Prestozon has long touted the importance of focusing on Search Terms when managing Amazon PPC accounts.  Now we’re bringing you a whole new way to look at your PPC data with our new Search Term Chart feature.  This chart allows you to look at search term performance over time across your entire account, giving you insight into the behavior of your advertising campaigns in unprecedented detail. This allows you to see which targets are performing best for your search terms over time so you can drive traffic towards the highest performers.

Why is this important?
Search Terms are the touch point you have with the customer.  Keywords, ad groups, campaigns, are all just internal structures that help you organize how you target search terms.  Knowing what is happening on the search term level is by far the most important indicator of actual advertising performance.  If you don’t believe me, consider this analogy:

If you are going to manage your finances and you have multiple accounts, how would you effectively manage everything if you could only look at one account at a time?  Say you shift your balance from your checking to your savings, but you are only looking at your checking account!You’d think you were bankrupt, but in reality, you had just transferred the money to a different account.

This is how most PPC tools want you to look at your advertising, one entity at a time.  Keywords may show a gain or loss in impressions, but the search term data is the true measure of consumer behavior.  It is more valuable to know what is going on with your search terms than just what is going on with your keywords on an individual basis.  If you had a financial platform that only showed you one of your accounts at a time, you’d be looking for a new financial management tool.  You expect a holistic view of your finances, why do you expect anything less when you’re managing your Amazon PPC?

What does it do?
The Search Term Chart will allow you to click into a particular Search Term and see the performance over time broken out by target.  You’ll get there by clicking on the new chart icon next to any search term in the analytics section of Prestozon:

First, let’s try to gauge historical performance by looking at targets on an individual basis:

Here you can see a target with a burst of impressions during a 3 day period from March 27th through the 30th:

If you were to look at this in a vacuum, you might be concerned with the loss of impressions over time.  But now let’s look at another target firing on the same search term:

Notice how there is a dip here corresponding to the same time where the boost occurs on the previous target.

Now let’s look at the comprehensive view of the search term across all targets:As you can see, the total search term impressions actually stays fairly constant over the end of March time frame, the impressions are just traded off from one target to another.

This is an incredibly valuable insight and this view clearly shows you how your traffic is shifting from one target to another.  Without this visualization, it would take a lot of digging to realize that the search term performance change here was due to shifting targets.  Now, you can see in a moment what is going on for this search term.

How will this help me manage my account?
This visualization is going to allow you to see the performance of your most important search terms over time and ensure that these search terms are firing on the most relevant, and most profitable, targets and ad groups.  You’ll be able to see when the search term performance dips and if it is due to a less relevant target stealing traffic.  Then you can take actions necessary to manage that search term’s traffic by pausing targets and isolating your search term to the most efficient or highest visibility targets.  This gives you unprecedented insight into where your search terms are performing, which in turn gives you unprecedented control over who is seeing your advertising.