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Moving from Single-Keyword Campaigns to Optimize at Scale

Reading time: 3 minutes

Let’s talk about campaign strategy and why sellers should be wary of setting up single-keyword campaigns, and more importantly, why they should consider transitioning existing single-keyword campaigns to multi-keyword campaigns.

The very nature of single-keyword campaigns presents limitations and constraints for efficient optimization of your ad portfolio in the long term. Moving your eCommerce ad campaigns away from a single-keyword structure will give you the ability to be agile when you need to pull levers manually for many different reasons, whether for changes due to seasonality, running deal events, or assortment adjustments of your ads, to name a few. Countless external factors play into why you will need to periodically pull some levers manually, but when you have a ton of single-keyword campaigns running, it creates a lot more hours and labor to optimize each of them, which is very time consuming and prevents you from being able to scale effectively.  

It’s also more difficult to identify and fix common campaign problems, such as running out of daily budget, when you have too many to monitor. One of the key objectives in moving from single-keyword campaigns is to control placement multipliers for specific keywords and to drive specific spend volume to your ‘must-win’ keywords. The hours that go into managing a single keyword strategy would be better used for other optimizations and other strategy work. The pareto principle (80 for the 20) rule applies to search, so even a campaign with numerous keywords will generally be driven by 5-10 keywords.

Search is incredibly dynamic so by having multiple keywords in a campaign, you’re enabling your brands to better respond to marketplace changes. For example, you might have a specific budget set for a single-keyword campaign. Suddenly a competitor starts bidding aggressively and makes this campaign underspend. You will have to identify this change and make the necessary adjustments to your other campaigns to keep your budget pacing where you want it. If you were to have multiple keywords in this campaign, ad spend would just naturally flow to other keywords.

Take Advantage of Amazon’s Relevancy Algorithms

Amazon’s algorithms attempt to show users the most relevant products in results pages and in the Buy Box. Single-keyword campaigns hinder your ability to fully take advantage of Amazon’s constantly changing relevancy algorithms, which favor seller history, sales, and search relevancy. If you break out of a single-keyword campaign structure, the success of it can help other existing campaigns, and bring benefits to your existing keywords and products. In a multi-keyword structure, it will be easier to make sure products are appearing where most relevant, increasing relevancy scores.  

Change to a Different Structure

For sellers and account managers who are still using the single-keyword campaign structure and simply don’t know how to begin restructuring their campaigns without spending countless hours to manually restructure, we’ve got the spreadsheet for you! We created a document that can save you up to 10 hours of manual work to restructure.  

Get Access to this Transition Tool

Download a free copy of our ‘Moving from Single-Keyword Campaigns One-Pager’ here with step-by-step instructions included. It allows you to not only transition your campaigns efficiently but will give you more power to maintain and optimize long-term performance at the same time.


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