Your first campaigns

Start simple and make it more complicated as you go. You want a structure small enough that you’ll actually check it every week.

Discovery, then testing

An auto campaign finds the searches. Amazon picks where to show your ad based on your listing, across searches and product pages. This is where your listing’s indexing gets put to work. Because it shows up in so many places, keep it efficient by negating searches that collect about 20 clicks without an order.

A manual campaign tests what the auto campaign found. When a search term in the auto campaign gets a couple of orders, add it to the manual campaign as an exact keyword. When a product page (an ASIN) gets orders, add it as a product target. Now that search has its own bid, and you can push it or pull it back without touching everything else. You can copy them over by hand, or use Target Promotion in the ads console to move them for you.

Keep keywords and product targets in separate ad groups in the manual campaign. Amazon requires it, and it keeps the data clean anyway.

Don’t cut off the source

A lot of guides say that once you promote a search term to an exact keyword, you should negate it in the auto campaign so the two don’t compete. I don’t. If the search is still selling in the auto campaign, it’s working there, and negating it throws away sales to tidy up a report.

Only negate it in the auto campaign if it’s selling there above your target ACOS while the exact keyword does better. Promoting and negating are two separate decisions with two separate rules.

One product per campaign to start

Start each product with its own campaigns, so its results are its own. Close variations of the same product can share, if you don’t need them split apart.

Starting bids

Your first bid matters less than you think. It’s your way into the auction so you can start collecting data. Higher bids collect data faster and cost more. Lower bids are cheaper and slower. Amazon’s suggested bid is a fair read on what the competition is paying. Start near it and let the data move it.

Budgets are guardrails

A daily budget is there to stop a runaway day. If a campaign hits its budget every day, it’s missing traffic while you’re limiting it, so control ACOS with bids and negatives and leave the budget with some room.

If money is tight, test fewer things at once (fewer new campaigns, keywords or products you don’t know work yet) instead of starving all of them.

Name campaigns so you can read them later

A campaign’s name should tell you what’s in it and why, at a glance, a year from now. Include the product (ASIN or SKU), the ad type and targeting, the goal, and a short product name. Spell things out rather than using acronyms you’ll forget.

B0EXAMPLE1 - SP - Auto - Discovery - Insulated Water Bottle 32oz B0EXAMPLE1 - SP - Manual Exact - Testing - Insulated Water Bottle 32oz