35 Negatives to 1 Positive: The Secret to Lower ACoS

35 Negatives to 1 Positive: The Secret to Lower ACoS Speaker 1: What's going on, Badger Nation? It's Mike here from AtBadger. Welcome to The PPC Den. I'm here camping on the eastern Cascade foothills, trekking through to the Idaho border, looking for our dear friend, the North American badger. The badgers have even been detected in the high elevation park lands of the North Cascade ecosystem. Oh, oh, hey boy, hey boy, there's the badger now. Hey, badger, what advice and tips do you have for the good people out there in badger nation today? Ah, I love that. I love that. That is a great topic. Yeah, that's right. That reminds me of that study we did in 2024. Ah, that takes me back. Let's jump in Badger Nation. In 2024, we did a study of some of the best and lowest ACoS accounts in our ecosystem. I'm talking sizable accounts generating at least $80,000 to $150,000 a month in revenue with considerable ad spends to match, all with great ACoSs less than 35%. And one of the most fascinating things that I learned during the study was that All these accounts had an intense focus on negative keyword management and they had many multiple more negative keywords than they did positive keywords. One account that I saw had for every one keyword that they bid on, they surrounded it with 35 negatives. So they had 35 times more negatives than they had positives. Really, really fascinating stuff. So I wanted to Pluck another leaf off the negative keyword tree and talk about this. Today I want to talk about the negative keyword reset. So let's talk about what this is. And why you should do it and the benefits you should expect when you do it. Negative keywords are perhaps my favorite thing in Amazon PPC. Whether it be negative keywords, negative products, negative placements, I've always loved telling Amazon, I do not want to appear for that. I love the idea of sculpting my traffic so that it flows into one ad group and not another ad group. I love the satisfaction of Stomping out high spend non-converters and I love the satisfaction of running Ngram analysis and finding those search terms that have one or two clicks. But when I find those root words, I'm able to take some action with negative phrases. I love negative keywords. And if you're a listener of the show, I hope you are too. Nothing really tightens up the efficiency of your account like a good old dose of negatives. Doesn't matter if it's auto or manual or category or anything, keeping those negatives tight is always beneficial. They keep your spend clean. They keep your targeting sharp and your ACoS low. But every once in a while, you should do a negative keyword reset strategically, meaning you have to let them go sometimes. Not forever and not recklessly. But sometimes you just need to do a little archiving of your negatives and see if they bubble up again as poor performers. The biggest reason behind this is because your product isn't the same as it was 6 or 12 months ago. In fact, I would say your industry isn't the same as it was 6 to 12 months ago. Maybe you refined your listing, dialed in your images, nailed your A plus content. Maybe your unit session percentage has crept up from 12 to 18 to 25%. You've got more reviews. Essentially your product has leveled up and it's even possible that the market has leveled up. Maybe you're in a category where literally the conversion rate for an average product has increased. Maybe the market has warmed up. With seasonality, maybe you sell a summertime product. So in the winter, you've been afraid of adding negative keywords because you don't want them blocked in the summer. You need to do a negative keyword reset. So you should add them in the winter when they're misbehaving, when those search terms are costing you money without sales. And then once you go into your peak season, you get ready and you remove those negatives to let that traffic flow in again. So you have to factor in seasonal conversion rate. Essentially, blocking search terms that can make your product stronger should be a consideration in the sense of you want to get rid of those negatives now. So here's what I recommend. Do a negative keyword reset. It's like walking through the woods at night, listening for the sound of a distant growl. Let's do this negative keyword reset. When you remove those negatives, The Search Term Landscape with your product's current strength and the market's current strength. There's many ways to do a negative keyword reset strategically. Let's talk about them. The first is to bulk reset the entire account. That's right. Select all and remove. This is generally not recommended unless you have A really big change happened. Personally, I think doing this kind of negative keyword reset adds a little too much chaos to things. I always like to keep my breadcrumbs. I like to be really strategic about where and how I make my changes. And I like to make small changes first to get validation that then I make a big change. However, it's worth knowing how to do this because let's say one day you're playing around with a bulk file or something like that. You accidentally add many, many negatives that you didn't intend to add. You should have knowledge of how to do a negative keyword reset in general. So I would recommend that you at least understand, I'll talk about ways to actually do this later in the episode, but I would say that you should have a way to know how to do a bulk negative keyword reset for your entire account. I will say, That if you do a bulk negative keyword reset, I'm talking about the entire account, be sure to have a way to do time comparison in your campaigns as well. So one way to do this is to go into your campaign screen in Amazon and just simply click download so that you download that snapshot of performance and then you download it again, you know, seven days from now, and then you can compare those campaigns for timeframe A versus timeframe B. There are some tools that help with this. But in general, another way to do this is campaign by campaign. This tightens up our strategy here, where instead of doing it at the entire account, we go campaign by campaign, focus