Smart Rules

Keyword harvesting

How converting shopper queries become their own keywords — and why that is the engine of account growth.

Harvesting is the practice of finding search terms that already convert and promoting them into their own keywords. Amazon's broad and auto targeting is a discovery engine: it finds queries you would never have guessed. But discovered demand stays imprecise — you can't bid a specific term up or down while it hides inside a broad match. Promotion gives each winner its own bid, its own stats, and its own future.

What a promotion actually does

When a term passes your Smart Rule's conditions, MerchDash creates it as a positive keyword in each target ad group you configured, in the match types you ticked (exact, phrase, and/or broad). Exact is the workhorse: it captures precisely the proven query.

How the new keyword's bid is chosen

Bid setting	Resulting bid
Default	The term's own observed CPC — what clicks on this query actually cost you. A proven, per-term starting point.
Adjust up/down	That CPC nudged by your fixed amount or percentage — e.g. +10% to win a bit more of the auctions you were already winning.
No CPC data	The keyword is created without a bid and uses the target ad group's default bid.

Bids are clamped to Amazon's $0.02 minimum.

Choosing conditions

Orders ≥ 2 is a common floor — one order can be luck; two begins to be signal.
Add ACOS below your break-even so you only scale profitable demand.
Longer lookbacks (60–90 days or lifetime) surface slow-but-steady winners; your permanent archive means lifetime really is lifetime.

Details handled for you

ASIN-shaped terms are skipped — queries like B0ABC12345 are product hits, not phrases; Amazon can't accept them as keywords.
Negation usually pairs with promotion — negate-exact at the source stops the research campaign re-buying a term its winner now owns (the full logic is on the negation page).
Re-runs are safe — applying a change checks live state first, so an already-promoted term isn't duplicated.