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Negative Keywords in Perpetua

Why doesn't Perpetua automatically add negative keywords?

Mitchell Bergin avatar
Written by Mitchell Bergin
Updated over 10 months ago

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Introduction

When bidding on keywords on Amazon, in addition to choosing keywords that you want to bid on, you may be used to selecting certain keywords that you do NOT want to bid on (negative keywords). Through our data, we've found that in many instances negative keywords are a myopic advertising strategy.  

When using Perpetua, if a keyword has a low conversion rate, our ad engine will automatically begin to lower bids until it reaches a point where your bid is too low to win on that keyword - resulting in no spend on that keyword (the same effect as adding a negative keyword in the traditional sense).
However, if our ad engine believes there could be improvements to the conversion rate (due to an improvement in reviews, or seasonality), it will begin to increase its bids on those keywords.

Find out more about how the engine behaves here.



Recommendations on How to Treat Negative Matches

Some advertisers liberally add negative matches to optimize conversion rates, however, we advise against this as it hurts the amount of scale we can achieve with our campaigns and ignores the dynamic nature of the Amazon marketplace.

❓ But what if you want to add a negative keyword? 

While our ad engine will not automatically add negative keywords that are not dictated by the goal type you chose, you can add negative keywords very easily in our app.
Check out this article on how to do so.

Just be cautious of using negatives on Phrase match keywords because they will wipe out what may be very positive performing Exact match keywords.
For example, you may have an Exact match and Phrase match for the same keyword, where the Exact is performing very well and the Phrase is performing poorly. If you negative match the Phrase, this will result in the Exact keyword no longer being bid on which can have dramatically adverse effects on performance - for this reason, we typically only recommend that you add negative keywords on exact match types. 

Want to know more about Negative Match?
Review the Help Centre article "Pausing a Target vs. Adding a Negative Match".


Article last updated February 2024. If you find this information to be out of date, please contact hello@perpetua.io.

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