Harvest and Block Search Terms

Outcome: Move converting search terms into control campaigns and add negatives where spend has proven unproductive.

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 the importance of properly transitioning PPC campaigns and keywords to isolate performance, maintain momentum, and make better decisions. It covers key concepts like momentum over structure, the 10% rule, and transitioning scenarios for duplicate keywords, mixed campaigns, singular vs. plural keywords, and discovery campaigns.

Key points

• Controlling the variables that affect keyword performance and rank is the #1 goal for keywords
• Transitioning campaigns properly allows you to isolate keyword performance and maintain momentum
• The ‘momentum over structure’ concept means tactical adjustments should not stop positive momentum
• If a keyword generates <10% of total PPC sales, it should be moved to a new campaign
• Transitioning scenarios cover controlling duplicate keywords, mixed campaigns, singular vs. plural, and moving from discovery to exact match

Lesson notes

Transitioning Campaigns Part 1 In this lesson, you will discover:

• Why transitioning campaigns is important
• The concept of momentum over structure
• Keyword transition scenarios
• How to approach each scenario [Video] Transitioning Campaigns Part 2 - Keyword Transition Scenarios In this section you will discover:
• Keyword control:
  • Controlling Duplicate keyword campaigns
  • Controlling Mixed keyword campaigns
  • Controlling Singular vs Plural
  • Moving from Discovery to Exact Demo 1 - Exact Match Transitions [Video] Demo 2 - Discovery Transitions & How to Use Your Campaign Search Term Report [Video]

Action checklist

• Identify and pause the lower-performing campaign when you have duplicate keywords
• Move keywords out of mixed campaigns before the 10% rule or mixed data makes it hard to make adjustments
• Isolate keywords that are being suppressed in impressions by a dominant keyword in the campaign

