How to Structure Amazon PPC Campaigns
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Most wasted ad spend on Amazon is a structure problem before it is a bidding problem. When every product and every kind of keyword shares a campaign, you cannot control where the budget goes, and the fastest-spending target wins whether or not it is the best one.
A good structure gives every campaign one job. That makes the weekly work simple: you can see what each campaign is for and whether it is doing it.
Start with the product, not the keyword
Group products that share search terms and similar prices, and keep unrelated products apart. A campaign that mixes a low-priced accessory with a high-priced main product will set bids that are wrong for at least one of them.
For your most important products, give each its own set of campaigns. For the long tail, grouping similar products is fine.
Give each campaign one purpose
A structure that works for most Sponsored Products accounts has four types of campaign for each product or product group.
- Automatic: Amazon chooses the matches. Its job is discovery, at a modest bid.
- Broad or phrase research: a manual campaign that explores variations of the keywords you already believe in.
- Exact performance: the search terms that have proven they convert, each with its own bid.
- Product targeting: ads placed on specific competitor or complementary product pages.
Keeping these separate means the proven terms get the budget they deserve and the discovery campaigns cannot starve them.
Move search terms through the structure
The structure only works if you maintain it. Each week:
- Open the search term report for the automatic and research campaigns.
- Promote search terms that are converting profitably into the exact campaign.
- Add those same terms as negative exact in the campaign they came from, so the two do not compete.
- Add irrelevant or consistently unprofitable terms as negatives.
This is the part that gets skipped. Without negatives, discovery campaigns keep paying for the same poor matches indefinitely.
Name campaigns so you can read them
A consistent naming pattern saves time every week. Include the product, the ad type, the match type and the goal, in the same order every time. Anyone opening the account should be able to tell what a campaign is for without clicking into it.
Set bids from your margin
Work out the break-even ACoS for each product, which is your profit margin before advertising. A campaign running below that figure is making money on the ad sale; above it, it is buying sales at a loss. That can be a deliberate choice for a launch, but it should be a choice.
Then look at total ACoS, sometimes written TACoS: ad spend as a share of all sales, not just ad sales. If total ACoS falls while sales hold or grow, advertising is lifting the whole product rather than just paying for itself.
Check the listing first
Structure cannot fix a page that does not convert. Before rebuilding campaigns, run through an Amazon listing audit for the products you plan to advertise.
If you want this set up and managed week to week, see our Amazon PPC management service.