A keyword is a guess about a person
By Steven Pope · September 7, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
A keyword is a guess about a person
Sellers keep treating it like a fact about a product
That confusion is expensive
The word sitting in your campaign is not the thing being sold
It is a compressed signal about what somebody wanted when they typed it
Two people can use identical wording
and be hunting entirely different items
Amazon does not resolve that ambiguity for you
It serves the ad and charges you either way
So stop building keyword lists off your spec sheet
Build them off shopper language
Reviews tell you how buyers describe
your product in their own words
Competitor questions tell you what confuses them
The search term report tells you
The messy real phrases people actually type
That is intent worth bidding on
Anything you invented in a spreadsheet is a hypothesis at best
Match type is your filter
Not a checkbox
Broad discovers language
Phrase narrows it
Exact protects what already earns
Terms should graduate through
Those stages as evidence stacks up
Instead of sitting in broad forever
Collecting whatever Amazon feels like sending
Give a term enough clicks to render a verdict
Killing it after two clicks is guessing with extra steps
Feeding it for two months with zero orders is worse
One diagnostic that saves accounts
Check whether the failure is selective or universal
Selective means traffic quality
Universal means the offer
If nothing converts on any term
Your price
Main image
Review count are the problem
No amount of campaign restructuring will save you
Relevancy is proven by data not assumptions