Is each campaign doing the job you built it for?
Three ways campaigns end up spending on something other than what they were set up to do, and how to check yours.
Every campaign starts with a job. Win top of search for a keyword. Stay profitable. Protect your brand name.
Then things change. Search terms shift, bids get adjusted, new products get added. The campaign keeps spending either way, and the ad report can look fine the whole time.
Here are three things we check first.
1. A top-of-search campaign that mostly shows on product pages
You built it to win the top of the search results. But Amazon also places ads on product pages, and if the campaign isn’t set up to favor top of search, a lot of the spend can end up there instead.
Product pages are a different placement, with a different conversion rate and different costs. The campaign is still getting sales. It’s just not doing what you built it for.
How to check: look at the campaign’s placement report and see where the spend actually went.
2. A profitable campaign running on broad match with no negatives
Broad match finds a lot of searches. Some of them are great. Some were never going to buy your product, and you pay for those clicks too.
Without negative keywords, a campaign that’s supposed to make money ends up paying for traffic that can’t.
How to check: open the search term report and look at what people actually searched before they clicked. Add the ones that don’t fit as negatives.
3. Spending on searches you already win
If you already rank in the top three organically for a search, some of the sales your ads get there would have happened anyway. The ad gets the credit, but you’d have made a lot of those sales for free.
This one is hard to see, because the ad report looks good. Here’s how we test it:
- Pick the searches where you already rank in the top three.
- Lower the bids step by step, not all at once.
- Watch total sales on those searches, not just ad sales. Ad sales will drop as bids come down; that’s expected. What matters is ads and organic together.
- Keep only the spend that adds to the total. If total sales hold, that spend was buying sales you’d have made anyway. If they drop, the spend was doing real work, often keeping competitors from taking the top spot on your searches, so it stays.
Either way you learn something: you free up budget, or you find out which spend is worth keeping.
Fifteen minutes, no call required
Pick your top-of-search campaign and open its placement report. How much of the spend actually went to top of search?
Then pick your highest-spend profitable campaign and open its search term report. How many of the searches would you never have targeted on purpose?
If an agency runs your ads, there’s an easier version: ask them to tell you, in one plain sentence per campaign, what each one is set up to do. If they can’t, that tells you something too.
How we keep it from happening
- One job per campaign. Help a product rank, take sales from a specific competitor, or make a set of keywords profitable. A campaign with one job is easy to judge. One trying to do all three isn’t.
- A target for every campaign, checked every week. That’s how we catch it when a campaign starts drifting, instead of months later.
For ranking campaigns specifically, see Ad spend doesn’t buy rank →