Playbook · 9 min read
How to run and manage Amazon PPC campaigns
Good Amazon PPC management is boring on purpose. The same small set of actions, repeated on a schedule, against a target you wrote down before you started.
Step 1 — Set the target before touching a bid
Work out break-even ACOS from price, Amazon fees, COGS and shipping, then set a target ACOS per ASIN based on lifecycle stage: aggressive for launches, break-even for rank defence, profit-focused for mature best-sellers. Fee schedules live in Seller Central's help hub.
Step 2 — Build structure around intent
- Brand defence: your name and variants, exact match, tight budget cap
- Generic harvesting: auto and broad campaigns feeding an exact-match tier
- Competitor conquesting: ASIN and competitor-brand targeting, separate budget
- Launch push: temporary, aggressive, reviewed weekly against rank not ACOS
Step 3 — The weekly cadence
Monday: search-term review
Pull the search-term report for the last 14 and 60 days. Promote converting terms into exact match. Negate terms with high clicks and zero conversions. Add negative ASINs where product targeting is misfiring.
Tuesday: bids and placements
Adjust bids toward target ACOS in capped steps — no more than 15–20% per change so you can still read cause and effect. Review top-of-search versus product-page placement multipliers separately.
Wednesday: budgets and pacing
Find campaigns hitting budget before evening and campaigns underspending all week. Reallocate rather than adding spend.
Thursday: experiments
One structured test per week: match-type split, new Sponsored Brands headline, a Display audience. Log hypothesis, dates and result.
Friday: report and decide
Spend, ACOS, TACoS, CVR, CPC, new-to-brand, plus the single decision you are making next week. If ads look expensive but CVR is falling, fix the listing before the bids.
Step 4 — Monthly review
- Profit per ASIN after fees, COGS and ad spend
- Organic rank movement on your ten priority keywords
- Wasted-spend total versus last month
- Targets re-set for ASINs that changed lifecycle stage
The same auction and quality-signal logic that governs Google Ads applies here: relevance beats brute-force bidding over time.
When to hand this over
If this cadence keeps slipping, the account is not being managed — it is being visited. That is the point where sellers bring in our Amazon PPC management services. Compare options first on the agency page, or read software vs agency.