How Many Keywords Should Your Campaign Have on Amazon PPC?

How Many Keywords Should Your Campaign Have on Amazon PPC? Speaker 1: Alexa, play that Amazon ads podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing that Amazon ads podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to that Amazon ads podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 2: All right. Welcome to this week's edition of That Amazon Ads Podcast. As you can see, we've got our tinfoil hats on today. We're going to be going over another Amazon conspiracy theory around limiting the number of keywords in a campaign and does it get you more impressions or not? And actually, you know, we've got our tinfoil hats on, but I think, Stephen, we're going to be taking these off because we're going to bust this myth. Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah. People always have their tinfoil hat conspiracies around how many keywords should you have in a campaign. Lots of debate. Five keywords, 10 keywords, 25 keywords. Some people get really spicy. They'll allow you to go up to 50 keywords in a campaign talking about how to maximize impressions, get as many clicks as possible. And Andrew, we're not in that camp, so we could just take these hats off. Speaker 2: I think that's a good idea. Speaker 1: And basically talk about the fact that it doesn't matter and we're going to dive into should you limit the number of keywords per campaign and if so how many keywords per campaign. So let's dive in. So this is actually a topic that we started to touch on gently back during the PPC debate where we were discussing single keyword campaigns. Should you be using single keyword campaigns? And Andrew, I believe this was your observation about historically the limits of how many keywords you can have for campaigns started off as 100 and then like it moved down to 50 and then what happened after that? Speaker 2: Yeah, so basically it just keeps going down. The recommendation went from 100 to 50 to 25 to 10. And I was like, oh, you know what, let's just make it three for no reason. So yeah, it's been a long history of this conversation going around, like, should you be limiting it or not? But yeah, it's constantly changing. Everybody's changing the limit that they're going with every year. Speaker 1: Yeah, and also the farthest that it can go is basically single-keyword campaigns are the smallest amount you could have and there are some people who advocate for Basically only ever doing single keyword campaigns. I don't know that we've actually talked at length on that one. Speaker 2: No, I don't know. Not you and I. Speaker 1: Yeah, we were kind of refraining from our opinions on that. We did a little bit in the campaign structure. In the most recent episode on campaign structure, we did kind of touch on single keyword campaigns a bit. So you guys can go back and look up that one, the best campaign structures, if you missed that episode. So the reason why we're bringing this up now is largely because we've had lots of questions in our Discord. If you're not in the Discord yet, Click the link below and you can join our free online community, share knowledge, ask questions with other PPCers. And I've also been getting this question a lot from new AdLabs users who are signing up. And that's something else that in case you didn't know, set up for AdLabs, you have a direct line of communication with me and we can message back and forth and I can give you some feedback on your advertising and campaigns and stuff. So probably three times within the last four days, I've had someone ask me about The issues with the number of keywords that they have. Some users getting quite technically advanced with their campaign structures just trying to ensure that no single ad group ever has more than 10 keywords. Per ad group. Now, Andrew, why is that? Why do people, what's at the end of the day, why are people even going through the trouble to do this? Speaker 2: I have heard a lot of similar things, people trying to limit the number of keywords in their campaigns with the reason being that they think that they're going to get more impressions, that Amazon for some reason rewards you for only having 10 keywords in that campaign or that ad group. A lot of times this stems from You know, people go into their campaigns and they see a whole bunch of keywords in there without any impressions, not a lot of spend and only a few, a handful of keywords actually receiving a majority of the budget. And so somebody in the Amazon space got crafty and thought that they would create a new marketing hook or whatever and basically started telling people, oh, take those keywords, put them in their own campaign or their own ad group and then those will start receiving adequate impressions, adequate budget. So that's like the main reason I hear people claiming or trying to, you know, do this with their campaigns. Speaker 1: Yeah, people essentially treat it as if it's a bug. In the system. It's either a bug or for some reason intentionally from from Amazon like they just they don't want you to you know, get more impressions, you know, they're they're you know, stacking the game against you as it were and you can be Amazon at the game and get them to give you more impressions or at least get around this bug by outsmarting them by putting keywords in different ad groups now. I think that this is actually just demonstrating a very big misunderstanding of cause and effect. People are seeing the