What is Keyword Harvesting?

Keyword harvesting is the routine of finding search terms that already sell your product through a broad source, such as an auto campaign or a broad match keyword, and adding them as exact keywords or product targets of their own. The term stops being one line inside someone else's results and gets its own bid, its own placement control and its own history.

Definition

Discovery and control are different jobs. Auto targeting groups, broad and phrase keywords and category targets cast a wide net, and the search term report shows what they caught. Harvesting takes the proven catches and moves them into a destination built for control, usually an exact match keyword in an ad group for that product, or a product target when the search term is an ASIN.

Harvesting is not the same as making a term exact where it already lives. Adding an exact keyword inside the auto campaign's own ad group keeps every setting that made it hard to control. The destination should be the campaign where you want that term managed.

The formula: the gate and the starting bid

Two questions decide a harvest: is the evidence real, and what should the new keyword bid?

Harvest when:  orders of the advertised product ≥ 2
               AND the query is relevant to that product
               AND it is not already targeted in the destination

Starting bid = Revenue per click × Target ACoS
             = (Sales ÷ Clicks) × Target ACoS

One order can be chance. Orders count only when they are for the product the ad advertised. A click that led to a different product in your catalogue is real revenue, but it does not prove the term sells this one. ACoS is not part of the gate. A converting term at a poor ACoS needs a lower starting bid, not exclusion.

Worked example

Suppose an auto campaign advertises an insulated water bottle, your target ACoS is 30%, and the report covers 30 days. All figures are example inputs.

• insulated water bottle 32 oz clears the gate. Revenue per click is $150 ÷ 60 = $2.50, so the starting bid is $2.50 × 0.30 = $0.75. The source paid $54 ÷ 60 = $0.90 a click, an ACoS of 36%, so the new keyword starts below what the source was paying.
• water bottle with straw lid has one order. Keep it running in the source and look again next cycle.
• bike bottle cage sold two units of a cage you also sell. The term is relevant, but to the cage. If it is harvested at all, it belongs in the cage's ad group with the cage's numbers.

How to use it to make decisions

1. Decide destinations once. Map each source ad group to the campaign and ad group where its harvested terms should go, so every cycle routes terms the same way.
2. Check relevance by searching the term. If Amazon returns products unlike yours, the orders may have been a one-off.
3. Set the starting bid from facts. Use revenue per click and your target, not the source bid, which is a setting. The max CPC calculator does the same arithmetic from price and conversion rate.
4. Decide what happens at the source. The common advice is to add a negative exact for the harvested term in the source campaign straight away. Our house view is not to do this by default. The source often keeps winning some of those clicks more cheaply, showing in two places covers more of the results page, and its converting data keeps informing bids. Negate at source when budget is genuinely constrained, or when the two placements start competing at worse cost. The trade-offs are covered under search term isolation.
5. Run it on a cycle. Our house cadence is every two to four weeks. On a low-traffic account, weekly runs mostly harvest noise.

Common mistakes

• Harvesting on one order. It reads like proof and usually is not.
• Counting halo sales. Orders of other products make a term look stronger for this one than it is.
• Filtering by ACoS. A term that converts is relevant. A poor ACoS is fixed by the starting bid.
• Copying the source bid. An auto campaign bid was set for a whole ad group of queries, not for this one.
• Harvesting the same term twice. Check what already exists in the destination before adding it.
• Treating harvesting as cleanup. The other end of the same report holds the terms that never sell. Those are a negative keywords job, judged on relevance.

How it relates to adjacent metrics

Harvesting and negation read the same report from opposite ends: proven buyers get promoted, proven irrelevance gets excluded. Revenue per click, which is conversion rate times average order value, sets the starting bid. Break-even ACoS sets the ceiling that bid must stay under. Once a term has its own keyword, its organic rank and share of voice can be followed separately from the source campaign's averages.

How Shurq helps

In Shurq's Ad Manager, the Search Terms view marks each term as targeted, harvested or negated. Select terms and choose Harvest, and Shurq routes each one through your campaign mappings, from source ad group to destination. It skips terms already targeted in the destination as of the last sync and terms that do not fit the mapping, such as an ASIN term in a mapping that creates keywords.

A preview lists every target that would be created. Each starting bid comes from the mapping's bidding method and can be edited row by row. Negate at source is off by default and can be ticked per row. Nothing is sent until you confirm. Harvesting covers Sponsored Products campaigns.

You can also ask Shurq AI to harvest search terms. It proposes exact keyword additions for converting terms, two or more orders by default, and leaves out any that already exist in the same ad type.