The number of sellers who strategize using Amazon PPC continuously increases year after year (Explore our Amazon PPC Services). A common question they all face is: How to develop an optimal Amazon PPC campaign structure? Should you go narrow and run lots of single-keyword ad groups (SKAG), or go broad and let the Amazon ad platform take control? Besides, keyword and bid optimization, the Amazon advertising campaign structure you choose is one of the most important factors that impacts your performance. This is why your Amazon PPC campaign must be well thought of and you should select an optimal structure right off the bat. Proper structuring may also become more crucial as your business expands and as you manage multiple ad campaigns.
If you’re doing Amazon PPC for the first time, here’s a step by step guide on how you can structure your Amazon PPC campaigns to achieve your sales and marketing goals. Alternatively, if you think you have a decent setup but want an export opinion, sign up for a free Amazon PPC Audit.
Article Contents
What type of Campaign Structure will Maximize Your Amazon Sales?
Factors to Consider before Deciding on an Amazon Ad Account Structure
An optimal ad account structure is one that enables to ensure a close fit between the keyword someone is searching for and the product that gets featured in the ads that you serve this potential customer. To create an effective structure you need to consider these factors:
How many different products are you selling?
Do the products that you sell all fall in the same category, or are you running a multi-category brand?
Are you competing in a niche that is dominated by national brands (think running shoes)?
Are sales evenly split across your product portfolio, or do you have certain hero SKUs that drive a large proportion of all sales?
Are you trying to maximize profitability or are you willing to accept a lower return on investment to grow your brand?
Do you have access to any past performance data that you can use to gauge the likely performance of your ads (can be past Amazon advertising campaigns, or also based on Google search ads)?
Selecting the Right Products for Your Amazon Ads
Armed with the research you have conducted based on the recommendations listed in the previous paragraph you need to make the first decision: Which product listings to feature in your ads. This decision may impact your ad account structure. You may for example choose to include all, or almost all products in an advertising campaign. If you have certain products in your portfolio that dominate in terms of sales, then these products will most likely also get most ad impressions and other listings that may not sell as well or are new get less exposure.
This means that if you want to use your Amazon ads tactically to support the launch of new product listings you may have to create separate advertising campaigns that only include your new product listing(s) to ensure that they get sufficient exposure and are not suppressed by legacy SKU with a stronger sales performance record.
Different Approaches to Amazon Ad Group Structuring
Within each Amazon PPC campaign, ad groups help organize ads based on targeting strategies, products, or keyword sets. There are three basic approaches:
Single Product Ad Groups: Organize each product or closely related products into individual ad groups for clear performance visibility. While this approach allows for granular targeting, it makes it difficult to control budgets and optimize spend. Also there is an increased risk that you overlook possible keyword combinations that trigger multiple ad groups and as a result you end up competing against yourself. We generally only suggest this approach for sellers that have few SKUs, where a number of selected listings drive most sales, or where specific listings are prioritized for strategic reasons (i.e. new product launches).
Keyword-Based Ad Groups: Group similar keywords by relevance, match type, or intent (e.g., branded vs. non-branded keywords). This is the approach that generally makes the most sense. Grouping branded keywords in one campaign for example makes sense as these keywords tend to have the lowest ACoS and maximizing top-of-page ad exposure is key. For non- brand / generic keywords, hitting higher ACoS targets may be more appropriate to maximize overall revenue.
Audience-Based Ad Groups: For Sponsored Display campaigns, structure ad groups by audience types such as interests, behaviors, or retargeting.
Clear ad group structuring simplifies optimization and allows precise control over budget allocation.
Keyword Match Type Strategies
Another variable that impacts your ad account structure are keyword match types. With Amazon ads you can select three basic keyword match types: broad, phrase, and exact match. If you are not familiar with keyword match types read more about them in our blog post on Amazon PPC broad vs phrase. Selecting the appropriate keyword matches types and reflecting on this selection in your campaign structure will significantly impact your campaign performance:
Broad Match: Captures a wide audience but can trigger irrelevant searches. Use broad match for keyword discovery in early campaign stages.
Phrase Match: More targeted than broad; useful for maintaining flexibility while reducing irrelevant clicks.
