We have, once again, Brian Johnson of PPC Scope and Sponsored Products Academy on the show. After we released the previous episodes I got so many questions that I had to get Brian back on. We’re going to do a Q&A session right now to address questions sent in from the listeners.

Relevancy of Keyword Phrases

Why do keywords sometimes not get impressions, even though I putting a high bid and the auto-campaign is showing they’re relevant?

It comes back to relevancy. Amazon continues to tighten up what they consider relevant to the keyword you’re trying to advertise for the product you’re trying to sell and the search terms the potential buyers’ are using. The first thing they’re going to look at is how directly relevant is the phrase you’re bidding on to the search term the shopper is using. Amazon is also looking at the information they have on that buyer. What they searched before and the products they bought. Often times, the match they don’t find is with the frontend content of your listing.

If you’re getting zero impressions, check that the keyword is in your frontend content. Just last week Amazon started messing with the backend indexing and it’s throwing off a lot of sellers. It comes back to what Brian teaches, you have to know your target audience and set up your listing based on the keywords that will convert.

If I’m not appearing for a search term, how much is it about the PPC setup, and how much is it about the product listing?

The question is: Is your ad showing at all? Or is it just showing lower? If your ad doesn’t show at all then you’ve been filtered out completely. That’s usually a product mismatch or a category mismatch with your product. If your ad is showing up low then you’ve passed the relevance test, but the quality score of your campaign is too low to be competitive. You can compensate by bidding higher, but there are better ways of doing it.

Segmentation is Important

Is it all about the listing matching up to the keywords or is there something else we need to be aware of in how we approach the PPC campaigns?

There are best practices that you can use when it comes to setting up campaigns in order to have the best analytics and the best control. The short version of that is to segment to everything. Segment to the match types, to the skus and have separate ad groups for everything.

As far as getting filtered out because of relevancy, yes, you listing plays a major role in that. Is your product in a sub-category that is directly relevant to that search term. Is there a match between the keyword phrase your bidding on, the search term phrase the buyer is searching, and the keyword phrase that is in your frontend content.

This is a major oversimplification of a very complex idea and system. We couldn’t possibly cover everything adequately in this podcast. If you want the full version and many many hours of training, you can get his full lesson with the  release of SPA 2.0.

Google Adwords as a Learning Campaign

If I run a campaign on Google as a learning campaign, talking about Adwords with single match goals, does a different keyword perform differently on a campaign on its own or with other keywords?

There are specific uses for splitting a keyword into its own campaign. In sponsored products, I would set that up in its own campaign if I was going to test bidplus, for instance. I wouldn’t run a whole portfolio of keywords in a campaign and try to run bidplus because I w...