Define Product Fit Criteria

Outcome: Score each idea against demand, simplicity, compliance, defensibility, shipping profile, returns risk, and margin potential.

What to do in this lesson

Watch: start with the lesson video.
Learn: use the summary and key points to capture the operating principle.
Do: complete the action steps against one real product, SKU, campaign, supplier, or workflow.
Submit: write one action card with owner, evidence, next step, risk, status, and review date.

Watch

Hosted on Google Drive.

Lesson summary

This lesson teaches how to determine the product type (non-subjective, semi-subjective, or subjective) for your Amazon products based on factors like customer buying behavior, keyword search volume, and competition. The product type dictates the appropriate PPC strategies and tactics to use for advertising.

Key points

Product type is determined by the subjectivity of the product, measured by customer buying behavior, keyword search volume, and competition
Non-subjective products have high search volume for hyper-relevant keywords and the primary buying decision is based on function
Semi-subjective products have some hyper-relevant keywords but design is also a key buying factor
Subjective products have broad keywords, low search volume, and the buying decision is primarily based on design
Keyword relevancy is critical - hyper-relevant and very relevant keywords should be targeted in exact match campaigns to drive high conversion and organic ranking

Action checklist

Determine the product type of your key products using the provided framework
Identify hyper-relevant and very relevant keywords for your products to target in exact match PPC campaigns
Avoid low-relevancy keywords that indicate browsing/shopping behavior and put those in broad/phrase match campaigns or exclude them

