Campaign Structure

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Why Campaign Structure Matters
3. Segregated Campaigns for Individual Products
4. Campaigns Split by Different Targeting Levels
5. Match Type Segmentation: Broad, Phrase, and Exact
   • Useful Tip on Using Broad Match
6. Limited Keywords Per Campaign (15-20 Keywords)
   • Thematic Grouping
7. Single Keyword Campaigns: Use with Caution
8. Auto Campaign Segmentation
9. Portfolio Usage for Better Organization
10. Separate Product and Category Targeting
11. Branded vs. Non-Branded Segregation
12. The Role of Naming Conventions
13. Final Thoughts: Building for Scale and Profitability
14. Additional Reading

Amazon PPC Campaign Structure for Maximum ROI: A Comprehensive Guide

In the world of Amazon PPC, your campaign structure can be the make-or-break factor in determining the success of your advertising efforts. Get it wrong, and you’ll be bleeding money faster than you can make it. Get it right, and scaling becomes second nature.
After over eight years in the trenches of Amazon ads, running thousands of campaigns, we’ve cracked the code. Here’s what we’ve learned—bad campaign structure is the #1 reason most advertisers fail to scale. But a smart, well-organized structure? That’s your golden ticket to higher returns and serious growth.
In this guide, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to structure your Amazon PPC campaigns for maximum ROI.

Why Campaign Structure Matters

Campaign structure isn’t just about tidiness or making things look pretty. It’s about control. It’s about precision. The right structure gives you a clear view of what’s working, what’s not, and where your money is going.
When we audit accounts, 99% of the time, we find campaigns that are wasting cash left and right—poor structure is usually the root cause. Get this right, and scaling becomes effortless. Get it wrong, and you’re stuck in an endless loop of overspending and guessing.

1. Segregated Campaigns for Individual Products

One of the foundational principles in building a successful campaign structure is creating separate campaigns for each product. This practice gives you greater control over how each product performs, particularly when making adjustments to bids, placement, and budgets.
For example, imagine you have multiple products bundled into a single campaign, and you decide to increase the bid to boost one product’s performance. That increase will affect all products in the campaign, including those that don’t need the extra boost. This inefficient use of budget can lead to lower-priority products soaking up funds meant for high-performers.
By creating individual campaigns for each product, you ensure that every adjustment you make directly impacts that product alone, allowing for more precise optimization and better performance tracking.

2. Campaigns Split by Different Targeting Levels

Campaign structure is more than just separating products—it’s also about targeting. We’ve found it incredibly useful to split campaigns based on different targeting levels, ranging from highly relevant keywords to broader, less relevant ones. This allows you to fine-tune your budget allocation and maximize performance.

• Highly Relevant Keywords: Long-tail keywords that closely align with your product should have dedicated campaigns with higher budgets. These keywords tend to have higher conversion rates, making them worth the investment.
• Broader Keywords: While broader keywords can drive traffic, they often convert at lower rates. Setting up separate campaigns for broader, less relevant keywords with lower budgets ensures that you don’t overspend on low-converting terms.

This level of segmentation helps you allocate your budget efficiently, giving the majority of your spend to high-impact keywords while still testing broader terms without overcommitting resources.

3. Match Type Segmentation: Broad, Phrase, and Exact

Different match types serve different purposes, and mixing them within the same campaign can lead to inefficiencies. This is a common mistake we often come across when auditing accounts. On the one hand, Broad match keywords cast a wider net, often pulling in irrelevant search terms that may inflate costs. Exact match keywords, on the other hand, offer more refined targeting and allow for greater control over which customer search term to show ads on.
Therefore, broad match campaigns tend to have unstable performance, whereas Exact match keywords have more stable performance, and usually perform as expected.

Having separate campaigns helps define budgets to reduce instability. By creating separate campaigns for Broad, Phrase, and Exact match keywords, you can effectively control how much budget each match type receives. Broad match campaigns should typically have more conservative budgets, as they are more prone to wastage. In contrast, Exact match campaigns—being more targeted and precise—can handle higher budgets for better scalability.

Useful Tip on Using Broad Match

To improve control over Broad match keywords, Broad Match Modifiers (BMM) can be a highly effective solution. Although 99% of the accounts we audit still don’t make use of BMMs, they can drastically improve campaign performance.

Why BMM are important? These days, we have noticed that Broad match can often target completely irrelevant or loosely related terms, sometimes showing ads for search queries that don’t closely match your keyword at all.
Creating a Broad match modifier is simple—just add a ‘+’ before key terms in the broad targeting type. With BMM, you ensure that your ads are only shown when the modified term is present in the search query. For example, if you're targeting the keyword ‘+running +shoes,’ your ad will only show for queries that include both 'running' and 'shoes,’ eliminating unrelated searches. This strategy helps strike a balance between reach and relevance, ultimately optimizing your budget.

4. Limited Keywords Per Campaign (15-20 Keywords)

More isn’t always better, especially when it comes to the number of keywords in a single campaign. Through extensive testing, we’ve found that campaigns with too many keywords often underperform. When you include over 20 keywords in a single campaign, many of them don’t get enough exposure, leading to missed opportunities for impressions and sales.

To counter this, we recommend limiting each campaign to 15-20 keywords.
In our experience, this has led to much better performance. For instance, in one of our tests, we had a campaign with over 20 keywords, many of which weren’t getting impressions. We split the campaign into smaller groups, each with 15-20 keywords, and kept the bids the same. The result? The previously inactive keywords started generating impressions and sales.

