Run both. An automatic campaign lets Amazon choose where your ad shows, the cheapest way to learn what converts. A manual campaign lets you bid on exactly those terms. The working pattern on Amazon India is auto first for two to four weeks, then move every search term with orders into manual exact match, and keep auto running at a lower bid for discovery.
Automatic targeting reads your listing and shows the ad on searches and product pages Amazon judges relevant. You set one bid, or one per match group: close match, loose match, substitutes and complements. Manual targeting shows the ad only on the keywords or products you enter, each with its own bid and match type. Blooprint's campaign structure guide covers how to organise them; this page is about the decision between them.
Neither is better. Auto finds terms you would never have guessed and wastes money on some you would never have chosen. Manual spends only where you tell it and finds nothing new.
| Automatic | Manual | |
|---|---|---|
| Who picks the targets | Amazon | You |
| Setup time | Minutes | Hours, plus research |
| Control over CPC | One bid per match group | One bid per keyword or target |
| Finds new search terms | Yes | Only within your match types |
| Typical ACoS | Higher, improves with negatives | Lower once built from proven terms |
| Needs the search term report | To harvest | To add negatives |
A post by Amazon staff on the Seller Central India forum, titled Are you making this mistake with Auto Campaigns, has around 1,600 views. The mistake is running auto campaigns and never reading the search term report: the campaign keeps paying for the same irrelevant searches month after month, and the seller concludes that ads do not work. One reply asks where to get the data and what to change, which is the whole method: download the search term report weekly, negate what does not convert, and move what does into manual.
A second thread, Amazon PPC What is the best approach, has a seller at 26% ACoS with over 240 SKUs paused, asking whether to run one campaign for many SKUs or one per product. The answer that holds up is one auto campaign per product group of similar items, and manual campaigns per product for anything that sells.
One order can be luck. Two or three at an ACoS below your ceiling means the term is worth owning.
Bid at or slightly above the CPC it achieved in auto. Our suggested bid guide covers where to start.
Otherwise both campaigns bid on the same search and you pay to compete with yourself.
It has done its job on that term; its job now is to find the next one.
The search term report is the loop. Ten minutes a week per product group.
The weekly loop is the same in every account: pull the search term report, sort by orders, add the winners to manual, negate them in auto. BlooprintAI's search term analysis for Amazon India shows every search term across all auto campaigns with orders, ACoS and the campaign it came from, and lets you add the selected terms as exact keywords and as negatives in one action after a summary. Nothing moves until you approve it.
Search-term, placement and product-level views that show where the money goes.
Learn more →Turn target ACoS, price and conversion rate into a starting bid in ₹.
Learn more →How to download it, read it and turn it into negatives and new keywords.
Learn more →Broad, phrase and exact on Amazon India: how each matches and how to bid them.
Learn more →Automatic, for two to four weeks, to collect search terms. Then build a manual exact-match campaign from the terms that produced orders, and keep the auto campaign running at a lower bid.
Auto lets Amazon pick the searches and product pages based on your listing, with one bid per match group. Manual shows the ad only on keywords or products you enter, each with its own bid.
Usually because nobody reads the search term report. Amazon staff on the India forum call this the auto campaign mistake: irrelevant searches keep getting paid for. Negate them weekly.
No. Lower its bid and keep it running as a discovery campaign, with the moved terms added as exact negatives so the two do not compete.
It shows every search term across auto campaigns with orders and ACoS, and adds the ones you select as exact keywords and negatives in one action after a summary. You choose; it applies.
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