Understanding the differences between Automatic and Manual PPC Campaigns is important. There are suitable scenarios for both Amazon Advertising campaign types and it is crucial that Amazon Sellers know when to use which campaign type. If you are new to this Amazon advertising campaign type, check-out or blog post on the topic: Amazon PPC Automatic Campaign. Let’s dive right into: Automatic vs Manual Amazon PPC Campaigns!
Amazon Auto Campaigns and Manual Campaigns Compared
Article Contents
How can Amazon PPC help increase your sales?
Amazon PPC helps increase your sales by allowing you to create ad campaigns. These ad campaigns target top-performing keywords relevant to your products. These keywords are what shoppers usually search on Amazon. You can be rest assured that they’ll work for your benefit! Amazon PPC helps your brand and your products gain visibility on Amazon search results, product pages, and more.
Amazon Ads: Automatic vs Manual Keyword Targeting: Scale vs Control
Both automatic and manual campaigns are sub-types of Amazon Sponsored Products Campaigns and serve ads based on target keywords (more about Amazon product ads management). Both types are cost-per-click ads, so you only pay for your ads when customers actually click on them.
For Manual Campaigns you can control how much you spend by setting a maximum ad budget. In addition to that you can also set a maximum bid per click for each target keyword.
With Auto Campaigns things are slightly different: You cannot set target keywords. As the name implies, the Amazon ad algorithm automatically selects target keywords for your ad campaign. For this reason you can also not define maximum bids at keyword level. You however define a campaign budget to control costs.
For automatic campaigns our ads will show up for relevant search results and product pages related to what you offer (as determined by the Amazon ad algorithm). Your ads will also appear in front of customers who are searching for any keywords that you have mentioned in your product listing.
For example, if you offer running shoes, Amazon may automatically choose the keyword “running shoes” for your campaign. Therefore, when someone searches for the phrase “running shoes for women,” there’s a huge chance that your ad may appear on the search results for this query.
Amazon PPC Automatic vs Manual Campaign Overview
Advantages of Amazon Automatic Campaigns
Amazon Auto campaigns campaigns have number of advantages:
They are Suitable for PPC Starters (with sufficient ad budgets): With the automatic campaign, Amazon automatically chooses the target keywords for you. This facilitates the entire campaign creation process as you do not have to conduct your own keyword research, or figure out how much to bid.
They Provide Broad Coverage: Auto campaigns are sort of “catch-all” campaigns. If you are worried about missing important keywords (and potential sales), auto campaigns can serve as an insurance policy that will increase the chances that your ads show.
They can Help you Spot New Search Trends: User search behavior is not static and shoppers come up with new ways to search for the same products all the time. With manual bidding there is a risk that you miss out on these new search queries.
They Help Cover Seasonal Searches: One challenge with manual targeting is seasonality. While some product categories are more affected by this than others (those suitable for gifting are usually impacted more), seasonality affects many products to some degree. Automatic campaigns are able to quickly pick up on seasonal searches and target them right away.
How Advanced Amazon Advertisers Use Auto Campaigns to Harvest Profitable Long-Tail Keywords
Pro Tip: Many sophisticated Amazon Advertisers use automatic campaigns with strict guardrails in place (aka negative keywords) to harvest new, high-potential long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords consist of multiple search terms and have a lower search volume, but high commercial intent. To give an example: The search volume for “nike running shoes” is higher than the search volume for “nike running shoes for men size 9 red”. The latter is a so-called long-tail keyword. You can instantly notice that the person searching for such a specific shoe is ready to pull the trigger. While there may not be that many searches that are this specific, targeting them with a suitable product is clearly a good idea.
Automatic campaigns are one way to identify these high-potential long-tail keywords. In the next step these “golden nugget” keywords are then added to a manual targeting campaign for better bid control. This means that you can bid more competitively on top-performing keywords to help you meet your sales goals fast.
Disadvantages of Amazon Automatic Campaigns
Running automatic campaigns Amazon PPC campaigns has one major disadvantage: loss of control. While these campaigns are great in terms of delivering broad keyword coverage and scale, they will also create situations where your product(s) show up for search queries that are not at all a good fit. Disadvantages associated with Amazon auto campaigns are:
No Control over Target Keywords: Products will show up for searches that a human would deem unsuitable for your products.
No Control over Bids: Bid efficiency is a critical component of Amazon PPC optimization. With automatic campaigns however, you cannot control bids at keyword level. That is also the reason why you want to move converting keywords from an automatic campaign to a manual targeting campaign.
In combination, these two disadvantages introduce the risk of ad budget waste and are the reason why many Amazon FBA businesses prefer manual campaigns over automatic campaigns.
Advantages of Amazon Manual Campaigns
Contrary to the automatic campaign, the manual campaign type allows you to choose (and customize) which keywords to target in your ads. You can do this by using an Amazon keyword tool or by evaluating and analyzing the performance of the keywords in your automatic ad campaign. You can target three types of keywords: broad, phrase, and exact match keywords.
