What Is Search Term Isolation And How Does It Work?

Since Amazon is a pay-to-play marketplace, advertising is a need for success. Everything above the fold is sponsored, and sponsored brand and product adverts take up almost the whole first page of search results. Organic placements are listed below sponsored products, however, even those positions are chosen based on the most successful conversion rate, favourable customer feedback, and relevance. Additionally, Amazon constantly introduces new forms of advertising, such as the relatively recent Sponsored Brand Video Ad.

The mainstay of your Amazon growth is advertising, and to advertise effectively and profitably, you need a plan and procedure for Amazon bidding that has been tested and proven to work.

Hence, there comes a need for you to know strategies like search term isolation.

Bidding on certain search phrases on Amazon is known as search term isolation. We examine what it implies specifically and how it might advance your advertising strategy.

Learning the complexities of the sector, particularly the vast vocabulary, is one of the most challenging parts of digital advertising. Advertisers frequently make the error of confusing the terms “keyword” and “search term.”

They are not interchangeable, even though both are significant components of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and have comparable meanings. While keywords are what advertisers or marketers employ for promotion and visibility, a search term is a term a user types into a search engine to look up information. We now come to the search word isolation.

What Is Search Term Isolation?

To ensure that you are only investing in the finest search keywords, search phrase isolation means bidding on search terms that convert while disregarding those that do not. Essentially, it entails bidding on keywords that correspond to the audience’s search phrases. On Amazon, this technique is very common.

By modifying unique bids for each keyword in search term isolation, you may break down each keyword separately to account for the number of impressions, budget, and CPC target, allowing for more customisation and increasing profitability. Therefore, you must comprehend search phrase optimization techniques as well as the distinction between search terms and keywords if you want to have a successful growth strategy.

Standard Bid Management

The Method

1. Amazon launches an auction each time a user searches.
2. Amazon will include you in the auction if you are running a pertinent ad and placing a bid on a keyword that can appear for that search term.
3. Your ad will be displayed if your bid is high enough, giving you an impression.
4. Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising means that you only pay Amazon when a customer clicks on your advertisement.
5. If your offer is too modest, no one will be impressed.

The Issue

Traditional bid management requires you to place the same bid on every Amazon search phrase in a bucket, regardless of whether you can benefit from the word.

The problem with this method is that the cost-per-click (CPC) distribution for each search phrase in an auto-campaign varies and changes frequently. You cannot lower your bid for any search phrases in the group that are detrimental to you. On the other hand, you cannot bid higher for search phrases that are advantageous to you. This restriction costs money and slows growth.

Let’s pretend. You market women’s haircare products and are introducing a fantastic new speciality shampoo for colour-treated hair that is sulfate-free. On Amazon, if you target shampoo with a broad match type, you are also targeting longer-tail phrases, such as shampoo for men or shampoo for curly hair. The issue is that you don’t even carry shampoo for guys! Uh-oh. Your offer is spread among a broad group of terms in these research match kinds. While some relevant terms convert profitably, others do so at a loss, and still, others are ineffective and do not result in sales. You’ll be paying to target search phrases that are utterly unrelated to your product if you don’t have complete control over your search terms, which can be a waste of money.

What Is the Difference Between Search Terms and Keywords?

Despite their apparent similarity, keywords and search terms are essentially different from one another. A marketer will employ a certain word or phrase as a keyword in a sponsored or unsponsored search campaign. As an illustration, you would use the term “gel moisturiser” as your keyword if you wanted to run a campaign for one.

The precise name of a brand or its tagline are examples of trademarked terms that can also be used as keywords. To increase visibility, marketers and advertising utilise keywords.

When using a search engine, users enter words or phrases known as search terms into the search box. The list of terms might not be in the correct order, contain extra terms unrelated to the search query, or even contain misspellings (in which case search engines will automatically correct them).

How Does Search Term Isolation Work?

The principles of search term optimization are based on the criteria you use to match keywords to the search phrases that customers are using, as well as how you bid on keywords.

You must first decide whether to target by keywords or by-products when running a manual PPC (pay-per-click) campaign on Amazon. You can select whether your keywords will show up in search results with a “wide match,” “phrase match,” or “exact match” when you bid on keywords.

Each of these choices has various bid prices and various match-making procedures. By placing the top-performing search terms in exact match campaigns, search term optimization enables you to focus your bids on the keywords with the highest conversion rates.

To understand why precise match and search phrase optimization are so crucial, let’s take a closer look at matching.

1. Broad match: When using broad match bidding, the search results will include any term that is associated with the phrase or word you are targeting. If you’re targeting “kitchen knives,” for instance, your product might appear in searches for “stainless steel knife for kitchen.” This is beneficial because that statement is pertinent. But it’s also possible that you’ll wind up outbid for terms like “kitchen knife sharpening,” “block for kitchen knife,” or even “toy kitchen knife set,” none of which you sell.

Of course, your audience will be larger the more widely your advertisement is used. The likelihood that you will pay for clicks to your listing from people who might not be interested in purchasing your particular goods is also higher. We’ll return to this, but a broad match keyword can provide you with useful insight into the search terms used by potential clients.