effect, like if they do this and there's some people with anecdotal evidence, they'll be like, no, as soon as I did that, I got way more impressions, whatever. So they're observing that before they split campaigns into different ad groups, they, you know, can only get, let's just say a thousand impressions a day. And then they put it into two different ad groups, two different campaigns. Now they can get 1500 impressions a day. And so they then say the cause was too many keywords per campaign or per ad group. Therefore, like that's the cause and effect. And what we want to try to outline here is all of the other variables that could heavily be influencing that. And because Andrew and I have tried ourselves to take campaigns and split them up into multiple campaigns or into multiple adverts or whatever, and we get zero growth in impressions or clicks as a result of that. So in a moment, we're going to talk about the different variables that could impact why Some people listen, probably a lot of our audience honestly, while a lot of people listening to this or a lot of people in the space have had this experience that they can get more impressions by doing these weird tinfoil hat tactics and the reason why Andrew and I have not had that experience. So we'll come back to that for what the key variables are between how we're managing ads versus how other people are managing ads that will create the actual difference. But before that, I want to take a step back and just imagine That you are a senior developer at Amazon working on the algorithm. Andrew's imagining deep on this one. He's been teleported into a new life that he once lived. You're a senior developer at Amazon, okay? You're working on the algorithm for the advertising console. Your whole job just depends on basically doing two things. Everything that you do in doing this algorithm This podcast is trying to achieve one of two outcomes, ideally both outcomes. Number one. You want to give the best possible shopping experience to consumers, meaning your algorithm should be putting the most relevant product for that keyword at the best price. You want the best product at the best price that's giving the customer the most bang for buck and is high relevancy to that keyword, low return rate. That's going to be a great experience for the shopper. That's your first job. The second job that you're trying to accomplish And my goal is to make Amazon as much money as possible from advertising. The Amazon marketing products and giving people the ability to like, you know, spend with them is one of the largest revenue generators for Amazon. Like, I forget the actual stats, but it's like their three largest revenue generators is like Amazon Web Services, like cloud computing, Amazon Marketing Services, ads, and then of course, just like the retail sales. That is like pretty much their entire business. So all of that money, all of that pay-per-click or CPM, whatever concept you're doing, all of that is going to Amazon. Your job as the algorithm expert is to drive up as much spend as possible. You're trying to maximize as many clicks, put as many of these customers or all of these advertisers who are basically telling you, I'm willing to pay money for clicks and impressions on these keywords. Do you really think, as that Amazon developer and anyone working on Amazon, That they would intentionally try to limit how much money they can charge you for in your ads because if let's just say you can spend $1,000 a day with 25 keywords in that ad group, if you go up to 100 keywords a day, you're basically telling Amazon charge me more. Do you really think Amazon's going to like reduce how much they're charging you based off of that if you had too many keywords? Like do you think they're intentionally trying to limit you Or have a bug that's that bad that is basically prohibiting, if they could charge people 50% to 100% more on a daily basis, but there's some weird bug that is just saying after a certain keyword level, like we just, we can't serve impressions there. Do you really think after 13, 14 years of Amazon working on this algorithm that is one of the top revenue generators for their company, that they are going to intentionally charge people less money When people are asking Amazon to charge them more money just because you had more than 10 keywords in an ad group. Sorry, that was a long rant because it was taking me a while to find where I was trying to get to. Speaker 2: To add on to that too, think about the people who are going to have more complex ad strategies. The bigger clients, the bigger brands, the more sophisticated advertisers are gonna be the ones who are building out these more sophisticated structures and deploying some of these granular tactics. If you're just talking to a mom and pop shop, Amazon seller, whatever, their ad strategy that they deploy is probably gonna be a lot simpler than these bigger advertisers. And the bigger advertisers, the more sophisticated people, they're managing a lot more spend. And so think about the impact of that Like, yeah, it's just kind of silly. And I think that it just doesn't make any sense if you're if you're thinking about it, imagining it from Amazon's perspective. