A manual keyword-triage method run after launch: download the six per-strategy PPC reports (one per campaign in the Six-Campaign PPC Launch Structure), sort each by ACOS then by spend, and color-code every keyword:
The workflow turns the raw four-metric diagnosis (Leading Actions vs. Lagging Metrics (PPC Diagnosis Framework)) into a concrete per-keyword action across hundreds of rows.
Quote on the rationale for doing this outside Amazon's UI: "doing it this way in Excel is a much better strategy than just making changes directly in Amazon's campaign manager" — bulk-editing and color-coding in a spreadsheet before pushing changes back avoids error-prone one-off edits in the campaign manager itself.
Downloaded PPC search-term reports get triaged into three buckets: red keywords (ACoS far over margin, or meaningful spend with zero sales) get turned off entirely; yellow/borderline keywords get their bids lowered gradually rather than cut; green/profitable keywords get pulled out into their own campaign that gets funded more aggressively. See 'Good Keywords' Scaling Campaign, ACOS-Above-Margin Optimization Sequence.
When reviewing a downloaded PPC report (sorted by ACoS and by spend) at the end of each 7-10 day cooldown, triage keywords into three buckets:
Zero-sale threshold: don't cut a no-sale keyword just because it has zero sales — there may not be enough data yet. Only classify it red once cumulative spend exceeds roughly 3x the per-sale profit margin in dollars; below that, leave it running for more data.
The same color-coding approach applies to hour-of-day data: after building an hourly pivot table for Day Parting (Amazon PPC) analysis (see Manual Hourly Day-Parting Analysis (Pivot Table Method)), apply conditional formatting across the hourly ACOS/CTR/CVR/CPC columns (PPC Efficiency Metric Formulas (ACOS, CTR, CVR, CPC)) to visually separate strong hours from weak ones before writing bid/budget rules.