Three steps to set up your keywords in sponsored ads

Background

Bestspeaker¹ is a small seller from China that leveraged Amazon Ads as soon as they started selling on Amazon in 2019. They believed that the most critical factor in optimizing sponsored ads was the choice of keywords, as the right keywords can bring high-conversion traffic and drive product sales.

Bestspeaker’s keyword strategy

I. Finding keywords

First, find relevant keywords from campaigns using automatic keyword targeting. After running the automatic campaign for two weeks, select search terms with good performance as keywords. Performance standards may vary for different sellers; Bestspeaker selected search terms with an order conversion rate higher than 8% as their products’ keywords.
Secondly, collect two to four primary keywords from similar products, then conduct keyword research to find around 60 keywords that are relevant and of high volume.
Take a listen from Bestspeaker for more details.

II. Filtering keywords

First, check the relevance of the collected 60 keywords, and delete keywords that are irrelevant to your products or don’t match the product features.
Next, analyze the relevance between each filtered keyword with targeted products on Amazon, and delete keywords that are irrelevant until there are about 20 to 30 keywords remaining.

III. What to do after keyword selection

Categorize the keywords collected through the previous two steps into three ad groups based on Broad, Phrase, or Exact match, and then run campaigns using manual targeting.
10 days after running manual ad campaigns, remove keywords that receive high clicks but no sales, and optimize your bids based on advertising cost of sales (ACOS).

Result

Bestspeaker observed monthly sales increased by 30% to 40% in 2019 through Sponsored Products compared to the period before the launch of the Sponsored Products campaign, with 25% of the sales generated by advertising.

¹As requested by the seller, this case study uses a pseudonym instead of the actual brand name.