Exact Match: Highly targeted, ensuring ads appear only for precise search terms. Essential for high-performing keywords.
Use these match types strategically and based on the maturity of your account to strike the right balance between minimizing ACoS and maximizing revenue (What is a good ACoS on Amazon).
Amazon Automatic Ad Campaigns: How to use them Strategically
The next thing to decide on is the campaign type: manual or automatic. If you are not familiar with these two ad formats, check out our blog post on Amazon PPC automatic campaigns.
You can start an automatic ad campaign as soon as your product is up and running. To kick off, log in to Seller Central and click the “Advertising” drop down menu. Select “Campaign Manager” on the drop down. Then, choose your campaign type, whether “Sponsored Products,” “Headline Search Ads,” or “Sponsored Display.” Then, click the yellow “Create campaign” button, and enter all the information required. These include your campaign name (you can put any), daily budget (you can start with $10-$25, depending on what you’re comfortable with), start and end date, and targeting type (automatic).
Next is the “Create Ad Group” form. You also need to fill in your ad group name, the products you want to advertise, and your default bid (the amount you’re willing to spend when a user clicks on your ad). Click “Save and Finish,” and voila! Your ad campaign is now live!
Now sit back, and let Amazon make wonders on your ad, as you let it run for a week or two, before evaluating whether it worked or not for your products.
The Role of Amazon Manual Ad Campaigns
The main difference with automatic and manual campaigns is that with manual campaigns you need to select your own target keywords, keyword match types and maximum CPC bids.
To start a manual ad campaign, follow the steps you did on Seller Center when you created an automated campaign, but for the targeting type, select “Manual targeting” instead of automatic. Then, choose the same product you used on the automated campaign and bit at the amount you’re comfortable with.
While this introduces more complexity, it also allows you to operate more strategically.
When to Select Automatic or Manual Campaign Structures
As a general rule of thumb, we suggest experienced advertisers with established product listings to start with manual campaigns as they offer more control. For sellers that are just starting out, automatic campaigns are often a better choice as they scale up a lot faster and are easier to run.
Advanced Amazon Ad Account Structure Examples
An effective account structure ensures that you maximize exposure in situations where shoppers are more likely to buy your products and at the same time minimize spend on irrelevant keywords. One way to achieve this is by leveraging an alpha / beta campaign structure.
Alpha/Beta Campaign Structure
The basic concept of a so-called alpha / beta campaign structure is that you create two campaigns: One that is your high priority campaign. This is your alpha. In this campaign you target keywords that have historically converted well. The goal of this campaign is to maximize efficiency. You select exact match type keywords only to ensure a close fit between search terms and the ad that gets shown. You also set aggressive bids and sufficient budgets to make sure that your ads can achieve optimal results.
You then create a second campaign: your beta. In this beta campaign you target exactly the same keywords that you also target in your alpha campaign. But instead of using exact match keywords you use phrase match keywords. You also set lower bids and add all exact match keywords as negative keywords (to prevent cannibalization).
Over time, you monitor performance of both campaigns and add converting search terms of the beta campaign to the alpha campaign (don’t forget to also negative them out in the beta campaign)
With this structure you essentially use the beta campaign as a wider fishing net to identify converting search queries that you can specifically target with your alpha campaign. The reason why this works is that “phrase match” keywords target a slightly broader keyword cloud then exact match keywords. Phrase match campaigns thus help in the discovery process and the alpha campaign is then leveraged to zero in on these converting terms.
Once you understand the concept of alpha / beta campaign structures you can extrapolate the concept: Sellers with bigger advertising budgets, or those who are starting out can use the same approach to run automatic and manual campaigns in parallel (with the automatic campaign serving as the “beta” campaign that assists in keyword discovery).
How to Evaluate and Optimize Your Amazon PPC Setup
Key to optimizing and further refining your ad campaign structure is analyzing your search term report. This provides you with a breakdown of the exact words users have searched for that ended up driving sales. After one to two weeks of running your campaign, go back to Seller Central and click the “Reports” drop-down menu. Then, select “Advertising Reports” on the drop-down, and you will be directed to the campaign type page. Click on the “Report Type” drop-down and choose “Keyword.” Fill in any name for the report; choose “last month” as the reporting period, and keep the data unit field as “Total.”
