Solved: Should I Use PPC for One or Every Product?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

That's a really common question for people just starting out with Amazon PPC, and to be honest, it’s one of those things where the 'obvious' answer can lead you down a very expensive path. I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of a strategic framework. The real goal isn't just to switch ads on, but to build a profitable system you can scale across your whole catalogue without just burning cash. It's less about picking 'one vs all' and more about creating a methodical process, starting small and expanding intelligently based on what the data tells you.

The Real Question You Should Be Asking

First off, let's reframe the problem. Asking whether to run PPC on your best-seller or on every product is a bit like asking if you should use a hammer or a screwdriver to build a house. You need both, but you need to know when and where to use them. The question you've asked sets up a false choice that nearly every new seller gets trapped by.

Option A: Advertise Every Product. This is the fastest way to go broke. You'll spread your budget so thin across so many products that no single one gets enough data (clicks and sales) for Amazon's algorithm to properly learn. You won't know what's working, what's not, and your daily budget will vanish by 10 AM with very little to show for it. It's chaos, and it's impossible to optimise chaos.

Option B: Advertise Only The Best-Seller. This is safer, but it's incredibly limiting. You're leaving a huge amount of potential revenue on the table. Your other products will never gain sales velocity, they won't climb the organic rankings, and you'll miss out on discovering a 'sleeper hit' product that could become your next best-seller *if* it just had a little push. You're essentially putting all your eggs in one basket.

So, the real question isn't "one or all?". The real question is: "How do I build a scalable, data-driven, and profitable advertising system for my business?"

The answer is to start with one, prove the model, and then systematically expand. It’s a process, not a simple switch to flip. A lot of so-called 'gurus' miss this out. They talk about tactics but not the overall strategy that holds it all together. Based on my experience managing campaigns for numerous eCommerce clients, the core principles of a successful advertising strategy are universal. What I'm going to outline for you is a strategic approach that applies these principles to Amazon PPC. It works because it's methodical and focuses relentlessly on profit, not just vanity metrics like clicks or impressions.

We'll need to look at your "Hero Product" as the Proving Ground...

Your first step is to pick one single product to focus on. This will be your "Hero Product." It's your testing ground, your laboratory. The goal here isn't to make a million quid overnight. The goal is to learn the mechanics of Amazon PPC in a controlled environment and, most importantly, to gather profitable data.

How do you pick your Hero Product? It should be your current best-selling item. No question. Why?

• Proven Demand: It's already selling without ads, which means people actually want it. You're not trying to find out if there's a market; you already know there is.
• Conversion Power: It likely has the best product images, the most reviews, and the best sales copy on its page (even if it's not perfect yet). This means it has the highest natural chance of converting a click into a sale. A click that doesn't convert is just wasted money.
• Data Head Start: Because it has a sales history, Amazon's algorithm already has some data on who buys it and what search terms are associated with it. This gives your first ad campaign a slightly better chance of success right out of the gate.

Once you've chosen your Hero Product, you are going to launch your very first campaign. Keep it simple. We're not doing anything fancy yet. You will create one, and only one, "Sponsored Products" campaign.

Inside this campaign, you will create one ad group, and you will set the targeting to "Automatic."

Why Automatic? Because at this stage, you don't actually know what your customers are typing into the search bar to find your product. You might *think* you know, but you're probably wrong about some of the most profitable terms. An automatic campaign basically tells Amazon, "Here's my product and my budget. Go find people who might want to buy it." Amazon will then show your ad for a wide variety of search terms that its algorithm thinks are relevant. This is a pure data gathering exercise. We are paying Amazon for market research, not for sales just yet. The sales are a bonus at this stage.

Set a small daily budget you're comfortable losing entirely. Let's say £10-£20 a day. Let this run for at least one to two weeks without touching it too much. You need to let it gather enough data to be meaningfull. Fiddling with it every day is a classic rookie mistake. Give the algorithm time to learn and collect impressions and clicks across different times of day and different customer behaviours.