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think just using common sense. And again, like maybe this, maybe this like weird bug, you could call it, was an issue 10 years ago. Like maybe very early on and we're just now experiencing like a lingering effect of everyone, you know, from 10 years ago. It's a little bit of like a Mandela effect. Not really. But, or Andrew, do you know about like the glass ceiling thing? I don't, I'm probably going to butcher this, but there was something where it was like, I was, they put a bunch of fleas in a jar. I think it was fleas or flies. It's fleas or flies, and they put a glass ceiling at the top of the jar, and people realized, like, the fleas were trying to jump out of it. They bred more fleas or flies, whatever, and they realized they could never escape, so they never tried to, because there was a glass ceiling, and then eventually they removed the glass ceiling. And now you can escape, but they never escaped because they all were like bred and taught through generation to generation. It was impossible to escape. Speaker 2: I've heard of this. I don't think it's called the Mandela effect. I think that's something. Speaker 1: No, no, no, no. I switched. I switched analogies. Yeah. Speaker 2: Oh, OK. I didn't hear what you said there, but this is this is the glass ceiling effect. Oh, glass ceiling effect. OK, cool. Speaker 1: But basically, it could have been that where it's like, the glass ceiling has been removed. Anybody can go through it now. But we've all just been hurt. It's been passed down from generation to generation of PPC managers, that it's impossible to get impressions on keywords beyond that. So point being, If you are Amazon and your goal is to make money, because again, this is one of their top drivers of revenue, you are not going to be turning down opportunities to charge customers more, especially when customers are saying, please, please take my money. Let me give you money, Amazon. Amazon's not going to say, uh, that's 11 keywords in that ad group. Not going to let you, uh, not going to take your money anymore. Like just common sense. All right. I think we've, uh, we've beat that one down. Moving on to why might some people feel that way today, experience that they're not getting those impressions when they should be. They think it's because it's too many keywords, Brad Group. But Andrew, a few episodes ago, I forget which episode number, but we did do a whole episode on why am I getting no impressions or zero impressions, low impressions. Speaker 2: That was last week. Speaker 1: Was it just last week? Okay. Yeah. Well, it aired last week, but by the time this episode airs, yeah, it might've been two or three weeks ago. But recap some of those key points, Andrew, for why people are maybe getting zero impressions or barely any impressions. Speaker 2: Yeah. Just to run through them real quick, there's three main reasons. It's your bids are too low, the keywords are low volume, or the impressions are going somewhere else. And then I'd add actually another one, like you're running out of budget would be another one. You don't have sufficient budget to continue spending on those keywords. And this is, people see this a lot. Like I even see this in my, my campaigns. Like I'll log in and look into a campaign and you know, there's a lot of keywords sometimes within certain ad groups that aren't getting a ton of visibility. And those are kind of the main reasons why. I often find, you know, Like, I don't want to say that you shouldn't like, there should be no cap. There should be no arbitrary cap on how many keywords you're actually putting in an ad group. I don't think you should then take that as, oh, there should be 5,000 keywords in one single ad group, because in that case, You're doing something else wrong, like you're getting something else wrong, which I would say you're over-harvesting or you're over trying to cover every single keyword and you don't really need to do that. Speaker 1: So there's two ways that I think people are looking at this incorrectly. Number one is just that the amount of traffic going to each keyword is very likely driven by the amount of search volume for each keyword. And for simplicity, let's just assume everything's exact match. So we're not taking into all the other like variations. You know, if you have like a hundred keywords that are all exact match and maybe like you got five or ten of those keywords are like short tail driving most of the search volume, like within Amazon of a million search volume search, the search query volume is like a million searches per month. Maybe like 900,000 of that is concentrated around just like the top five or ten keywords. The rest of it's very, very, very small elsewhere. And so in your ad group that has all of these 100 top searched terms that you got from like the search query performance report, you're looking at like, wow, 90% of the volumes going to 10% of these keywords. The other 90 are like getting percentage wise relative to the ad group. They're getting nothing. So then what you do is you take those 90 out, you put them in a new ad group and now in the new ad group, they're getting an equal amount of impressions and you're like, wow, the problem is solved. But what you're mistaking here is you're just looking at their percentage of like impression or click volume relative to the total ad group. And not actually saying, did I get more impressions or more clicks? You're getting the same amount of impressions and clicks. You're just relative to everything else because this is now a low volume ad group. It's more equally distributed because you took all of the keywords that were seemingly getting low volume. As a percentage to the total are now in their own ad