Amazon Ads — More Keywords ≠ More Sales

God, I love those YT videos, where a professional-looking guy tells you to just go to Helium10, enter your top 3 competitors’ ASINs, copy the keywords, dump them into Amazon Ads as exact, phrase, and broad match, and boom, you have an expertly build (m̷o̷n̷e̷y̷-̷l̷a̷u̷n̷d̷e̷r̷i̷n̷g̷ ̷m̷a̷c̷h̷i̷n̷e̷) profitable advertising campaign.

After all, if everybody knew how to run Amazon Ads, I would already be searching for a new career. Again. (thanks Google)

Alright folks, story-time.

This is Tom.

Tom likes to play big. So he purchases a fancy $100/mo. software, uses it to generate a 300-keyword list, filters out all the irrelevant terms, and then finally dumps it all into his brand new campaign as exact match. Total work time is 2 hours.

Say hi to Ed.

Ed is a simple man. He just puts the 5 most relevant keywords in an ‘Alpha’ campaign as exact and then proceeds to add two well-known industry terms in a second ‘Beta’ campaign as broad match. Total work time — 20 minutes.

A week later . . .

Tom checks his account and sees an ACOS of 63%. He is losing money. He spends hours trying to save the dying campaign, but his data is spread across hundreds of 4-clicks-zero-sales keywords. At this point, he just cuts the bids in half and hopes for the best. Total work time — 6 hours.

Ed quickly glances over his account. The ACOS is 31% — a bit higher than he’d like, but certainly not in the red. He looks at the ‘Alpha’ campaign. One keyword has a 49% ACOS, so he lowers it’s bid by 20%. Next, he checks the ‘Beta,’ where he excludes a few bad search terms and adds a great one as an exact match to the ‘Alpha’. Total work time — 30 minutes.

A month later . . .

Tom finally manages to get a break-even ACOS. But now he delivers only two sales per week. The volume is just not there. The store owner fires him.

Meanwhile, Ed is crushing it. His client is really happy with the first month's results and increases the budget by 20%. Now Ed has some spare funds to get a bit more creative — maybe add some phrase match keywords in the ‘Alpha’ campaign.

While working with Google Ads, I used the Alpha & Beta structure quite frequently. Here’s an article on how to implement it with Amazon Ads.

Amazon doesn’t want you to use a ton of keywords.

In fact, they offer a very sophisticated top-secret solution, that allows advertisers to bid on multiple terms using a single keyword — it’s called a match type. (wow, bet you didn’t see that coming)

If you want all the terms that contain X, just put X in phrase match. And in case you are feeling a bit more adventurous and want to find new ways consumers are searching for your product, make it a broad match. See, it doesn't have to be that hard . . .

“More Keywords = More Sales” is the equivalent to saying that if you play three slot machines at the same time, you have a higher chance of hitting a jackpot. Actually, you are just going to run out of cash three times faster.