As a seller on Amazon, I am always thinking keywords, keywords, keywords. What are the customers searching for on Amazon that can give me an advantage? This is how Amazon businesses can be optimized in terms of product research or increasing sales. Although Amazon will not give you exact data on customer organic searches, the Amazon Search Term Report, within the Amazon advertising console gives precise customer search data from your Amazon PPC campaigns. It is also amongst many other Amazon advertising reports in your ad console.
In order to run your Amazon Search Term Reports, you will need to be running Amazon PPC campaigns. To run your search term report on your Amazon ad console go to the side nav and select “Report”.
On the Report Screen, click “Create report”
Select the report type “Search Term”, click “Run report”. You create a search term report for the following ad types:
That’s how your run your Amazon PPC Search Term reports.
Article Contents
What are Search Terms?
Search Terms are a series of phrases that a shopper enters into the Amazon search bar to find the product they are looking for. As I mentioned before, a lot of my thoughts as an Amazon seller are preoccupied with this activity.
Customer entering search term “0.5 mm pens”
Knowing the customer search term is really a large part of the battle for Amazon sellers. This information filters down to important selling operations such as:
We will really focus more on search terms in relation to Amazon PPC in this article since we are specifically talking about Amazon Search Term Reporting data found in the Amazon ad console.
Relationship Between Keywords and Search Terms in Amazon PPC
For the people not in the E-Commerce/Amazon space, when referencing keywords and search terms it might sound like the same thing, but it is fundamentally different.
Keywords are originated on the seller and advertiser side, it is an estimate that the other side of the search (shoppers on Amazon) will trigger the approximation results on a keyword.
When I say approximation it is because there are different match types a seller/advertiser can set on the keyword to set how tightly it matches the customer searches.
Search Terms, also called search queries/query, are word phrases entered into the search field by your shopper. Search terms are intended for the shopper to find a certain product. In the previous example, the search term is “0.5 mm pens”. Getting this data is very important as it gives a very good insight into the intention of the shopper.
Also keep in mind, as sellers research customer search terms, search terms can then become keywords and negative keywords depending on the performance.
Keyword does NOT also equal to Search Terms
As mention, the seller can set different Amazon PPC match types, because of the difference in match types. The keyword is not equal to the search term unless the keyword is an “exact” match type in which case the keyword only triggers when the search term matches the keyword exactly.
What are Amazon Search Term Report?
Amazon Search Term reports are a list of customer search terms that have been triggered for at least an impression for your campaign in Amazon advertising.
This report shows which customer searches attributed or not attributed to an order and also its corresponding keywords, ad groups, and campaigns related to the search term.
Types of Search Term Reports
You can run a search term report on Amazon advertising ad types that allows for keyword targeting. These include Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Brand Video ad types
How to use Search Term Reports to Optimize Amazon PPC Performance?
Once your Search Term report is loaded and downloaded it’s time for some good old fashion spreadsheet analysis.
Create a search term report by clicking “Report” ➡Click “Create Report” ➡ Select Campaign Type ➡ Report Type “Search Term” ➡ Report Period last 60 Days ➡ Click “Run Report”
By analyzing the search term reports you can perform these 3 very actionable steps to optimization your Amazon PPC performance.
Basically, your task will be to add good performance search terms as new keywordsandnegate poor performing search terms by adding them to a negative keyword list.
Add New Keywords into Campaigns
You’ll filter the report for any “Customer Search Term” that turned into an order, and you’ll eliminate “Exact” as a match type.
Finally, check to see if the “Customer Search Term” is different from the “Targeting” values. This may be done using a simple IF expression in a spreadsheet.
The goal is to find unique “Customer Search Term” values that resulted in an order that isn’t in your campaign right now.
Afterward, you will filter for any rows that had attributed to an order. It is up to you to decide if 1 order is enough for you to add as a new keyword. You may decide to increase your threshold to 2 orders to make sure of the keyword relevance.
Add the selected search term as a new keyword into the related Amazon PPC campaign. I’d use the CPC value at the campaign level to determine what the beginning bid should be.
Add Negative Keywords/Blacklist
Returning to the search term report, you can find poor-performing search terms by filtering for clicks => 7 and order (14/7 Day Total Orders) = 0 in the clicks column.