Full transcript

Open transcript

Other method was a very one size fits all approach, right? Everyone does copy the same way. We write our bullets the same way. We write our titles the same way. Within the certain character range, blah, blah, blah. We create images. We have one image for this. We have one image that shows sizes. And we do all of these things. There’s just kind of one size fits all approach. And that no longer works. Okay. Again, as Amazon changes, we have to change as well. So there’s a lot of things that we’re going to go into discuss. And all of these things that have been kind of embedded into this framework. Okay. So if we all sell in different niches niches, however you want to say it. We all sell different products and we all sell to different customers. Our strategy should actually reflect the differences. Okay, it has to. If it doesn’t, then we’re just making the same old mistakes that we’ve been making for years on end, right? So product type. So this is a key word. This is something you’re going to hear a lot of today. Especially throughout the week. But product type reframes the expectations and deployment of the strategies that you use to be successful on Amazon. Now this conversation is all about PPC. But in all fairness, product type actually dictates how you do product development, how you write your copy, how you set up your images and all of those things. But for this week, we’re just going to reference it for PPC. All right. So the first line of business, we’re going to be talking about product types. Okay, and this applies to the sub category that you’re in and also your product. And I’ll break that down as we get through this. So the first thing we have to talk about is subjectivity. Okay, what is it? And the actual definition is just something that is subjective or something that is subjective is based on personal opinions and feelings rather than facts. All right, it’s not super helpful. I suppose when you’re thinking about it in terms of PPC, but when you’re thinking about your product. Somebody, how they feel about your product or why they want your product is subjective, right? It doesn’t matter how what you think about your product and matters what your customer thinks about your product. Okay. So for example, this is a Jackson Pollock painting. I think it’s called 17 a or something like that. It’s sold for $200 million to somebody or some institution. I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, my four-year-old could have done this. But to somebody, this was worth a whole lot of money. So art is obviously something we could all agree is very subjective. Right. So when you think about subjectivity, think about personal opinion on something. In this case, it’s going to be our products. Okay. So that being said, there are three product types. All measured based on how subjective one is over the other. So when we talk about this, we’re referring to the subcategory that you compete in and to your own product. All right. This will all make sense or more sense as we go through this. The first product type is called non-subjective. Okay. Non-subjective products typically have many hyper relevant keywords. And the primary buying decision is usually based around function. Okay. Think of commodities. I have a bunch of examples. We’ll go through in a minute. The next product type is semi-subjective. All right. These products also have a lot of hyper relevant keywords. But the buying decision is not only function, but design is a core component of that buying decision. Okay. So when somebody is buying a semi-subjective product, how it looks or how it is designed is going to be a key factor in why they purchase that product over another. And lastly, we have subjective products. These always look bad when you compare them to non and semi, but there’s a lot of multi seven eight nine figure sellers selling subjective products. All right. All right. So subjective typically have broader keywords. Very few, if any hyper relevant keywords. And the buying decision is almost always solely related to the design itself. If the product doesn’t look exactly the way the customer wants, they simply won’t buy it. And because the selection is not as heavy as it would be for a non-subjective or semi-subjective product, the price is less important. Okay. It’s not that it’s not important. It’s just less important. Okay. So Justin. Can I dive in? Can I take a moment real quick, just to clarify a couple things with this. And hey, guys, I didn’t intro myself. I’m just a side show for today. Fred and Pettit. Hello. But I wanted to cover the product type piece. Don’t get too caught up on the bucketization of these words. This is sort of a sliding scale of subjectivity. Everyone’s going to fall into some range, but we try to organize it in a unique way or an easy to digest way. So that you guys can understand the concept and try to place yourself on the product type spectrum. Along with this, it’s one one other way to clarify this is with the product type, just really becomes. Like when a customer comes in search of your product, how browsable the keywords sets are as they’re going through their journey. So kind of frame that in your mind. Don’t get too caught up on the bucketization. It’s just going to help you simplify where you’re at currently. So just want to cover that. Exactly. Love it. I think just why just why transitioning there in the chat box guys and on Facebook just seeing that list before we kind of show the examples. And go ahead and drop what you think you’re the target products that you’re going to be working on this week, like you’re maybe your hero skew. Or maybe it’s one that’s got potential that’s fallen behind. What do you think you are? So drop it in the chat box. Think of the products that you’ve got in mind and drop in there. Yeah, so we’re getting a super of semi subjective subjective semi. Okay, cool. Now carry that thought forward and let’s see if you’re right. Right on. Alright, so let’s break this down a little bit further. So product type is essentially measuring subjectivity. Alright, and there’s three key parts of that. The first is customer avatar. Okay, this is who’s buying your product and why they’re buying your product. Okay, so the buyer intention is essentially the problem that they have. When a customer is buying something on Amazon, they don’t care what the product is. They care that whatever they’re buying solves a problem. That’s why they’re there in the first place. No matter how vain or important the product might be or the problem might be, it doesn’t matter. They are there to solve a problem. So when you think about how a customer shops, you need to be solution oriented. In other words, your product listing the keyword you pick and all of those things have to align with a solution. Not a product. Okay, no one cares what you’re selling. They care how it solves a problem. So you have to bear that in mind. The second part of this is the buying decision. Okay, there’s a lot of subjectivity here. Why one person buys an espresso machine and why another person buys an espresso machine. Are not necessary the same thing. So what is important to the buyer and that’s the buying decision. The second component here where there’s a lot of subjectivity is in the keywords and or search terms. Okay, this is how they find your product. Are they able to find your product easily? Why are why not? Okay, generally speaking products that have a lot of light for light