The 3-Campaign PPC Structure Every Amazon Seller Should Use

Most Amazon sellers either skip PPC entirely or throw money at a single auto campaign and hope for the best. Both approaches leave money on the table. The 3-campaign structure splits your budget across three distinct campaign types, each with a specific job.

Campaign 1: Auto (Discovery)

Your auto campaign exists for one reason — finding keywords you haven't thought of. Amazon's algorithm tests your product against thousands of search terms and shows you which ones convert. Set conservative bids (£0.50-£0.75) and a modest daily budget. This campaign will lose money initially. That's fine. It's paying for data.

Add negative keywords from day one. Block terms like "free", "cheap", "wholesale", "used", and "how to". These attract clicks from people who will never buy your product.

Campaign 2: Broad Match (Reach)

Take the converting search terms from your auto campaign and move them into a broad match campaign. Use 15-20 keywords with moderate bids (£0.75-£1.00). Broad match captures variations of your keywords — misspellings, synonyms, related phrases — that exact match would miss.

Add negative exact keywords for any terms you're targeting in your exact match campaign. This prevents your own campaigns from competing against each other and driving up your cost-per-click.

Campaign 3: Exact Match (Conversions)

Your exact match campaign is where the money is made. Take your 10-15 highest-converting keywords from the broad campaign and target them with exact match at higher bids (£1.00-£1.50). You're paying more per click, but these are the searches most likely to result in a sale.

Budget Allocation

Split your daily budget roughly equally across all three campaigns. If your total budget is £20/day, that's roughly £6.67 per campaign. As you gather data, shift budget toward whichever campaign delivers the best ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales).

The Flywheel

The beauty of this structure is the data flow. Auto discovers keywords. Broad validates them at scale. Exact converts them efficiently. Every two weeks, review your search term reports: promote winners from auto to broad, from broad to exact. Add losers as negative keywords. Over time, your campaigns get sharper and more profitable.

Common Mistakes

• +Running only an auto campaign. You're letting Amazon decide everything and paying for it.
• +Not adding negative keywords. Every irrelevant click is wasted budget.
• +Setting the same bid across all campaigns. Exact match keywords deserve higher bids because they convert better.
• +Not reviewing search term reports weekly. The data is there — use it.
• +Running all keywords in one campaign. Separating by match type gives you control over bids and budget at the keyword level.

Getting Started

If you're building campaigns from scratch, tools like ListingForge can generate this entire 3-campaign structure from your ASIN in seconds, complete with keywords, bids, negative keywords, and a ready-to-upload bulk file. But even if you prefer to do it manually, the structure above will outperform a single campaign every time.