Full transcript

Open transcript

What’s up guys, Brendan Pettit here, in this module we’re going to talk about transitioning PPC campaigns. Here’s what we’re going to cover. Why transitioning campaigns is so important. We’re going to go over the concept of momentum over structure. I’m going to go through a couple keyword transition scenarios and then show you how to approach each scenario properly to get the most out of it. Let’s go through the importance of transitioning first to set up this whole thing. Your number one goal for keywords is controlling the variables that affect your performance and rank. Transitioning campaigns properly allows you to, one, isolate keywords performance to be able to make better decisions and two, it creates structures so you don’t lose momentum in the process. Quick pro tip for everybody. If you run a lot of discovery campaigns or high volume mixed keyword campaigns, watch the keyword research foundation series and or the module on keyword and campaign structure for better context. I want you to be able to get some of the understanding in the context around these topics before you dive into transitioning all of your campaigns. So first let’s go through the momentum over structure concept. This is just a guideline to simply say no tactical approach to campaign adjustments should prevent or stop positive momentum from moving. You’re always need to look at your current sales and conversion momentum as a filter for how you transition a keyword or a campaign. In any given campaign, you always have to keep the best performing keywords running in the campaign and move the rest. The exception being discovery campaigns usually do the opposite and we’ll go through that in another module. Pro tip again, I just want to reiterate if you are gaining most of your sales momentum out of discovery campaigns, you need to work at establishing an exact match approach, then watch this module again to understand how to use transitions to your advantage. For the 10% rule, if you need to transition the keyword out of a campaign and that keyword does not generate more than 10% of your overall PPC sales for that specific product, you should make the decision to start a new campaign and pause the original keyword. This is simply done by taking the total sales for that particular keyword and dividing it by the total PPC sales for the product over the same date range. In a low volume situation, if it has less than 10 sales over a 30 day period of time, you can also make a simple decision to pause and move into its own campaign. Each new campaign should be set to fix bid until you’ve picked up or reestablished the impressions and clicks on that particular keyword and also recommended leave it alone if it’s working. A simple pro tip too, in most cases there is a clear definitive line and decision on a keyword with the best performance and momentum. These are simply guidelines to help you prevent analysis paralysis because taking action is the key here. So let’s talk about keyword transition scenarios. The main topic I want to cover here is really centered around keyword control. It’s one of the number one goals you should have when going after keywords in your PPC campaigns. This is simply boils down to controlling the number of variables that can go through that are actually in your control and that goes through four different areas. The first one is going to be controlling duplicate keyword campaigns. The second is going to be controlling mix keyword campaigns. The third being controlling singular versus plural and finally moving from discovery to exact. So let’s first talk about duplicates. Duplicating keywords can split your keyword performance data making it hard to know what’s helping or hurting your overall performance or rank. The goal of your keyword targeting is to isolate the number of variables affecting each keyword so you can control their performance. I put control in italics here obviously because Amazon does control a number of variables that are outside of our control however we’re trying to isolate certain issues so that you can try to get as much out of the keyword as possible. And finally this allows you to be more effective in decision making and adjustments. So let’s go through a scenario of an exact campaign duplicate. In this scenario you’ll want to identify the best performing campaign for each and pause the keyword with that is lower performing overall. If there is a close performance match the goal is to choose the keyword with the best position by campaign structure and control. Single keyword if available meaning if it’s in a mix keyword campaign versus if one is in a single keyword campaign you want to try to look at the one in the single keyword campaign first. Again you’re going to judge this off performance which I’ll talk about here. You’ll want to factor in overall sales and a cost as well. It’s very important that you do the momentum over structure philosophy and go after the one that’s actually generating the most momentum. This will shift the focus for Amazon to a single keyword and allow you to make quality decisions when trying to maintain. If you have a lot of the impressions going in opposite directions it can skew your results and again skew the maintenance process. And just a simple pro tip, wait a few days for the impressions and clicks to transition. Give it at least five to seven days before making any additional changes to these campaigns once you make the change. Let’s talk about duplicates in a discovery campaign. You’ll simply need to create a negative exact with a discovery campaign and anywhere the keyword could gain impressions or clicks outside the exact match campaign. So once you move the keyword out of the exact match or into exact match you’ll want to make sure not only in the discovery campaign, the broad campaign or auto campaign that it was originally in, it’s negative exacted but you’ll always also want to make sure that anywhere else that it could show up, i.e. auto campaigns or other broad campaigns that include those keywords. It also is negative exacted there so you can reduce the amount of duplication that may occur. This will also shift the focus for Amazon to the single keyword and allow more control. A simple pro tip, this is why it’s much more efficient to do your keyword research upfront isolate the 90 plus percent of keywords that drive sales in your market. This allows you to do much more of your negative matching upfront and it prevents the duplicates in heavy transition or maintenance later on. So if you guys haven’t gone through the keyword research foundation series that Justin Dyson did, I recommend you do so and you’ll get better perspective around that concept. So let’s talk about mixed campaigns in an exact scenario. Campaigns that have more than one keyword campaign can cause issues and how you read your data and make decisions like we’ve talked about. Over time keywords can fluctuate in volume and start to pick up impressions or clicks in multiple campaigns over time depending on how Amazon chooses to rate the performance. The goal is to move these keywords before the 10% rule becomes a factor or mixed campaign data starts to make it hard to make adjustments or bid adjustments. Hey guys, Brendan here and I want to take you through some campaign transitioning