Understanding Amazon PPC Campaigns.

Bradley Sutton, Helium 10’s Director of Customer Success and Training, is back and here to answer the question, “Can you run too many words in a single Amazon PPC campaign?”

Short answer: It depends on your goal.

Amazon’s PPC algorithm is changing all the time. As an example, some users report taking the keywords of a successful automatic PPC campaign and plugging them into a manual campaign, only to have the manual campaign fail. This method was recommended heavily last year and now it seems to be less effective.

Decoding the PPC algorithms is pretty much an impossible feat for anyone on the outside (that is, all of us), so the best you can do is testing, trial and error, and some basic logic.

For example, if your goal is to have Amazon do some research for you by finding Search Terms for Broad Match keywords, a PPC campaign with 75 keywords might be a good way to cast a wide net. However, if you’ve done your keyword research (using Magnet 2.0 of course) and found high-traffic, high-converting keywords relevant to your product, you should place these in their own campaign. This is because they will spend PPC budget quicker, leaving no budget to test other keywords. For this example, no more than 10 high-volume keywords is a good general rule. 

Another critical thing to check on is indexing. Are your keywords indexing?

If you need a reminder about keyword indexing, remember: if your keywords are indexed, that means Amazon recognizes those keywords are relevant to your product, and that people searching for those keywords on the front end will see your product in organic AND PPC search results.

On the flipside, if your keywords are not indexing, there’s a high chance that Amazon may not find them relevant to your product and will not match them to the keywords in your PPC campaigns. This typically happens if your product is miscategorized, as popular keywords are grouped by product category to prevent people from manipulating categories to have less competition.

Helium 10’s Index Checker tool can help you determine if your keywords are being indexed, by the way. (Not familiar with Index Checker? Read more about it here).

Make sure to use Index Checker to see if your products are indexing for the keywords you’ve entered into your campaigns, otherwise you may just be hemorrhaging money for no reason.

So there you have it. The amount of keywords you place in a PPC campaign will vary based on your goals, but use the suggestions here as a general guideline since PPC campaigns can be somewhat difficult to navigate!

(In-depth advice provided by Vince Montero, PPC Tool Product Manager)