competitors and the search results. Be are less subjective or a more non subjective or semi subjective product type. Okay, and then volume. This is another indicator. So if there are a bunch of hyper relevant keywords that like are exactly what you’re selling. But the search volume is less than a hundred. Well, not very many people apparently know that those are the right keywords to use. Okay, so if you have low volume keywords and a lot of non light for light competitors. You are more subjective. All right. Again, we’re going to go through a bunch of examples to really drive this home. The third piece here is the product itself. Okay, this is what they’re buying. And I hopefully it is the solution to their problem. Okay, there are three components for the product itself. But in this is essentially the primary buying decision. You have price, you have function and utility or you have design aesthetics and specifications. Okay, one thing I want you to keep in mind. All of these things are important all the time. But it is the primary buying decision that we care about. Okay. And as Brendan mentioned earlier, subjectivity is a sliding scale. There’s nothing that is truly non subjective. Not a single thing. Okay, if there was, there’d only be one competitor and one offer. That would be truly non subjective. All right. But everything is on a sliding scale here. We’re simply using the terms non subjective, semi subjective and subjective. To somewhat put things into a category. So when we talk about, hey, which campaign should you start first? We’re going to base it around the product type that you have. Because that product type will dictate who’s trying to buy your product. Where they’re most likely to convert. And if there are enough keywords available to you in order to target for keyword ranking purposes. Okay. So all of this comes back to PPC. And you’re going to see that as we go through this. Now, let’s actually identify what you have. Okay. The, the first part of that is the searchability. Okay. This is traffic. Okay. Do most customers, in other words, your customer avatar. Do they know how to find your product? Okay. In other words, are there keywords and a lot of them that are hyper relevant? Are there a bunch of them? Okay. Now the primary buying decision, which is the conversion component of this. What does the customer care about the most when deciding to make a purchase? Okay. This is basically another way of reiterating the last couple of slides here. You have price, you have function and the design. Okay. These are the three primary buying decisions on Amazon. There are many others, but those are the main ones. Let’s talk about the first thing, searchability or traffic. Okay. Is your product easily searchable? That’s what you should be asking yourself. Pretty much when you’re doing product development after you’ve already sourced and got the product Amazon. It’s a little too late, but ideally you identify this before you ever source the product. Okay. Is it easy for your customer to find? Does it have hyper relevant keywords? Does it have only relevant keywords? Are there only primarily shopping and browsing intent keywords? What’s the search volume of all of those, right? Do you have high search volume for the hyper relevant keywords or all the hyper relevant keywords low volume? Okay. So all of these things impact searchability. And then lastly here, we have like for like competitors in both function and design. I’m going to show you that I’ve figured this out for your product in particular. Now the second part of this again is the primary buying decision. What are the most important factors to most customers? There’s going to be an exception for every single product and every single niche. But what we’re trying to capture is what is most important to most people. Okay. And ideally that most people should align with the product that you have developed or the solution that you have developed. So again, the price, functional utility design aesthetics and specifications. Okay. The more designs, aesthetics and specifications that exist, the more subjective the product ultimately becomes. All right. And as I said earlier, all of these things and many others are factors when a customer makes a purchase, but these are the top ones. That are really going to dictate why they’re buying your product over somebody else’s. Okay. Now why the hell does all this matter? Right. What is the impact for you as a seller? Why are we talking about product type to begin with? Okay. So the first is the search volume of the available hyper relevant keywords is going to be different for each product type. Okay. And that’s why they exist in all fairness to begin with. Okay. If you’re a subjective product, you likely don’t have any high volume hyper relevant keywords. Okay. And that’s okay. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to know that before you go try to put top of search placement on all your keywords and PBC is not going to work. Okay. The broadness and relevancy of all the keywords that you have available to you. Conversion rate. This is a massive indicator of whether or not your product is going to convert by per keyword. Okay. Everyone knows if you go to the or maybe you don’t know, but if you go to the search for your performance report, you can see conversion rate by keyword, right? If the conversion rate is different for each keyword, that means the keywords we pick and run in our advertising need to be the keywords that have the highest conversion rate. We don’t want to be picking keywords that naturally have a low conversion rate. So this is a massive impact for you when it comes to advertising. The product type also helps us figure out where clicks and conversions take place on page one or maybe even page two. For non subjective products, top of search is going to be the primary place where clicks and conversions take place. You can see that in the brand analytics data. You can also see that in the SQP data. All right. For non sub or for subjective products, it’s quite the opposite. People are browsing people are shopping. So being at the top of search is not near as important. And if you don’t have hyper relevant keywords there to begin with, why are you targeting top of search? Okay. And then lastly here, when you need to introduce targeted discovery campaigns. Now we have not talked about what the heck targeted discovery campaigns are, but think of them essentially as auto broad and phrase campaigns. Okay. The product type that you have will help dictate when you need to introduce those campaigns because of the number of hyper relevant keywords you may or may not have available. All right. So if I were to summarize all this into like the most technical definition in the world, it would be this. All right. Non subjective products are easy to find. It’s easy for the buyer to make a buying decision and the customer preference is primarily around function and utility. Okay. For semi subjective products, they’re also easy to find. They’re kind of easy to make a buying decision and then design aesthetics and specs are important to the customer, not just function and utility, but also the way they look for that customer. These are harder to find. There’s not a lot of keywords. It’s more difficult to make a buying decision because the buyer itself may not even know what they want just yet. And then finally customer preference is literally everything. All right. When somebody’s looking for a vase for their