Advantages of manual PPC campaigns are:
Bid Control at Keyword Level: You can set maximum bids for every keyword. Based on your sales price, profit margin and expected conversion rate (or historic conversion rate) you can calculate maximum bids that make commercial sense for you. This means that you can bid more competitively on top-performing keywords to help you meet your sales goals fast.
Optimum Coverage for Important Keywords: You can segment important keywords, such as your brand name, into separate ad campaigns to ensure that they have sufficient budget and that bids are high enough. This ensures that your ads will constantly feature in top positions on the Amazon search results page (and that you don’t miss out on any sales).
Match Type Control: By setting keywords to either broad, phrase or exact match you have good control over the granularity of your keyword targeting. You can set higher bids for exact match keywords for search terms that have proven to deliver sales and select phrase or broad match for keywords where you want to cover a wider range of closely related search queries.
The Ability to Target Competitors’ Brand Names: Competitor bidding is a popular Amazon advertising tactic. In case you identify other Amazon Sellers that sell products very similar to your own, it can be a promising approach to simply bid on their brand name. Chances are your ad will show up in a high enough position and you can manage to divert some of their sales right into your own pocket.
The Ability to Protect Your Own Brand Name: On the flipside, the same may happen to you. That’s why it is critical that you run a so-called Brand Campaign. While this campaign will not drive incremental sales and you may end up paying for some clicks that might have otherwise been for free, we generally advise all our clients to always run ads targeting their own brand names. Otherwise the risk of getting targeted by competitors’ is too high and ultimately sales will be lost to peers.
For these reasons, the most Amazon PPC experts prefer manual campaigns over automatic campaigns. But this is also one of their downsides: things can be complicated for Amazon Sellers who are new to Amazon ads and lack either the expertise to fully optimize their ads, or do not have sufficient historic click data to draw statistically significant conclusions.
Disadvantages of Amazon Manual Campaigns
Manual Amazon PPC campaigns come with a set of disadvantages:
Expert Knowledge is Required: Running manual campaigns well is not easy. While anyone can target their own brand name and generate sales things get more tricky when figuring out which so-called “generic keywords” to target and how much to bid for them. Generic keywords are all keywords that do not include your brand name (or product series names).
Making Data Driven Decisions is Expensive (and make take time): In practice, figuring out which keywords convert and which ones don’t is often expensive. For many keywords many (expensive) ad clicks are required to reach a statistically significant threshold to determine whether a keyword is worth bidding on or not. That is one of the advantages of working with a professional Amazon Ad Agency: An Agency has a bird’s-eye view across the accumulated click data of many Amazon ad accounts and can make better decisions in a much shorter amount of time and at a lower individual spend than any single Amazon advertiser can. While each account is slightly different, general patterns as to what keywords work and which ones do not emerge quickly and are homogenous for brands with similar value propositions.
Important Keywords may be Missed: With manual campaigns, even when broad match keywords are utilized, there is always the chance that either emerging new search queries, or seasonal search queries are overlooked. The same is true for high-potential long-tail keywords.
You may start noticing that many of the disadvantages of manual Amazon PPC Campaigns are the inverted advantages of automatic campaigns. In other words, both campaign types are really just two sides of the same coin.
The Benefits of Running Both Automatic and Manual Ad Campaigns
If you’re wondering whether manual or automatic are better, our answer is: running both in parallel is often ideal. This binary approach allows you to do two important things: stay on top of search trends of automatic campaigns, and find the most effective keywords for your manual campaign. Here’s the step by step process on how you can leverage both automatic and manual ad campaigns.
Phase One: Launch an Automatic Campaign
Create a sponsored products campaign using automatic targeting.
Let the automatic campaign run for at least two weeks.
Once you’ve completed the campaign period, download the “Search Term” report from the “Advertising reports” tab. Open it on Google Spreadsheet or Excel.
Generate a list of keywords that perform better than others using the data under “Impressions,” “Clicks,” average “Cost Per Click” (CPC) and/or advertising cost of sale (What is a good ACoS on Amazon?).
Keywords with high impressions and clicks or conversions are considered good keywords, as long as the average cost per click suits your strategy (and you budget, of course.) After you’ve identified the best keywords, you’re ready to start your campaign with manual targeting.
Phase Two: Layer in a Manual Campaign
Create an additional sponsored products campaign using manual targeting.
Choose at least 30 keywords for a start, not more than 100. To be able to determine the right keywords, export the data or results of the automatic campaign and Identify the keywords that generated the most clicks and sales. Then, add them to your manual campaign. You may also use an Amazon keyword research tool for more keyword options.
For first-time manual campaign advertisers, we recommend using the broad match type. This can help you expand your potential reach by targeting the widest set of shopper searches. But you may also narrow your match types to “phrase” or “exact” to also reach more specific keyword searches.
To help increase your sales on the keywords you’ve chosen, set your bids a little higher on your manual targeting campaign than the amount you set on the automatic campaign. Over time, you can increase your bids on the top-performing keywords.
