The Exact Amazon Ad Strategy We Use to Scale

Published on March 2, 2026

About this video

For personalized assistance with your Amazon Advertising strategy, visit https://amazoniappc.com

This video details how to structure your Amazon PPC campaigns for optimal performance, drawing from over a decade of experience. We discuss the importance of granular control in your Amazon advertising and how to analyze and clean up messy Amazon ads structures. Learn the best practices for Amazon ppc optimization and how to develop an effective Amazon ppc strategy to scale your business.

If you're running Amazon PPC campaigns with multiple ad groups stuffed into one campaign, hundreds of keywords with all match types mixed together, you might be seeing decent results on paper but you cannot scale that. You cannot control where your money is going or which products and keywords you want to push harder.

I walk through the exact process of analyzing messy campaign structures and how to clean them up. The goal is simple: one campaign, one ad group, up to 10 targets. This gives you absolute control on your targeting and products. When you want to push a specific keyword or lower spend on a particular product, your team should be able to do that in seconds.

One major issue I keep seeing in Amazon PPC audits is branded sales scattered everywhere. You might have campaigns targeting competitors or important subcategory keywords, but when you check search terms, a lot of sales come from your own brand name plus product. That's not real growth. You need to bid on branded keywords to keep competitors away, but it should be controlled and limited to dedicated branded campaigns. Always exclude your brand from every campaign that's not specifically targeting branded keywords.

When restructuring campaigns, timing matters. Off season is best, or periods when you can absorb fluctuations in ad spend and ACOS. Never archive previous campaigns when transitioning or restructuring. Always build on top of existing campaigns because you'll get better results than starting from scratch. I recently saw an agency archive everything before transitioning an account, which resulted in 100% ACOS for the first few weeks.

The restructuring process is tedious but worth it. Analyze which ad groups perform best, keep those in the original campaign, then slowly extract other ad groups into new campaigns. Mimic the CPC's and add 10 to 20% to help new campaigns gain traction. Once new campaigns perform well, pause the old messy structure. Work slowly and have proper expectations that performance will be disturbed slightly during this transition.

Whether you're managing Amazon sponsored products, sponsored brands, or any Amazon PPC campaign type, this structured approach to Amazon PPC marketing and ppc optimization will give you the control needed to scale profitably.

Contents: 0:00 Why Campaign Structure Matters for Amazon PPC 0:45 How to Analyze Messy Campaign Structure 2:06 One Campaign One Ad Group Rule 3:13 Setting Proper Expectations During Restructuring 4:09 Excluding Brand Terms from Non-Branded Campaigns 5:35 Never Archive Previous Campaigns

