How to Delete an Amazon Advertising Campaign?

When it comes to the fast-paced world of online advertising, it's crucial to keep your campaign management as clean and organised as possible - and Amazon advertising is no different. Keeping your ad campaigns up-to-date often involves removing campaigns that are no longer active, profitable or relevant, in order to continue pushing and promoting your most popular and profitable listings (and thus improving your ROI, aka your return on investment).

You might therefore find yourself wondering: how to delete an Amazon advertising campaign?

As of 2023, Amazon does not actually allow users to delete an advertising campaign entirely - this is because it’s helpful for sellers to be able to hold onto the data from various campaigns and use it in their future marketing efforts. However, this does not mean that you're left with a cluttered interface full of outdated campaigns - there are several alternatives that can help keep your campaign dashboard organised and focused on your current marketing efforts, and we’re going to explore these different options below. Let’s take a look!

Understanding Amazon Advertising

Before diving into the details of campaign management, it's worth taking a step back to understand Amazon Advertising as a whole:

Amazon’s Global market

As one of the world's most popular e-commerce platforms, Amazon offers a vast digital marketplace where millions of products are bought and sold every day, with the platform’s revenue for online sales in 2022 reaching a whopping $220 billion (around £170 billion) in 2022. Given the high volume of products and stores available on Amazon - as well as the site’s universal popularity all over the world - it's a space where visibility matters.

Types of Amazon Advertising

Overall, Amazon Advertising is a comprehensive suite of marketing tools designed to help sellers, vendors, and publishers drive discovery and sales of their products. The platform offers various ad formats including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display ads, and these tools can be used to promote individual product listings, enhance brand visibility, or target customers with specific browsing or buying behaviours. Plus, you don’t even need to sell products on Amazon to use Amazon Advertising - the platform offers custom solutions for those looking to drive traffic to other businesses and platforms.

Amazon’s PPC Model

Moreover, Amazon Advertising operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. This means that you only pay when a shopper clicks on your ad, making it a cost-effective way of driving traffic to your products without committing to a large budget right off the bat.

Monitoring and Analytics

Amazon Advertising is not just about putting your products in front of potential customers, it's also about understanding the performance of your ads. Amazon provides advertisers with a wealth of data about their campaigns, including impressions, clicks, sales, and more. This data can end up being crucial in measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns and informing your future advertising strategies.

Getting started with Amazon Advertising

For those new to the platform, it’s fair to say that managing Amazon Advertising campaigns can be a complex task, especially given the dynamic and competitive nature of the Amazon marketplace. That's why it's important to stay organised. Whether you're using portfolios to group related campaigns or archiving inactive campaigns, maintaining a tidy dashboard is key to effective campaign management.

For those new to the Amazon PPC model, or those who simply wish to enlist the help of an expert as they familiarise themselves with the process, the expertise of a UK-based Amazon agency can be a great way to maximise your returns and improve your overall strategies.

Now, let’s take a closer look at some alternative strategies to deleting your Amazon ad campaigns.

Alternative 1: Create a Portfolio for Inactive Campaigns

Instead of deleting campaigns, one effective practice is to create a dedicated portfolio for your inactive campaigns. This allows you to separate your active campaigns from the inactive ones, making management and analysis much easier.

To create a new portfolio, go to the 'Portfolio' view in your Amazon Advertising dashboard. Click on 'Create portfolio', name it appropriately (for instance, 'Inactive Campaigns'), and save it. You can then move your inactive campaigns into this portfolio by editing the 'Portfolio' setting in each campaign's settings.

Creating a portfolio for inactive campaigns helps to declutter your dashboard, enabling you to focus on active campaigns, while also retaining the historical performance data of your inactive campaigns, which can provide valuable insights for future advertising strategies.

Can you Delete an Ad Portfolio on Amazon?

Just as with individual campaigns, Amazon does not currently offer the option to delete an ad portfolio.

Again, this is not necessarily a limitation. By retaining your portfolios, you keep a valuable record of your advertising history, and these records can be especially useful for comparing performance over time, identifying trends, and informing future campaign strategies going forward.

Alternative 2: Archive an Amazon Campaign

Archiving is another alternative to deleting your Amazon advertising campaign, and this option essentially hides the campaign from your main view, reducing clutter without losing any historical data.

To archive a campaign, simply go to the 'Campaigns' tab on your Amazon Advertising dashboard, find the campaign you wish to archive, click on the 'Campaign settings' tab, and then select 'Archive'. Your campaign will no longer be visible in your main dashboard but can be accessed anytime by filtering for 'Archived' in your campaign view.

Remember to pause your campaign before archiving to avoid any unwanted costs. Archiving doesn't pause a campaign automatically.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, managing your Amazon Ad campaigns effectively is a key aspect of success on the platform. While the inability to outright delete campaigns might initially seem like a limitation, it actually offers sellers the benefit of retaining valuable historical data that can be leveraged for future campaigns and marketing ideas.

And don’t forget that deleting - or archiving - campaigns isn’t the only way to refresh your Amazon advertising strategy - regularly reviewing and optimising your keyword selection, refining your targeting strategy, tweaking your ad copy to maximise engagement, and adjusting your bids based on performance are all vital ways of keeping your campaigns fresh and effective.

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