group, where now it seems like it's more equal, but you basically just segmented the ad groups by volume so that they would, as a percentage share of the total, they would be more equal, but you didn't actually get more impressions. I don't know if that makes sense. I hope it did. Speaker 2: Yeah, that was very well said. I mean, people neglect the fact that There's only a handful of keywords for any given product that actually get searched on Amazon. Now, you certainly have long tail keywords that get searched here and there, but a vast majority of is going to concentrate around 5, 10, 15 keywords for most products. And so, yeah, that's where the opportunity is. That's where the eyeballs are. That's what people are actually looking for. And so, yeah, that's where your spend is going to go. And if you do just like a quick Look at what are those top five or 10 keywords in the group that are getting the volume. Go look up the search volume for those and I guarantee they're higher than all of them and I bet they're short tail and I bet if you compare them to those long tail keywords, they're gonna be a lot more. You're gonna have a lot more search volume coming through the keywords that are getting spent. Speaker 1: Let's say someone now has the experience that they took those 90 keywords that were lower volume and they move it over to a new ad group and let's say before they were getting literally zero, like zero clicks and they move it into a new ad group and now they're getting 10, 20, 30 clicks like, you know, on each keyword. And they would say, see, I went from zero traffic to now a lot more traffic. So we can address that one as well. What happens a lot of the times is let's say in the first campaign where you had everything in there, let's say you had a $100 daily budget. And for those really high volume keywords, those shorter tail stuff that get searched hyper frequently, you had $1 bids on all of those. And let's just say by like 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. Pacific time, those short tail items, you got hit a hundred times, like those queries came through a hundred times, you got a hundred clicks, you spent the whole budget, budget is now paused. And the campaign is now paused. So now as the rest of the day goes on and these lower volume search queries come through, your campaign shut off. So yeah, you're not getting any impressions or clicks for anything else for the rest of the day. And then by the time, you know, a whole week passes, you come back in, you go in at 9am, the campaign's not out of budget yet. So from your perspective, signing in on a Friday at 9 a.m., campaign's still alive, it's not out of budget yet, you look at the last seven days and you see all the spend just went to like the top two or three keywords, everything else got no spend, and you're not checking the budgeting tab, you're not realizing that this campaign was on average only in budget 50% of the time or less. Because from your limited perspective of what you're seeing right now in the ad console, it looks like it's doing just fine and it must just be that there were 12 keywords in here and that's why these keywords didn't get any traffic. So you're going to move into a separate campaign with a separate budget. So now even after the first campaign runs out of budget midday, you still have the budget to go after the long tail keywords. And that's why you start getting more impressions then. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So it's just a failure to properly manage budgets. And if you want to learn more about how to actually manage your budgets and all that, we just did an episode a couple episodes back talking to all about that. So go back and watch that. Now, another thing too, that has to be considered is like sometimes people will have Keywords in a manual campaign, they'll be trying to grow visibility on that and they're not having much luck. I mentioned before, low bids. So that's another issue with low impressions. If your bids are too low, you're not gonna get impressions. Or it could be that your impressions are actually going somewhere else. So sometimes what you'll see is an auto campaign getting a majority of the spend on an individual higher volume target. And your bids are just higher in that auto campaign than they are in the manual campaign. And so you just got to pay attention with where those impressions are actually going. Sometimes they're hidden a little bit underneath like broader match types and things like auto campaigns. So you got to make sure that those impressions aren't just going elsewhere. And that's why you're not getting as many impressions on those keywords. Speaker 1: Yeah, this episode actually piggybacks nicely off of the last like two or three episodes we did. We talked about managing budgets. I think that was actually... I forget when that was. Yeah, that was in January. Honestly, this is the first episode we're recording in January after taking a few weeks off. The other episodes that were released in January, we recorded at the beginning of December. So that's why we're a bit more confused on episode order. But the episodes on why we're getting zero impressions, how to manage budgets and campaign structure, those three episodes, we will make sure that we link those in the description as well so you can more easily find them. And this episode just is really piecing a lot of those things together. But I think that the overharvesting example is another great