The Ad Project

Overview: 

Amazon Sponsored Products manual campaigns can provide a lot of great results that drive high volume and conversions if you have a great campaign funnel structure. In this episode, we’ll talk through how manual campaigns are structured and the importance of developing a solid campaign funnel structure, the typical controls in manual campaigns, and how to utilize the different targeting types.

Key Takeaways: 

• The key components of a manual campaign are keyword targeting and product targeting.
• When setting up new manual campaigns, make sure they’re structured to have separate ad groups for broad match, phrase match, exact match, and product targeting. This helps with visibility, control, and organization of the account.
• If you already have manual campaigns running, make sure you’re continually moving your high performing keywords or product targets downstream.
• When funneling from auto campaigns to manual campaigns, it is best practice to have consistent naming conventions to better organize your campaigns.
• We recommend focusing on longer-tail keywords for broad match keywords since these typically convert better and target customers with higher intent.
• If you use product targeting category targeting, we recommend having filters to prevent them from getting really broad and wasting ad spend.

Structuring Amazon Sponsored Ads Manual Campaigns: 

We typically structure our manual campaigns in a series. First, we’ll use our auto campaigns for discovery. We move converting keywords and product targets down the funnel into the manual campaigns from our auto campaigns. Within our manual campaigns, we have ad groups for keywords (separated according to match type) and ad groups for product targets.

One of the key pieces of structuring your campaigns is using consistent naming conventions. This helps to make sure that the same products you’re funneling from your auto campaigns are grouped together in your manual campaigns. This way, your campaigns can stay organized and well structured.

In summary, our typical manual campaign for a product or product group would potentially have four ad groups: broad match, phrase match, exact match, and product targeting ad groups. We find that this segmentation helps with control, visibility, and organization of your account.

Ways to Optimize your Amazon Manual Campaigns: 

• We recommend moving your high converting keywords from auto campaigns to phrase match in your manual campaigns. Making this move to phrase instead of exact match allows us to pick up more permutations that can perform just as well as the keywords in auto campaigns or even better.
• As you move keywords from auto campaigns to manual phrase, it’s important to set them as negative phrase in the auto campaigns. This forces impressions to show up in the manual phrase campaigns, where we have more control.
• Utilizing both long-tail keywords and short tail keywords to maximize your campaign performance.
• Segment your brand defense keyword into a separate campaign. This increases visibility, budget control, and overall performance.
• When using category targeting, make sure to use filters. Otherwise, it could get really broad, resulting in wasted ad spend.

Episode Highlights: 

Benefits of Manual campaigns [01:13]

How to structure your manual campaigns [02:29]

How to group keyword match types in manual campaigns [05:50]

Moving from auto to manual campaigns [06:49]

Long-tail vs. short-tail keywords and when to use them [12:23]

A common mistake with new sellers setting up manual campaigns [14:31]

How to use broad match keyword targeting in manual campaigns [16:26]

Branded vs. Non-branded keywords [18:40]

Deep dive into Product targeting in manual campaigns [21:17]