Amazon portfolios may seem like a purely organizational tool, but they can be a valuable resource for campaign spending control and reporting as well.
Amazon added portfolios to both the Ad Counsel for vendors and Seller Central for third-party sellers in December 2018. You can find it in the “Campaign Management” section in the left-hand navigation rail. As you create them, new portfolios are added to the rail for easy access.
I’ve taken advantage of the portfolio feature since the beginning, and I love the way portfolios make it easy to find what you’re looking for without searching for a campaign!
Check out these three reasons to give Amazon portfolios a try.
Organization
There are many ways to organize campaigns into portfolios. They are highly adaptable to multiple business structures. Think about how your business is structured, and consider replicating that structure with portfolios.
Campaigns focused on these three areas work best for me:
- Products: Some companies have many types of a similar product or defined product lines, with multiple campaigns for each. Creating a portfolio for those product types or product lines helps to keep all similar product advertising efforts together in one view.
- Keywords: If a company has few products, but they span multiple keyword targeting groups, creating a portfolio and grouping all like keyword-focused campaigns consolidates that view.
- Goals: If a company is highly motivated based on specific goals, such as advertising cost of sale (ACoS), campaigns with the same ACoS goal can be grouped together in the same portfolio.
Don’t feel like you have to choose just one method. Set up several different portfolio types and see which you use most frequently.
Campaign Control
We all have monthly budgets that can limit our campaigns. You can set a portfolio-level budget cap to ensure that all campaigns within that portfolio only spend up to the cap, collectively.
In addition, you can set a start and end date for that budget cap. This is useful for controlling spend during peak seasons, sale events, Prime Day, or any other event that is time sensitive.
Portfolios are also editable. If a campaign has ended, or is no longer relevant to that grouping, it can be removed. This gives you complete control over the campaigns that do – or do not – appear in the portfolios, and the effects they may have on the portfolio’s performance.
Reporting
All metrics viewed within a portfolio are based on the campaigns listed within that particular portfolio. This is where incorporating the business structure mentioned before really comes into play.
For example, by grouping campaigns with like products together in a portfolio, you can easily see spend, sales, impressions, clicks, ACoS, etc. for that product line. This is very useful when determining which product line, keyword group, or goal is driving sales, increasing spend, or has a better clickthrough rate in comparison to similar portfolios.
Being able to see all grouped campaigns together makes it easier to determine what is working and where more resources should be dedicated.
In addition, reporting at a higher level is now simpler and automatic. In the days before portfolios, you’d be manually grouping those metrics together, yikes!
How did we manage all these campaign goals before? Spreadsheets. Lots and lots of spreadsheets. No wonder I’m a fan of portfolios!