scenarios. I actually found a campaign that kind of covers a lot of the bases I’ve been talking about in this module and we’re going to go through a couple different scenarios. One being moving keywords out from a mixed campaign scenario, the second being the singular plural dynamic, the third being the impression suppression or one you get when you’re not able to pick up as many impressions on other keywords because one keyword is sort of dominating or pulling a lot of the impressions and what to do. All of these scenarios will lead to me doing the same campaign maintenance based on what’s happening but I do want to walk you through what to look out for and sort of how to diagnose what’s happening here. The first one I’ll start off with is the microfiber camping towel. Again, setting up context, this is for my travel towel that I sell in my outdoors and travel niche. This is a popular keyword. The singular version of this keyword which we’ll go through in a minute is also starting to pick up steam on this campaign and I’ll show you that dynamic breakdown in a minute. The point here is when you start to see momentum going through a campaign like this, you need to make sure that you’re isolating this keyword so that this data is not mudding up the placement data long term. I wanted to quickly show you what it looks like on the placement dynamic and try to give you an indication of what’s happening here. It’s really hard to read the data when you have multiple keywords feeding into the top line data which is the placement data because placement data in itself is just a top line stat or an aggregation of all of the keyword data that’s flowing through this campaign. It’s really hard to start to pick apart now which clicks are going to product pages versus top of search and then in addition to that, it starts to make it really difficult to make a decision on how to adjust the bid, how to then adjust the bid placement to help that bid get more top of search relevancy because what I would want to do here is shift some of this emphasis onto the top of search. I do get a healthy conversion rate here. This isn’t so bad either but again the 80-20 rule, I really want to go after keyword emphasis, keyword search emphasis so I’m going to try to shift that but there’s no way for me to do that with all of these mixed keyword stats. We could make some assumptions based on the amount of impressions and clicks that have gone through this one keyword but with the other keywords generating clicks and sales, it is hard to truly diagnose what’s happening. The one thing I’m going to do regardless of the other scenarios I walk through is I’m going to move these campaigns out or sorry these keywords out of this campaign. I’ll be able to generate these low impressions if I go and restart them. I’m not going to lose a significant amount of momentum so again having that momentum over structure in place, I’m not going to pause this top keyword, I’m going to keep this keyword in the original campaign, this campaign and I’m actually going to move out these keywords into their own single word campaigns. When touching on the impressions suppression, what might be happening on some of these keywords here is they’re not really getting any love. A lot of times with impressions suppression too, you’ll start to see a lot more zeros than just a couple of impressions. These might be significantly low volume keywords anyway but what you want to do is also isolate them because of the fact that you now have a keyword in this campaign taking up a lot of the impressions. We don’t know what that threshold is with Amazon, what we do know is as a keyword or multiple keywords start to pick up a lot of impressions, it can start to dim the impression share to the rest of the keywords in this campaign so regardless of the performance indicators here, I’m going to want to move and split out these keywords into their own campaign so that I’m able to see the data clearly and I’m able to see what these keywords are really able to do. You might also spot check the volume against these just to make sure that suppression and pressure either is or isn’t affecting it but again that’s one scenario that you could diagnose from this. But being that this is a very polarizing, I want to move this into or keep this in its campaign and move these keywords out. So that’s scenario two. Now scenario three is something that I’m going to spend some time unpacking so you guys understand what’s happening here and this is why it’s so important I think to really use the campaign manager to be able to move the dates and slide these dates back and forth so you can really build context around what a keyword is doing or what it’s not doing. So I want to cover the singular plural scenario. I pulled up that I actually have microfiber camping towel running in this campaign. So the singular version is running in this campaign. Now when I go back and I actually look previous up to this point this keyword was actually getting a fair amount of the volume. Again this is me building context around what happened to this keyword because this keyword was doing well on its own. It’s a single keyword campaign. It’s technically the highest keyword or sorry highest volume keyword within this keyword set. Because when you set up a singular or a plural version of a phrase it can hit against microfiber camping towel or the plural version of microfiber camping towels and I’m going to show you within the other campaign what Amazon did is they shifted the impressions. So similar to the discovery campaigns you can go into the search terms here and see all of the search terms. Now this does include the other search terms that are in this campaigns currently but I want to show you that somewhere around the beginning of December Amazon started putting an emphasis on the singular version of microfiber camping towel and started sending most of the impressions and clicks here. So all of the performance data for that singular keyword even though I have it set up and its own single one off campaign Amazon transition the volume here. So what I’m going to do in this scenario is I’m going to keep the volume going where Amazon is flowing right and I didn’t mean to really create a rhyme there but it works. So I’m going to again it’s the same general output as far as how I transition the campaign. I’m going to keep this keyword in this campaign. I’m going to shut off this keyword here and I’m going to allow Amazon to shift the momentum because I’ve already basically generated a plan to move these keywords out. So I’m just going to isolate this campaign based on the volume and allow all of the variations of this or any variations of this that might hit to go through microfiber camping towels versus the singular version. So hopefully that’s making sense guys. Again all roads lead to the campaign maintenance piece being isolate the keywords for control because your data gets muddied as you start to have mixed keyword campaigns. You also again the teaching point also is to build context around what happened because when you’re going after the higher volume phrase the higher volume phrase can also convert under the plural version of that. So you want to be very conscious of diagnosing what’s really going on and using these date ranges to sort of build context and a story