The Advertising console

Six lists, one marketplace

Campaigns hold ad groups; ad groups hold targets — the keywords and products you bid on — and the ads themselves. Search terms are what shoppers actually typed.

The console does not draw that as a tree. It gives you six flat lists — campaigns, ad groups, ads, targeting, search terms, negatives — and each one shows only its own kind of thing, over nine window columns: today, yesterday, the last 7, 14, 30, 60 and 90 days, this month and last month.

It works one marketplace at a time, deliberately, and there is no "all". Money in different currencies does not add up, and a console that pretended otherwise would be wrong in a way you could not see.

If you want the hierarchy drawn, it is on a product's page under Structure, where a campaign opens into its ad groups and each ad group into its search terms, negatives, targets and ads. Note that search terms sit beside targets there rather than beneath them: a search term carries no target id, so there is no key to join the two on.

The column Amazon cannot show you

Beside a product's ACoS sits break-even ACoS — what that product can afford, computed from its real royalty. Amazon's console cannot show it, because Amazon does not know what you keep.

Verdicts come from that pair, or from a campaign ACoS goal you set yourself. A goal you set is judged as your goal and labelled as yours, which matters on a shared campaign: judging one against a single member's break-even would judge it against economics that belong to somebody else.

Break-even lives on the product, so you meet it on a product's page and on the product table rather than in the console's own metric columns.

Levers — every change stages first

The console is where you act, and every action stages into the Publish queue rather than applying:

• Bid, per target. Edit inline; the queued row shows current → proposed.
• Budget, per campaign. The same pattern — a number edit that waits.
• Default bid, per ad group. For the targets that inherit it.
• Pause and enable. State changes stage too. Archive is deliberately not offered — a queue row that reads "pause" must never archive, and archiving stays in Amazon's own console.
• Negatives. A negative keyword or a negative ASIN, at ad-group or campaign scope, typed by hand or taken from a search-term row.
• Promote a search term. A converting term graduates into a manual campaign — a new one, one already queued, or an existing manual ad group, with the match type inherited from the destination. Negating the source term is a separate, off-by-default step: graduate on evidence, negate deliberately.

Search terms: what the data can and cannot say

Amazon's search-term report carries spend, sales and orders. No clicks, no impressions. It arrives as a trailing 65-day total rather than a series, and it is replaced whole on each fetch.

So a search-term finding is "spent this much and returned no orders", never "this many clicks and no orders" — and first seen is the only onset signal that exists. Storing a zero where the truth is unknown would answer a question the report never asked, so the console says what it knows and does not invent the rest.

Lottery campaigns

A campaign advertising many products at once, where spend goes wherever Amazon decides, is cheap to run and impossible to attribute cleanly. The console counts these separately — it infers them from the campaign's shape, an automatically-targeted Sponsored Products campaign carrying more than one product, because Amazon does not label them.

It can also split one. Splitting stages a new campaign for the product you are pulling out and pauses its ads in the original; there is no move in Amazon's API, so the new campaign starts without the old one's history while the originals keep theirs.

Ads history is shorter than sales history. Amazon serves roughly the last 90 days of daily advertising data, and the window starts at a different point in each marketplace. Per product, that recent window is all there is — there is no deeper backfill behind it. A day with no spend recorded is not a day with no advertising; see Data health and sync.