table in their house, they don’t know exactly what they want yet. They just know they want a vase that goes on their table in their house. There’s not a lot of keywords that are going to describe that. So that would be a more subjective product. So let’s actually look at this and break this down a little bit because I want to make sure this point really gets driven home. I don’t want to go through some examples. So one of the things I want you guys to do later tonight, which we’ll review at the end. You don’t have to write anything down at this moment. You’re going to have this worksheet and I’m going to quickly run through how it’s meant to function. So when we everything we just talked about, you have a searchability and you have the primary buying decision as the two primary factors and how we’re going to identify if you have a non subjective, semi subjective or subjective product, right. So if you have rankable keywords or a breakable hyper relevant keywords with at least 10,000 searches or more collectively. So if you have five that are all 2000 search volume, then that counts. Oh, I’m afraid that’s yeah. So if you have a rankable hyper relevant keywords with 10,000 or more search volume a month, that’s typically going to be non subjective products and semi subjective products subjective, not so much. If you have five or more like for like competitors when it comes to function and design, non subjective and semi subjective are also going to follow that category and subjective simply won’t. Now this is a searchability component. So this is about all the traffic that can go to your listing right now the primary buying decision, you have price function and you price function and design. Okay, when it comes to non subjective products, price and function are the top primary buying decisions for semi subjective, it’s going to be function and design and for subjective, it’s primarily going to be design. As some examples, so let’s actually talk about examples to really make sure this shows up. Let me see if I can zoom in here and hopefully make it a little bit easier for you guys to see. So when we talk about the different product types, all right, non subjective products, you have band aids, no strips, coffee filters toilet paper, garlic presses, press towels, even vinyl gloves, simple electronic products, all right, the more complicated ones, not so much. Turkey Baster’s double neck containers, K5E ethernet cable. Okay, all of these are non subjective products because the number of variables or number of preferences are very limited. Okay, or there’s enough volume in the keywords available for each specific type of band aid or each specific type of coffee filter for the customer to already know how to find what they want. Okay, so for example, toilet paper, everyone knows about toilet paper map, you know, you got one that’s a four pack, but it really holds like 5,746 rolls and then you get another four pack, but only holds 800 million rolls for the toilet paper. Everyone seen that toilet paper map doesn’t make any sense, but toilet paper itself is just toilet paper, they need something to wipe their butt, they go to Amazon, they can decide how many they want and that’s about it. All right, everyone has multiple plies or single ply, they have offers or they have multiple offers on their listing, so toilet paper is just non subjective. All right, things start getting weird when you get into semi subjective, this is when customer preference becomes super important. Swaddle blankets, bed sheets, garden hoses, spatula sets, French presses, bath towels, kitchen towels, work gloves, phone cases, all of these products are semi subjective and the biggest difference between these products and the non subjective is the design element is significantly more important. Okay, for swaddle blankets, for example, if they are looking for swaddle blankets with flowers, they simply won’t buy one that’s blue. It doesn’t matter what the price is, the function is exactly the same, but it has to be one with flowers, same with bed sheets, if they need bed sheets that are black, they’re not going to buy some that are red. Okay, so design is a core buying decision when it comes to these products, garden hoses as a weird one, it should have been non subjective, but there’s been so many sellers that have introduced new designs for garden hoses, it’s now a semi subjective product type. Not only have different sizes, but you also have materials, you have the different connectors and you’ve got metal ones, you’ve got the tricky ones, I don’t remember what those are called that were on that TV ad show came up with what I called either, but garden hoses semi subjective spatula sets, same thing, does it have what they want. And then finally, all the way in the end is when things get really broad, okay, so subjective products are things like home decor, whether it’s art shelving, throw pillows, things like Halloween costumes, pretty much all supplements, not every single supplement, but most supplements, cosmetics, jewelry, craft kits, seasonal holiday gifts. And the one thing I really want you to notice here is you have commodities on this side and you basically have categories on this side. Okay, and that’s because for subjective products, it’s very hard to describe exactly what they are, and that’s why they have their own strategy that we’re going to talk about in detail tomorrow. Alright, so how we actually make this determination, there’s a short and sweet method, you don’t, as Brennan talked about earlier, you don’t need to get too caught up in like bucketizing yourself here, I simply want you to make two or answer two primary questions. Do you have keyword volume keywords with volume, if the answer is yes, then the next question is, do you have at least five like for like competitors based on function and design, if the answer is yes, you’re not subjective, if the answer is no, you’re semi subjective. And then at the beginning, if you don’t have that many hyper relevant keywords with that much volume, the answer is no, and then the same question, do you have at least five competitors like for like based on function and design, if the answer is yes, then you’re semi subjective, if the answer is no, you’re subjective. So super simple, super straightforward, I only want you to do this as an extra item for later tonight, you don’t have to screenshot this or anything, I’m going to give this to you as a handout. Alright, so the whole point of this is helping you to really understand what it is you’re selling, the product type itself is simply going to capture what you offer and how we’re going to approach that from a PPC perspective. Alright, so before moving on, based on this criteria here, has anybody’s product type change based on what they originally thought in all fairness, most products do fall in the semi subjective category, that’s why it’s on here twice, it’s pretty much the same. So cool, so a few people say no, a few people saying yes, it’s actually about half and half at the moment, right on, great, so cool, that means you learned something, I love it. Alright, okay, so let’s dive in to the next kind of step here, the key kind of takeaway on this is that more customer preferences equals more subjectivity. Your job as a seller is to make sure you capture that properly and then show up for the right customer at the right time with the right offer. Okay, now this is one thing I want to address, I think I saw a few questions in the chat box