The non-incremental trap of branded keywords

Each of the larger term segments – branded, generic, and competitor – needs to be thought of in terms of the consumer’s place in the purchase funnel:

• Brand keywords capture shoppers deepest in your purchase funnel
• Competitor keywords capture shoppers that are deep in someone else’s purchase funnel
• Category keywords capture shoppers at the top of your purchase funnel 

On Amazon, when a user searches for some variation on a brand name, the A9 algorithm generally does whatever it can to surface as many of those brand’s products as possible on that search page. That includes both top sellers, which will get the top organic placements, along with the long tail, which will occupy spots further down the page. Amazon takes the intent of the user – “I want to see products from this brand” – very seriously. This is borne out in the underlying data – it is much, much harder to rank organically on a category term, as compared to a branded term, as seen in the examples below.