After a week or two, you're going to have your first valuable asset: a Search Term Report. This report is the absolute foundation of any successfull Amazon PPC strategy. It shows you the *exact* phrases and keywords that real customers typed into Amazon before clicking on your ad. This isn't guesswork; it's hard data. And it's where the real work begins.

I'd say you need to graduate from Auto to Manual Campaigns...

Okay, so your automatic campaign has been running. You've spent a bit of money, and hopefully, you've even made a few sales. Now it's time to put on your analyst hat and dive into that Search Term Report. You'll find it within your campaign reporting dashboard.

When you open it, you'll see a list of customer search terms, along with metrics for each one: impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale). Your job is to sift through this raw data and pan for gold. You're looking for two things:

1. Winning Keywords: These are the search terms that have generated sales at a profitable ACOS. For example, if you see that the term "handcrafted leather wallet for men" has 2 sales from 15 clicks, that's a winner. It's a proven converter.
2. Losing Keywords: These are terms that are getting clicks and spending your money but have generated zero sales. For instance, if the term "cheap phone case" has 30 clicks and no sales, it's irrelevant and just wasting your budget.

Once you've identified a handful of these winning keywords (even 2 or 3 is enough to start), you're ready to "graduate." This is the core process of optimising Amazon PPC accounts, moving from discovery to controlled profitability. You are now going to create a *new* campaign for the same Hero Product. This one will be a "Sponsored Products" campaign again, but this time, you will select "Manual Targeting."

You'll create an ad group and, instead of letting Amazon choose the keywords, you will add your winning search terms as "Exact Match" keywords. This tells Amazon: "Only show my ad when a customer types in this *exact* phrase." This gives you incredible control. You know this term converts, so you want to be able to set a specific bid for it and ensure you're showing up for it.

Now for the crucial final step of this process: you must go back to your original Automatic campaign and add those winning keywords as "Negative Exact Match" keywords. This is absolutly critical. It prevents the two campaigns from competing against each other for the same search term. You want your new, highly controlled Manual campaign to be the only one bidding on that proven keyword. Your Automatic campaign's job is now to continue searching for *new*, undiscovered keywords for you. It's your ongoing research department.

This cycle of discovery and refinement is the engine of a profitable PPC account. You let the Auto campaign explore, you analyse the data, you move winners to a Manual campaign, and you block them in the Auto campaign. Repeat this every week or two, and you will slowly build a powerful, efficient advertising machine. It takes patience, but it's the only way to do it properly.

You probably should master your profitability metrics...

This is probably the most important section in this whole letter. If you don't understand the numbers behind your ads, you are flying blind. You can have the best campaign structure in the world, but if the maths doesn't work, you're just lighting money on fire. The single most important metric you need to master is your Break-Even ACOS.

ACOS stands for Advertising Cost of Sale. It's a percentage calculated as: (Total Ad Spend / Total Ad Sales) * 100. So if you spend £20 on ads and generate £100 in sales from those ads, your ACOS is 20%.

New sellers often ask "What is a good ACOS?". This is the wrong question. A "good" ACOS is entirely dependent on your product's profit margin. A 40% ACOS might be fantastic for a high-margin product but disastrous for a low-margin one.

What you need to know is your Break-Even ACOS. This is the point at which your ad spend equals the entire profit you make from a sale. Any ACOS *below* your break-even point means you are making a profit on that sale. Any ACOS *above* your break-even point means you are losing money on that sale.

Calculating it is simple. It's just your profit margin before ad spend. The formula looks like this:

Break-Even ACOS = (Product Sale Price - Cost of Goods Sold - Amazon Fees) / Product Sale Price

Let's walk through an example.

• You sell a product for £50.
• The cost to manufacture it (your COGS) is £15.
• Amazon's fees (Referral Fee + FBM Shipping Credits/Costs) come to £10.

Your pre-ad profit is: £50 - £15 - £10 = £25. Your profit margin is: £25 / £50 = 50%. Therefore, your Break-Even ACOS is 50%.

This number is now your North Star. When you look at your Search Term Report, you can instantly see which keywords are making you money and which are costing you money.

