Talk of keywords and SEO is always rife regarding advertising campaigns. But did you know you can also add negative keywords to stop your products appearing where you don’t want them? Negating bad search terms within your Amazon advertising campaigns is crucial for optimisation. It can essentially improve the overall performance and cost-effectiveness of your ads. Here are 5 key reasons why you should negate bad search terms.

1. Minimise Wasted Ad Spend

Adverts can become costly expenses when not fully optimised. If you negate bad search terms, you’ll be saving money!

• Irrelevant Clicks: If your ads show up for irrelevant search terms, you’re paying for clicks that are unlikely to convert into sales. Adding negative keywords to campaigns prevents your ads from appearing in unrelated searches, saving your budget for more relevant clicks.
• Reduce ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale): Wasted ad spend on irrelevant search terms increases your ACoS. Negating these terms helps lower ACoS by focusing your budget on searches that are more likely to result in conversions.

2. Improve Campaign Performance

Adding negative keywords can improve your overall campaign performance. But how?

• Higher CTR (Click-Through Rate): When your ads appear in relevant search results, customers are more likely to click. Negating poor-performing terms improves your CTR by ensuring your ads only show for relevant queries.
• Boost Conversion Rate: By eliminating irrelevant terms, you can target customers who are more likely to buy, improving your overall conversion rate and making your campaigns more effective.

3. Better Targeting

Whilst we know who our target market is going to be, sometimes reaching them through online advertising can be a minefield. If you negate bad search terms, you’ll be able to better target the market you’re after. So how does a few keywords do that?

• Provides Focus on Intent: Negating search terms allows you to better align your ads with searchers’ intent. This means you’re showing your ads to people who are genuinely interested in your product, rather than people looking for something else.
• Refine Audience Segmentation: By removing bad search terms, you ensure your ads target only those who are more likely to engage with your product, leading to more accurate audience segmentation.

4. Improve Ad Rank and Quality Score

One major benefit of adding negative keywords to campaigns is the positive outcome it has with algorithms – the invisible technology we battle every day as businesses! Consistency and precision with negative terms can be a major natural boost to your adverts.

• Higher Relevance: Amazon’s algorithm favours ads that are relevant to search terms. By negating irrelevant terms, you increase the relevance of your ads, potentially improving your ad rank and lowering the cost-per-click (CPC).
• Enhanced Long-Term Optimisation: Consistently removing bad terms and refining your targeting improves your campaigns over time, allowing you to maintain a high level of performance as you scale.

5. Better Data Insights

Streamlining your adverts is the best way to get the most accurate data. Removing irrelevant terms ensures your search term reports reflect meaningful data for precise analysis. This allows you to make more informed decisions about which keywords truly drive sales and which are not.

How to Identify and Negate Bad Search Terms

There are many ways you can search for keywords to help your campaigns, so how do you find negative ones? Well, in precisely the same way.

• Use Search Term Reports: Regularly review Amazon’s search term reports to identify irrelevant or poor-performing keywords.
• Look for High Clicks, Low Conversions: Focus on terms with a high number of clicks but no sales, or those with a high ACoS.

You can then implement any negative keywords by heading to your campaign manager. Add these bad search terms as negative keywords so your ads no longer show for these queries. Here’s how:

You can even update these whilst your campaigns are live to get the most out of your advertising.

By negating bad search terms, you can enhance your ad performance, reduce wasted spend and improve the overall efficiency of your Amazon advertising campaigns.