How a campaign is built

How Amazon structures campaign data changes how you should build and manage them.

At the top is the campaign. Think of it as a container. Inside it are one or more ad groups, which are containers too.

Inside each ad group are three sets of data that sit side by side.

• Targets, your keywords and product targets. This is where bids live.
• Ads, the products you’re advertising.
• Search terms, the actual searches (or product pages) your ads showed up on.

Each of these breaks out the same clicks, orders and sales a different way. The ads data splits them by product, the targets data by keyword or product target, and the search term data by search. The search term report only lists searches that got a click, so a search you showed up for but nobody clicked won’t be there.

A single target can show your ad on hundreds or thousands of searches, depending on its match type. Every ad in an ad group shares the same targets and bids, so they’re all eligible for the same searches.

The attribution problem

Those three datasets don’t connect to each other. If an ad group has three products and five keywords, you can see which keyword got orders and which product got orders, but not which keyword sold which product.

That’s why a lot of advertisers keep one product per ad group, even though Amazon’s own advice is to group similar products. Then every keyword and search term result belongs to that product, and you always know what’s working for what. Grouping close variations of the same product (sizes, colors, formats) is a reasonable trade if you don’t need them separated.

Placements

There’s one more dataset at the campaign level. Placements split the whole campaign’s results by where the ad appeared.

• Top of search, the top row of the first page of results.
• Rest of search, everything else in the results, including page two and beyond.
• Product pages, product detail pages and other spots outside the search results, like the add-to-cart page.
• Amazon Business, placements shown to business buyers.

Your ads can also run on some sites and apps off Amazon. Those show up in the placement report, but there’s no adjustment for them.

Placement data only exists for the campaign as a whole. There’s no placement breakdown for a single keyword, product or ad group, which matters when you set the bid modifiers in the next lesson.