One keyword, two buyers: splitting the tradesman from the weekend user

A search for a cordless impact driver is run by two people with almost nothing in common. One of them replaces a tool every eight months, already owns the battery, reads a duty cycle figure and does not care what the case looks like. The other is buying the first one of his life, wants to know whether it will strip the screws in his deck, and is quietly worried he is buying too much tool.

The brand's listings were written for the first buyer and its advertising was bought against terms dominated by the second. Both halves underperformed: professionals bounced off copy that explained what an impact driver does, homeowners bounced off copy that quoted specifications without a single sentence about what they could build with it. The team read the resulting 39% ACoS as a bidding problem and had spent a year adjusting bids on it.

We stopped treating the audience as one and let each half see a different argument.

• Intent signals mapped from the search term report — kit versus bare tool, brand-plus-model versus job description, warranty and duty-cycle language versus “for home use”.
• Two campaign structures, not two bid levels — separate budgets, separate match types and separate negatives, so one audience's cheap clicks stop subsidising the other's expensive ones.
• Two creative stacks on the same ASINs — image frames 2 to 4 rewritten twice, with the professional version leading on duty cycle and the homeowner version on the first three jobs the tool does.
• Price tiers made legible — the kit and the bare tool separated in the variation family so each buyer lands on the version that matches how they shop.

Blended ACoS fell from 39% to 21% and revenue grew 71% on an advertising budget that ended the year slightly below where it started.

The mechanism is not better bidding. It is that every click now lands on an argument written for the person who made it: the contractor sees a duty cycle, the homeowner sees a deck getting built. Average order value rose 12% as a side effect, because professionals who arrive on the right path buy the kit rather than the cheapest single tool.