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#078: How Many Keywords In An Amazon Ads Campaign

Oct 26, 2024

Read Time: 3 Minutes

 

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I remember very distinctly, having breakfast before school one day.

On the day in question, I thought it would be a fantastic idea to load up my spoon with muesli and milk, balance said spoon on the edge of my bowl and catapult the contents of the spoon across the room.

You've likely heard the expression throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Well, apparently muesli sticks to the wall pretty well, too.

I digress...

But this story does lead perfectly into the topic for today's newsletter.

How many keywords (or ASINs) should you use in an Amazon Ads campaign?

Throwing spaghetti (or muesli) at the wall and seeing what sticks is equivalent to targeting 100's of Keywords inside an Amazon Ads Campaign.

Over the years, I've tested everything from 1 keyword in a Campaign, upto 100's of keywords per Campaign (the maximum number of Keywords in a Campaign that Amazon allow is 1,000).

I've gradually become a component of less is more.

So much so, that I now use no more than 10 keywords in a single Campaign.

I also use a handful of SKCs (Single Keyword Campaigns), as I discussed in this recent newsletter.

But why do I use so few keywords?

After $10,000's spent testing Amazon Ads, what I found every single time I put more than 10-20 keywords in a single Campaign, was that a handful of the keywords would get the majority of the impressions, clicks and budget, and the rest of the keywords would get the remains.

When I reduced the number of keywords in a single Campaign to 10 or less, the budget (and impressions and clicks) would be spread more evenly.

This ensures every keyword in the Campaign has the opportunity to prove itself.

Clearly, you need to be sensible about this.

If you add 3 keywords into a single Campaign, for example, and the monthly search volume of those keywords looks like this:

Keyword #1: 10,000 searches per month

Keyword #2: 9,000 searches per month

Keyword #3: 150 searches per month

Keywords 1 and 2 will take up 99% of the Campaign budget and leave Keyword 3 with the dregs.

Why?

Keywords that receive lots of search volume will naturally receive most of the budget – because there's traffic there. And traffic, to Amazon, is money, in the form of Sales (from customers) Ad Spend (from advertisers).

Having said this, I don't group keywords into Campaigns based on search volume.

Instead, I group them based on reader behavior (something I'll be going deeper into inside Amazon Ads Mastery For Authors – join the wait list here).

But being aware of the search volume each keyword has is still important because it will help you decide whether a keyword is worth targeting (or not).

When you have 10 or fewer keywords in a single Campaign, you can gather data on each of these keywords so much faster than having 20, 50, 100+ keywords in a single Campaign.

Your budget is much more focused and doesn't require Amazon to spread it thinly across dozens or even hundreds of keywords.

When you have statistically significant data on a Keyword, you can decide what to do with it:

→ Keep it running

→ Turn it off

→ Reduce the bid

→ Increase the bid

→ Find related keywords

Data is your best friend when running Amazon Ads (or any advertising for that matter).

But, from my experience, more than 10 keywords in a Campaign spreads your budget and therefore your data way too thin.

You'll end up with a bunch of Keywords that have 1 or 2 clicks on them and you won't know for sure if these are good or bad keywords.

If each click costs you, on average, $0.50 (some genres will be much higher than this), and you have 100-500+ keywords with 1-2 clicks on them, that $0.50 adds up.

But you can't confidently turn these Keywords off because they "might just work one day".

You need more data on them to make a decision.

When your budget is spread so thinly across 100's of Keywords, it's going to take months to figure out the wheat from the chaff.

So, my advice...

Keep the number of Keywords per Campaign to 10 or below.

And you'll soon start collecting data within a matter of weeks, not months.

That's it for this week.

Thanks for reading, have fun with Amazon Ads and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt

 

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