2. Phrase match: You can limit your target search keywords to particular phrases by using phrase match bidding. When contrasted to broad match, phrase match’s primary advantage is its control over word order.

A broad match offer for the term “kitchen knife,” for instance, might also show up for bids on terms like “kitchen bread knife.” Any altering keywords would need to be placed at the front or end of your “seed phrase” when using phrase match. You have more power as a result. However, as you can see in this specific illustration, phrase match has no particular influence on the additional, potentially irrelevant search terms for your “kitchen knife” advertisement described above.

3. Exact match: The exact match bid is what it claims it is. You can place a bid on a specific word or phrase and nothing else, even plurals. The term in question could be quite prevalent and general, such as “kitchen knife.” Exact match advertisements, however, frequently target “longer-tail,” hyper-targeted keywords and search queries. “Japanese stainless-steel knife,” as an illustration. It reduces exposure. But when done correctly, it maximises conversions, increasing the effectiveness of your advertising budget.

How Does Amazon’s Search Term Isolation Work?

A list of customer keyword search words that have generated at least one impression for your Amazon advertising campaign is included in Amazon search term reports. They are simply the search phrases that customers use to find things on Amazon.

You can run one of three different reports on Amazon search terms:

• Sponsored businesses
• Types of sponsored brand video ads
• Advertised goods

When you download an Amazon search term analysis, you may examine it and include three extremely practical strategies to improve the effectiveness of your Amazon campaign:

• Increase the campaign’s keyword volume 
• Include negative keywords (where you focus on only the most relevant keywords)

Search Term Isolation Bid Management Strategies

For each group of products, we created a sophisticated campaign framework. By using a single search phrase rather than a group of related terms, this structure enables us to optimise bids just on the best-performing Amazon search terms.

When the research campaign or the auto campaign generates a sale for a particular phrase, our proprietary technology takes the search term from those two campaigns, adds it to the performance campaign in an exact match so that it only targets that search term, and simultaneously removes it from the first two campaigns, isolating it in this performance campaign.

1. Auto Campaign

Amazon launches auto-pilot advertising when they believe certain keywords are appropriate. These keywords are selected based on the product description and title.

“Buckets” of search terms make up keywords. For each term on Amazon, you can only set one cost-per-click bid. This implies that if you set a $2 price for the keyword trousers, $2 will also be set as the bid for all related search phrases, such as men’s pants, khaki pants, etc. You cannot lower your bid for any search phrases in the group that are detrimental to you. On the other hand, you cannot bid higher for search phrases that are advantageous to you.

It is helpful to use auto campaigns to identify which keywords convert well and which don’t. However, these campaigns generally waste money and only serve the objective of providing knowledge of each keyword’s effectiveness for a little period.

2. Research Campaign

You have the option to specify the keyword to target in research campaigns. Maybe you’ve found a term you’d like to study because it’s done well for you in your auto campaigns and you want to dig into it more. For instance, if the keyword “white t shirt” has been successful for you, you might want to check to see whether comparable terms, such as “white t shirt for men” or “white t shirt large,” are also effective.

Broad match and phrase match keywords are used in research initiatives. Your chosen keyword, along with any other words in any sequence, is considered a broad match. Therefore, a white t-shirt might be a cropped white t-shirt or a white t-shirt for males. A phrase match includes both the keyword and any other word in the precise phrase order. So, a word can come before or after the Superman t-shirt (men’s white t-shirt or white t-shirt huge), but not in the middle.

Research programmes are very useful for locating long tail keywords. Compared to simple, generic keywords, longtail keywords typically convert better.

Men’s white t-shirt pack of 6 could be a longtail term for white t-shirts, for instance. The consumer is looking for a particularly specific item because this longtail keyword comprises more precise words. Longtail keywords frequently do well since the customer is nearer to the moment of purchase.

3. Performance Campaigns

In performance campaigns, bids are solely optimised for the top-performing search phrases—one specific term rather than a group of related terms. Performance campaign keywords have a high conversion rate, which has been demonstrated.

Exact match keywords are the only ones used in performance marketing. The only possible word for your keyword Superman t-shirt is Superman t-shirt because it is an exact match keyword.

Unless you have a clear concept of a precise exact phrase that works well for your business, performance campaigns are typically left vacant at the start. However, auto campaigns are typically run initially, and high-performing keywords are automatically filtered in later, to fully grasp the breadth of an account.

Conclusion

Your Amazon strategy will benefit from the specificity, the economy of scale, and competitive edge that a thorough understanding of keywords and search terms will bring.

When you use isolated search words, you may control the bid on a single term rather than a group of terms that are all connected to the same keyword. Only in this fashion can Amazon marketers scale while controlling ACoS and profitability.

Isolating search phrases can enable you to ensure that every dollar of your marketing budget is being used effectively. You’ll also have the secret to scaling if you can use technology to automatically separate search terms. With the help of an analytics tool, you can take fine-grained control of your PPC campaigns, find unmet search term needs, and boost conversions. It would be even better to be able to break this data into different geographic areas, personas, and purchase cycles.