Add the resulting values on the “Customer Search Term” field, use these to add as negative keywords by going into the corresponding campaign ➡click “negative targeting” ➡click “Add negative keywords”.
It is also highly recommended that you use the “Negative Exact” match type
Single Search Term Isolation Campaign
This is largely based on the 80/20 principle, if you apply this principle to Amazon selling you will find probably find that 80/20 principle is even stronger. In a lot of Amazon PPC campaigns, I have seen the 10% of keywords actually can drive 90% of all your Amazon PPC sales.
If you dig even deeper you can find even 1 or 2 keywords that drive a significant amount of your order. These are the keywords that you want to hawk over, one way to do this is by creating what we in the Amazon PPC community called the single keyword campaign.
Other ways to use Amazon Search Term Reports
Backend Search Terms
Backend search terms on Amazon are phrases or words that are not visible from the front end of Amazon. These are carefully put in the ‘backend’ portion of a product listing and help to target potential consumers by exposing it more to the Amazon A9 search algorithm.
You can leverage the search term report from Amazon advertising to add or optimize the back-end search terms in your Amazon listing by adding phrases and words that are attributed to sales and orders.
Improve your Amazon Listing Titles
Your title is hugely important to your Amazon SEO. You are only allowed 200 characters so you need to make it count!
You want to make sure that the shopper understands what your product is within seconds. Having a clear and concise title can help the click-through rates tremendously.
Hence, you can use the Amazon PPC search term reports to make sure the title includes the specific search terms, words, and phrases that are attributed to sales and orders within the report.
Get more accurate data in your Product Launches
When you do product launches, you can use keywords researched from tool providers, but these keywords are estimates. You can use more accurate keywords from the search term report.
What better way to find keywords to rank for than search terms that you know have attributed to a sale?
How can SellerMetrics help?
As mentioned you can use the Amazon search term reports to optimize your campaigns by adding and negating search terms. But you can see that doing this manually is inefficient and prone to errors.
This is an especially tedious process when you are operating multiple marketplaces and advertising accounts.
We at SellerMetrics can either streamline this process or automate it entirely. Let’s see how it works!
1. Set the Rules
You can do this in the Automation Settings screen in SellerMetrics under “Search Term Rules” or “Negative Keyword Rules” columns.
2. Enter Rules Settings (Search Term Rules)
Here you will add settings to trigger search terms within a campaign. You will also tell the system the campaigns/ad group combo you want the search terms to be added to as a new keyword and enter what order threshold would trigger the search term.
Below are the settings to enter:
Name of the Rule (used to call the rule being created)
Destination Campaign (can select one to many)
Destination Ad Group (from the campaign selected, can select one to many)
Order/Max ACoS Threshold (tell system only grab search terms that satisfies the threshold)
Target Type (Keywords or ASINs)
Match Type and Bids
3. Add Search Terms as Keywords into Destination Campaigns
After adding the search term rules, the triggered search terms will show up on another screen for you to push the new keywords into the destination campaign with one click.
As mention earlier search term turns into a keyword in a campaign during this optimization. This is exactly how it is done!
4. Enter Rules Settings (Negative Rules)
Here you will add settings to trigger fo search terms to negate/blacklist within a campaign. You will also tell the system the campaigns/ad group combo you want the search terms to be added as a negative target and enter what click threshold with 0 order that would trigger. Below are the settings to enter:
Name of the Rule (used to call the rule being created)
Destination Campaign (can select one to many)
Destination Ad Group (from the campaign selected, can select one to many)
Click Threshold (tell system only grab search terms that satisfies the threshold)
Automate (enabled the system to add search terms automatically)
Target Type (Keywords or ASINs)
Match Type (negative exact or negative phrase)
5. Add Search Terms as Negative Targets/Keywords into Destination Campaigns/Ad Group
After adding the negative keyword rules, the triggered search terms will show up on another screen for you to push the new keywords to the negative list into the destination campaign/ad group with one click.
If you have questions or insights to share, please feel free to post them via the comments section. Please also consider joining our Facebook Group where we discuss any questions you may have about running an Amazon business.
We are SellerMetrics, our Amazon PPC Software helps Amazon sellers, brands, KDP Authors and agencies navigate Amazon Advertising PPC via bid automation, bulk manual bid changes, and analytics.