Once you’ve downloaded the report, organize the data, then go to the”7 Day Conversion Rate” column. Click the filter button, and select “sort largest to smallest.” This will sort the top keywords based on their conversion rates. From there, you can select which keywords to target on your next campaign, but we suggest that you choose keywords that convert at least 10% and are offered at a lower rate at the same time.
How to Identify Long-Tail Keywords for Ad New Campaigns
From the search term report, you can now start generating a list of long-tail keywords (which are observed to lead to higher conversion rates). You can do this by getting short keywords that had a good conversion rate on your campaign and turning them into 10-20 topics or keywords with at least three words. Compile them in a document so you can test them on your next campaign.
Campaign Naming Conventions: Best-Practices
Adopting a clear and standardized naming convention for your Amazon PPC campaigns is crucial for effective management. A structured naming system helps you quickly identify campaign details such as product category, targeting type, ad placement, and date created. The campaign names should indicate the following:
Advertising Type (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display)
Targeting Type (Auto or Manual)
Keywords or Product Targeting (KW and PAT for short)
Product (Using ASIN, SKU, or Short Description)
Strategy (Launch, Mature, by Match Type etc)
We name our Amazon PPC campaign to the following naming convention. This is what we do, and you don’t need to follow exactly.
For example, if the campaign is a sponsored product, manual, ASIN: B07PY7GLKV, and the product just launched. Then the campaign name should be:
SP – Manual – KW – B07PY7GLKV(Moon Lamp) – Launch
By naming your campaign like the above, you can stay organized and pinpoint the exact type of campaigns you want to optimize.
Determine the Appropriate Amazon Ad Campaign Type
Something we have not discussed in a lot of detail in this post but that is also critical is deciding which type of ad to run. This will naturally also impact your campaign structure. Keyword based ad types such as Sponsored Products Ads or Sponsored Brands Ads require a different approach than Sponsored Display Ads, which are audience based. If you are new to Amazon advertising and not familiar with the different ad formats refer to our tutorial Amazon PPC for beginners.
How SellerMetrics can Help You Optimize Legacy Amazon Ad Campaigns
Proper Amazon PPC campaign setup requires experience. The first few campaigns created by sellers, in most cases, are not the most optimally structured. This includes not properly naming your campaign, budgeted or adding too many keywords.
At the same time, these “grandfathered” campaigns drive a lot of the PPC sales; shutting them down and creating a new campaign could potentially be a very risky proposition. If your campaigns are not properly named, take the time to dig through your campaigns to the naming conventions mentioned above.
If your campaign/ad group is too tough to manage from having too many keywords via keyword dumping, SellerMetrics can help. Our automation bidding function has 3 types of bid settings, they are:
Growth
Moderate
Optimize
In a situation where you have too many keywords to manage, you can use our “Optimize” bid settings, this setting do the following:
Will down bid lesser relevant keywords ➡ compress bidding on less relevant keywords, while leaving more budget to high performing keywords
Change bid according to user-specified ACoS goals
Make bid change to all keywords daily
By using the SellerMetrics bid automation feature, y
Final Thoughts: Flexible yet Scalable Campaign Structure Key to Success
Formulating the right Amazon PPC campaign structure requires enough research, proper targeting, constant testing, and patience. One key takeaway of this post is that you need to constantly balance two constraints: ad efficiency and overall sales. If you create an account structure that is too conservative you will likely miss out on sales. On the other hand, going all in with automatic campaigns only will almost certainly result in significant budget wastage. So striking a balance between both aspects is key to PPC campaign success.
Here at SellerMetrics, we offer an Amazon advertising software that can help you easily navigate Amazon PPC. We know that running PPC campaigns can take a lot of time and energy, that’s why we’re here to do the heavy lifting on your behalf. SellerMetrics can do bid automation, variance reporting, manual bidding, benchmarking, keyword whitelisting and so much more. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about our Amazon tool and how we can help you reach your Amazon sales goals.