• A keyword with a 25% ACOS? Brilliant. You spent £12.50 to make a £50 sale, leaving you with £12.50 in pure profit. You should probably increase your bid on this keyword.
• A keyword with a 65% ACOS? Alarm bells. You spent £32.50 to make a £50 sale, meaning you lost £7.50 on that transaction. You need to lower your bid or pause this keyword imediately.

Without knowing this number, you're just guessing. Knowing your Break-Even ACOS turns you from a gambler into a strategic investor. It allows you to make cold, hard, data-based decisions about where to allocate your budget. I've built a simple calculator for you below so you can find this number for your own products.

You'll need to expand your advertising systematically...

Once you have run the Hero Product system for a few weeks or a month and you're confident it's working—meaning, you have a Manual campaign that is consistently generating sales below your Break-Even ACOS—it's time to scale. But we're not going to jump in and switch on ads for everything. That would be reverting to the chaotic approach we want to avoid. Instead, we're going to use a structured "Tiered" approach.

Go through your entire product catalogue and categorise every single product into one of three tiers:

• Tier 1 (The Stars): These are your absolute best-sellers. Your original Hero Product is the first member of this tier. Add any other products that have a strong, consistent sales history and good reviews. These are your most valuable assets.
• Tier 2 (The Potentials): These are products that get some sales but aren't yet stars. They might be newer products, or ones in a more niche category. They have potential but are unproven from an advertising perspective.
• Tier 3 (The Rest): This includes all your other products. New launches with no sales history, very slow sellers, or products with low inventory or poor reviews.

Now, you apply the exact same campaign structure (Auto > Manual) that you perfected on your Hero Product to every other product in Tier 1. You already know these products convert well organically, so they have the highest probability of succeeding with PPC. The goal is to establish a profitable advertising system for your entire portfolio of star performers.

Only once all your Tier 1 products are running inside this profitable system should you even think about Tier 2. When you do, you start again with the same process. Pick one product from Tier 2, treat it as a new "Hero Product," and run the Auto-to-Manual process. Because these products are less proven, you have to be stricter with them. If after a few weeks a Tier 2 product just isn't performing and the ACOS is way too high, you pause the ads for it and move on to the next one. Don't get emotionally attached and throw good money after bad.

Tier 3 products are generally not worth advertising with conversion-focused campaigns until you are a much larger, more established seller with a significant ad budget. The risk is too high and the chance of profitability is too low. You might use them in broader brand-focused campaigns later on, but for now, they sit on the sidelines.

This tiered approach allows you to manage risk and scale intelligently. You focus your budget where it's most likely to generate a return. A sensible budget allocation might look something like this:

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To bring it all together, here is a clear, step-by-step table outlining the strategy. This is your roadmap from where you are now to running a sophisticated, multi-product advertising operation on Amazon. Don't try to jump to Phase 3. Follow the process, master each phase, and build on a solid foundation of data and profitability.

Why you might want some expert help...

As you can probably tell, this is a lot more involved than just boosting a product. Running paid advertising effectively is a full-time discipline. It requires a clear strategy, consistent analysis, and an understanding of how all the different pieces fit together. The mistakes beginners make—like spreading budget too thin, not understanding their break-even numbers, or not structuring campaigns properly—can cost thousands of pounds very, very quickly with nothing to show for it.

Working with an expert or an agency helps you skip that expensive and frustrating learning curve. We've already made all the mistakes and managed millions in ad spend, so we know exactly what to do from day one. An expert can implement this entire structure for you, provide sophisticated analysis, and free you up to do what you do best: source great products and run your business.

This isn't just about saving you from costly errors; it's about accelerating your growth. We can often achieve in a couple of months what might take a new seller over a year to figure out on their own. The opportunity cost of *not* getting your advertising right from the start can be huge.

If you've found this initial guidance helpful and would like to have a more detailed chat about your specific products and goals, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can discuss the principles in this strategy, how they apply to your business, and help you create a clear roadmap for your next steps.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh