Amazon Ads Case Study
From #20 to Category Best Seller: My Amazon Keyword Strategy
How a keyword audit, a proper match-type structure, and inventory-aware bidding turned a brutally seasonal product into its category's top performer — in one 16-week window.
Econour's windshield snow cover has one of the most punishing demand curves I've worked with — almost all of it crammed into a 16-week window between October and February. Miss that window and you've missed the year.
When I took over the Amazon Ads account, the product was hovering around #18 in its category. The spend was steady, but there was no real keyword strategy behind it — just budget going out the door and hoping.
By the end of the season, it was the category's best seller. Here's what actually got it there, keyword by keyword.
We Started With an Audit, Not a Bigger Budget
Everyone's first instinct with a seasonal product is to pour more money in as the season gets closer. I did the opposite.
Before touching the budget, I dug into the search term reports to see where the money was actually going. Turns out a big chunk of the broad match spend was landing on vague, low-intent terms — things like "car accessories" and "winter gear." Technically relevant, sure. But converting well below what the account needed.
Instead of scaling a leaky system, I rebuilt it first.
The account got restructured into a proper match type ladder:
- Auto campaigns to handle discovery
- Broad and phrase campaigns to harvest new search terms worth testing
- Exact match campaigns to protect and scale the terms that were already proven converters
Only once that structure was in place did spend start climbing.
Budget Had to Move With Inventory, Not Just Demand
Seasonal products come with a trap most people don't see coming: you rank your way into a stockout right before the weeks that actually matter.
I paced the budget against a live inventory forecast, and that meant deliberately pulling back on the most aggressive bids in weeks where a stockout would've cost more in lost rank than the extra sales were worth. It felt counterintuitive to hold back spend during a high-demand window, but the math was clear — a sold-out listing loses more momentum than a slightly underspent one ever gains.
Not just efficient spend — making sure the product was actually sitting on the shelf during the three weeks that decided the whole season.
Protecting Rank on the Keywords That Actually Mattered
Once we knew which 15–20 keywords were the real revenue drivers, they got their own dedicated exact match campaigns, with bids set to hold position 1–3 — not just to grab any impression that came along.
By the end of the season, over 90% of the account's high-search volume keywords were sitting consistently in that top-3 spot. That's not an accident; that's what happens when you stop treating every keyword the same way.
What I'd Tell Anyone Starting a Seasonal Amazon Campaign
- Audit before you scale. Most "seasonal underperformance" is actually a broken keyword structure wearing a seasonality costume.
- Build your exact match protection campaigns before peak season, not during it. You don't want to be restructuring while the clock is running.
- Loop in inventory planning early. Ranking #1 means nothing if you can't fulfill the demand you just created.
Running a seasonal product on Amazon?
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