Module 3 kick-off — building Sponsored Ads campaigns from scratch.

Welcome to Module 3 of the AMALYZE Amazon Marketing course. Module 1 covered every promotional mechanic Amazon offers — coupons, Lightning Deals, PEDs, Subscribe & Save, the lot. Module 2 covered the CPC mental model behind Sponsored Ads: the auction, eligibility, the bid range, the four advertising goals, brand defence and conquesting, reading and calculating from the data. Module 3 is where we stop talking about PPC and actually build the campaigns.

The next twenty-four episodes walk through every screen of Sponsored Ads in Seller Central — and every Vendor Central equivalent — from the moment you pick a campaign type to the moment you load the first keyword. There is more depth here than the official help pages, because the official help pages stop at what each field does; we keep going to what it should be set to and why.

How Module 3 is structured

The arc of Module 3 follows the order Amazon itself imposes on you when you create a new campaign. First the format, then the targeting type, then bids, then names, then the portfolio it sits in, then start/end dates, then budgets, then bid strategy and placement modifiers, then match types and the actual keywords or targets, then negatives, then attribution and structure.

That sequence is not arbitrary. Every later decision constrains the earlier ones — and several of the early defaults silently rule out the better strategies later. We will flag each of those traps as we get to them.

Sponsored Products, Brands, Display — covered separately where it matters

The three Sponsored Ads formats share most of their plumbing but diverge in a handful of places that actually decide campaign performance: bid strategies (three different rule-sets), targeting (Sponsored Display has audience targeting; the others do not), and match types (Sponsored Brands has Broad PLUS). We will treat the shared layer once and then split out where the formats differ.

What you should have ready before episode 02

Three prerequisites. First, an active Amazon Advertising console — Seller Central -> Advertising -> Campaign Manager, or the Vendor equivalent. Second, at least one ad-eligible ASIN: in stock, winning the Buy Box, in a category that allows ads. Third, the keyword-research output from Module 2 — the broad bucket, the relevance-scored long-tail, and the brand-defence list. Without those three things, every later episode is theory.

Naming conventions and structure decisions come first

Before we click Create campaign, episodes 06 and 07 cover naming conventions for campaigns and ad groups, and portfolios. That sequencing is deliberate. The single biggest source of wasted hours in real Amazon accounts is inconsistent naming. Once a campaign is named badly it is annoyingly difficult to rename without breaking dashboards and bulk operations. We will pick a convention first.

What changes in 2026

Amazon ships changes to the Sponsored Ads console almost monthly. The fundamentals in this module are stable — the auction, eligibility, match types, the bidding strategies and their interaction with placement modifiers have not moved in years. What changes is the surface: where Amazon hides certain settings, which beta is rolled out to which marketplace, which fields are required versus optional. Where a screenshot in the German video looks different from your console today, the logic is the same.

That is the module. Twenty-four episodes, end-to-end, building Sponsored Ads campaigns the way we build them for accounts we actually manage. Episode 02 starts with the foundational decision every campaign sits on top of: which ad format and which targeting type.