Assign Each Campaign One Job

Outcome: Separate discovery, ranking, defense, product targeting, and profit campaigns so budget and performance are interpreted correctly.

What to do in this lesson

Watch: start with the lesson video.
Learn: use the summary and key points to capture the operating principle.
Do: complete the action steps against one real product, SKU, campaign, supplier, or workflow.
Submit: write one action card with owner, evidence, next step, risk, status, and review date.

Watch

Hosted on Google Drive.

Lesson summary

This lesson teaches how to effectively organize and name your PPC campaigns on Amazon. It covers the importance of simplified naming conventions, using a module naming key for ad types and intentions, and organizing campaigns by product. The goal is to make your campaigns easier to search, maintain, and adjust.

Key points

Use simplified naming conventions for your PPC campaigns
Employ a module naming key for ad types (SP, SB, SD, etc.) and campaign intentions (exact, broad, gifts, etc.)
Organize your campaigns by parent product using portfolios
Leveraging descriptive merchant SKUs in campaign names can save space
Sponsored Display campaigns cannot be added to portfolios currently

Lesson notes

In this lesson you will discover:

Simplified naming conventions for your campaigns
Simple naming key for ad types and intentions
Organizing your campaigns by product [Video] Action Steps
Spend some time thinking through how you want to name your campaigns
Keep in mind that you will add products or variations later
Utilize Portfolios to add more organization to your campaigns

Action checklist

Spend time thinking through your desired campaign naming conventions
Keep in mind you will add products/variations later when setting up naming
Utilize portfolios to add organization to your campaign structure

Full transcript

Open transcript

Hey guys, Brendan Petit here and this module we’re going to talk about organizing your PPC campaigns. Here’s what we’re going to cover. Simplified naming conventions for your PPC campaigns. Module naming key for ad types and intentions. And organizing your campaigns by product. Why campaign naming is so important. It helps you organize your campaigns for easier searchability. It speeds up the maintenance when sorting by product match type or intent. It also gives you a layer of protection for anything not added to portfolio which we’ll discuss in the later slide. Also it’s important to note guys, these are only guidelines. You can use different naming conventions or different campaign labeling conventions. But the key here is structure and organization. We’re just trying to add some guidelines around that. Important labeling to include. So let’s go through the most important first, at least in my opinion. Product short title. So what your product is, swaddle blanket, taco holders, etc. You can always shorten that name to SB or TH as needed. Campaign type. So obviously you want to emphasize what sort of campaign it is, sponsored products, sponsored display, sponsored brand, etc. The campaign intent. So this is where you might be a little more specific on the keyword that you’re targeting. If it’s a one-off keyword campaign, the icing that you’re targeting, if you’re being very specific on that, the description, if you’re doing more of like a category or something more broad, and then the goal, if it’s like a specific season or gifts or a specific day of the year, something like that, you might want to name that intent. So there’s something to reference there. Match type, obviously, exact broad auto, etc. And then some extras might include specific advertised skew or asin. Obviously if you have multiple variations running in a campaign, this is harder to do. But if you have variations and you emphasize one specific skew to do most of your advertising, you can actually put that in your campaign title and be more hyper-targeted with that. And then placement emphasis, top of search or product placement. Not as important with keyword specific targeting, but you can if you’re trying to use maybe product placement as a defense on your keyword related. That’s a little bit more advanced stuff, but again, you can use it in your campaign title if necessary for better indexing. Campaign and placement type key. So here’s what it’ll look like. For sponsored product, you might say SP, for sponsored brand, SB, sponsored brand video, SBB, sponsored display, SD, product targeting PT. And then the placement emphasis might look like TOS for top of search, which we use quite often, and then PP for product placement. And your match type key might look something like this, EX for exact, pH for phrase, VR for broad, auto can be broken down in a couple of different ways, substitute might look like auto-dash sub, close match, auto-cm, loose match, auto-lm, and compliments auto-com. Here’s some examples for what a good campaign title looks like. So SP obviously sponsored product, underscore the short title, underscore placement type if necessary, underscore match type, exact broad phrase, underscore if needed your skew and then your keyword or intent. So the specific keyword or maybe category that you might be targeting for that specific product. And all the rest of these look pretty much the same. Again, you can mix and match these as needed based on what your requirements are. But again, the most important piece here is the match type, the product short title, and at least the intent of what you’re trying to do. So there’s a little bit of description and indexing related to your campaign types. A pro tip is if your merchant skew is descriptive enough that you don’t actually need a product short title, use that. A lot of people have very descriptive skews for their products. So you can use that in replacement just to save space on the campaign title. So let’s talk about organizing by portfolios. You want to create and organize your campaign portfolio by parent product. This will allow you to get a snapshot of your total performance per product for the majority of your campaign types. So I’ll also allow you to break down your maintenance by product versus generic parameters and it will allow you to be more intentional about adjustments. Note sponsored display cannot be added into portfolios at this time. For some reason, Amazon has not allowed us to do that. But these ad types should make about a low percentage of your overall budget and labeled SD for better indexing and searchability. Organizing by portfolio looks something like this. You’ll create portfolios in this section on the top left of your campaign manager. It’ll look something like this so I just labeled it generically product four. But it will give you a total snapshot of that specific product if you’re able to put all the campaigns for that product in that folder. Action steps. Spend some time thinking through how you want to name your campaigns. Keep in mind that you will add products or variations later. Utilize portfolios and add organization to your campaign structure.

Resources

Source lesson: PPC Optimization Part 4 Name your PPC Campaigns
Resources: none attached yet.

Track: 04 — PPC Control Loop
Module: Campaign Architecture