The Easiest Way to Automate Negative Keywords for Amazon Ad Campaigns

automate Amazon negative keywords

Blocking Negative Keywords is time consuming, but it is also one of the best ways to lower ACOS and avoid wasted spend. What if there was a kind of superpower to cut out Seller Central, Negative Keyword research, and spreadsheets? Something like Negative Keyword Automation. 

Never fear, Ad Badger is here. We automate Negative Keyword rules with a suite of tools inside our app. 

What are negative keywords?

We wrote The Complete Guide to Negative Keywords, but I’ll summarize it.

Negative Keywords are essential to lowering ACOS for an ad campaign. It is often neglected by Amazon sellers because it’s just another thing that they have to do to optimize their ad campaigns. On top of keyword research and making sure you’re bidding the right amount for the search terms where you want your product to appear, now you have to set Negative Keywords?

Negative Keywords are keywords that are low converting and you don’t want your product to show up for them. 

For example, if you’re selling Badger tonics and don’t want to show up for “Badger poison”, you’d turn that keyword into a negative. This prevents your ad from appearing for “Badger poison.”

Non-converting keywords are like the vampires of an ad campaign. They are taking your money but not getting you sales, therefore raising your ACOS. 

A good way to find negative keywords is running an automatic campaign for a few weeks and finding keywords that are costing you money but aren’t converting to sales. You can find keywords that are good candidates to be added as negative keywords if they have poor metrics and are costing you money without converting.

If a keyword gets 40 clicks without converting once, add it as a negative keyword so that keyword stops wasting your ad budget. This also applies to keywords with poor click through rate.

Another great idea is using Ad Badger’s Negative Keyword tool! 

Here’s a live demo of how we automate Negative Keyword Bidding:

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  1. Inside Our Negative Keyword Tool

Okay, so here we are inside of our Negative Keyword Tool within Ad Badger. Our Negative Keyword Suite has four different components to it and we’re going to run through those real quick.

  1. The first one is the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt, formerly known as the Predator Tool, which is a daily automator and it comes with three pre-built rules you can use or you can set your own rules.
  2.  The second tool we have is the Negative Keyword Quick Attack, formerly known as the Forage Tool. This is a one-time action tool and it’s meant to go through every single keyword in your account so you can see all of the different metrics and the data of how that keyword has performed. If you don’t like its performance, add it as a negative keyword within the Negative Keyword Quick Attack. It’s a cool tool that’s will replace having to use spreadsheets ever again.
  3.  We also have our Negative Keyword Whitelist. Before the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt adds any search term as a negative, it’ll check the Negative Keyword Whitelist. If a certain keyword is not performing well but you still want to rank for it, you can still bring in sales for it. Add it into the Negative Keyword Whitelist and it will never be blacklisted by the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt. A lot of our customers do this for a competitor’s branded keywords; they might not perform super well for their branded keywords, but but they still want to appear in their market share, and reach their customers.
  4.  Lastly, the Negative Keyword History, where you can see exactly what the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt has done. In the Negative Keyword History, you can see all the blacklisted keywords, or all the keywords that were added as negative keywords. You can also see why it happened, when it happened, and you can make sure that only the keywords you want were added as negative keywords. It’s a great resource. 

That’s it for our tool overview. Let’s jump right into the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt. 

Ad Badger NKW Overview
The Ad Badger Negative Keyword Tool

Negative Keyword Nightly HuntTool

Here we are inside of the Nightly Hunt Mode. As you can see, there are some pre-built rules you can use or you can add your custom rules further below. If you want to add our pre-built rules, hit these three plus signs right here– plus, plus, and plus.

What these pre-built rules will do within your account is  scan every single keyword over the past six months to find anything inefficient causing wasteful ad spend. It will add that as a negative keyword or blacklist it.

