How Often Should You Harvest Or Negate Keywords On Amazon PPC?

How Often Should You Harvest Or Negate Keywords 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: How often should you be harvesting keywords in your Amazon PPC campaigns? Speaker 1: And how often should you be negating keywords in your Amazon PPC campaigns? Speaker 2: We're answering those questions today on That Amazon Ads Podcast. Speaker 1: Now, quick announcement before we begin. If we stayed on track with our podcast publishing schedule, today is February 25th when this episode is going live, which means next week we will be in Berlin with the entire AdLabs team. So from March 2nd to March 6th, Andrew, me, the whole AdLabs team will be in Berlin and then Andrew and I are then going to Madrid for March 7th To the ninth. So if you are in either of those cities at either of those times, make sure you connect with us on LinkedIn. You can connect with us in the description below. You'll see the links to our profiles and we'd love to meet up, grab coffee or whatever you guys drink over there in Europe. So, all right, Andrew, anything else or should we just talk about these frequencies? Speaker 2: Yeah, one more thing before we dig in. This episode is going to be very highly dependent on a couple previous episodes that we released. If you haven't yet seen episodes 83 and 84 where we talk about the criteria that we recommend and that we use for harvesting as well as negating keywords, make sure you go back and watch those two episodes. It's going to give you a lot more context for the discussion that we're having today. Speaker 1: Yep. Good point. All right, Andrew. So how frequently should people be harvesting keywords? Speaker 2: Yeah. So when it comes to keyword harvesting, I kind of think of it as a spectrum. On one end you have newer campaigns and on the other end you have more mature campaigns. And if the campaigns are newer, then you're going to want to utilize keyword harvesting and do keyword harvesting a lot more frequently. And as campaigns get older and mature, and as you're doing this process, you're going to be able to do it less and less often. So for some quick answers, you know, if a campaign is new, Then I'm typically running through and trying to harvest the best keywords out one time per week. As they get more mature, it can kind of graduate up to one time per month. And then as you work with an account for years and years and years, like I've had clients for five years, you can start to get to where you can do it maybe once a quarter. And that's just really, if you've got very mature campaigns and you're really hitting all those main keywords. Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's really two reasons for why this is the case where it's more frequent at the beginning and less frequent as campaigns mature. Those two reasons are necessity and efficacy or just how actually efficient you're being. So when you just launch a series of new campaigns, you've got some research, some performance based campaigns. Usually those performance campaigns don't have a ton of keywords, whereas your research campaigns are picking up a lot of new keywords. So there's just a lot more opportunity at the beginning over time. As you're harvesting a lot more keywords, those performance campaigns have pretty much most of the keywords that you could be and should be targeting. And so if you're trying to harvest super, super frequently, let's just say on mature campaigns, let's say you're trying to do it on a daily basis for campaigns that have already been running for a year, you're likely not going to be getting any new keywords most of the days that you're going into harvest, assuming you're using the right harvesting criteria. Of course, it's possible to find 100 new keywords every single day. For the rest of your life, but that would be over harvesting and a bad idea. And so if you're harvesting properly, which is going to again on those previous episodes, lots of reasons for why most people are doing it wrong. But if you're doing it properly, you really only need to do it around once a week. In the beginning, you could do it daily. But again, I said efficacy, which is just how efficient you're being. That's including time efficiency. If you have some new campaigns, Let's say I launched some campaigns yesterday. By the end of the week, let's just say I'm going to have 20 new keywords. I could have done a lot more work and added two or three new keywords every day for a week, or I could have just waited till the end of the week and added 20 keywords. It's not going to make a big difference on my account. The marginal impact is negligible to the point where you're fine just doing it once a week. Yeah. Anything else there? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And initially when you're launching new campaigns, sometimes you might find that you did a lot of the keyword research on the upfront and got a lot of those main keywords into your performance campaigns from the start. If you have your starting bid set properly, there may not be a whole lot of really high volume terms coming through even on those new campaigns. And that's just if you're doing the upfront work of finding the right keywords and making sure you're going after the right thing. It can vary depending on how much initial research you're doing. If you're just launching with auto campaigns and stuff like that, then you're going to need to be doing this a lot more frequently and harvesting a little bit more often. Speaker 1: Yeah, to give one final example here just on the mature campaigns aspect, I have a client that I've been working with, gosh, since 2019. So it's been a long time working together and it's by and large the same product catalog. When he adds a new product to the catalog, it's still within the same category. So it's going to be all the same keywords. So when we launch a new campaign, we already have several hundred keywords that we know are relevant. At this point, if I were to go back and Try to harvest from the last six months of search term data. Try to harvest new keywords and we'll just go back to the tennis rackets example. Let's pretend that he's selling tennis rackets. There's only so many variations of people searching for tennis rackets that are both relevant and good volume, decent volume, right? Because those are the two primary criteria. So for the last 60 days or 90 days or 180 days, when I try to harvest from my entire account, looking at all my research and phrase match campaigns and seeing where are the opportunities to harvest new keywords into exact, I might get like Two new keywords out of an account that has 100,000 keywords. There's only so many ways you could type in tennis rackets. So after a point of certain maturity, like that's why I say once a quarter for these campaigns that have been actively harvested for over a year. Yeah, there's just only so much that you can do there. Speaker 2: Yep. Very well said. All right, Stephen. What about negating frequency? What would you say about that? Speaker 1: Much like Andrew, negating is on the spectrum with how frequently you should be doing it. And just kidding. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 1: It's honestly going to be pretty much the same frequency. So for brand new campaigns, probably once a week is going to be the level at which you want to be going through and looking through your search reports for negative opportunities. As those campaigns start getting more mature, you might just be doing that task once a month. For super, super mature campaigns, you know, campaigns that have been running and actively harvested and negated during that time after they've been running for over a year, you really only need to check back And on these around once a quarter. And the reason for that is kind of same example as before. If I'm launching a campaign today and then I'm trying to check back tomorrow or in three days for negative keyword opportunities, chances are most of those search terms are just not spending enough to really trigger any conditions or filters that I'm applying to try to find negative keyword candidates. So you're probably going to need around a week of data anyways. And it's going to be, you know, all stuff that's relatively low spend usually, and you're just not getting that much volume at the very beginning. So yeah, once a week at the beginning, and then moving on to once a month, and eventually once a quarter, it's really not as important of a task as bid optimizations, which is, I mean, we have a whole other episode on how frequently should you be optimizing bids, but Andrew, let me just ask you this. In your own accounts that you're managing currently, what do you think is the ratio of bid optimizations to harvesting or negating? How many bid optimizations do you do for every one round of harvesting that you do? Speaker 2: Gosh, probably 20 to 30 to one. That's much more frequent optimizing bid. That's much more, you know, that's the 20% that gets 80% of your results. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And that's why AdLabs was successful from day one when we launched where all we had was a simple sponsor product bid optimizer. That was it. And, you know, we got a lot of positive feedback that kept us going, but it's because everyone knows, especially our user base knows how valuable that is. It took us like a year just to build the keyword harvesting thing. And now I was actually going through some of our user data just to look at how active are people harvesting relative to optimizing and just on a few of like our top active users. It's a ratio of like, well, I mean, some of these are like 500 to one. Some people have just not harvested at all. But yeah, 15 to 1, 20 to 1. So for every one round of harvesting that you're doing, you should be doing like 15 or 20 bid optimizations. And something else that's important is, you know, this is only showing me like harvesting actions, which the harvesting action could have just been like 5 keywords, 10 keywords. But a lot of these bid optimizations are thousands of optimizations. So even if we were just going by row count, it would be like thousands to 1. You're doing thousands of bid optimizations for every 5 or 10 new keywords that you might have harvested. So That should give you a pretty good idea there. Just looking at Andrew's experience, my experience, I'm in a similar boat of Andrew, probably like a 30 to one ratio. Like I said with that one client, that tennis racket, well, he's not actually selling tennis rackets, but the example I was talking about earlier with that, that client, I can't harvest any more frequently because there's not that many new keywords meeting my criteria. So it's literally like once or twice a year. I'll pick some super long timeframe and see if there's anything there. But if you've done a good job harvesting keywords with your criteria, with your keyword research beforehand, it should all be in there. I guess we were supposed to be talking about negating right now. Same concept, right? It's all basically the same. It's just the inverse of harvesting. So frequencies, what you're looking for, it's all very identical. That's why 83 and 84, those two episodes go hand in hand together. Speaker 2: Now, one thing to add to negating, something just to think about, especially for campaigns that you've exclusively tried to make non-brand targeting, is in the onset of a campaign, you'll go through negate all your brand acents, negate all your brand terms. Sometimes clients add new products. And so it's important that you're accounting for that because I have seen situations where campaigns will start spending on brand And today sends and stuff like that. Just make sure if a client's adding new stuff to their catalog, make sure those are getting added as negations whenever that's happening, just to make sure that you're keeping that segmentation between your different tactics. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And it might be interesting to see what's the negative keyword negation to keyword harvesting ratio. It's kind of all across the board, but it does seem like in a very general sense, It's roughly, I'd say, a 2 to 1 or a 3 to 1 ratio. So people are negating more frequently than harvesting, you know, probably makes sense because there might be, and again, we don't know how big those batches are. So those could be like adding a single negative keyword could be added there and they could be adding negative keywords for reasons that Andrew just said, like maybe you just launched a new campaign and you already have a list of keywords that you know should be negated from the beginning. If you add those negatives in AdLabs, that would count as a negation point or whatever you want to call it, activity. Yeah, some of those negation activities could be just adding new products, adding new campaigns and negating some stuff routinely, not necessarily they're finding twice as many stuff to negate from their search reports as harvesting. It could also be that. So shorter episode today because it's a shorter answer. Think pretty straightforward, but we do get that question quite a bit and we hope that that clears the air and gives you guys the information that you need to be a better PPC manager. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe. It really helps us out and we'll see you next week.