How To Use Sellerboard Smart Portfolios For Amazon PPC Automation

Sellerboard’s Smart Portfolios feature handles most of this repetitive work for you on autopilot.

The system relies on a continuous, three-stage pipeline to handle your advertising cycle:

• Discovery: It mines new keywords through an automated framework.

• Optimization: It matches and tweaks bidding to stay within your strict profitability target.

• Scaling: It funnels your capital directly into the top-converting search terms.

While it handles the heavy lifting, your role shifts from manual calculator to high-level manager, your main task is checking the broad results to ensure everything moves in the right direction.

You can monitor everything under the PPC Dashboard tab inside the software.

Step 1: Setting Up the Portfolio Core

To build your first automated campaign cluster, open the PPC dashboard and click the Create Smart Portfolio button.

The initial configuration screen is simple and straightforward.

Give your portfolio a descriptive name and choose the specific marketplace region where you are running ads.

Next, you will select the products you want to include from your active catalog.

Crucial Grouping Rule: When adding multiple items to a single Smart Portfolio, only pick products that belong to the exact same logical or semantic category.

The system harvests search terms based on everything in the group. If you mix completely unrelated items, the keyword matching will get messy and muddy your target audience.

Once your products are selected, set your total Daily Portfolio Budget.

This single dollar amount acts as a hard ceiling, covering your discovery campaigns, bid adjustments, and scaled keyword budgets combined.

Step 2: Seeding Keywords and Finding New Ones

With the baseline budget set, you need to tell the system where to start looking for traffic. The software splits this phase into two distinct branches:

• Automated Keyword Harvesting: Check the dedicated auto-campaign box. This tells Sellerboard to launch a brand-new, backend auto campaign that continuously pulls real customer search terms directly from Amazon's latest shopper data.

• Seeding Custom Phrases: If you already know your top-performing organic keywords, type them directly into the search field. You can set a manual starting bid for each phrase you enter.

When you launch, the system deploys these two structures side by side under the Discovery Stage.

They work together to test different keywords and figure out exactly what drives actual conversions for your listings.

Step 3: Setting Profit Targets and Bidding Rules

Once a keyword makes a sale in the discovery phase, the automation moves it over to the Optimization Stage to protect your profit margins.

You guide this optimization by choosing between two main performance targets:

• Target ACoS Range: You specify a strict threshold, such as keeping your advertising cost of sale between 20% and 30%.

• Target Profit Margin Range: You define the specific target margin you want the item to maintain.

Because Sellerboard acts as a direct profit tracker, it doesn't just look at basic ad data. It calculates the profitability of each keyword individually.

The software looks at the unit sales a keyword generates, pulls the product's cost of goods sold (COGS), factors in Amazon's referral fees, subtracts return rates, and tracks the exact ad spend used to secure that order.

If a keyword's current ACoS climbs to 40% and steps outside your 20% to 30% target, the algorithm recognizes it is spending too much.

It will automatically lower the bid in small increments to bring the metric back down into your chosen sweet spot.

If you want deeper control, opening the Advanced Settings allows you to adjust the speed of these updates.

You can set a custom keyword Grace Period, set to 7 days by default, to choose how long a phrase gets to try and make a sale before the system automatically shifts it to a negative match to stop budget waste.

You can also choose what percentage of your total daily funds to invest in research versus scaling active sales.

Step 4: Tracking the Automation Logs

After saving and launching, you can track the active portfolio metrics by expanding the portfolio view back on your main PPC screen.

The platform breaks your active campaigns into clear columns matching their current status:

• Discovery Columns: These campaigns are purely experimental. They test broad search terms to see what works, so do not expect incredible ACoS metrics here.

• Optimization Columns: Here, you can click on any campaign to see the exact ad groups and individual keywords currently getting their bids adjusted.

• Scale Columns: This is where your actual returns show up. Once a keyword locks into your target ACoS or margin range, the system stops altering the bid and instead funnels the majority of your daily budget into these terms to maximize your high-margin sales.

If you ever need to pivot your strategy, you can jump over to the right-hand column, click Actions, and hit Edit to update your budgets or target ranges in real time.

Best Practices for Launching

To get the cleanest data and the best results from the start, keep these expert execution guidelines in mind:

Consolidate Existing Campaigns: If you already have active manual campaigns for a product, do not run a brand-new Smart Portfolio alongside them from scratch.

If you run both independently, they will compete against each other for the same auctions, drive up your costs, and duplicate keyword data.

Instead, use the setup options to pull your current campaigns directly into the portfolio structure.

The software will instantly inherit your historical campaign data and optimize from there.

Start Small to Build Trust: It takes time for the algorithm to run tests, learn shopper behavior, and dial in the perfect bids.

Pick a single test product or a small product group first, allocate a modest slice of your overall ad budget to it, and give the system a few weeks to prove its efficiency.

Once you see the performance level out, you can safely scale up and roll it out across the rest of your catalog.