Search Term Isolation

This article was contributed by Elemerce. Learn more about their business here!

As an Amazon seller, you need a strategy that will set you apart from your competition. Whether you’re an advertiser or a business owner, it’s important to know that certain external factors may affect your efficiency to sell online. Amazon’s algorithm is constantly improving, your competitors are getting stronger, and your valuable strategy may abruptly stop working. To help you overcome these issues, let us share what we’ve learned through the Search Term Isolation technique. This advanced bidding strategy was once praised by many top specialists in the business. The core idea behind it is to focus all your investment on converting search terms, while excluding the ones that don’t work. Easier said than done. Most products are featured in at least three different campaigns, making this process more complex. Below are the three prominent campaigns you’re most likely to have.

• Auto campaign: You can use it as a safety net for keyword harvesting and/or as an anchor between your listing and Amazon because it will typically tell you how Amazon sees your product. Usually, you wouldn’t be able to see the current segmentation, so all that‘s visible are searches for the products that match yours. That’s why our strategy worked. You could add as targets everything that converted and remove everything that didn’t. At present, this can be achieved through advanced bidding.

• Manual campaign(s): If you really want to take your business to the next level, you’ll need multiple campaigns, and manual campaigns are one of them. But, for now, let’s focus on Search Term Isolation;. With Search Isolation, we pay attention to emphasizing and showcasing the best features of your product and customize strategies based on your business needs and budgets.

• Sponsored Brands campaign(s): If your brand is registered, then you’ll see how well these campaigns perform. However, should you limit them to the queries that perform in Sponsored Products or should you leave them untamed?

Now that we went through the types, let’s explain how the strategy yielded best results. You would need to pull all data from multiple campaigns advertising an ASIN and merge them together to identify what is worth keeping on the account - while adding them as negative terms in multiple places. That way, you would guide the search term through multiple campaigns in order to increase its effectiveness.

For instance, if you branched your campaigns on branded and non-branded keywords, you should be mutually excluding them through both positive and negative targeting. If you have a match type split, you would probably add a negative converting exact in both Auto and Phrase, but keep the exact match where it’s meant to be.

We invested top dollar into finding the best tool in the market that would make this happen almost “live”. And this used to work well, Until...

A big revelation happened when one of our clients wanted to increase their ad spend from $5,000 to $10,000 a week. Since they have a huge catalog of ASINs, we needed to step up our game with the strategy. Once we dug into it to find opportunities, we learned that we’ve had top-performing search terms that stopped or decreased delivering without reason. It was then that we realized that negating everything that converted could potentially do more harm than good. Our conclusion was that if a keyword worked well in one place, it must have happened because it had historical advantages over another new keyword. That way, you would always re-initiate the learning phase starting from scratch.

Once we stepped away from the Search Term Isolation philosophy and overhauled the account, we managed to unlock the real potential. The new strategy we tested out worked so well that we are now aiming at $28,000 a week in an ad spend with ROAS targeting easily going above their threshold.

Our takeaway from this experience is that if you choose not to go up, the only way left is down. With the exponential growth in online marketing we’ve all witnessed in the past year, there’s never been a better time to shape up your online presence. Don’t settle with the “ordinary”, because your competitors won’t.