Many Amazon sellers face a common challenge during new product launches: their automatic ads generate relevant high-volume keywords that underperform. Should they negate these keywords and risk lowering overall conversion rates? Or let them run and watch their limited budget evaporate? This conundrum requires strategic solutions.
Budget First: Prudent Planning Prevents Waste
Before launching any product, sellers must establish detailed budget plans with clear advertising ceilings. Small sellers especially should allocate every dollar purposefully, maximizing return on investment. Different promotion models require varying ad spend approaches—personalized budgeting is essential.
Comprehensive Strategy: Preparation Over Panic
A complete pre-launch plan should include daily ad budgets, bidding strategies, and promotion timelines. Many sellers operate without frameworks, testing random methods before abandoning campaigns or resorting to off-platform liquidation when results disappoint.
Patient Observation: Data Needs Time
When automatic ads generate relevant but underperforming keywords early in a campaign, resist immediate negation. Allow sufficient time for listings to accumulate conversion data. Frequent adjustments during this critical period often worsen performance metrics.
Root Cause Analysis: Optimize Listings Before Negating Keywords
New sellers often react to poor initial sales by shutting down campaigns and launching new ones. When results remain disappointing, they begin negating keywords—only to see impressions and clicks plummet. Low performance typically indicates listing problems, not necessarily keyword issues.
Avoid Time-Based Bidding: Maintain Conversion Stability
Testing shows that time-of-day bidding creates conversion rate volatility—peaks and valleys that Amazon's algorithm interprets as inconsistent performance. This often forfeits the platform's valuable new-product traffic support.
The New Product Phase: Conversion Is King
During launch periods, focus relentlessly on improving conversion rates. Strong early performance makes subsequent growth phases significantly easier, while poor starts lead to increasingly expensive advertising.
The 30-Day Rule: Collect Substantial Data
Let automatic ads run for approximately one month before making significant adjustments. Only extended observation provides enough data for informed optimization decisions.
Strategic Thinking: Quality Over Quantity
Prolonged busywork is easy; deep analysis is hard. Without meaningful reflection, effort becomes ineffective. Sellers must cultivate analytical skills to develop truly productive strategies.
Precision Negation: Surgical Keyword Management
After sufficient runtime, if certain high-volume keywords consistently underperform, implement targeted negation. For example:
- Negate completely irrelevant terms (e.g., "kids' wallets" for a genuine leather wallet product)
- Reduce bids for moderately relevant terms (e.g., "men's wallets") while improving listing optimization
Negation Types: Avoiding Collateral Damage
Amazon offers two negation options:
- Negative exact: Blocks only identical search terms
- Negative phrase: Blocks all searches containing the phrase
Choose carefully—overly broad negation can eliminate valid traffic. For instance, negating "cheap" as a phrase would block searches for "cheap men's wallets" that might convert.
Continuous Listing Optimization: The Foundation of Success
Poor keyword performance often stems from listing deficiencies. Regularly refine titles, bullet points, descriptions, and backend keywords to strengthen relevance and attract qualified traffic.
Leveraging Search Term Reports: Mining for Gold
Analyze search term reports to identify high-performing queries for manual campaigns and underperforming terms for negation—this dual approach maximizes advertising efficiency.
A/B Testing: The Path to Improvement
Systematically test variations in titles, images, pricing, and promotions to identify what drives conversions. This empirical approach leads to sustainable advertising improvements.