Relevancy (or “relevance” in correct English) is a ranking factor given by Amazon to your AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) campaigns. Based on this, your ads may or may not appear for the keywords that you are bidding for.

What is the relevance score in Amazon marketing ads?

The definition of the relevancy/relevance score is a well-kept secret within Amazon. They have decided not to make public the formula to calculate it. Furthermore, they haven’t made public the rank or score that your campaign is given (personally, I believe they don’t know themselves how exactly it is calculated – for those from Amazon reading this… well… prove me wrong).

The feedback from Amazon about relevance is that “to ensure a good customer experience, we try to show ads that are most relevant to customers’ search and browse activities.”

My definition of relevancy/relevance is not far from what the Cambridge dictionary defines relevance to be: the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate. On the same line as this, the relevancy/relevance factor in AMS campaigns is nothing else than the relation between your campaign, the products that you are promoting, and the keywords that you are bidding for.

How is relevancy/relevance calculated in Amazon Marketing campaigns?

As the exact formula to calculate the relevancy/relevance score is hidden, I had to test different campaigns in different circumstances to get to the point of understanding how this factor is influencing the AMS campaigns (i.e. different budgets, different seasons, etc.).

Before we go into more details, I would like you to keep in mind the following: the relevancy/relevance score doesn’t refer to a single metric or factor. Instead, it is based on a mixture of keyword/targeting and ASIN (Landing Page) performance, and not by overall campaign performance.

As we have seen above in its definition, relevancy/relevance is calculated based on what products you are promoting, based on your campaigns, and based on the keywords that you are targeting – the stronger the connection between all these is, the higher you are going to rank.

To be even more specific, here are most of the things that contribute to how relevant your campaign is/isn’t:

• CTR
• Conversion rate
• The content on your product detail page (title, bullet points, description, A+, etc.)
• Copy of your ad – for example, the creative that you are using in a Headline search or product Display ad.
• Reviews (i.e. words used in the reviews)
• Star ratings

Take all of these factors and compare them to the keywords that you want to bid for. Are they related? Are you selling what you are bidding for?  Are the keywords that you are targeting with your AMS ads also in the content of your product detail page? …

If yes, then your campaign is more likely to be relevant and that your relevancy/relevance score is good.

As an extra tip, Amazon may not give a relevance score, or a quality score for your campaigns as Facebook and Google do. They are using though the Click Through Rate (CTR) as the metric to determine how relevant a campaign is.  That is also the reason why Amazon has decided to automatically stop any keywords that have a CTR lower than 0.7%.

Is the relevancy/relevance factor clearer now?

If yes, you are on the right path. Keep testing and keep learning. Keep trying to understand why your keywords are being paused, why you are getting 0 impressions for some keywords, why you are winning a low number of impressions for some keywords. The answer to all of these might just be the relevancy factor and the fact that Amazon isn’t considering your campaign to be relevant enough for the keywords that you are targeting.

Curious to learn more? Take a look at our complete guide to optimise AMS Amazon marketing campaigns. You’ll also discover what are the other major factors that determine if you are winning or not impressions with your campaign (a tip: it has to do with money).