one. So let's actually consider this. Let's say you have the phrase match tennis rackets and you're bidding. Speaker 2: Before you say that, somebody the other day asked me if I play tennis because they were like, you talk about tennis rackets all the time. And I was like, no, I don't play tennis. Do you play tennis? Speaker 1: Let's go back to our favorite product. We'll go AK-47s for toddlers. You're selling military-grade weapon equipment for toddlers. Just kidding. Yeah, tennis rackets is a good default. If you have phrase match tennis rackets and then you also have exact match blue tennis rackets for toddlers and let's just say that keyword you you're bidding a dollar as well. So you got a phrase match dollar and then the other one is a dollar. The phrase match technically still qualifies for the same search term as that longer tail exact match and so If they have the same bid, the same CPC, it doesn't make a difference. Let's just say when someone types in the long tail version, blue tennis rackets for toddlers, you're going to get that click for a dollar. Whether it went to the exact match at a dollar or went to the phrase match within the same ad group for a dollar, it doesn't really make a difference. And so, or maybe even like the phrase Metro's bidding $1.01. So with like a one penny difference, again, you can't you can't bid against yourself, but like, maybe that was the next highest bidder in the second price auction, like $1.01 was the winning bid and $1 was not. So the traffic's going to that other thing. And then you think like, man, this exact match keywords not getting any any volume. There's like two or three reasons there. Number one, The bid just might be too low number two. It's just you know, the traffic is going somewhere else. It's just going to a different It's going to a different keyword. We also talked about in that Zero Impressions episode, sometimes it's going to a different campaign. Like Andrew was mentioning earlier, there could be an auto campaign somewhere that's picking up that same search term volume if it wasn't negated, which is not a problem. The whole point of this is that if you take that keyword and you move it out to a new campaign, and let's say you just give it its own dedicated single keyword campaign, and then you go through and you negate that search term from every single other campaign out there and you've perfectly optimized the budget and everything, Will you get more traffic on that keyword? Probably. You probably will. But if you download a search term report for the last 30 days or 30 days before this new strategy viewers and 30 days after, did you actually get more impressions on that search term as a whole, like at the search term level through all of your campaigns? Probably not. Unless if you had campaigns that were like running out of budget or the bids were not being managed properly or whatever. Speaker 2: So the volume changed. The search volume can change. That's such another big important factor too. It's like, oh, I segmented them off and I got more impressions, but maybe there's just more people searching that this month than last month. Speaker 1: Have you ever seen a weekly search volume trend chart for keywords? Speaker 2: Yeah, all over the place. Speaker 1: It looks like a key teeth. It's like it's super jagged. Different search queries can jump up and down like 20% from one week to the next. So you might move something from one campaign to another, you get 20% more volume. But like, did your impression share change? Probably not. Maybe there's just more overall, maybe your impression share actually went down. You know, it was actually like a bad idea because the new campaign, you know, had, the only reason why you really ever want to put things into different campaigns is to take advantage of the campaign settings, which is going to be primarily budgets, placements, dynamic bidding up and down versus down only. That's the only added benefit. I know we're going a little off our script here that we had outlined, but going back to what Andrew was mentioning earlier around should you have 5,000 keywords in a campaign, that's not what we're advocating. To try to pull everything in for a landing, what's our answer for how many keywords should you have? The answer is do not worry about limiting it. But rather, just more focus on doing everything else right. So when we look at all of these issues for why people think you can get more impressions if you adopt these tinfoil hat conspiracies, it's usually because they're either not doing keyword harvesting properly, they're over-harvesting, they're taking every single search. Someone else I was just speaking to last week mentioned that they had, I forget the exact amount, but they had like, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords. And they were concerned that like they weren't getting a lot of search volume on most of these keywords. So like 99% of these keywords are like not getting any search volume. The account on average only spent like $1,000 a month. Okay, we're talking about a very tiny account that what I think was happening was they were basically harvesting as exact match pretty much every single search that pretty much ever came through their account. And what you'll end up finding is that the whole 80-20, 90-10 rule, you're always gonna have that. Just because you move things from one campaign to another, it might look at an individual campaign or ad group level, might look more evenly