Effective Portfolio Management in the Amazon Ad Console

Amazon advertising portfolio management is a critically important part of your Amazon advertising operation. A clean portfolio setup makes everything easy to see, understand, and control.

Poor portfolio management can make it hard to find campaigns, understand your numbers and cause confusion.

Proper portfolio management on Amazon can help:

With billing reports
View performance metrics at a glance across products and strategies
Organize campaigns for strategies
Implement budgets for specific products and strategies based on goals
Easily identify where spend is going

We’ve thought a lot about how we want to use portfolios in our Amazon advertising management system. Below you’ll find how we structure, name and maintain portfolios on client accounts so that you too can have a better operation.

How we structure our Amazon portfolios

We use a specific naming structure for our portfolios to help make organization easy, intuitive and useful for reporting.

While we naturally have them broken up by product (or brand) we also have some important portfolios based on strategy and ad type. This helps capture anything we need specific budgets or KPIs for as well as fitting anything that doesn’t neatly go into a product or brand portfolio.

We number these to help with the visual sorting of everything. You can see a breakdown below. Here’s an example below.

Here’s a breakdown of each, including some you don’t see above.

1. Archive

For old campaigns that don’t fit anywhere else. Importantly, you should NOT move all paused campaigns here as it will distort the historical performance in other portfolios. We usually put things here that have messy campaign structures or experiments that didn’t really work.

2. Ranking

All campaigns that are meant for keyword ranking. These will generally be more expensive and should be budgeted for. These can include SP, SBV and HSA keyword campaigns that can be targeted towards specific search terms.
Your KPIs on these campaigns are keyword rank, not ROAS/ACOS and are managed by budget allocation since they will likely be losing money on the ad sales.

3. Conquesting

Similar to ranking, these will be expensive campaigns that are dedicated to PT campaigns. These will be single ASIN SP, SB and SD exact match PT Campaigns
Your KPIs on these campaigns will be “stolen sales” and/or a drop in your competitor’s sales rank. These are also managed by budget allocation.

4. Branded

Very straightforward, and should include any type of campaign specific to your brand so you can track branded spend and performance as a whole.

5. HSA (Headline Search Ad)

Any non-branded, non-conquesting or non-ranking HSA campaigns.

6. Catalog/allpro/allproducts/all

This is for campaigns that have all the products in your catalog in your portfolio. These are good for large catalogs that can’t have everything focused on and generally perform well with low bids. You want to make sure the majority of your spend is NOT going here so it’s good to have a separate portfolio for it.

7. Additional Groups/strategies – [group name]

You have a lot of flexibility with this section. Maybe you want to put seasonal campaigns in different portfolios so they are easy to find and turn on when you come back to them, or you could break up smaller groups of products when you want multiple products to be advertised in the same campaign because they are all relevant to the keyword.
You could have specific strategies that you want to keep track of unique to the account.

Naming portfolios for products

Outside of the above, we make portfolios for each specific product to house the rest of the campaigns for that product.

We name these portfolios using the below naming convention but we drop the SKU unless there is both an FBA and FBM listing (since they will perform very differently).

Product Name – ASIN – SKU
note: you can use any separator you prefer such as a bar, comma, colon, etc. As long as it’s easy for you to read then it works.

The one change we make when it comes to naming products is wholesale accounts. Wholesale sellers tend to be concerned with budgets being spent on certain brands and may actually have budgets given to them by the brands to spend.

In this case, we will organize by brand rather than product and only break out products at the request of the client.

Other considerations: off-Amazon advertising

There has recently been an addition of off-Amazon advertising options to the ad console. Depending on how these evolve you will likely want to keep these in separate portfolios with smaller dedicated budgets until they prove themselves.

Cleaning up (portfolio hygiene)

For some reason, Amazon did not make it possible to delete portfolios. While there is probably some technical reason for this, in my eight years on Amazon, this has not been fixed so instead we came up with a way of managing portfolios that consider this.

Below are the series of rules we follow to keep portfolios clean and organized:

Don’t create temporary portfolios
Don’t create portfolios outside the system
Don’t create separate portfolios for the same products
Try to consolidate portfolios as simply as possible in the beginning. You can break them up later.
1. For example, put all size/color variations in the same portfolio and then, once you know you will have a lot of spend for one variation that you want separate, you can separate them. Until then, use your naming conventions and/or tags to do reporting.
Rename/reuse any old portfolios you are not using
If you need to get rid of portfolios, put a Z at the beginning (or just rename them to Z). This will help push them to the bottom when sorted alphabetically

Note: All portfolio names must be unique so you cannot name all the ones you do not want “z”. You have to keep adding more characters to make them different. It can be more z’s, punctuation, numbers or just other random letters. It shouldn’t matter as long as it has the z.

Thinking about budgets with portfolios

If you use budgets frequently with your portfolios (which I don’t recommend unless necessary) then you will want to make sure you are keeping track of them.

In times when we had product/brand-specific budgets or had to manage risk when scaling up ads we would use budget control systems.

Budgets on portfolios can be pretty useful when you have actual budgets (which most brands do) but are sub-optimal when it comes to optimizing ad spend. This is because Amazon ads always need to be optimized as markets change and competitors adapt.

What this means is that your least efficient spend will happen first.

So if you have a hard cap on for a budget and you’re hitting it, then all of the campaigns you would want to keep spending can no longer spend. Ideally, you would always want to be coming just under your budget cap with no campaigns running out of budget.