Campaign Setup Cheat Sheet: Four Goal Categories (Performance / Brand Defense / Research / Ranking)

Chris Rawlings organizes every Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display configuration into four goal categories, each with a prescribed starting bid, match type, targeting, bidding strategy, and entry in the PPC Campaign & Portfolio Naming Convention:

Performance — campaigns built to convert profitably around a shared shopper-intent theme.
Brand Defense — campaigns protecting the brand's own listings, overlapping with Defense / "Shielding" Campaigns (Product Targeting).
Research — campaigns run to surface new keyword/product-targeting opportunities rather than to convert efficiently.
Ranking — campaigns whose goal is organic rank movement, typically run on Fixed Bids (Amazon PPC Bidding Strategy).

The category a campaign belongs to determines which of the three bidding strategies (see Amazon PPC Auction Model) fits it — a Ranking campaign pairs with fixed bids, a new Performance campaign or launch pairs with Dynamic Bids Up and Down (Amazon PPC Bidding Strategy), and a matured Performance campaign runs on Dynamic Bids Down Only (Default Steady-State Bidding Strategy).

Per-Category Prescribed Setup

Each of the four goal categories comes with a prescribed starting bid, match type, targeting, bidding strategy, and naming convention rather than one improvised setup per campaign. Two campaign types demoed against the cheat sheet: a Multi-Keyword Targeted Campaign (exact match, grouped by shared shopper intent) under Performance, and a Single-Keyword Ranking Campaign paired with fixed bids under Ranking.

Catalog-Wide Brand Defense

Brand-defense targeting shouldn't stop at the flagship product: add your own branded keywords to targeting across the entire catalog, not just the hero SKU, so a competitor's ad never finds an easy, uncontested placement on any of your listings.

Из тем: PPC Campaign Structure & Bidding