How to use Negative Keywords on Amazon

Part 6 of 11 – This is the sixth part of a multi-step guide on how to succeed with Amazon ads. In this part, I’ll cover how to work with negative keywords on Amazon, what they are, and how to use them.

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What Are Negative Keywords on Amazon?

By using negative keywords on Amazon, you as an advertiser can filter out unwanted searches. This can be done, for example, to filter out searches that convert poorly or for other reasons you don't want to appear for.

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Why Use Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are a must for effectively choosing which keywords you should and shouldn’t advertise on. Amazon itself is clear that negative keywords for Amazon PPC are very important. I personally use negative keywords primarily in two situations: 1) to filter out keywords that aren’t profitable for me or the clients I help, and 2) to filter out search terms that I’ve chosen to target in other campaigns/AdGroups because they’ve performed very well.

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Example of How to Work with Negative Keywords on Amazon

Let’s say you sell a pair of premium headphones. You’re running a campaign with Broad Match and one of the keywords you’re advertising for is “Headphones.” A customer with a low budget goes to Amazon and searches for “Cheap headphones.” This customer is very unlikely to convert because your product is in a premium segment while the customer is looking for a budget product.

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Despite this, your ad will now be shown to the customer because the keyword matches the search. Advertising can be tricky like that. So how do you solve this problem? Fortunately, you can address this by working with negative keywords. You can add “Cheap” as a negative keyword in your campaign, and now your ads will no longer match any search that includes the word “Cheap.” This helps you save money and focus your ads on searches that are more likely to convert.

Negative Keyword Match Types

Negative keywords also have match types, and they work similarly to regular keywords but with a negative effect. For negative keywords, you can use Exact or Phrase as match types. Broad is not available. And the match types work just like regular keywords, so refer back to Part 1 where we discussed how Amazon ads work to remind yourself about match types.

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Optimize with Negative Keywords on Amazon

With the help of negative keywords, you can optimize your ads for maximum results. This is probably the easiest way to improve ad performance. In the next part, I’ll go over how to use negative keywords to optimize your results, but for now, I’d like to introduce the overall strategy.

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Of course, you can go into your ads and add negative keywords that you are sure will improve the results. See the example above for a “no-brainer” keyword. But often, negative keywords are not so obvious. Instead, you’ll want to analyze the results from your ads, identify potential negative keywords, and then add them to the relevant campaigns. This is not guesswork but a completely data-driven approach. This will set you apart from most sellers out there.

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There are plenty of YouTube videos on how to identify negative keywords, and almost all of them do it completely wrong. At least if you analyze what they’re doing from a mathematical and statistical standpoint. So do this correctly, and you’ll have a significant advantage over most competitors.

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Hope you have now gained a little knowledge about how to think about negative keywords on Amazon!