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Transcript

Hi and welcome to another episode on Amazon PPC. In this video, I'll talk about proper campaign structure and how to spot if your own account is having this kind of issue. It's one of the most important things to have properly set. Now there are ways how you can do this differently but I'm going to share how we do it internally for over a decade now and it's working pretty well because you have a granular control on what you want to push and where you want to scale down if necessary for whatever reason it is you know you want to have an absolute control on your targeting on your products. So, if uh you want to tell your team, hey guys, let's push on this keyword or let's uh lower the spend and sales on this product. You want them to be able to immediately do that like in a second literally. So, uh I'm going to share some like a breakdown of what are the most important steps to analyze and what will be the outcomes. There are definitely pros and cons to this approach. Now, uh forward this to your team if you think you may fit in these uh kind of uh structure cleanup uh issues. Now, one of the most important things is to analyze first. So, you even if you have shitty campaign structure like one campaign, 20 ad groups and then inside each ad group, you can have hundreds of keywords with all match types. You know, I've seen that sometimes it even works. It can produce magnificent results on paper, but you cannot scale that. You cannot grow sales. You cannot control what's happening and where your money is going. It it's it's absolutely uh horrific. So, what you want to do first is you want to analyze and check what's happening. Is are there any uh for example let's say real real case scenario a few weeks ago I analyzed an account which literally had uh more than 20 ad groups in one uh campaign. Some of them were performing really good. Some of them nah and some of them uh were terrible and some of them didn't even have proper clicks and and engagement. So what you have to do is you want to analyze what will be the potential ad group that's going to be left inside the campaign. And if there are few, you definitely need to make a decision which ad group is going to stay. We because we want to have um one campaign, one ad group and up to 10 targets in one campaign in one ad group. So to accomplish that you need to carefully analyze. Um the best thing is to have the best performing ad group stay in the campaign. Others you want to extract and extract them slowly to check you know uh create new campaigns and then mimic these the CPCs and add additional 10 to 20% to that. I mean it's a tedious process and to explain everything in details this video would be an hour long easily just to cover the basics. So I'm trying to give you an overview. So you want to analyze and see what's going where keep what's working and what's has some potential. Extract that. Create new campaigns. And when you see that new campaigns have started to perform really well or even okay she's good. then pause the ad groups or campaigns that were not performing as well. So you want to start slow. So once you first see what's working, recreate that once it gets some some traction, then pause the the old campaigns and work slowly. Now um I should have said even at the beginning the most important thing here is to have proper expectations. Now, if you are the one who's in charge, then you need to have proper expectations that this process is going to disturb your performance. Not like by a lot, but definitely you're going to see some uh strange fluctuations in ad spend, in a cost, in sales. The best possible time to do this is off season if you if your product is seasonal. Also, a good time is I don't know around this time of the year, you know, because Prime Day is is is far away from us. It's going to be in June this year probably. So uh you know fix it while it's still not hot you know when you can um absorb certain fluctuations um because when you are not even thinking about it any rise in a cost is going to shock you and you may know act emotionally. Um, also one of the most important things, and I don't know why, but I still keep seeing this that you're getting sales all over the place, branded sales. Now, you have campaigns targeting competitors. You have campaigns targeting your most important keywords in your subcategory. And when you dive deep into search terms, you realize that a lot of those sales are coming from your brand terms, from your brand name plus the product or some of the most important keywords. While that's okay, that's not real growth. You know, you cannot grow from getting sales and spending money on branded like crazy. Yes, you need to bid on your branded keywords so your competitors aren't appearing there. But you know that should be limited controlled. Everything on Amazon ads should be controlled. You know, you shouldn't be leaving too much um room to to Amazon to to do their thing. Um so yeah, negate branded in phrase match in every single campaign that's not a branded campaign. You you want to exclude your brand from uh as in targeting your branded keywords in every possible campaign and then have proper campaigns uh branded campaigns for wherever whatever you want to advertise like sponsor brand videos, sponsor brands or sponsor products whatever that's that's also really important. So always build uh on top of the existing campaigns. Most likely you're going to have better results than just starting from scratch. Do not archive previous campaigns. So recently uh when we took over one account uh terrible thing happened is that previous agency archived all campaigns. So I never witnessed that in in the last 10 years where uh doing this this business that previous agency archived everything. So it was really bad way to transition the account to to the new agency you know but you know that happens but if you are the one who's managing that don't do that ever because it's always best to build on on top of existing campaigns then start from scratch you know so we had like 100 a cost at first few weeks and then you know brought it back down where it should be you know because it's just the way that that account is Um, it's a big topic. I may record multiple videos on on the same topic because it's something that I keep seeing over and over again when we do uh advertising audits. And it shouldn't be that way. You know, if more people realize this, then it's going to be better for everyone to for brands to have proper control on their ads and for agencies and PPC managers to e easily um grow the account and structure the campaigns properly. Let me know if you have any questions and see you tomorrow in the next video. Bye-bye.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ideal Amazon PPC campaign structure for maintaining granular control and scalability?

The target structure is one campaign, one ad group, with up to 10 targets per campaign. This level of granularity means that when you want to push harder on a specific keyword or reduce spend on a particular product, your team can act on that in seconds without wading through multiple mixed ad groups. Campaigns with 20 ad groups and hundreds of mixed-match keywords may produce acceptable results on the surface but cannot be meaningfully controlled, scaled, or diagnosed when performance issues arise.

How should you restructure a messy Amazon PPC account without destroying performance?

Start by analyzing which ad groups within the messy campaign are performing well and which are not. Keep the best-performing ad group inside the original campaign and extract the others one at a time into new, clean campaigns. When creating the new campaigns, mimic the CPCs from the original and add 10 to 20% to help them gain traction. Once a new campaign is performing reliably, pause the corresponding old ad group. Do this gradually, not all at once, and do it during off-season or quieter periods when your account can absorb temporary fluctuations in ACoS and spend. Never archive existing campaigns during a transition: building on top of historical data produces better results than starting from scratch, and archiving campaigns resets that history, which can cause ACoS to spike for weeks.

What is branded search term leakage and why does it matter for Amazon PPC?

Branded search term leakage happens when non-branded campaigns (targeting competitors or category keywords) are generating attributed sales on branded search terms, meaning shoppers searched for your brand name and a product before clicking and converting, but those sales are being credited to campaigns that were not designed for branded traffic. This inflates the apparent performance of non-branded campaigns and makes growth look stronger than it is. The fix is to add your brand name as a phrase match negative keyword in every campaign that is not specifically a branded campaign, and to run dedicated branded campaigns for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands where that traffic should be captured and controlled.