I’ve been launching a $40 SKU over the past couple weeks, following the exact workflow I’ve used for years, but I’m running into a few unexpected issues with my ads right now. I figured I’d lay out my full process below, and would love to hear what you all think, plus what launch strategies are working for you lately.

For the initial launch phase, I price the SKU a few dollars higher than my top competitors, then run a 30% off official Amazon Coupon to drive initial sales. I target one to two orders per day in the first two weeks, mostly through the Amazon Vine Program (if eligible) and targeted shareable discount codes to get early social proof. I usually aim for 20 verified reviews in this phase before pulling back on promotional discounts to let the Listing organically gain traction. I’ve tested off-site traffic for this product category before and haven’t seen a positive Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS), so I’m sticking 100% to internal Amazon traffic for this launch.

I use a pretty standard ad stack for launches, with four core campaigns.

The first is a Sponsored Products automatic campaign with fixed bidding, set to $0.01 above Amazon’s suggested bid, with a 10% bid adjustment for Top of Search (TOS) ad placements.

Next, I run a Sponsored Products manual exact match campaign with three core high-intent KeyWords, targeted specifically to capture traffic for the initial promotional orders.

I also launch a separate manual phrase match campaign with three additional mid-tail KeyWords.

The final campaign is a manual broad match campaign with 10 KeyWords I pulled from competitor reverse Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) research, using top-performing search terms for similar products in the category. I didn’t segment these by search volume initially, which I know has caused one to two high-volume terms to eat up most of the campaign’s daily budget. I’ve also noticed I have to set bids much higher than suggested just to get any impressions for most of these terms.

I check campaign impressions daily, and if a term is only getting 50 to 100 impressions per day, I bump the bid up by $0.02 each time until I see consistent impression volume.

The first big issue I’ve noticed lately is that my automatic campaigns only pull meaningful data from tight match in the first seven to 10 days. I never used to see this in past launches, so I’m confused why loose match, substitutes, and complements aren’t delivering any data right now. I’ve double-checked that my Listing is fully optimized with all relevant key terms, and the terms the campaign is pulling are all relevant to my product, so that’s not the issue.

Every seven days, I run through a full campaign audit routine. I lower bids for any match types in my automatic campaigns that have 10+ clicks and 0 conversions. I launch a second fixed-bid automatic campaign with a slightly different starting bid, and monitor impressions for both groups. Once the new automatic campaign has seven days of data, I pause underperforming match types in the old campaign, and keep any match types that have driven conversions even if their Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS) is higher than my target. I give those two to three more weeks to optimize before cutting them.

I keep launching new automatic campaigns until I have at least one group with all four match types performing well. If an existing campaign only has two strong match types, I’ll launch a new automatic campaign focused only on the remaining two match types to test performance.

I do weekly negative keyword audits, adding any term with 10+ clicks and 0 conversions as a Negative Keyword. Any term that drives 2+ conversions gets moved out of automatic campaigns into its own manual exact match campaign for more control.

I also track traffic, order volume, and Conversion Rate (CVR) for the Listing daily to spot trends early. As I mentioned earlier, off-site traffic has never performed well for this category, so I’m 100% focused on internal traffic for this launch.

Right now I’m two weeks into the launch, I’ve hit my 20 verified reviews, but my ACOS is still sitting way above my 30% target, and I’m still having to overbid just to get impressions on my core manual terms. I’m not sure if my workflow is outdated now with all the recent Amazon Ads changes, or if I’m missing something obvious.

I’d love to hear what you all think. Is there anything you’d change about this workflow? What launch strategies are working for you right now, especially for products in the $30 to $50 price range? Have you also noticed automatic campaigns only delivering tight match data lately? Drop your thoughts below!