Keywords before bids — the Amazon PPC ordering rule.

The most common process error in Amazon PPC is also the easiest to fix: people open a new campaign, type in a keyword they think describes their product, and immediately ask "what should I bid?" That is the wrong question, in the wrong order.

Bids price demand. If you do not yet know what the demand looks like — which keywords customers actually use, which of those convert for products like yours, how the intent shifts across the long tail — then you have nothing to price. Episode 05 is a long argument for doing the keyword work first.

Three categories of keyword, three different jobs

Brand keywords

Your own brand name and brand-name compounds ("YourBrand running shoes"). High intent, low CPC, almost always profitable, but the lowest-volume bucket. Brand keywords are Episode 17 territory — brand defence — and they need their own campaign so you can read their economics cleanly.

Category keywords

Generic terms that describe what the product is ("running shoes", "wireless headphones", "stainless steel bottle"). High volume, broad intent, high CPC. These are where most of your PPC budget will go. They are also where the spread between best and worst performer is widest, so they need the most careful structure.

Use-case / problem keywords

Long-tail terms that describe a specific intent ("running shoes for flat feet", "wireless headphones for small ears"). Lower volume per keyword, but much higher conversion when the product genuinely matches the intent. The most under-bid bucket in most accounts.

Where to source keywords

Five sources, in roughly this order:

1. Amazon's own auto-suggest. Free, ranked by search volume in the marketplace you care about. Start by typing the seed term and recording every completion.
2. Your own search-term reports. If you have historical PPC data — even from a single auto campaign — it contains the terms your shoppers actually use.
3. Competitor reverse-ASIN. The keywords ranking competitor ASINs are the keywords your product should consider. Use a third-party tool, or AMALYZE.
4. Category buyer reviews. Customers describe products in their own words. Mine the top reviews on competitor pages for the vocabulary you missed.
5. Off-Amazon search trends. Google Trends and category retailer search bars give you seasonal and emerging-term signal Amazon's own data is slower to show.

The negative-keyword baseline

You build your negative-keyword list at the same time as your keyword list. Three baseline negatives every campaign should carry from day one:

• Wrong-intent generic words ("free", "diy", "how to").
• Adjacent-category words your product does not serve.
• Cross-brand terms (your competitors' brand names), unless you are deliberately conquesting (Episode 18).

Why this episode matters more than it looks

The downstream consequence of doing keyword work properly is that every subsequent decision in the module gets easier. Bids are computed against known demand. Match types are chosen for known intent shapes. Negatives are pruned against known false positives. The accounts that struggle most with PPC are almost always the ones that skipped the keyword work and tried to learn it from spending live ad budget.