Transcription:

In this video, I’m going to talk about search term collisions or keyword collisions and why you should avoid it. I’ll be using a screenshot provided by one of our users, of which I’ve deleted or covered all the important details about what he’s selling and what products he’s having in the ad groups and the keywords.  

The important thing to understand is that as you see right here, the screenshot is taken from the same keyword across his account. For the sake of this example, we’ve changed whatever keyword it was to ‘helium balloons’.

We did a search for ‘helium balloons’ on this keyword dashboard and came out with this screenshot. And as you can see, these are all the instances of ‘helium balloons’ within this account which are about 20 if not more. And almost every one of them is in a different campaign and in a different ad group.

Now, let’s look at the performances. What you can see is that for whatever reason, Amazon decides to send the most traffic, the most impressions to this specific keyword, with this specific Exact match inside the EX 1 campaign.

This is good because as I can see, the performances are not bad at all because we generated 27 orders. We made $500 at 75% ACoS, which is good.

But, if you look better into the data, you see that for instance, there is this Exact over here (look at the stats of this one); the EX 1 is here (lower part of the screenshot) and EX 5 is here (higher part of the screenshot). EX 1 has 0.21% CTR and the EX 5 has 1.41% CTR. What does this tell me? This tells me that for whatever reason, when the users search ‘helium balloons’, they deemed the EX 5 much more relevant than the EX 1 to whatever they want to buy. So, for each time you show EX 5 to a user that is searching for a helium balloon, there’s like almost twice as much the likelihood that the same user will click on the EX 5 SKU versus the EX 1.

This is how I interpret it.

What we see here already is if we found a way to force Amazon to simply show the EX 5 SKU and keyword pairing, we would get twice as many clicks.

Now, you can also see that the cost per click of the EX 1 is higher than the cost per click of the EX 5. Not only will we get more clicks, but also, the clicks will cost us less money.

Additionally, you can see the conversion rate of the EX 5 and keyword. So, the SKU of the EX 5 and ‘helium balloons’ matching in this case, is a little bit below the conversion of the EX 5 but still good enough. Especially because our ACoS is much lower, taking into consideration the fact that the cost per click is smaller.

In my opinion, running or pausing the EX 1 SKU and simply forcing Amazon to simply show the EX 5 SKU and campaign for this keyword might bring you more sales, more volume and ultimately, more profit.

Again, in my opinion the goal of PPC is not to create more sales but to make you more money. Of course not always because when you launch a product you might want to create more sales. But over time, whenever you look at that in this way, if you’re to spend more money on a keyword, would you rather spend money on a keyword that brings you 10% profit at the end of the day? Or, would you rather spend on a keyword in the SKU match that brings you a double of that? In my business, the answer is easy. I’d rather spend money and show a customer whatever SKU keyword match brings the best conversion of that SKU, which is automatically the best profit margin for me.

As for the other SKUs, I wouldn’t advertise them but will still sell them because most likely, this is the same listing with different variations. My choice is, if I have to put $1 in a slot machine, I want to use the slot machine that gives me the most out, and I wouldn’t use the other slot machines. I would still maybe work on organic ranking or as for PPC goes, I would pick the best most performing SKU keyword match type.

Now, we can run the same analysis on the phrase match. We see down here (screenshot) that the phrase match that is getting the most volume of impressions is this one (EX 4). We can see that the EX 4 has 0.98% CTR. The conversion rate is 30%. The ACoS is 12.12%.

If you look at the other phrase match that is close to this one, we will find the EX 3 down here (screenshot). You can see that although the cost per click is slightly higher, the clicks for it is quite much higher. The conversion rate is a lot higher so, we got 35 over 30%. The ACoS is a lot lower.

Again, in my opinion whatever the SKU and keyword pairing of EX 3 brings in much more clicks and more conversion and better profit than the EX 4 SKU keyword pairing.

Again, in my opinion, in my business, what I will do is to find a way to force Amazon to simply show this one and ignore the EX 4. This means I will be pausing whatever keyword is in here or campaign or simply not show the SKU we are showing here for this specific keyword.

There is no easy answer for this keyword collision as an issue.

A lot of users, accounts, brands, sell products in their inventory  that are relevant to the same keywords. That’s very hard. But from the numbers in PPC perspective, if the goal of PPC is to bring in as much money as possible with the least spend as much as possible, it shouldn’t matter what SKU you’re advertising as long as you know it’s the SKU and keyword pairing that’s bringing you exactly most clicks, most conversion, and the most money. I will just not run the other SKUs in order not to affect the good performance of what I just talked about

The way I will mine this kind of data will be most progress in selling color variations, or size variations. I will find a way to structure a PGN, although I would say that you should put in the PGN orders that have the same profit margin or the same sales price point.

If your inventory shows a lot of products that are similar and relevant to the same keyword, I may want to structure the PGN in a different way to include products with slightly different profit margins and slightly different price points in order to identify which one converts the best within that PGN and then, pause all the other SKUs. That’s what I might want to do.

But again, I don’t expect to be right in what I just showed you. I just showed you what the data tells me.

Every business owner has knowledge of his business that I do not possess so, you should take the best decision for your business.

You should always test. Never believe what I say unless you test it. Even if you don’t or do believe what I say, you should always run a test to know if what you were doing previously is better or worse than what you think or what I told you to do. So, always test.

Aside from testing, look at the data and make informed decisions based on the data Amazon provides.

Thank you for watching. I hope this was helpful, and I’ll see you in the next video.