on a certain campaign, remove the negatives just for that campaign, so that all of those search terms that you once blocked will only find their way to just one campaign. This provides you with an easier way to sort of evaluate these results without shaking up the entire account. This brings us to my favorite way to do a negative keyword reset. And for this, I like to do it strategically. So what do I mean by this? I mean removing negative ASINs and negative keywords very thoughtfully. So how do you do this thoughtfully? Let's think about this. The first is to do time-based analysis. This is where, let's take that seasonal summer brand, they added some negatives in the winter, and then all they want to do is identify the negatives that they added in November and then simply remove those. That's a strategic way to go about doing that. Another way to be strategic here is to do this by theme. Let's say I'm selling running shoes. And at one point in time, I negated workout shoes. Since then, my product has improved a lot. My conversion rate is up. My reviews are up. My unit session percentage is up. I've done a ton of price testing and A-B testing. I'm ready for this term that was once too challenging for me. So I thoughtfully searched my entire account for workout shoes and removed that singular negative across my entire account. I can repeat this process a few more times strategically for terms that I once couldn't compete for, like sprinting shoes or trail running shoes or fashionable running shoes. I can also go ahead and remove negative products of competitor products that maybe they were too strong when I first launched. But now with more reviews, I'm ready to take them on again. Doing a negative keyword reset is a way for you to do your negative keyword research and sculpt your visibility from right inside of your account's history. So maybe an old performer can now get sales with your improved product visibility, your improved product conversion rate. And ideally, the goal here is to capture things and get sales for them at one time you couldn't get sales for. And I would definitely advise you to do this thoughtfully. It makes a lot of sense for seasonal brands. It makes a lot of sense for your product strengthening over time. And maybe now you can go after that competitor ASIN. Track the campaign performance closely. Monitor it. And if something performs poorly still, of course, re-negate it. And this time you'll have an increased level of confidence as to why you're doing it. All right, Badger. I hear you. Well, that's all the Badger wanted to share today. You know, negative keywords are very powerful. And sometimes a negative keyword reset allows you to have a little bit more aggressiveness in adding negatives in the first place, knowing that, hey, eventually you'll add it back. It also helps you overcome that doubt that you might make when people are afraid to add a negative, where, oh, this only has 10 clicks without a sale. Maybe I don't want to add it just yet. But if you know that eventually it'll get a time in the spotlight again, hopefully you can do so with a little bit more confidence. So I hope you feel a little bit more inspired to go in and look at those negatives with new eyes again. And some notes about how I personally do this. The first thing that I'll say is that the Amazon ads interface, you can do this ad group by ad group. However, you're not able to look at your negatives for your entire account. So if you do have 500 ad groups, you will have to go into 500 different ad groups and do it individually for each ad group. And I would say that's not just inefficient, it's borderline cruel, Amazon. So here is what you need to do instead. It is a bulk file activity, which is why I mentioned it at the start of the show, which is it's a skill that I think every Amazon advertiser should have, at the very least, how to do a negative keyword bulk reset. We've got a lot of content. I've shown you before how to do this inside bulk files. Be sure to go get the checklist in the description of this video and you can go find those bulk file episodes or you can go ahead and just search it on the AdBatcher website. Search for bulk files and you can find the bulk file episodes. So essentially what you would do is you would download a bulk file and then you would remove them. You know, you would change them to archived and then you would re upload them. It's telling Amazon, hey, please archive these negative I will also say that we did build this into the Badger software, allowing you to basically scan through your entire account and then strategically remove negatives as you see fit. So you can search for things like walking shoes. That's why I encourage the team to build that way for this exact purpose. So that definitely helps along this process. And if you're curious to check it out, be sure to send us a message. We'd love to show you around. Our software. But that being said, I love negative keywords and I hope you do too. If you're a listener of the show, I think you like the ability to sculpt and control and get your search terms exactly how you want them to get. Every once in a while it's helpful. To reconsider what was added and see if you want to open it up again. The biggest thing I see in negative keywords is relevant terms that don't perform well. And doing a negative keyword reset should give you more confidence to add relevant terms that don't perform well because it might open the door later for when your product is stronger to give those search terms a second chance. Well, if you'll excuse me, the sun is setting here in the eastern Cascade foothills. Looking out at the Idaho border, Looking for the North American Badger. I'll learn some more Amazon PPC knowledge from him, and I'll see you next week here on the PBC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: I've launched campaigns and picked keywords. I've got my bids, set placements too. And bad mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of rocky ones, but I've gone through. Oh, you are the creepy suit and my frail. You are the PPC dead, we're talking about Hamilton. No time for medicons, cause we fixed the game.