Use Reverse ASIN Lookups for New Amazon PPC Keyword Research

November 11, 2020
By The Badger

One of our core beliefs here at Ad Badger is that knowledge is power when it comes to Amazon PPC. You always want to know what’s going on with your ASINs and find potential opportunities to make your Amazon PPC campaigns run even better.

This strategy comes to us straight from veteran PPC Den listener Ryan Hofacre, who shared it on our member’s group. It was so powerful and working so well, we knew we had to have him on the show. We are thrilled to know that members of Badger Nation are out there creating and innovating new tactics and ways to get the most out of their campaigns.

While growth can certainly come from competition against others, another strong source for growth and improvement is competing against yourself. If you can stay in the zone and focus in one particular direction, you can beat yourself at your own game and find keywords that you can be certain will deliver while doing it.

Use Your Amazon Campaign Inertia

A major driving force behind success in Amazon campaigns is inertia. The more sales you’ve gotten in the past, the more you’ll get in the future. This strategy takes advantage of that inertia by letting you know exactly where you’re reaping its benefits organically and how to further capitalize on that inertia in your PPC campaigns.

In order to be successful on Amazon, you must optimize your listings on a regular basis. The more you optimize your listings, the more your conversion rates will increase. The higher your conversion rates, the more money Amazon will make off your product, so it makes sense for Amazon to throw a few bones your way, even if you don’t notice them.

You should know when and where Amazon is favoring your ASINs. You want to find where Amazon is giving you love and capitalize on it. By competing against your own ASINs, you gain new and valuable insight into how those ASINs are being treated.

When sellers are stuck with a high ACOS, the culprit is often the strategy of bidding on a ton of keywords that they have never converted for. If you try to force keywords to convert, either organically or via PPC, you could slow or even reverse your inertia, causing your conversion rates to go down over time.

Reverse ASIN Your Own Products

The key to learning about your own particular ASIN is using a reverse ASIN lookup. A lot of people use reverse ASIN lookup tools to gain vital information about their competitors’ products, such as organic ranking, advertising ranking, and different search volumes of the keywords they’re using.

While the importance of competitive analysis can’t be overstated, you don’t want to fall into the trap of structuring your entire strategy around this data. It’s a lot harder to go up against your competitors if you’re always two steps behind them.

What happens when you use your reverse ASIN lookup tool of choice to find that data on your own products? After all, your competitors most likely are already running reverse ASIN lookups on your ASINs, why not level the playing field by getting your hands on that same information? What happens is that you find high-potential keywords that maximize your Amazon PPC power.

The first step to this strategy is, of course, getting a reverse ASIN lookup tool. You can typically find several free options, such as Viral Launch or AMZScout. From there, just start putting your own ASINs into the reverse ASIN lookup and take a look at what keywords you get in the results.

Depending on which tool you use, the results should look something like this.

Right off the bat, you’re likely to get a ton of results, and not all of them will be useful to you. To narrow them down to just what’s useful to you, use two separate filters.

The first filter is organic rank 1-20 (or 1-25, depending on your industry). This narrows your results to keywords and keyphrases for which Amazon already considers your ASIN relevant.

The second filter we recommend is “match types.” Specifically, look for keywords where you ARE placing organically, but where you AREN’T bidding. You’ll then want to start bidding on those keywords for that ASIN.

The key principle at play here is finding converting keywords and doubling down on them– like with RPSB! When choosing which keywords will get your bids, give yourself the best odds that you’ll get a return on those bids.

Pictured: You, after finding already-converting keywords to add to your PPC campaigns.

Bid on Keywords you Rank for Organically on Amazon? Yes!

“But Badger,” you may be asking, “why would I go to the trouble of bidding on a keyword when I’m already ranking for it organically?”

Firstly, Amazon PPC real estate is a zero-sum game. If you don’t bid on a keyword, one of your competitors will, and they’ll take advantage of the paid traffic coming in from that real estate. By not taking advantage of a keyword where you already place organically, you’re handing your competitors an opportunity to get ahead.

Secondly, when you do take advantage of that real estate, it establishes you as an authority in your industry. Even when you bid on a keyword for a certain ASIN, that ASIN will still show up in the organic results.

When a customer searches a certain keyword on Amazon and sees your product both in the first row due to PPC and a few spots down where it ranks organically, something interesting happens. That double placement subtly tells the buyer, “Hey, this product is the big kahuna around here. You can trust this product and the brand behind it.”

These two effects keep the positive feedback loop going and your inertia growing. They help boost your conversion rate, leading Amazon to favor your ASINs more, and so on and so forth.

Another huge benefit of this strategy is it keeps you in the know of new keywords that people use to find your product. Every single month, Amazon sees a certain percentage of search terms that were never used before. If you regularly run a reverse ASIN lookup on your own ASINs and find that you place for one of these keywords, you can get a head start over your competitors by bidding on it.

Key Takeaways

If you have a high ACOS and are struggling to find keywords that convert, using reverse ASIN lookup on your own ASINs is an excellent strategy. It’s a surefire way to find keywords that will deliver because you already rank for them.

Bidding on keywords where you already rank organically may at first glance seem like a waste of ad spend, but it gives you the benefit of claiming that paid real estate and positions you as an authority figure in your industry.

Adding PPC advertising to the mix doesn’t negate the benefits you gain from placing organically; rather, it compounds on them. When you combine paid and organic strategy for keywords, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Just find a reverse ASIN lookup tool, search for your own ASINs, find keywords where you place but aren’t bidding, and you’re off to the races!