Maximize Your Amazon PPC Dollars with These Super Keywords

In this post, I’m going to tell you how Helium 10’s Black Box and Magnet tools can be used together to give Amazon sellers an inside look at very special keywords. 

Amazon sellers are constantly searching for the keywords that your competitors are paying a great deal of money for, hoping to catch the eye of buyers on Amazon.  

This technique is different. 

Using this method, you’ll find keywords that possess far-reaching superpowers. 

As Amazon becomes more competitive every single day, Amazon PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising has become the starting point for the majority of the product launches that ultimately find success. 

With PPC advertising, you (or a company you’ve employed) create your ad and build a prospective buying audience through your selection of keywords, then set a daily budget and an amount of money per click. Learn more by using this Amazon FBA PPC tool!

Amazon refers to PPC as their Sponsored Products and says that they are, “ads for individual product listings on Amazon,”  and that they, “appear on search results pages and product detail pages, helping drive sales and product visibility.”

The scientific/voodoo thinking behind the value of PPC related keywords goes something like this: 

If Amazon is charging money for these keywords, then they must be converting. The fact that experienced Amazon sellers are spiritedly jostling with each other for the right to pay for these keywords only validates Amazon’s choices.  

This is where science and commerce run head-on into each other.  The better (more converting) keywords cost more.  

But here’s a secret. 

Those expensive keywords aren’t sitting there all by themselves in a listing; they’re almost always part of a longer phrase. 

The more phrases they are associated with, the better the value. 

But first, I’m going to tell you a fish story.

When I was younger, I used to do a lot of fishing.  

I was principally a fly fisherman, and I’d spend hours at my bench tying tiny little flies. 

The general idea was to match the most recent hatch of the bugs that the trout I was targeting loved to eat. 

Trout are wary fish and spook at the slightest shadow or unnatural movement on the surface of the water. Like for example, a clumsily delivered fly on the end of a length of a line. 

I’d spend hours at the side of the stream and a good day involved catching one or two fish.  

This cool new technique using two of Helium 10’s best tools in conjunction with each other brings to mind a very different way of catching fish.  

One time after spending a few hours casting my line with nothing to show for it, I noticed a couple of young boys walking a large net through a marshy tributary that branched off from the stream. 

Two minutes later, they ended up with a net full of fish.  

Now that I spend my time thinking about keywords instead of fish, that image comes back to me. 

A big net works better.  

In this blog post, you’ll learn how you can use Helium 10’s Black Box and Magnet tools together to create a very big keyword net for yourself.  

The technique involves using the Broad Reach Potential filter of Helium 10’s Black Box tool.   

Broad Matching, as its name suggests, is the keyword match type that allows you to reach the widest audience. 

When your keyword in is Broad Match, your ads are eligible to appear whenever a user searches any word in your key phrase, in any order. It also includes all the misspellings and synonyms that also trigger a paid-for ad to appear. 

Here’s how this technique works:

First, navigate to your Helium 10 dashboard.  If you’re not a member yet, you can become a part of Helium 10’s growing family of software users for free, here. 

Then, on the left side of the screen, open Black Box. 

Now, select the Keywords tab. 

This is the view that you will have. I have already chosen values for the search volume and review count that will allow me to filter for what a lot of experienced Amazon sellers call the “lucrative middle ground.”

I’ve also selected two categories that I’m interested in. 

At this point, simply press the search button on the lower right of the screen and wait for the results.  This search brought back 167 long-tail keyword phrases that fit within the parameters I set. Here’s a look at part of the first page of the results. 

Now, let’s take a look at the Broad Reach Potential Category.  In this view you’ll see that one product has a value of 9, and the other a 5. 

This is a relatively new metric that Helium 10 has built into the Black Box tool and it measures the theoretical Broad-Reach Potential of your keywords on a scale from one to ten.  

Specifically, it gives you an idea of the potential of your seed keyword to reach a (much) larger search audience. This happens because of the relative likeliness that it will show up in a different position or form of the word itself in the search.   

What that means is that people who are searching for your keyword are many times more likely to find it.  

Let’s take a closer look at a specific keyword in phrase form. 

For example, this bath bomb with monthly revenue of over $120,000 has a Broad Reach Potential of 10.

Let’s look closer. 

Now we’re going to use Helium 10’s Magnet tool which has the largest database of actionable Amazon-related keywords on the market.  To do this, go to the last column and select, Run Magnet. 

In this view, we see why it’s such a valuable keyword phrase.  In the distribution category, we see that there are 7,500 different instances of Amazon using it in a Smart Complete search. 

Amazon is throwing a very large net and will capture an enormous number (7,500, actually) of possible ways that this keyword phrase will appear in searches by buyers. 

If you are like me, when you’re searching for a product, (or a an address, for that matter) you are anticipating the search engine completing the search for you and tend to trust the advice.  

Here’s a look at a few examples of the way that Amazon uses the keyword in searched-for phrases:

Now, let’s look at a couple of keyword phrases that probably aren’t worth investing a lot of PPC money in.  First let’s look at this one; jewelry holder organizer. 

At first glance, with over $50,000 per month in sales, it appears interesting. But, with a Broad Reach Potential of zero, there’s reason to exercise caution.  

Again, let’s look closer. (Go to Actions, and choose Run Magnet)

With only one instance of it being used in an Amazon Smart Complete search, this is the fishing equivalent of putting an unbaited hook out there in a big ocean and crossing your fingers.  

Here’s another one:

Again, over $90,000 in monthly sales might normally catch our eye. 

Let’s zero in with Helium 10’s Magnet.

It appears that because of the overly specific wording that Amazon has been able to use it in only seven Smart Complete searches. 

Not a very big net.  

If you’re not a Helium 10 member, you can try us out for free, here.

If you are a Helium 10 member, make sure to put this technique to use. You’ll save money, but more importantly, you’ll reach the largest possible amount of prospective buyers that are looking for your product.

All you’re doing is simply making it much more likely that they will see your product when they search for it, and you’re spending less money to do so.