How to structure Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns

A clear campaign structure is what makes an Amazon advertising account manageable. When everything sits in one or two large campaigns, you cannot control where the budget goes or tell what is working. This guide sets out a simple structure for Sponsored Products that most sellers can run and grow, and explains the routines that keep it healthy.

Start with your products and goals

Before you build anything, decide how to group your products and what each group is for.

• Group similar products together, such as variations of the same item, so that keywords and bids make sense for every product in the group.
• Keep different goals apart. A launch, a profitable best seller, and a clearance line need different bids and budgets, so they should not share a campaign.
• Separate your own brand terms. Searches for your brand name behave very differently from generic searches, and mixing them hides what is really happening.

Automatic campaigns: let Amazon find search terms

In an automatic campaign, Amazon decides which searches and product pages to show your ad on, based on your listing. You can bid separately on four targeting groups:

• Close match: searches closely related to your product.
• Loose match: searches loosely related to your product.
• Substitutes: shoppers looking at products similar to yours.
• Complements: shoppers looking at products that go with yours.

Automatic campaigns are best used for discovery. They show you real search terms and products that lead to sales, which you can then manage more precisely in manual campaigns.

Manual campaigns: keywords and product targets

In a manual campaign, you choose what to target.

• Keyword targeting uses three match types. Broad match reaches the widest range of related searches. Phrase match requires the search to contain your phrase. Exact match targets the exact term and close variants of it.
• Product targeting shows your ad on specific product pages (by ASIN) or in categories, which you can refine by brand, price, or rating.

A simple structure that scales

For each product group, a structure like this works well:

1. An automatic campaign for discovery.
2. A manual broad or phrase campaign for research on promising themes.
3. A manual exact campaign for proven search terms that convert, where you want the most control over bids.
4. A product-targeting campaign for competitor or complementary products that perform well.
5. A separate brand campaign for searches that include your brand name.

Keeping these apart means each campaign has one job, its own budget, and a report that tells a clear story.

Search-term harvesting and negatives

The search term report is where most of the real work happens. For an active account, review it weekly.

• Harvest winners. When a search term converts profitably in an automatic, broad, or phrase campaign, add it as an exact keyword in your exact campaign.
• Avoid competing with yourself. After moving a term into exact, many managers add it as a negative exact keyword in the campaign it came from, so that the exact campaign handles it.
• Exclude waste. Add irrelevant or consistently unprofitable searches as negative keywords, using negative exact or negative phrase match.
• Do not cut too early. A term needs enough clicks before you can judge it. Excluding everything that has not converted after a handful of clicks starves the account of data.

Bids, budgets, and placements

• Bidding strategy: Sponsored Products offers dynamic bids that Amazon can lower when a sale is less likely, dynamic bids that it can raise or lower, and fixed bids. Many managers start with “down only” and change it when they have data.
• Placements: you can adjust bids for placements such as the top of search results and product pages. Check the placement report before raising them.
• Budgets: a profitable campaign that runs out of budget early in the day is a missed opportunity. Check budget reports and move money towards what works.

Amazon adds and changes options regularly, so check the Amazon Ads help pages for the current settings in your marketplace.

Use a naming convention

Consistent names make reports readable and mistakes obvious. A simple pattern is ad type, product group, targeting, and match type, for example:

• SP | Travel mug | Auto
• SP | Travel mug | Manual | Exact
• SP | Travel mug | Product targets
• SP | Brand | Exact

Mistakes to avoid

• Too many unrelated keywords in one ad group, which makes bids a compromise for all of them.
• The same keyword in several campaigns with the same match type, so your campaigns bid against each other.
• Changing bids every day on too little data.
• Ignoring the listing. Ads send shoppers to the product page. A weak listing, an uncompetitive price, or low stock limits what any structure can achieve.

Get help from a reviewed specialist

Restructuring a large account takes time and care. You can compare reviewed Amazon PPC specialists, or describe what you need and we will suggest suitable specialists. To set the right targets first, read our guide to ACoS vs TACoS.