Keyword Harvesting: Finding New Opportunities

Gautham Head of Market Intelligence

October 20, 2022

Winning in ecommerce means fighting battles over an infinite number of aisles, all defined by different keywords and the search results they generate. Knowing where to bid your Amazon advertising spend on sponsored products among varying combinations of search terms is crucial to running the most effective campaigns. While campaign maintenance and spending optimization are important, the more standard tools at your disposal may not uncover the full range of keywords that can yield incremental opportunity for your business. Finding effective new keywords outside of your established set is a bit like digging for valuable artifacts. The prize is worth pursuing, but there’s a lot of worthless dirt to sift through before you reach it. Knowing where to look can be more than half the battle. To this end, CommerceIQ has developed three methods that can help you unearth new keywords worthy of your attention.

1: Isolate High-Performing Search Terms. Amazon’s auto campaigns allow vendors to set ad budgets and have the retailer automatically distribute appropriate bids on a list of keywords that Amazon has determined to be relevant for your offer. While these campaigns yield new keywords over time, the process of correctly categorizing them as branded, competitor, or generic keywords and incorporating them into your existing strategy is normally performed manually. CIQ speeds this process by automatically finding the best-performing keywords and adding them to the right campaign. Their performance is then constantly evaluated on an ongoing basis for use in future campaigns.

2: Study the Competition. Amazon’s list of relevant keywords for your offer can be a great place to start when allocating your advertising budget. Yet there may be excellent keywords and search terms for your offer that nevertheless do not appear because the platform has no way of knowing that the shoppers searching these terms would be interested in your offer instead of the currently suggested alternatives. For instance, your PDP content or existing ad spend might not be optimized for these keywords, so they will never show up for these searches at any meaningful rank. Thus, the organic connection between these keywords and your product remains undiscovered. More importantly, the competition might be reaping sales where you are not. CommerceIQ can help bridge this gap. By generating these keyword lists as they would appear for your competition, our Keyword Harvesting dashboard can uncover generic keywords that have been proven to be effective for competing brands. CommerceIQ will use this information to identify gaps in your strategy and automatically add promising keywords. After incorporating these terms into your advertising strategy, CommerceIQ can then begin optimizing spend.

3: Survey the Landscape. While other harvesting methods mine keywords that are at least tangentially associated with existing lists of terms that pertain to either you or your competitors, expanding your horizons outside of these anchor points can allow you to understand what keywords are trending independently in your broader category and area of interest. It is a great way to get ahead of the curve and link to new opportunities that others may not have noticed. CommerceIQ tracks searched keywords on our Market Insights dashboard and records metrics such as search frequency rank, ROAS, impressions, ad spend, and many others. By plotting search frequency rank vs. change in rank you can determine which keywords will be ripe for future opportunities and align content, ad spend, or even new products to match these trends.

Keyword harvesting can unearth hidden opportunities that can add incremental dollars to your business and improve your Share of Voice online significantly. You may find easy opportunities that can yield additional sales without much investment, or you might find that you can enter your competitor’s consideration set and steal share in the market. Unlike ROAS, Share of Voice is a leading indicator of sales, making it a great metric for benchmarking. Improving your Share of Voice directly correlates towards higher future sales, and CommerceIQ helps you harvest new keywords and optimize your ad spend to make sure you’re spending where it matters most. Try a demo today!