Keep the campaign up for a week or two to collect a more reliable performance data.
Just like what you did on the automatic campaign, once you’ve completed the campaign period, download the “Search Term” report from the “Advertising reports” tab.
Generate a list of keywords that perform better than others using the data under “Impressions,” “Clicks,” average “Cost Per Click” (CPC) and/or advertising cost of sale (ACos) for another round of the campaign.
Phase Three: Use Both Campaigns Simultaneously
Based on the top-performing keywords on the manual campaign, set up new automatic and manual campaigns.
Keep both campaigns up and running. Tag them as “always-on” campaigns.
Check your search term campaign reports whenever you want to use new keywords, or when you think you’ve already exhausted the earning potential of your previous keywords.
Note: If you will bid on the same keyword in both manual and automatic campaigns using the same account, you won’t be competing against yourself.
Amazon Automatic Campaigns vs Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage Plus
There is another interesting angle to consider: Both Google and Meta have had great success rolling out “automatic targeting” campaigns. Adoption rates for Google’s and Meta’s “auto targeting” campaign types Performance Max (PMAX) and Advantage Plus are high and many DTC brands have been able to utilize them with great success.
So why is it that in comparison to that adoption rates for Amazon’s auto campaigns have been sluggish and many Amazon Sellers report that results have been mixed at best?
The answer lies in the complexity of the Google and Meta advertising ecosystems. Google’s PMAX campaigns serve ads across search, shopping, display and YouTube placements and creative assets include everything from standard text ads to static ads and videos. Meta Advantage Plus ads offer a similar number of variables that impact ad delivery.
As a result it is basically impossible for any human to beat an advanced optimization algorithm that can instantly weight a complex set of factors including user past behavior, search history, device type, location, demographics and so on to serve them a well composed ad across a wide range of channels and placements.
With Amazon Sponsored Products PPC ads, things are less complicated: Your product listing is your ad creative and the search term input by a shopper into the Amazon search bar is an incredibly strong intent signal by itself.
For this reason the benefit of ensuring that your ads do serve for relevant target keywords by adding them to manual campaigns with a precisely fine-tuned bid is often the more effective approach.
How SellerMetrics can help optimize your Amazon Automatic and Manual Advertising Campaigns
As mentioned, one of the key reports is the Search Term reports in your Amazon Advertising account. Using SellerMetrics you can easily gather these search terms and further optimize via adding negatives and new search terms.
Final Thoughts: Choosing Amazon Auto or Manual Campaigns?
Using both automatic and manual ad campaigns can help you achieve your Amazon sales goals, as long as you would follow the strategy outlined in this article. Meanwhile, if you need help in navigating Amazon PPC, our Amazon advertising software can help. SellerMetrics can help you with bid automation, keyword whitelisting, manual bidding, keyword navigation, search term generation, and benchmarking to develop successful ad campaigns. To learn how we can help you learn more about our Amazon PPC Services.
What is the difference between automatic and manual Amazon PPC campaigns?
Automatic campaigns allow Amazon to select relevant keywords based on your product listings, making them easy to set up and ideal for gathering keyword data. Manual campaigns, give you full control over keyword targeting and maximum keyword bids – thereby offering you better cost and efficiency control.
Which is better for beginners: Amazon automatic or manual campaigns?
Automatic campaigns are more beginner friendly, because the setup is easy (no keyword research required). They can also be a great starting point for discovering valuable keyword insights. As you collect data on high-performing search terms, you can transition to manual campaigns for more control over targeting. However, this process is costly, not always efficient and may take quite a while.
Can I run both automatic and manual campaigns at the same time?
Yes. We even recommend running both types of campaigns simultaneously. This strategy allows you to discover new keywords with automatic campaigns while fine-tuning and optimizing proven keywords in manual campaigns for better control and ROI.
How do I optimize an automatic campaign on Amazon?
You optimize an automatic campaign, by reviewing their search term report to identify high-performing keywords (move to manual campaign) and weeding out irrelevant and underperforming keywords (add as negative keywords) to reduce wasted ad spend.
Can I adjust bids in an automatic campaign?
No. You cannot adjust individual keyword bids, because you cannot select target keywords in automatic campaigns. You can however control your overall campaign daily budget.
What is the role of negative keywords in automatic campaigns?
Adding negative keywords to automatic (or manual) campaigns prevents your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. Adding negative keywords is thus crucial to filtering out low-quality clicks.
Should I switch entirely to manual campaigns once I have enough data?
It depends. While manual campaigns offer more control, automatic campaigns can still be useful for discovering new keywords. A combined approach—running both automatic and manual campaigns—can yield the best results. It depends on how dynamic changes in user search behavior are in your product segment. For categories where changes are not that frequent (i.e. no seasonality, product is a staple type of good), you may not need automatic campaigns.
We are SellerMetrics, our Amazon PPC Software helps Amazon sellers, brands, KDP Authors and agencies navigate Amazon Advertising PPC via bid automation, bulk manual bid changes, and analytics.