around this as well, so I want to be super clear on your product type versus the sub category, and this is where things can be kind of confusing, but it doesn’t need to be. So your product may or may not match the other product types in your sub category, I’ve got an example to make this super clear. Now, this is kind of off topic, but I wanted to bring it up product differentiation is the process of adding subjectivity to your product. So when you’re developing a product and you’re trying to stand out, make a different, you are literally adding a layer of subjectivity to that product, and that is perfectly okay within reason, but you need to be careful not to over engineer your product, if you over engineer it, you can essentially change the actual function and utility to the point that you’re no longer serving the right customer avatar. So this is again, a little off topic, but it’s worth calling out so don’t over engineer it unless it’s done on purpose. So as a quick example, these are garlic presses, everyone has been using the same example for the past like 10 plus years, and that’s because it’s just a good product example to use, especially in this scenario. Garlic presses are non subjective, there are two different kinds, you have the squeeze kind, you have the smash kind, okay, everyone is selling the same damn thing. There’s nothing really special about any of them, most of them are stainless steel, you got someone with a plastic one, you got one with red rubber handles, woohoo, it doesn’t change the function utility whatsoever, and most customers don’t really care. Okay, however, then you’ve got Dracula down here, you’ve got this seller who is selling, they really call it Dracula, so this is a garlic press, in fact, it’s a smasher, I believe it’s a smashable kind. So the actual function utility didn’t change, but what they did is they added a design element that looks absolutely nothing like anybody else in this category. Okay, so in this example, this seller added the layer of subjectivity to their product in a very non subjective category, okay, so this is okay if it works. This seller had no idea, at least in my opinion, take that for what it is, they had no data at least to support that having a Dracula themed garlic press was going to be a success, their gamble paid off, they sell like a thousand plus of these a month. So they’re doing really well with this, but this is a very simple example of your category can be one thing and you can be another. Now for the most part, none of this really changes the deployment of the strategy, so long as you understand what keyword you can and cannot target based on the reality of what you decided to create versus what everyone else is selling and what the customer is expecting to see. When a customer types in garlic press, they’re expecting to see these results, they’re not expecting to see this, so they have to really change their mind about what their expectations are in this scenario. So key take ways before moving on to the next conversation and we get a little feedback here, every product, regardless of whether it’s non semi or subjective has some level of customer preference or subjectivity to it. Okay, how subjective your product is should influence the strategies and tactics that you deploy that is like kind of the whole point, the whole reason we’re covering this is because when we talk about the actual structure itself, your product type will tell you what strategy, which of the three strategies you’re going to deploy. Okay, product type is setting expectation for conversion rate, the quantity of ranking keywords for ranking campaigns, where your product will convert best on page one and the deployment of targeted discovery campaigns. So if you kind of take nothing else away from what we just covered, that last set of bullets is what matters the most your product type is going to be resetting expectations for how you convert how many keywords you have available to target for ranking purposes, where your product will convert on page one. And when you need to start running more discovery campaigns to find more keywords or more essence categories audiences, whatever. Okay, so let me know the chat is also is all of this tracking is making sense as everyone grasping what the concept is for a product type and how that applies to their product. So type product type in big capital letters, let us know you track in this and let us know this is landing because every single conversation from this point forward during this challenge workshop is going to be framed in the frame of what product type you sell because it forms the basis of every future decision that we make. Because this framework is tailored specifically to the type of product you sell it’s not a one size fits all approach because that while that got us here it won’t get us there and with all the variables and updates competition and margin compression that’s taking place on Amazon, we have to get more precise in our execution. And the way we get more precise in our execution is deploy the correct strategies, placements and tactics for the type of product we sell that’s influenced by the buying behavior and the path to purchase. That that shopper is taking so yeah, everyone saying product type there in the chat and a thinner I know you were feeling the energy in the chat box that I saw you commenting on Facebook feeling good right. Yeah, especially the toilet paper comments were cracking me up, but yeah. Awesome. I’m glad I could keep it. I was going to say that’s going to live on Justin. Yeah, that’s a new one. That was a new one. I haven’t heard that before. It’s a meme. It exists. All right. All right. Moving on. That’s wrong. Meem card Justin. Great. You’re in the chat. Drop in the Facebook comments in the group. All right. Okay, guys, let’s let’s switch gears here. So we’ve covered product type in the next point of conversation is going to be around keyword relevancy and keyword intention. All right, so there’s a few more definitions I want to call out. Some of these should be reviewed for most of you, but this is this is incredibly important to me. So this is like one of those topics where I get real passionate and I start yelling. The keyword research in general and then understanding what keywords are relevant or not relevant to your product is literally the most important thing about selling on Amazon outside of developing your product itself. If you do not understand how to get the right eyeballs to your listing, you’re going to fail. And I’m going to say it that bluntly. So keyword relevancy and intention is a core component of success, especially when it comes to advertising. All right, so there’s a few things we have to define so that when I keep saying these over and over, you know what the heck I’m talking about. All right. The first is buyer intent. Okay, does the customer know what they want? All right, that is the buyer intention. Do they know what they want? And then as we talked about earlier, do they know how to find it? Right. Your keywords are a good indicator of this. So buyer intention kind of answers two questions. Does the customer know what they want and does the customer know how to find it? Okay, this is the difference between shopping or buying your job, especially when it comes to advertising on Amazon is to show up for the buying keywords and to stop showing up for the shopping keywords. Why do you want to get a click with no sale? That’s what happens when you show up