Amazon Ads Manager

Amazon explicitly recommends starting with an automatic targeting campaign and letting it run for roughly two weeks before layering a manual campaign on top^[1]. Auto campaigns let Amazon match your ad to four targeting groups - close match, loose match, substitutes, and complements - which is the source data you need before any manual structure makes sense^[2].

Run the Sponsored Products search term report after the discovery window and pull search terms with at least one conversion and an ACoS below your target^[3]. These are the candidates to promote into a manual campaign with exact-match keyword targeting at a higher bid. Add the same terms as negative exact-match keywords in the auto campaign so the two campaigns stop bidding against each other^[4].

For the manual campaign, start with dynamic bids - down only while you stabilize a search-term-level ACoS. Switching to dynamic bids - up and down after 7-14 days of stable performance can lift conversions on top-of-search auctions, but Amazon's own guidance is to budget for double your bid input because the up-modifier can raise bids by up to 100%^[5].

Auto campaigns created with targetingType: "AUTO" via the Ads API cannot have manual positive targets added later^[6], so the auto-to-manual move is always a new-campaign operation, not an edit. The Cortex Bid Hygiene Sentry watches for the inverse antipattern - auto campaigns where 80%+ of spend is concentrated on a single search term that should already have been promoted^[7].