Thematic Grouping

When splitting a keyword list (e.g., 100 keywords) into smaller groups of 15-20 per campaign, thematic grouping is an effective strategy to maximize performance. This approach involves organizing keywords based on two key factors: relevancy and search volume.
First, sorting the keywords by relevancy, from highly relevant to less relevant, and creating groups based on this. Then, within each relevancy group, sorting the keywords by search volume, from high to low. It’s important to avoid mixing high and low search volume keywords within the same group, as high-volume keywords tend to dominate, leaving low-volume keywords underexposed. By grouping keywords with similar search volumes together, you ensure more consistent impressions across the campaign, which results in better individual keyword exposure.

This approach also allows for more strategic budget allocation. High-relevance, high-traffic keywords can be prioritized with higher budgets, while low-traffic but relevant terms can still receive adequate exposure without overspending.

5. Single Keyword Campaigns: Use with Caution

The one extreme of segregated campaign strategy is Single Keyword campaigns. It sounds ideal—after all, it gives you full control over a keyword and is often recommended. However, there's an exception that's not often discussed.

While high-traffic keywords tend to do well, mid- and low-traffic ones often struggle with low impressions and fluctuations. From our experience, these keywords rather perform better when grouped in sets of 5-10. This approach generates more data, transactions, and campaign history, leading to stronger results.

6. Auto Campaign Segmentation

Auto campaigns in Amazon PPC can be powerful, but only if managed carefully. Auto campaigns generally target four different groups: close match, loose match, substitutes, and complements. By default, Amazon lumps these together, but segregating auto campaigns by targeting type—one for keyword-targeted groups (close and loose match) and another for product-targeted groups (substitutes and complements)—yields better performance.

This level of segmentation allows for greater control over each targeting group’s budget and performance, ultimately improving the efficiency of your auto campaigns.

7. Portfolio Usage for Better Organization

Portfolios have been available for quite some time, yet we still encounter many accounts that either don’t use them at all or fail to utilize them effectively. For larger accounts with multiple product lines, portfolios can be a game-changer. By grouping campaigns into portfolios, advertisers can streamline organization, making it much easier to track spending and measure performance across different product categories or brands.
In addition to better organization, portfolios provide the ability to set budgets at the portfolio level, offering enhanced financial control over your campaigns. One of the standout features of portfolios is the ability to set monthly spend limits, which can be configured to renew automatically. This ensures that all campaigns grouped within a portfolio do not exceed the set budget.

While Amazon currently lacks daily budget limits for portfolios (offering only monthly limits), the feature remains highly useful for keeping your overall campaign expenditures in check and ensuring that you stay within budget. If used effectively, portfolios offer an organized, high-level view of your advertising strategy and a powerful tool for managing larger or more complex accounts.

8. Separate Product and Category Targeting

One of the most common mistakes we see in accounts is the combination of product and category targeting within the same ad group. These two targeting methods serve different purposes and should be kept separate. Product targeting allows you to focus on specific ASINs, while category targeting casts a broader net across an entire product category.

Mixing these two types in one campaign results in scattered performance data and inefficiencies. By keeping them separate, you can better analyze which type of targeting is driving results and allocate budgets and adjust bids accordingly.

9. Branded vs. Non-Branded Segregation

Another essential aspect of campaign structure is the segregation of branded and non-branded keywords. Branded keywords typically have a lower ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) because they target users who are already familiar with your brand, whereas non-branded keywords help attract new customers.
When branded and non-branded keywords are lumped together in the same campaign, the ACOS may appear artificially low, masking poor performance from non-branded keywords. Segregating these campaigns ensures that you can allocate budgets more accurately and control how much you’re spending on brand awareness versus customer acquisition, which ultimately depends on your business goals and the account.

10. The Role of Naming Conventions

Effective naming conventions are another crucial part of campaign structure. A clear and consistent naming strategy enables you to easily identify campaign types—whether branded or non-branded, specific product-focused, or keyword-focused—and improves reporting. This makes it easier to run filters, generate reports, and make informed decisions based on performance data.

For instance, by using a consistent naming convention, you can quickly filter for all your exact match or branded campaigns to see how each segment is performing, making it easier to adjust strategies accordingly.

Final Thoughts: Building for Scale and Profitability

Optimizing your Amazon PPC campaigns for scale and profitability is about thoughtful, data-driven strategies. The way you structure your campaigns has a direct impact on your results, and small changes can lead to significant performance improvements. By segregating campaigns for individual products, splitting campaigns by targeting levels and match types, and limiting the number of keywords, you’ll have a more manageable, scalable, and ultimately profitable advertising strategy.
This is why we always start by restructuring campaigns when we onboard a new account. It’s a simple yet highly effective approach that consistently improves performance. Our case studies often highlight campaign restructuring as one of the key strategies we implement to drive better results. Laying a strong foundation with proper campaign structure helps maximize the effectiveness of other optimization tactics, ensuring long-term success.

Take the time to set up a solid campaign structure now, and you’ll be well on your way to achieving both higher sales and better ROAS. Stay tuned for more insights, or subscribe to our newsletter where we’ll share data-driven case studies and actionable strategies to help you optimize your Amazon PPC efforts.

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