for browsing or shopping keywords. Okay, so buyer intention is everything and we’re going to talk about how to figure out what that is through the keywords, which as it so happens is the next bullet. So keyword intent. Okay, what is that? Does the keyword indicate that the customer knows what they want? All right, does the keyword align with a buyer intention or a shopping intention? This, as I said, indicates a buyer intent and as an example, you have 4K TVs or you have Samsung QN85C 4K TV. 4K TVs is a browsing keyword. The customer does not know what kind of TV they want other than 4K. They don’t know the brand, they don’t know the size, they don’t know how many Hertz is at 120 Hertz is at 240 Hertz. Do they even know what the hell that means? Do they care? We have no idea. 4K TVs is a shopping keyword. It’s a browsing keyword. All right, we’re on the flip side. Somebody searching for Samsung QN85C 4K TV. That’s a mouthful. They know exactly what they want. They’ve already done the shopping. They’ve already done the browsing. That’s how they knew to type this in. So if you were to be selling this TV, this specific model, make a model, this would be an incredibly hyper relevant keyword that you would get a crap ton of sale done. Whereas if you were to target 4K TVs, you would be essentially participating in the customer’s shopping journey. But most likely not going to get a sale. You could, and good for you, you could thumbs up, but you’re not going to get conversions most of the time. So it also indicates the product type. And as another example, and we’re going to pretty much going to use these examples a lot throughout this week, you have vase for centerpiece, and then you have vinyl gloves. All right, if I were to ask you to describe or just draw on a piece of paper, a vase for a centerpiece for your table, you would all draw something very different. And you’re not allowed to use the artwork trick you learned when you were in middle school. You have to draw something that is actually what you had in mind. So vase for centerpiece is not very, what would you call it, a specific on the type of vase. Is it round? Is it square? Is it tall? Is it short? Does it hold flowers? Does it hold marbles? Who the hell knows? So vase for centerpiece indicates that it is a subjective product, right? Whereas vinyl gloves, everyone knows what a vinyl glove is. You can picture that in your head. You know that there’s very few options to choose from. You’ve got black ones, clear ones, blue ones, and then in the month of October, you can buy pink ones. Okay, so vinyl gloves are pretty straightforward. Most people know what that is, so it’s a more non-subjective product type. Okay, and then finally, we’re going to talk about keyword relevancy a lot in this throughout the rest of the week in all fairness. So keyword relevancy is how effectively the keyword describes your product and or the buyer’s intention. Okay, and then how close is that keyword typed into your actual product offer? Keyword relevancy is everything. Keyword relevancy will determine whether or not you make a sale or you don’t, is when it comes to Amazon advertising. So I want to define this better than I have in the past. So hyper relevant keywords is not a new concept. This is something we’ve been talking about for almost four years now, I think. And I don’t know that I’ve done a great job of explaining exactly what hyper relevant keywords are and why it’s so important you understand the difference between that and something that’s only relevant or something that is a browsing keyword. Okay, so a hyper relevant keyword explicitly and unmistakably describes your product when the customer types it in your product shows up in the search results and many other competitors just like you also show up. That is a hyper relevant keyword. Okay, gifts for girls is not a hyper relevant keyword for any product ever for the end of all time. Okay, just because he sell a product that is meant for girls and can be given as a gift doesn’t make that keyword hyper relevant. Okay, so I want to be super clear on this, it has to explicitly describe your product. A very relevant keyword describes part of it, right, those are useful. There’s a lot of keywords that are very relevant, but they’re not exactly what you’re selling. Okay, and then you have a shopping keyword, which typically only captures the product concept or the category. When we looked at the subjective product type examples, most of those were shopping keywords home decor art or wall home decor, right, that’s a shopping keyword. It’s very hard to be specific. Okay, now the kind of whole point of having this conversation as it relates to PPC is the only keywords. We are going to target when it comes to advertising or hyper relevant and very relevant keywords. And the reason that is because these are the only keywords that are actually rankable unless you are, which we haven’t even talked about yet, but unless you’re essentially a phase four seller. In other words, you’re one of the top one to maybe three sellers in your entire category. You simply cannot rank for categorical or shopping based keywords. So for the remainder of this week, when we talk about keywords that you should target an advertising, it is only hyper relevant and very relevant keywords. So let’s look at this. I’m going to say this one more time. But I might make a sale on that keyword. If you if that is the thought that runs through your head when you go through your search term report, that’s the reason you have high tacos. If you’re thinking I might make a sale, that means you don’t actually know what you’re selling and you don’t know exactly how to get in front of the right customer. The question you should be asking is I or it’s not even a question. It’s a statement. Yes, I’m most likely going to make a sale on that keyword. It exactly describes my product. It captures the essence of what I’m selling. You shouldn’t be looking at keywords or search terms, thinking I might make a sale. Right. You might get struck by lightning, but you don’t want to put money on that. So quick putting money on that on PPC. All right. That’s kind of the point here. So this is not a good strategy. Don’t have that mindset. So let’s look at some examples. Make sure we break this down and I’ve got I got a few examples here. This isn’t the only one. So buckle in. Everything you see on the left here is hyper relevant. Okay. Black vinyl gloves, muzzle swaddle blankets, girl, garden hose, 100 foot heavy duty, 10th generation iPad case for kids and so on. These are hyper relevant. These capture the essence of what it is that you’re selling, assuming you sell these things. Right. Now vinyl gloves is very relevant because it’s a more non subjective product. When somebody types them vinyl gloves, they see the results. All the sellers sell the same exact thing. So everyone’s like for like they have the same variations, the same variation colors. They have all have powder free. They all have powdered versions. So vinyl gloves are still very relevant. Whereas cooking gloves is more of a shopping keyword. Right. Now we also know the vinyl gloves can be used for cooking. They can be used in medical stuff. There’s all sorts of applications for vinyl gloves. So cooking gloves really isn’t capturing much of anything other than the buyer is still shopping. They don’t know what they want. Okay. So as you move from left to right, going down this list, this is the difference between something