distributed. But if you ever look at the entire account level, You're always going to have most of the volume going to a small amount of keywords. So moving things into separate campaigns doesn't increase the overall volume at the account level. If it does, if you are experiencing that you actually get more traffic on these keywords when you break things out, it's because you were not managing bids properly. Not managing budgets properly or not managing keywords properly. And we've talked at length on all of those topics, but I think just at the end of the day, if you have a good campaign structure, if you have good keyword harvesting criteria, if you're managing those bids properly, those budgets properly and those placements properly, then you should not worry about how many keywords you have in a campaign. That will not matter. It will not make a difference. The only exception being like there are times where it can be advantageous to take some of your like top VIP keywords, do a few single keyword campaign strategies. Sometimes like after a thousand keywords, if you have a thousand keywords in the campaign, those campaign settings for like placements and budgets, those might be a little bit too generalized for all 1,000. So like you could break things out on a smaller level, but I wouldn't just, it's not just an arbitrary because it's too many keywords. It's just like, hey, we have so many keywords with a lot of volume. That we could probably get a bit more particular with how we're classifying these keywords like top of funnel keywords, bottom of funnel keywords, keywords that are long tail versus short tail. You'll have a few additional levers to pull on, but it's not the keyword count per se that's the problem. I hope that made sense. Andrew, I'll let you throw in your concluding thoughts as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's pretty much just keyword bids and budgets. And if you're doing the right things, like the stuff that we're teaching you, we feel is the right things. And in most cases, The accounts that I look at are doing none of them right or maybe one or two of them right. There's always a lot of other issues at play in accounts and misconceptions and all that type of stuff going on. It's not that Amazon has a glitch or anything like that. It's pretty much just a mismanagement of one of those three areas. And if you can get those things right, you're gonna be maximizing the visibility and the sales and all that within your given targets on Amazon. So, I mean, that's pretty much all I got. Speaker 1: And we might have made some enemies, so feel free to comment your disagreements below. Come at us, but I'm really glad we finally got a chance to record this because it's been like, you know We've been podcasting now for a year and a half and we never actually addressed this topic at length as we as we did now and Yeah, I'm glad because I feel like I hope that was helpful. I just know that We've from the earliest days that I was in Amazon I was really adamant about not never having more than 25 keywords in a campaign or ad group and then I just kind of I stopped doing that and just started like testing around and realized it made zero difference. And either times that it did make a difference could be tracked down to basically campaigns running out of budget before the low volume stuff actually got a chance to spend. Speaker 2: I've done it too. I at least wanted to test it out. We always recommend testing the theory. I've done this on my own accounts and broke out. I basically would label the campaigns like group one, group two, group three, group four. I'd predefine what those keywords were and put them into an individual campaign. The only thing that really did was create added complexity for myself. It made it more difficult to manage. And the main thing that it really made tough was doing keyword harvesting. Like when I'm starting to harvest keywords, I got to create a whole other campaign and then I got to make sure that I'm not already targeting those other keywords somewhere else and then I can decide to harvest things. Whereas it can be a lot simpler than that if you do kind of generalize a little bit. So that's kind of that spectrum of aggregation, segregation that we've talked about so many times. That I've seen at play, but yeah, I've done it. It just creates additional complexity that's unnecessary. Speaker 1: Yeah, and we probably need to do another episode on harvesting because I can't emphasize enough the problem of over-harvesting, which is like if you just take any keyword that ever had one sale, if that's the end of your criteria, like did it drive one order? Harvest it. The amount of low volume keywords you're probably inadvertently pulling in is extraordinary and is going to be causing a lot of problems down the road for you. So the harvesting criteria should be it is a relevant keyword with decent volume and a proven rate of success, proven track record of like driving sales. That's the summary, but we'll do another episode really diving into all of that. Anything outside of that, you're probably over-harvesting and it's causing these weird zero impression items and death by thousand cuts, which is another topic we've got to cover off on. Thank you guys for tuning in. We got lots to do this year it seems in terms of topics and coverage. So let us know what you want us to cover. Don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you guys next time on That Amazon Ads Podcast.