Lore

Auto Campaign as ~10%-of-Budget Keyword-Harvesting Cap

Rule of thumb from a live PPC audit: auto-targeting campaigns should receive roughly 10% of ad budget, used purely for keyword harvesting (discovering new search terms via Amazon Search Term Report) rather than as a primary sales driver. The rest of budget should go to manual exact/phrase-match campaigns built from vetted, winnable keywords (via Cerebro Filtering Protocol (Organic / Competitor Rank / Number of Competitors)) plus Manual Product Targeting (Category vs. Individual ASIN). The diagnosis: an agency running mostly on auto was burning spend on head terms it surfaced that were dominated by category giants (see "Right to Win" Keyword Selection Framework) and on non-incremental branded-keyword clicks (see Branded Keyword Ad Spend Non-Incrementality).

Case Study: Redirecting Budget Away from Broad Auto

A five-year-old candy brand plateaued at ~$5K/month partly because its PPC spend sat in low-ROI buckets: broad auto and its own branded keyword. The fix capped auto spend at roughly 10% of budget, used purely for keyword harvesting, and shifted the rest into manual keyword and product targeting selected via Helium 10 Cerebro and Switchers Tactic (Product Targeting by Competitor Star-Rating Gap). See "Right to Win" Keyword Selection Framework for how the manual keyword list was chosen.

Broad Match Shares the Same Discovery Role

Broad Match Shares the Same Discovery Role

Broad match campaigns serve the same keyword-discovery and organic-ranking-research function as auto campaigns — neither is meant to be the account's long-term profit driver. Left un-optimized, both get expensive fast, which is why winning terms need to be proactively harvested out into exact match — see Search Term Harvesting into Exact Match.

Minimum Viable Spend

Don't under-fund an auto campaign meant for keyword discovery — budget at least £10/day so the campaign gathers a reasonable amount of search-term data within the first day or two, rather than starving it and getting too few clicks to act on.