Our first rule: any keyword with over 2,500 impressions and a poor click-through rate (CTR) with no sales over the past six months will be blacklisted. Any keyword with over $35 in ad spend without conversions, it will blacklist that. Any keyword over the last six months with over 34 clicks without a single conversion, that will be added as a negative keyword as well.

If you want to manually turn on the Nightly Hunt so it runs daily, it will automate all of your negative keyword blacklisting. Just look for the three plus signs. If you don’t see our pre-built rules when you load the Nightly Hunt, expand those plus signs by clicking this question mark.

Once you hit the three plus marks, you can see your options at the bottom and your Nightly Hunt should look like this (see video).

Adding a new rule on Ad Badger's NKW tool
Here is how it looks to add a rule in the Nightly Hunt.

That’s the Nightly Hunt. I definitely recommend giving it a shot.

There’s no reason you should let inefficient keywords run through your budget. If they’re not converting, they’re not getting your sale, why are you spending money on them? 

The Nightly Hunt lowers ACOS and prevents wasteful ad spend and to make your campaigns much more optimized and much more efficient.

Now that I’ve shown you around the Nightly Hunt, let’s review the Negative Keyword History Tool to see how we can keep an eye on the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt and understand the changes within your account.

Negative Keyword Quick Attack

The Quick Attack is a cool tool. Normally when you want to sift through every single keyword or search term in your account and understand which ones convert well, you have to go into the Ad Manager inside Seller Central and download an advertising report that can be thousands and thousands of rows of information. It’s hard to sift through: time consuming and tedious.

We designed the Quick Attack to eliminate the need to ever use one of those pesky spreadsheets again.

In the Quick Attack, you can see every keyword in your account and sort it by which campaign you want. You can sort it by date range, either 14 days, 30 days, 90 days, or 180 days. It also has options to exclude the last two days from your data because of the 48-hour Amazon reporting delay.

Here is the ability to filter through keywords based on different metrics and sort it by impressions, clicks, click-through rate, total spend, average cost per click, ACOS, your one-day conversion, seven-day conversion, 30-day conversion– so yeah, you can add a whole bunch of filters and really sift through those keywords to focus on the ones that you want.

See all of the different metrics for every single keyword. See which ad group it is from. See the keyword itself. See the query, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, total spend, cost per click, and the average cost of sale for every single keyword right here in the Quick Attack. 

If you want to use the Quick Attack, just click it, click. 

You can also edit at the campaign level, the ad group level, or the account level. If you wanted to add it at the ad group level. All you do is click Update Account and that will add the keyword as a negative keyword.

The Quick Attack is really awesome. Definitely recommend giving it a shot. 

Ad Badger's Negative KW Forage Tool
How the Quick Attack Works

The Negative Keyword Whitelist Tool

The Whitelist is great if there are certain keywords that aren’t performing well but you don’t want the Nightly Hunt to add them as a negative keyword. The Whitelist is where you want to add those terms.

Filter Existing Keywords to go through all of your existing keywords. Or you can add your own keywords easily right here, by entering the campaign and ad group, and then adding certain keywords to the Whitelist. 

Ad Badger's NKW Whitelist
The ins and outs of Keyword Whitelisting

Negative Keyword  History

In the Negative Keyword Predator History, you have access to every single keyword that was  added as a negative keyword by the Negative Keyword Nightly Hunt.

You can see which campaign the keyword is from, which ad group, the keyword itself,  and if it was added from the Nightly Hunt or the Quick Attack. It says the exact time it was added as a negative keyword.

To undo that keyword, if you don’t want it to be a negative keyword, manually add the option to rank for it again by clicking Undo.  

Join our membership community

I hope have a good sense of our Negative Keyword Suite and how it’s essential for lowering  ACOS and avoiding wasteful spend. 

If you still have questions, comment on this post and we’ll answer any questions you have about Negative Keywords, our app, or anything else Amazon PPC related. 

If you’re interested in unlimited videos, an Amazon PPC community, and one-on-one coaching, be sure to join the wait list to our membership course which we have a link to below. 

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