Synonyms via Advertising — Sponsored Products as deliberate keyword discovery.

The Search Term Report (Episode 07) is the after-the-fact harvest from whatever Sponsored Products campaigns are already running. This episode is the deliberate version: structuring campaigns whose primary purpose is keyword discovery, with revenue as a secondary benefit. Done well, it's the broadest single synonym source in the module — usually 80–200 candidates per ASIN over a 30–60 day run.

The harvest-first campaign structure

A harvesting campaign has three layers running in parallel:

1. Auto-targeting campaign. Let Amazon match your listing against any query it considers relevant. The four targeting buckets (close match, loose match, substitutes, complements) each surface a different intent class. Run all four, with low default bids and per-target bid adjustments.
2. Broad-match campaign with seed keywords. Seed with the top 10 keywords from Episodes 03–12. Broad match expands each into related queries Amazon thinks shoppers use. Each expansion is a candidate synonym.
3. Phrase-match campaign on category head terms. Captures variants that include the head term plus modifiers — exactly the long-tail synonym class that's hardest to find by other means.

The bid and budget discipline

• Bid low. The campaign exists to discover queries, not to win every auction. Bids 30–40% below category-average are enough to generate impression data without burning budget.
• Daily-budget cap. Set a hard cap — €20–50/day per ASIN is usually sufficient to generate statistically meaningful search-term data inside 30 days.
• Negative-keyword discipline. Add competitor brands and obvious mismatches as negatives the day they appear. Otherwise the budget bleeds into queries you can't legally capture organically anyway.

The harvest schedule

1. Days 1–7. Don't touch the campaigns. Let Amazon explore.
2. Day 14. First Search Term Report pull. Tag winners (orders > 0) for the organic synonym list.
3. Day 30. Full report pull. By now, most viable queries have surfaced. Cross-reference against the Module 8 working copy — anything not yet in title/bullets/backend is a write-in candidate.
4. Day 60. Decision point. Promote successful auto-targeted queries to their own manual phrase or exact campaigns (Module 9 territory). Negative-keyword the losers. Close the harvesting campaign or repurpose it.

How this source differs from Episode 07

• Intent. Episode 07 mines whatever campaigns already exist; this episode builds campaigns whose first job is mining.
• Coverage. Episode 07's coverage matches whatever your current ad strategy already targets. This episode covers Amazon's full breadth of "what queries do you think this ASIN matches".
• Cost framing. Episode 07's cost is sunk; this episode's cost is research budget. Account for the 30–60 day spend as part of the listing-launch cost, not as advertising ROI.

The launch-listing variant

For brand-new ASINs with no history, this is the most useful synonym source — auto-targeting Sponsored Products is one of the only ways to learn what Amazon's algorithm thinks the product is before reviews and organic ranking signal it back. Budget for 60 days of intentional harvesting in every new-listing plan.

The handoff to evaluation

By the end of Episode 13, the working synonym list typically contains 200–400 raw candidates across all eleven sources. Episode 14 is where that list is evaluated — search volume scored, intent classified, duplicates merged, the final 25–40 keywords chosen for the listing. The harvest stops here; the writing starts after evaluation.