Portfolios — when to use them and how to name them.
Portfolios are Amazon's grouping layer above campaigns: shared monthly budgets, shared date ranges, easier reporting filters. When portfolios add structure and when they get in the way.
Portfolios are Amazon's grouping layer that sits above campaigns. A campaign belongs to at most one portfolio. Portfolios offer three things that loose campaigns do not: a shared monthly budget cap, a shared start/end date, and a reporting filter that groups campaigns together.
What a portfolio is genuinely good for
Three use-cases, in order of how often we actually deploy them:
- Brand-level P&L grouping in multi-brand accounts. If a single seller account runs three brands, three portfolios let you see brand-level spend and revenue in one click without filtering on naming substrings.
- Hard monthly spend caps. The portfolio-level monthly cap is the only Amazon-native way to put a true ceiling on a group of campaigns. Daily budgets do not cap monthly spend (a single Lightning Deal day can blow your model). A portfolio cap will.
- Time-bounded promotional pushes. A "BFCM 2026" portfolio with a hard start and end date is a clean way to corral every campaign that should run only for that window — and to switch them all off in a single action afterwards.
Where portfolios actually get in the way
If you use the monthly cap, individual daily budgets inside the portfolio still apply, and Amazon enforces both. That means you can hit the portfolio cap mid-month and have every campaign in the portfolio stop, with no warning louder than a small banner in the console. For high-volume accounts, portfolio caps should be set generously and treated as a safety net, not a target.
Portfolios also do not nest. There is no portfolio-of-portfolios. If your taxonomy is two layers deep (brand → product line), the second layer has to live in the campaign name, not in the portfolio.
Naming portfolios
Two-field convention is plenty: Brand | Purpose. Examples: AmazingKnives | Always-on, AmazingKnives | BFCM-2026, HouseBrand | LaunchPipeline. Keep the field separator different from the one used in campaign names so that grep filters do not collide.
When to skip portfolios entirely
Single-brand seller account with a clean campaign-naming convention and no need for a monthly cap? Skip portfolios. They add a UI layer for no payoff. We use them deliberately in the cases above; we do not use them by default.
Watch Episode 07: Portfolios (German)
The German walkthrough — when to use portfolios and how to name them.
Group campaigns the way your P&L is organised.
AMALYZE rolls up campaigns by portfolio so you can see brand-level, product-line-level and goal-level performance in a single click.