How Important Are Keywords In Your Amazon Title?

When discussing Amazon listing optimization, the question often comes up:

What is the most important part of the listing with regard to keyword rank?

This is an understandably important question. When setting up new listings, or optimizing old ones, it makes sense to focus your efforts on elements that will have the greatest impact.

Most third-party literature on the topic will say the title is the most important. This is an almost unanimously agreed upon idea (though some argue for subject matter terms, but there isn’t strong evidence to support that).

How did so many come to this conclusion?

The key to answering this question lies within Amazon’s own data. Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t much help in this regard.

One visit to the seller central page dedicated to instructing sellers on how to optimize their listings shows the tone-def nature of Amazon’s robotic and ultra-corporate communication style.

Aside from the fact that it is both foolish and sometimes impossible to include all relevant information for a product in just 60 characters, this advice says absolutely NOTHING about indexing or the impact this element has on the A9.

So how can we know? Who can we trust?

We know titles have the biggest impact due to our understanding of relevance and how it can be affected. Titles, in essence, are like most H1 tags and therefore dictate the most amount of relevance for the keywords within it.

But we can’t just trust what seems logical and run with it. After all, we are dealing with Amazon. Not everything they do makes sense at all.

There are dozens of data points that can be looked at to create a more robust picture of a listing’s title impact. However, for the purposes of this article, we’ll zero in on one. The impact that keywords in the title have on PPC ads targeting the same keywords.

Let’s dive in…

Amazon PPC: Keywords In Title vs. Keywords Not In Title

This was fun data to collect.

It involved analyzing over 250,000 rows in Excel, close to 1,000 ASINs and lots and lots of formatting (😫).

Here are the results. In this analysis, there was a mix of campaigns that had been optimized by our AI, and some that had not yet, some that had just started, and some that were well optimized.

Basically, don’t pay attention to the overall performance, as they are a mix of hundreds of campaigns at different levels of optimization within our system. This is ONLY to illustrate what impact having the keywords targeted in the listing title had.

So, as I mentioned, we looked at hundreds of campaigns across almost a thousand ASINs just to see how ads WITH the targeted keywords inside the listing title performed against ads targeting keywords NOT in the title.

In the end, we determined that ads targeting keywords within the title perform significantly better than those targeting non-title keywords. Check this out…

This chart represents the amount of revenue generated FOR EVERY DOLLAR SPENT ON ADS. As you can see, for keywords in the title the revenue is always greater.

In fact, here is the average amount greater…

Ads targeting title-keywords represent an average increase of 180% in revenue per dollar spent!

Now let’s look at ACoS.

Across the same five clients, hundreds of campaigns and a thousand ASINs we saw that ACoS tended to be much lower for ads targeting title-keywords.

Here’s a prettier graph just to get the point across.

Lower ACoS means higher sales for less adspend. Definitely the goal of anyone hoping for profitable advertising.

What Can We Take Away From This?

First of all, this paints an interesting picture of how important the listing title is to Amazon and their various relevance metrics. This is good to know for pretty much all optimization strategies.

Next, this information can also inform us on a great way to optimize our overall ad strategy. For best results, target your title keywords.

Finally, this data helps us to understand on an even deeper level how Amazon determines relevance. It clearly illustrates that the title is the most powerful way in which a seller can individually impact how relevant Amazon sees their listing.

**To Learn More About Our Managed + AI PPC Service, Simply Submit the Form Below...