that is hyper relevant and very relevant. What you want to rank for and things that do capture the category or the concept, but are going to be very hard to rank for. These keywords on the right here typically have a lot of search volume ski gloves ski goggles. Lots and lots of search volume. It’d be awesome if you could rank at the top of page one for that. But the likelihood you can do that without an established product already at high volumes in terms of revenue, high review count, big review mode. It’s unlikely unless you have those things already. So when we’re running our advertising, we want to live over here. We want to target the hyper relevant very relevant keywords that are going to lead to a sale because they are most likely going to convert not just my convert. Okay. You might convert on these. You’re most likely to convert on these. Okay. So all that to say when we keep saying hyper relevant, you can rank for it. That’s what we mean. So when in doubt, there’s a real simple test for this. It’s actually not hard to do this. You just check the results on Amazon. Okay. Type in the search term that you want to see if it is hyper relevant or not. Look at the results are most of the results like for like are some of them like for like or none of them like for like. If none of them are like for like, it’s not very hyper relevant. Okay. Unless your product just happens to be the only product on Amazon. That is that keyword. Okay. So this isn’t terribly difficult to kind of figure out and go through. But let’s look at a couple more examples. I’m not going to go through this in great detail. I want to again, I can give this to you as a handout so you can kind of examine it a little bit more. But the reason this is important and the reason I want to cover this in such detail is. It is when it comes to actually making the conversion. It comes down to the keyword you’re targeting and your product offer. Those are the only two things that matter. The traffic and the conversion. Okay. So there’s three examples here. You have a non subjective product. And this example up here, which is going to be part of gloves. You have a semi subjective product example, which is going to be a muzzle and swaddle blanket for girls specifically. And then you have a subjective product, which is going to be a base. All right. So when we look at these. I want you to look at the sliding scales. Okay. So if subjectivities always on a sliding scale. So are these metrics here. On the left, you can see that gloves is kind of like the most simplistic way of describing a vinyl glove. Right. You have gloves. You have categories like work gloves, you have gardening gloves and so on and so forth. But in our case, we’re selling vinyl gloves. And if we really kind of dive into this like tree of potential hyper relevant keywords. We can get vinyl gloves large. And then even more hyper relevant. You can get vinyl gloves large black and then vinyl gloves large black 100 pack. So you can see the same thing happen across every kind of keyword tree or keyword family, if you will, when it comes to something that’s non subjective. There’s a bunch of different ways to describe the same thing using just a random mixture of mostly the same words. All right. As you go from left to right, the results on Amazon become more subjective. Gloves is going to be more subjective. There’s no telling what’s going to show up vinyl gloves might not show up at all. But the further right you go, the results become less subjective because the customer is removing the subjectivity by adding it to the keyword. Okay. The expectation is on the left, you’re going to have a lower conversion rate. And as you go to the right, you’re going to have a higher conversion rate. So if we know that to be true, the keywords we want to put in our advertising campaigns are going to be on the right hand side here. You have shopping. So I don’t want to interrupt your flow. I want to clarify a couple of things that I’ll raise my hand in the future. I put a little emoji. You didn’t see it. But a good way to think about this guys is think about the customer journey when they go on to Amazon. They’re going to start with a search, right? Your goal, if we were to summarize this is not to be the first search. It’s to be the last search with the most buying intent, right? If you look at gloves all the way on the left, they’re using that as their first search intent. So they don’t really know what they’re looking for. They kind of know they’re looking for gloves. Maybe they even have it pictured in their mind. They just don’t have to describe it. They might start with gloves. And then they might look through the list of options on page one. And they might click on a product and go, oh, that’s actually what I was talking about work gloves. Okay, let me go to type in work gloves and see all the types of work gloves. Then you see how like that search they’re going to come back up to the search bar and kind of rotate through the keyword options until they get to a more descriptive keyword, which is where you want to show up for the highest conversion potential. Is that making sense everybody? I just want to try to drive that home because I think that’s really what Justin’s pressing on here is like you don’t want to be the first search. The broadest search you want to be the last search with the highest conversion intent. So that being said, I think that pretty much drives the point home, are we good on this thing the only thing I want to call out here is subjective products. And we talked about it already, but when it comes to subjective products and you look at these individual words here, none of them are hyper relevant. Not going to get close to being pretty relevant, but in all retrospects, if you were to search for these keywords on the Amazon and you sold a vase for centerpiece for your kitchen table or something. These results would be so terribly different that you’d realize none of them are like for like you have some that are bulk, you have some that are single, you have tall ones, getting one spat one short ones, you’ve got every variety possible. Okay, so the key point I want to drive home here, subjective products and hyper relevant keywords generally do not align. That is okay, but the key point for you to understand is your PPC strategy must change as a result. All right, so I’m going to move on. I think we’ve got a good understanding of keyword relevancy at this point. Thank you for driving that point home because I got a totally gone on that forever. Like I said, for passionate about this, this is important to me. So when we say hyper relevant, what we mean, there goes what we mean is it is a keyword you can maintain a high conversion rate on and as a result, rank high enough to yield organic sales. Okay, I’ll say that again, high enough to yield organic sales. The only keywords we want to target in our advertising are ones we can rank for and get organic sales organic sales are free. We want as many free sales as possible. Okay, that’s a fancy way of saying it’s rankable. All right, the keyword has to be rankable. If it’s not rankable within reason, it’s not hyper relevant. And then finally, the customer intends to buy exactly the product described by that keyword. Okay, subjective products, those don’t exist. I think we’re getting the point here. So what does this matter from a campaign perspective or from an advertising perspective? All right, hyper relevant, very relevant keywords offer