#085: One Simple But Lucrative Amazon Ads Campaign

Read Time: 3 Minutes

In today's newsletter, I'm going to walk you through one very simple Amazon Ads campaign that is driving a steady trickle of daily low-cost sales of my wife's books.

It's called a Catch-All Campaign.

Before we get into what it is and how to set it up, let's back up a little.

My approach to Amazon Ads is very simple; in every Campaign, I advertise one book.

One Book, One Campaign, One Ad Group.

One book that receives 100% of the Campaign budget.

All the keywords/ASINs this Campaign is targeting are all related to one book.

This structure keeps things very simple and focused.

Sure, we can get more complex, but why make things more difficult than they need to be?

And if your budget and time are on the low-end, you don't have the capacity for a complex Amazon Ads account with 20,30, 40, 50+ Campaigns.

You also don't need that many to see results.

So, now you know a little more about my general approach to Amazon Ads (which I'll be sharing in-depth inside Amazon Ads Mastery For Authors, launching March 2025 – join the wait list here) let's dive into the Catch-All Campaign I teased you with at the top of this newsletter.

What Is Is?

A Catch-All Campaign is an Automatic Targeting Campaign which advertises every book (in one format) in one series.

For example, my wife has a 4 book series (with 1 additional side-story), so our Catch-All Campaign contains 5 books in the Kindle format (we also have a separate Capaign for the paperback versions of the books).

What Are The Settings?

Very simple to set up (takes 2 minutes, seriously).

One Campaign, One Ad Group. All books in one series (in one format) in this Ad Group.

We use a low budget ($10 per day).

And low bids $0.40 - $0.50.

One Very Important Step

To get the most out of this Campaign, there is one critical step you need to take to reduce wasted Ad Spend as much as possible and get the best results from it.

And that is to use Negative Targeting.

In our Catch-All Campaign, we currently have 107 Negative Keywords.

Yes, you read that right, one hundred and seven Negative Keywords.

Here's a sampling of just a handful of those keywords:

– writing

– league

– tropes

– teens

– vampire

These are words that we have previously (unsuccessfully) spent money on or from research I did with Publisher Rocket.

And, importantly, these readers may use these irrelevant keywords in conjunction with relevant keywords.

As an example, fantasy for teens.

Fantasy is relevant for my wife's books, but teens isn't.

So, I've added teens as a Negative Phrase match keyword to prevent any search terms that contain teens from triggering our Ad to show.

Negate Your Brand Keywords

Amazon will always go for the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit on any Campaign to get you results (i.e. sales).

The lowest-hanging fruit with Amazon Ads are brand keywords and brand ASINs.

Essentially, any words related to your books (e.g. author name, book titles, etc), and your own ASINs (e.g. if you're advertising Book 1 of your series, Amazon will target Book 2, because it's likely to convert into a sale for you).

But we're not using this Catch-All Campaigns to go after this low-hanging fruit, as we have separate, dedicated Campaigns for targeting brand keywords and ASINs.

Catch-All Campaigns are research Campaigns; the whole purpose of them is to discover new keywords and ASINs that we can scale up over time.

So, I always, always, always negate Lori's brand keywords:

– Lori Holmes

– Ancestors Saga

– The Forbidden

– Daughter of Ninmah

– Enemy Tribe

– The Last Kamaali

And I negate these in Phrase Match to prevent any variation of reader search terms from triggering this Ad to show.

For example, by negating Lori Holmes in Phrase Match, if someone searched for Lori Holmes Books Ancestors Saga, our Ad wouldn't show. That's exactly what we want.

If we negated Lori Holmes in Exact Match, Lori Holmes Books Ancestors Saga would still trigger our Ad to show (provided the bid was high enough).

Wrapping Up

These Catch-All Campaigns are very quick to set up and can be incredibly lucrative.

What I would recommend though to help with your workflow is to build up a Negative Keyword list in Google Sheets, Excel, Notion, etc, so that you can very quickly copy and paste these Negative Keywords into this and future Campaigns.

I use the same Negative Keyword list (that I add to over time) on every Automatic, Broad Match and Phrase Match Campaign.

Once your Catch-All Campaign is up and running, let it run for 7-14 days to gather data.

Then go into the "Search Terms" section (at the Ad Group level) and look through the list to see which Keywords and ASINs have triggered your Ad to show.

Negate anything that is irrelevant and add them to your Negative Keyword list.

You can also make a separate list of ASINs you want to negate in this and future Campaigns.

And there you have it.

This Campaign drives daily sales at a very sustainable cost, and also generates plenty of page reads too.

It's not quite set-it and forget-it, but provided you're keeping on top of the Negative Keywords, it's going to be a Campaign you can keep running for months, if not years.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt