for Amazon PPC Success

Most sellers focus on finding the right keywords, but they forget about the keywords that are actually hurting their campaigns. These are the search terms that are costing you clicks without leading to sales. Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing up for these irrelevant searches.

Here’s why this matters:

• Reduce wasted ad spend: By blocking irrelevant searches, you ensure your budget is spent on potential customers.
• Improve ACOS: Fewer clicks on irrelevant terms mean a lower Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS).
• Increase conversion rates: By showing your ads to a more targeted audience, you’ll see a higher percentage of clicks turn into sales.
• Boost overall profitability: Less wasted spend and higher conversion rates translate to more profit in your pocket.

How to Find Money-Wasting Search Terms in Your Amazon PPC Campaigns

Before you can start using negative keywords, you need to identify the search terms that are costing you money. Here’s how:

1. Dive into Your Search Term Reports

Your search term reports are goldmines of information. They show you exactly what search terms triggered your ads and how they performed.

• Access the report: In Amazon Seller Central, navigate to Advertising > Campaign Manager > Advertising Reports > Sponsored Products > Search Term Report.
• Set the date range: Choose a date range of at least 30-60 days to get a good sample size.
• Analyze the data: Look for search terms with high impressions and clicks, but low or no sales.

2. Identify Irrelevant and Low-Converting Terms

Now that you have your search term report, it’s time to identify the money-wasting keywords.

• Look for irrelevant terms: These are search terms that are completely unrelated to your product. For example, if you’re selling protein powder, you might see search terms like “protein bar recipe” or “protein shake blender”.
• Check for low-converting terms: These are search terms that are related to your product but have a low conversion rate. For example, “cheap protein powder” might get a lot of clicks but not many sales if you’re selling a premium product.

3. Use the “Search Term Pivot Table” Feature in AdLabs

AdLabs’ Search Term Pivot Table feature makes this process even easier. It analyzes your search term data and identifies the worst-performing keywords, saving you hours of manual analysis.

Shawn Gharib, an AdLabs customer, says his favorite feature is “the nested tagging of campaigns, search terms, targets, and products.”

Two Types of Negative Keywords: Exact vs. Phrase Match

Amazon offers two types of negative keywords:

• Negative Exact Match: This prevents your ad from showing only when the search term exactly matches your negative keyword. For example, if you add “red shoes” as a negative exact match keyword, your ad will not show for “red shoes” but will show for “buy red shoes” or “red running shoes.”
• Negative Phrase Match: This prevents your ad from showing for any search term that contains your negative keyword phrase in the exact order. For example, if you add “red shoes” as a negative phrase match keyword, your ad will not show for “red shoes,” “buy red shoes,” or “red running shoes.”

The best choice depends on your specific needs. Exact match offers more control, while phrase match is more efficient for blocking broader irrelevant terms.

How to Add Negative Keywords in Amazon Seller Central

Adding negative keywords is a straightforward process:

1. Go to Campaign Manager: Navigate to Advertising > Campaign Manager in Seller Central.
2. Select your campaign: Choose the campaign you want to optimize.
3. Go to Targeting: Click into the ad group.
4. Choose Negative Targeting: Click “Negative Targeting” and then the “Negative Keywords” tab.
5. Add Negative Keywords: Enter your negative keywords, choose the match type (exact or phrase), and click “Add Keywords.”

Pro Tip: Regularly review and update your negative keyword list. Amazon search trends change, so it’s important to stay on top of it.

Real-World Example: Saving $2,400/Month with Negative Keywords

Let’s look at a real example. One of our clients was selling a premium coffee grinder. They noticed a lot of wasted ad spend on search terms like “coffee grinder cheap” and “used coffee grinder.”

Here’s what happened after implementing negative keywords:

• Before: ACOS was 38%, and they were spending $8,000/month on ads.
• After: Added “cheap” and “used” as negative phrase match keywords. ACOS dropped to 28%, and ad spend decreased to $5,600/month.
• Result: Saved $2,400/month in wasted ad spend while maintaining the same sales volume.

Automate Negative Keyword Management with AdLabs

Manually managing negative keywords can be time-consuming. AdLabs calculates this process with features like:

• Automated Search Term Analysis: AdLabs algorithmically identifies and suggests negative keywords based on your campaign performance.
• One-Click Negation: Add negative keywords directly from the AdLabs interface with a single click.
• Cross-Campaign Negation: Easily apply negative keywords across multiple campaigns for maximum efficiency.

As Matt Watson, another AdLabs user, puts it “For us, AdLabs is the right balance of efficiency + strategy + control—and it’s a big reason our brands scale smarter on Amazon.”

By automating negative keyword management, you can save time, reduce wasted ad spend, and focus on growing your business.

Don’t Let Wasted Ad Spend Drain Your Profits

Negative keywords are a powerful tool for optimizing your Amazon PPC campaigns. By identifying and blocking irrelevant search terms, you can reduce wasted ad spend, improve ACOS, and boost your overall profitability. Don’t wait – start using negative keywords today and see the difference they can make.

Key Discussion Points from the Episode

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

I’m, I’m signed out of my Amazon account on this computer, so you’ll have to look that up. But yeah, that’s a good point. And actually, Andrew, if you remember, there was a time when we couldn’t negative product target on those auto campaigns and that was a brutal time because we’d see in our searching reports all these ASINs appearing that we didn’t want to be showing up for.

But Amazon did not give us the ability to do negative product targeting. So if you are in your account and you’re on an auto campaign and you’re looking at the negative tab and you don’t see a product targeting option, it’s probably because that auto campaign is super, super old legacy and it’s, you know, predates when Amazon enabled negative product targeting on auto campaign. So if that is you, I’d recommend creating a new auto campaign.

Don’t worry about losing all the momentum on that. That. Well, I mean, if you’re, if you’re seeing irrelevant stuff in that auto campaign, negative ASIN or ASINS that you would like to negate, you’d have to restart and create a new auto campaign.

But did you get the answer, Andrew? Yeah, yeah. Quick status update on that.

So, yeah, with auto campaigns, you, at the campaign and ad group level, you can do both negative product targets and negative keywords. So that’s an important tidbit there. So you can do it at both levels.

Yeah. In case, if anyone’s wondering what a product targeting is, it’s, I mean, do you want to give a quick definition on that? I was about to and then I didn’t quite know how to say it.

It’s basically you can, you can target. I mean, it’s a good idea when Amazon introduced product targeting because there’s a lot of other ways in which we can find relevant audiences. Not just based off their search terms, what they’re looking, you know, what they’re searching for, but products that they’re looking at.

And so by targeting keywords, you know, you’re basically, if someone types something into the search, your, your ad is going to follow around that customer based off of what they typed in the search. And if you’re targeting an asin, you’re basically going to follow that ASIN around Amazon. So wherever that ASIN is going, you know, your, your ad has the ability to appear there as well.

This article is based on Episode 9 of That Amazon Ads Podcast. Subscribe for weekly Amazon PPC strategies.