ranking. So we’re putting these in exact match campaigns. You don’t need to write that down. We’re going to break this down in more detail later. Every other keyword is either for browsing and should be put in a broad phrase or auto campaign. Or you completely ignore it. Okay, if it’s not relevant enough, just ignore it. You are not missing out. You can throw your photo in the garbage. It’s not helping you. It is hurting you. So if it’s not something you can rank for and put an exact match campaign or something that is maybe not super, super relevant, but enough to put in a broader phrase or auto campaign. Or you can put an auto, but you know what I mean, a broader phrase campaign, then just ignore it. You don’t have to have every single keyword you found in keyword research to point less is more. All right, remember when we talked about sophistication. We’re not trying to add as much as we can. We’re trying to remove as much as we can. All right. So the reason this is so important, we know on Amazon, if we can maintain a high conversion rate on a keyword more than our competitors for that keyword, we will get organically ranked for that keyword. If we get organically ranked, we’ll get free sales. If we get free sales, we can lower our tacos. If we lower our tacos, we can have more profit. If we have more profit, we can reinvest. We can launch a new product with a high conversion rate to get more organic rate to get more free sales to lower the tacos, give more problems, reinvest and go on and on and on. That was fast. Hopefully that made any sense. But the point here is this is a cycle and everything starts with maintaining a high conversion rate when it comes to Amazon advertising. You’re going to see this point driven home over and over and over until it stays because unfortunately for the past five, 10 years, everyone has been focused on a cost, which you’ll notice isn’t in this graphic. I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter because there it is a useful metric, but for the most part, if your campaigns are driven by a cost, you’ll never see this come to fruition. And that is unfortunately the way it works today on Amazon. Like I said earlier, but I might get a sale in that keyword is a losing advertising strategy. That is FOMO that is going to cause you to have so much wasted ad spend that you cannot survive. Okay, get rid of that mentality. What you should be thinking is I am most likely going to make a sale in that keyword. I should target it. If that statement’s not true, you don’t target it. Okay. So as an example, let’s say we sell a travel dog bed is the product, the dog bed type it in a chat. Is it a dog bed? Alright, cool. It wasn’t a trick question. Good job guys. The answer is yes, that is true. It is a dog bed. Okay. Is the solution the customer is looking for when they type in travel dog bed is the solution a dog bed? Lots of nose, some yeses. The answer is no, they don’t need a dog bed. They already have one. That’s why they looked for one for travel, right? The customer already has one in their house. They just don’t want to take it with them, right? It might be too big. It might be something they don’t want to get dirty and then put back in their house. So the solution is not a dog bed. The solution is something that is travel friendly for their dog to lay on. Remember, we’re selling solutions, not products. So if that’s true, should we target keywords such as dog bed or dog create that because it might be used for that, it might get a sale. No, that’s correct. Now the question you should be asking yourself is like, do I have keywords in my campaigns that currently follow this logic incorrectly? So if you said no, you were right, even if you might make a sale. Okay, I don’t care if you make a sale on an irrelevant term, you shouldn’t be spending money on that irrelevant term intentionally or unintentionally rather because most of the time that’s going to be caught in auto broad and phrase campaigns. And again, the reason is the solution you’re selling is a travel friendly, portable version of a dog bed. You are not selling a solution for their house. You’re selling it for on the go. And so when somebody types in the word dog bed, they the search the keyword itself implies it’s for their house. We know that when someone types in dog bed, it’s for the house. We know that because all of the flipping search results on Amazon say so. Okay, again, it’s not hard to find out of a type of relevant or not. You just type it in and see what comes up. Okay, same thing with dog create Matt. Technically speaking, a travel travel dog bed could be the same exact size as the dog create Matt. But just because it could be used for something doesn’t mean that’s the primary purpose and doesn’t mean you should target it either. Okay. The whole point with that is the dog bed keyword and the dog create Matt keyword have different buyer intentions when compared to travel dog bed. They are not the same buyer intention and therefore the conversion rate of a travel dog bed on just the keyword dog bed or just the keyword dog create Matt is not going to be good. And if you consistently maintain a low conversion rate, you were telling Amazon’s algorithm, you do not want to make organic sales. That is what you’re translating over. Okay, so just pictures just for reference, right, you have a travel dog bed over here. Dog create Matt or create dog bed, whatever you want to call it, and then a regular dog bed. They all have the same function, the dog can lay on it, but the intention behind buying each of these products is not the same. And that’s the point here when we’re talking about keyword relevancy, all right. So you have traffic and conversion, that is what we’re talking about when it comes to Amazon advertising. The traffic is the keyword, the asin, the category, the audience, whatever the advertising target is, that’s the traffic. Your product offering is where the conversion is going to take place. And even before that, it’s going to be in the search results. You have to win the click. So traffic and conversion are everything that should be something everybody already knows keywords on the traffic your product offer is a conversion. So your job as a seller when it comes to advertising on Amazon is to send the right traffic to the right offer sending dog bed to a travel dog met offer is not doing that correctly. That was the point of that example. Your job is send the right traffic to the right offer, which means you have to understand who you sell to and what you’re offering them. Key takeaways here keywords of the driving force behind sending the right traffic to your product listing. The relevancy and your product offer determine if you will have a high conversion rate, we just discussed that when it came to the dog bed. High conversion rate leads to organic ranking hyper relevant and very relevant keywords are the only things that are for ranking. Everything else is for auto broad and phrase campaigns or ignored. Alright, so when it comes to relevancy hyper relevancy, I think we’re all very clear at this point. The only keywords we’re going to be targeting in exact match campaigns are hyper relevant and very relevant keywords that are rankable so that they lead to organic sales.

Resources

Source lesson: Understanding the Product Type Framework
Resources:
- Product Type Matrix
- Keyword Relevancy Examples (by Product Type)

Track: 02 — Product Opportunity & Sourcing Engine
Module: Product Fit Map