around what’s actually happened because again as we see after December 3rd we got almost no impressions because all of the impressions started going to the mixed keyword campaign. So that can really muddy up your data not only because there’s so many things going into the placements but now I can’t isolate that keyword and control that keyword from a ranking standpoint to then make justified decisions and make sure I have a healthy amount of sales and momentum going through that keyword. It’s almost like duplicating keywords and again not being able to maintain them properly. So hopefully that makes sense guys. I know I covered a lot of different topics in this but I wanted to use this sort of unicorn campaign to build the story and the understanding of how you might diagnose this and then what the action would be. Again the number one goal for your keywords is control Amazon only gives us so many areas to control our keywords in and so we want to be able to build the data properly read the data properly and then make justified decisions based off of that. So hopefully enjoyed this I’ll see you in the next video. Hey guys Brendan here and I want to go through a broad or discovery campaign scenario and take you through how I like to go through the search term report process for finding and eliminating keywords within these campaign types. So I’m in a campaign right now and I’m going to give you full context on the product. So this is the cut resistant glove that we sell in one of our kitchen brands and this is a specific sort of root keyword grading gloves that we’re going to be going after. And so when you go into your campaign itself you’re going to go to the targeting page and in the targeting page under the discovery campaign you’ll see search term as one of the fields. When you click on that what this will allow you to do is actually see the search terms that are being generated underneath the discovery campaign for that specific phrase over a specific and dynamic period of time. So you’re actually able to play with this date range and select. So if I select the most recent days like let’s select the first through let’s say the 12th to let the data settle. You see how I have far less results than I did if I did sort of a 65 day snapshot. So what I want to get you guys in the mindset of is maybe working outside of the search term reports. Search term reports tend to be pretty stagnant. And if you’re only looking at them on a seven day, 10 day, 14 day period of time you may be missing clicks or sort of that death by a thousand cuts, especially if you are getting some negative terms in there with some words or some features or speaking towards things that your product does not offer whether it be material types, pack sizes, so on and so forth. So I’m going to take you through a small exercise. I recommend if you guys have not done this in a while or if ever, if you’ve never used this section, I would, I would go look back at your 60 day or 65 day or as far back as you can. Let’s say all the way up until most recent again, give it a couple days for it to settle as well. And as you can see here, I have a massive list of different words. Now I’ve moved out a lot of these keywords. I will side note, I will be getting with my PVC manager to wonder why we did negative exact. However, I do know that we are in a pattern of consistently moving these things out. And I want to really set the precedence for you guys. The overarching goal of using something like this on a consistent basis is you don’t want to experience death by a thousand cuts over time and you want to rely on your discovery paint, your discovery campaigns less and less over time. So the goal here is not only to play offense and discover the keywords that are showing up on the search term report and also try to move out as quick as possible. But also, I want to show you an example of what my product is not and show you how you can go and actually negative exact from this screen so that you don’t have to use the search term report. So again, I set up the context as telling you guys that this product is a cut resistant glove. Basically for protection of your hands, if you’re in the kitchen using a knife or something sharp, it just allows you to protect against cutting. So it’s not, however, a heat or liquid protection glove. So anything that’s going to have heat or liquid, I need to negative phrase this. So I’ll actually show you guys how to do that. You’re actually going to go to this actions tab and it’s going to allow you to negative exact or negative phrase this. I’m going to negative exact this phrase. But now that I’ve built some context around some of the words showing up that I don’t want to ever show up, I’ll actually go to my negative targeting as well. And I’ll add the phrase liquid and heat. And now those are forever saved as my negative phrase matches. So those will no no longer target heat or liquid resistance. So again, the sort of root keyword here is grading gloves. You can see over time it’s performed really well. It’s been a great root keyword to find other terms. And I really wanted you guys to see how you can take action like you would on the search term report through this specific field here underneath the discovery of the broad campaign. Now again, going back to the offensive piece of this, I would be trying to set a goal of moving these keywords out as quick as possible. The days of trying to wait for 10 clicks, 13 clicks, enough clicks to make a decision are over. I think if we’ve done a good job doing the keyword research, and if you haven’t gone through the keyword research foundation series, go through that. Justin does a great job of breaking that down. But the goal of that whole series is to get you to a point where you have 80 or 90% of your keywords that are going to drive the most volume and success for your product in your campaign set up at exact match already. So you should only be using these to filter in or bring in keywords that are slow drip keywords over time. So it’s going to take you a long time to build history on these generally. So what you want to do is use your own filtering process and basically go through and say does this keyword match my intent or does it not? And then if you have any sort of questions on it, you can always either search it on Amazon or put it in its own campaign. And generally, what we’ve done is we’ll have a specific campaign that we’re moving, these questionable keywords into sort of like a testing campaign. And I’ll move these, even if they have one click to clicks, if it’s speaking somewhat towards what my product is, but there’s just a low amount of clicks, I’m going to move it into that campaign just so I can control it and understand what I’m able to get out of that keyword over time and allow this this campaign to do what it’s intended to do, which is simply identify new keyword opportunities. So again, I wanted to drive home sort of the offense and defense of how you use this feature. Hopefully that makes sense, guys. Let me know if you have questions in the network and I’ll see you in the next video.

Resources

• Source lesson: PPC Optimization Part 5 Transitioning Campaigns
• Resources: none attached yet.

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Track: 04 — PPC Control Loop
Module: Campaign Architecture