Two keyword tactics that most accounts never run, both aimed at the same thing: finding profitable traffic your competitors are not bidding on.
One looks sideways, at searches adjacent to your product rather than describing it. The other looks forward, at searches that are growing quickly and are not yet crowded.
Prefer to watch? One hundred and twenty seconds on what an outlier keyword is and why it converts, the filter that finds them, and why trending terms need the opposite bid approach.
Outlier keywords
What they are
Outlier keywords are broader terms related to your product without describing it.
Sell a car wash mitt, and your obvious keywords are car wash mitt, car wash glove. Your outlier keywords are car cleaning accessories, gifts for car lovers, car stuff.
Nobody typing "gifts for car lovers" is looking for a wash mitt specifically. But some of them will buy one.
Why they work
High search volume. Broad terms are searched far more than specific ones.
Low cost per click. Few sellers bid on terms that do not describe their product, so the auction is soft.
Effectively total share. If you are the only car wash mitt on the results page for gifts for car lovers, you capture essentially all of the wash-mitt demand there. It is like being the only one of your product in a shop where nobody came looking for it — the few who want one have no alternative.
The sales are incremental. These are not shoppers you would have reached otherwise. Five extra sales a day is about 1,800 a year that would not have happened.
Finding them
Work from your competitors rather than your imagination.
1. Identify your top 3–5 competitors by best-seller rank within your niche.
2. Pull the keywords those ASINs rank for, then filter to find the adjacent ones:
| Filter | Setting | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum search volume | 1,000 (or 500 for a wider net) | worth the effort |
| Number of competitors ranking | between 1 and 2 | few rivals means a soft auction |
| Competitor rank | between 1 and 20 | someone is ranking, so the term converts for something |
That "1 to 2 competitors" filter is the one doing the work. A term ten competitors rank for is a main keyword, already contested. A term one competitor ranks for is an opening.
3. Add them to your back-end search terms, then build the campaign.
The campaign
Sponsored Products, manual, exact match. Down-only. No placement multipliers. Budget $25–50.
All bids at $0.50. You are casting a wide net cheaply to see which terms have anything in them.
Optimising it weekly
Set the target ACoS at your gross margin minus 5 points. On a 35% margin, the ceiling is 30%.
For targets above the ceiling, cut the bid by the difference:
| Target's ACoS | Bid change |
|---|---|
| 45% | reduce 15% ($1.00 → $0.85) |
| 70% | reduce 40% ($1.00 → $0.60) |
Kill non-converters quickly: more than 15 clicks and no sales, pause it. This is a discovery campaign, and most terms will fail. Cut them faster than you would in a core campaign.
When it works, double the budget. If ACoS is inside the ceiling and the campaign is spending its budget, double it, and keep doubling while efficiency holds. These sales are entirely incremental, so there is no cannibalisation to worry about.
When an outlier becomes a main keyword
Occasionally one converts unusually well. When that happens, treat it like a keyword you would want to rank for organically:
Break it into its own single-keyword campaign. Push Top of Search to buy the velocity that moves rank. Consider adding it to the title.
At that point you are running a ranking campaign rather than a profit campaign, and the rules change — see Profit Campaigns and Ranking Campaigns.
Trending keywords
The opportunity
Trending keywords are terms growing more than 50% month over month.
Get onto one early and you buy top placements cheaply, before competitors notice, and convert that into organic rank. Once you hold the organic position, dislodging you is expensive.
A common cause is Amazon's own autocomplete. When Amazon changes what it suggests in the search bar, shopper behaviour shifts quickly — and there is a window before the rest of the category reacts.
Finding them
Same starting point, different filter: minimum search volume 1,000, and search-volume trend of at least +50%.
That list is your trending set.
The campaign
Very close to the outlier campaign, with two deliberate differences:
Sponsored Products, manual, exact, down-only. Budget $25–50.
Bid at Amazon's suggested bid, not $0.50. These terms are growing, so you need to actually compete for them.
Set Top of Search to 25%. You are trying to establish rank, which means winning the placement that drives velocity.
Target ACoS: your gross margin — a little more generous than the outlier ceiling, because you are buying a position rather than just profitable clicks. If you normally run above your margin, adjust accordingly.
Same delta-based bid cuts. Same 15-clicks-no-sales rule. Same doubling when it works — and here the urgency is real, because you are racing competitors to a term that is still cheap.
Cadence
Check for new trending keywords every one to two months. More often in high-volume niches, where terms emerge and get crowded faster.
Run consistently, this is one of the more reliable ways to grow market share: you are repeatedly first onto terms that later become contested.
Doing this without a separate research tool
Both tactics need the same underlying data: what your competitors rank for, at what volume, and which way that volume is moving. Historically that meant a third-party keyword tool and a manual export each round.
TrackIQ carries the same signals. Search Query Performance gives search volume and your share of it per term; organic rank tracking shows what you and competitors hold; and Search Terms shows what is already converting for you. See Understanding Search Query Performance and SQP and Keywords: Finding Unbid Queries, which is the same "we are not bidding on this yet" question applied to your own data.
Common mistakes
Bidding normally on outliers. The low bid is what makes them profitable.
Being slow to cut. Most outlier terms fail; that is expected. Cut at 15 clicks.
Not doubling down when one works. Incremental profitable sales should be scaled hard.
Using the outlier bid approach on trending terms. Trending terms are contested and need a real bid plus Top of Search.
Checking for trends once and never again. The whole advantage is being early, repeatedly.
Related
- Search Term Harvesting: Criteria and Bids — promoting terms your own campaigns already found.
- Scaling Profit Campaigns — what to do once one of these works.
- Keywords and Match Types — reading them once live.