Introduction
How do you determine if a search term should be “harvested” as a keyword in your Amazon PPC campaigns? What criteria decide whether a search term is worthy of being promoted to keyword status—so it can be targeted again and again?
5 Best Practices for Harvesting:
Orders > 1 Filter
When harvesting keywords, you are looking for good performers, targets that are driving sales for your product but aren’t being targeted in manual campaigns yet.
Using an Orders > 1 filter allows you to look at terms that have had at least 2 orders, which generally means it meets 2 important criteria:
The product regularly converts on the term, and
It has enough volume to justify harvesting into manual targeting
This approach ensures you're prioritizing high-value keywords and optimizing your campaigns for continued growth.
: You can quickly see whether a term is being targeted in your destination campaigns by adding and grouping by the “Harvested” column in the Search Terms table. The green check box means the search term is being targeted in all of the manual campaigns that your source campaign is mapped to. If a target is showing as gray, it means there is at least one destination campaign that your source campaign is mapped to that the search term is not yet being targeted in.
AdLabs will automatically ignore anything that is already being targeted in its destination campaign.
Data Group (Campaign) or Campaign Name (contains)
To select a smaller group of campaigns and only run the harvesting tool on particular source campaigns, you can use the Data groups filter (if you have them set up) or Campaign Name filters to quickly refine your selection.
This allows you to only harvest keywords on a subset of your account, rather than doing blanket harvests, enabling you to be highly selective and adaptive with the optimizations you make.
Search Term (doesn’t contain) your branded terms or ASINs
When harvesting keywords, excluding any branded search terms or ASINs is often necessary. Hopefully your campaigns are set up properly and you’ve segmented them by brand and non-brand, but if not, you can exclude any of those terms using the search term contains/doesn’t contain filters.
ACOS < X%?
No! And here’s why: If a search term is getting conversion for a product, it’s relevant. If the ACOS is too high, you’re bidding too much for that term.
By leaving the term in your more expanded match type campaigns, you deny yourself the control over that search term’s bid.
If you try and adjust your bids to optimize for the term, you are impacting the bids of many other strong performing targets.
By harvesting the High ACOS search term, you are actually becoming more optimized and giving yourself MORE control over your spend on the target.
High Spend, Non-Converting Targets: When to Harvest
Yes, there is a time when harvesting terms that have never converted makes sense.
And that time is: if it’s relevant.
If you have a high volume of non-converting spend on targets that are relevant to your product, harvesting them into manual targeting and negating them in the source campaign may be your best option for improving the efficiency on the terms.
By harvesting, you give yourself more control over the keyword and can better set the bid according to its performance without impacting the performance and bids on other targets.
Clicks > X
When harvesting keywords, it can be helpful to use a click filter to prevent pulling in irrelevant or low-search-volume terms.
By setting a minimum click threshold, you can avoid scenarios where a search term has one click but has generated multiple orders—these instances can skew your data and lead to poor targeting decisions.
Add a filter that looks at search terms with more than X clicks to ensure you’re only harvesting terms that have gathered enough data to be meaningful.
By following these keyword harvesting best practices, you’ll be better equipped to refine your campaigns, improve targeting, and maximize your ad performance.
If you need a walkthrough, you can watch the video training here.