What is Search Term Isolation?
Structuring campaigns and negatives so a search term is served from one place, giving clean data and one bid to control it.
Updated
Search term isolation is the practice of arranging campaigns, match types and negatives so that a given customer search is served by one ad group rather than several. The aim is a single bid to control and a single row of data to read.
The problem it addresses
A term such as "insulated water bottle" can be eligible in an auto campaign, a broad keyword, a phrase keyword and an exact keyword at the same time. Amazon serves only one of your ads in a given auction, and which of your own eligible targets enters it is not something you set directly. Your history for that term ends up split across several rows, none of them complete enough to bid from.
The tools, and what each costs
| Tool | What it blocks | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Negative exact | A single query rather than a family of them | Precise, low risk |
| Negative phrase | Every current and future query containing that phrase | Blocks long tail you have not seen yet |
| Match type split by campaign | Competition between your own match types | More structure to operate |
| Single keyword campaign | Everything except the one term | Only worth it for a small set of terms |
Negative phrase is the leverage tool because it applies forwards in time as well as backwards. That is also its danger. Applied to an ambiguous single word, it silently removes discovery you will never see reported. Where a word is ambiguous, negate at the two word level instead, scoped to the campaign or ad group where it is wrong rather than to the account.
Where isolation is worth it
Separating brand, non-brand and competitor traffic is not optional. Branded searches convert at a different rate to cold traffic, so blending them produces an account average that describes no real audience and hides the true cost of acquiring a new customer. Negate your own brand out of non-brand campaigns and keep the two apart at campaign level at minimum.
Where our house view differs from the common advice
The usual instruction is to negate a term from its source campaign as soon as you harvest it into exact. Our doctrine does not do this by default. The source campaign often keeps winning the same click more cheaply, dual presence covers more of the results page, and the converting data continues to inform bid optimisation. Negation on harvest is reserved for genuine budget constraint.
Moving a term between campaigns costs you nothing in history, since performance keys on the keyword and product pair rather than on the campaign it sat in.
The binding rule sits underneath all of this: the only reason to negate is irrelevance. A term with sales is working, and a converting term with poor ACoS has a bid problem, not a relevance problem. Over-negation is quiet, hard to detect and effectively permanent.
Examples
- →Adding a negative exact for a converting term in an auto campaign only once budget is genuinely constrained
- →Negating your own brand name from a non-brand campaign so blended conversion is not distorted
Related Terms
Negative Keywords
Search terms you exclude from a campaign or ad group so your ads stop serving on queries from shoppers who want a different product.
Keyword Harvesting
Promoting search terms that already sell your product into keywords of their own, so each one gets its own bid and its own row of data.
Search Term Report
Amazon report listing the queries shoppers used before clicking your Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands ads, with the clicks, spend and sales each produced.
Share of Voice
The proportion of a search term's visibility or purchases that belongs to you rather than to competitors.
Tools and Guides
Keep Exploring
Track your Search Term Isolation automatically
Shurq updates your key metrics hourly and automates your bids, budgets and keywords.