What Are Keywords?
Keywords are the words that you want Amazon to display your ads on when customers search for something relevant to your product.
(Be careful! Keywords are different from Customer Search Terms. We’ve got a quick and easy breakdown of the differences in this article.)
Since it’s really hard to predict the words people will use to find a product, Amazon uses a few different ways to match keywords and customer search terms.
Let me explain…
The Three Basic Match Types
This is what you see when you go to set up a manual campaign. You can select from three match types: Broad, Phrase, and Exact.
There are also negative match types which you can read about here.
Let’s break these down. Let’s say our product is a dish brush like this one.
Broad Match
This is the least specific match type.
If you set up a campaign using the keyword “dish brush” then it means that your ad can show up as long as the customer uses both of those words in their search in any order.
So, you might show up on searches like:
- Scrubbing dish brush
- Blue dish brush
- Dish brush packs
- Brush dish
- Brush for doing dishes
Phrase Match
Phrase match is slightly more specific.
With phrase match, all of the words must be present and they must be in the correct order.
So your ad would show on these searches.
- Scrubbing dish brush
- Blue dish brush
- Dish brush packs
But not these.
- Brush dish
- Brush for doing dishes
Exact Match
Exact match is the most specific match type.
As you can probably tell from the name, in an exact match campaign your ad will only show up when a customer searches for those exact words in that exact order.
So, in our example, your ad would only show up when a customer searches for “dish brush”. You wouldn’t show up on any of those other searches.
How to Take Advantage of the Different Match Types
So how do you know which match type to choose?
There are lots of different ways you can use these different match types depending on your strategy. Here’s one way you might use match types in your PPC strategy.
Step 1: Create a broad campaign with a ton of relevant keywords. Think of this as your research phase. Or as we call it, “farming”. You can also create an automatic targeting campaign in this step as well. Read more about automatic vs. manual campaigns here.
Step 2: Pick out any of the search terms from step one that you think might be successful for your product and put those into a new manual campaign with exact targeting. Looking at conversions is a good place to start.
Step 3: Then, pick out the search terms from step one that you think won’t be successful and turn those into negative exact matches. (Check out our article on negative matches here.)
How do you use the different match types in your campaigns?
Did anything in this article spark your curiosity or bring up a question? Comment below or email us at Howdy@PPCFarm.com. We love talking about PPC!
