How Many Keywords for Amazon PPC Should You Be Bidding For?

When you first create a campaign for Amazon PPC, you inevitably get to the steps to add your keywords. The question then becomes, “how many keywords/targets should you be adding to your ad group?” Many inexperienced sellers will add as many keywords as possible and sometimes hit the 1000 allowable keywords limit in the ad group.

The experienced sellers on the other hand will limit the number of keywords because they are thinking about the following:

• Manageability
• Scalability
• Campaign Budget
• Campaign Objective

Structure of your Amazon PPC Campaigns

To ensure that your Amazon PPC account is set up for manageability and scalability, you have to make sure to name each of your PPC campaigns. The campaign names should indicate the following:

• Advertising Type (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display)
• Targeting Type (Auto or Manual)
• Keywords or Product Targeting (KW and PAT for short)
• Product (Using ASIN, SKU, or Short Description)
• Strategy (Launch, Mature, by Match Type etc)

We name our Amazon PPC campaign to the following naming convention. This is what we do, and you don’t need to follow exactly.

{Advertising Type} – {Targeting Type} – {Keywords or Product Targeting}- {Product} – {Strategy}

For example, if the campaign is a sponsored product, manual, ASIN: B07PY7GLKV, and the product just launched. Then the campaign name should be:

SP – Manual – KW – B07PY7GLKV(Moon Lamp) – Launch

By naming your campaign like the above, you can stay organized and pinpoint the exact type of campaigns you want to optimize.

What is your Campaign Budget?

Another aspect in determining the number of keywords in your campaign budget. You want to set a campaign budget that allows all your keyword to get a chance at an impression. If you add many keywords, you might be spreading your budget across too many keywords, where >60% of the keywords will not get any impressions

In order to give all your keywords a chance, your campaign budget should be set to the below formula:

Daily Budget (Campaign) = Number of Keywords or Product Target x Est. CPC

So if you have a campaign budget limit on your Amazon advertising, this would be a constraint on the number of keywords you can use. In other words, you can determine the number of keywords base on your campaign budget if you reverse the above formula:

Number of Keywords or Product Target = Daily Budget (Campaign)/Est. CPC

Avoid Keyword Dumping

As mentioned above, you can add up to 1000 keywords per ad group. If you add many keywords indiscriminately from keyword research tools, you are probably keyword dumping. Keyword dumping can lead you into what I call a “Whack a Mole” situation.

What is the “What a Mole” situation?

When you are caught up in a cycle of constantly optimizing for keywords because your ad group/campaign has too small of a budget for the number of keywords in it, if your ad group has over 100 keywords, you are a good chance probably keyword dumping.

For example, the seller has 1000 keywords in his ad group, but there is not enough budget to win an impression on all 1000 keywords, so what Amazon will do is to allocate impression to only 100 of the 1000 keywords. As you optimize the first set of 100 keywords, the campaign budget will then move on to the next set of 100 keywords, and then you would need to optimize for that set. If it takes you one full month to fully optimize your 100 keywords, it will take a full 10 months to optimize this campaign completely.

So what’s the solution to this Amazon PPC mistake?

Limit the number of keywords or product targets in an ad group to 100 at most

As a well-informed Amazon seller, you will limit yourself to 100 keywords and ensure your campaign will get optimized within a reasonable timeframe.

What is the Optimal Number of Keywords for your Campaign?

You should look to add around 50-60 keywords per ad group and 100 keywords in a campaign level.

How SellerMetrics can make sure you recover from Keyword Dumping mistakes

Proper Amazon PPC campaign setup requires experience. The first few campaigns created by sellers, in most cases, are not the most optimally structured. This includes not properly naming your campaign, budgeted or adding too many keywords.

At the same time, these “grandfathered” campaigns drive a lot of the PPC sales; shutting them down and creating a new campaign could potentially be a very risky proposition. If your campaigns are not properly named, take the time to dig through your campaigns to the naming conventions mentioned above.

If your campaign/ad group is too tough to manage from having too many keywords via keyword dumping, SellerMetrics can help. Our automation bidding function has 3 types of bid settings, they are:

1. Growth
2. Moderate
3. Optimize

In a situation where you have too many keywords to manage, you can use our “Optimize” bid settings, this setting do the following:

• Will down bid lesser relevant keywords ➡ compress bidding on less relevant keywords, while leaving more budget to high performing keywords
• Change bid according to user-specified ACoS goals
• Make bid change to all keywords daily

By using the SellerMetrics bid automation feature, you easily manage and optimize these large campaigns without any interruptions.