One of the best ways to test and optimize a specific keyword for Amazon Ads is to create a campaign or ad group with that keyword as the only keyword running. This might seem counterproductive. After all, wouldn’t it be best to manage as many keywords as possible under the same rules and settings? Not necessarily. Especially since Amazon added the placements tab in the campaign settings for Sponsored Product ads, single keyword campaigns have started to grow in popularity.
This is the most significant advantage when it comes to single keyword campaigns. The tool allows you to adjust the bids for the campaign to prioritize where you prefer the ad to show. The three options for this are:
- top of search (first page)
- product pages
- the rest of search
You can currently only do this at the campaign level. So this is where the single keyword campaigns can help. You can take the high-converting keywords for your brand and fully optimize them to the point where they show in the placements where they perform best. For example, if you see that the Top of Search placement has a higher return on ad spend (ROAS) than on product pages, adding a bid adjustment of 10% can increase your bid for that keyword when it’s eligible to show at the top of search results. This strategy can also help if there are certain negative keywords you want for one set of keywords but not for all keywords.
In addition, if there are keywords you want to gain more of an impression-share on, single keyword campaigns can allow you to focus on this search term and fight to gain the impression share you are looking for. For example, that could be very helpful with getting top-of-search results on brand terms. If people are searching specifically for your brand, getting those top-of-search keywords is crucial to keeping shoppers away from competitors.
In a sense, this could also be a better way of category targeting. Through campaigns with category-related keywords, you can get a placement at a lower cost than targeting your specific category in product targeting. If you are new to your category, getting eyes to your page can be expensive, especially for more broad, high-volume keywords. Targeting and optimizing these specific category keywords can be more cost-effective than running category-targeted campaigns.
There is a downside to this strategy. If you elect to use this strategy on multiple keywords, the optimization process does take much longer than optimizing one campaign, sometimes containing hundreds of keywords. Optimizing is also harder with single keyword campaigns because, naturally, there will be much less search volume to examine the data. It can be challenging to make decisions with only a few clicks. To help with time management, start with a small number of keywords for this strategy. You can continue to add campaigns as you get more comfortable.
To summarize, single keyword campaigns can be effective at getting keywords to perform to their highest potential, especially if you use the placement tool in the campaign settings to optimize further. This strategy can be challenging to manage with the time needed to run these campaigns and the limited amount of data you will have to make decisions from, depending on bids and budgets. For those reasons, you should start with a small number of single keyword campaigns and build from there.
