Catch-All Campaigns in Amazon PPC: When (and How) to Use Them

If you’ve spent any time looking at a well-run Amazon PPC account, you’ve probably noticed one campaign that doesn’t fit the usual pattern: it targets almost everything, bids almost nothing, and somehow posts a better ACOS than anything else in the portfolio. That’s a catch-all campaign, and it does one specific job — getting cheap orders from cheap clicks. It isn’t there to rank on a keyword or discover new search terms. It’s there to cast a wide net and pick up cheap sales wherever they turn up.

Short answer: a catch-all campaign is a low-bid auto campaign running your entire catalogue (same brand), designed to soak up cheap clicks when competitors run out of budget or drop their bids — not to harvest keywords or grow your SKC structure.

Where It Sits in Your Account Structure

With a catch-all campaign, bids are set deliberately low, and it’s almost always run as some form of auto. Autos and broad match campaigns will often produce meaningfully cheaper clicks on the same keywords than exact match does — not a guaranteed rule, but a consistent pattern in practice.

The mechanism behind this is straightforward: you’re letting Amazon find the moments when cheap clicks are available. That might be when a competitor’s exact-match campaign has run out of daily or weekly budget, or when you’re up against advertisers using dayparting and there are windows where their bids drop off. Because a catch-all campaign runs as an auto across your full product catalogue, it also surfaces a much wider, more random set of search terms than you’d ever deliberately target with exact or broad match — terms you wouldn’t normally build a dedicated campaign around. It’s worth making it obvious in the campaign name that this is a catch-all rather than a research auto — the two do completely different jobs, and you don’t want to confuse them when you’re reading account-level numbers in a bulk sheet. If you don’t already have a naming convention that encodes campaign purpose, that’s the place to start.

How to Build One

Structurally, a catch-all campaign looks nothing like your other campaigns. With exact or broad match, you deliberately limit the number of products and keywords you’re targeting. With a catch-all campaign, you do the opposite: add your entire catalogue — as long as it’s the same brand — into a single auto campaign.

Bids sit low, typically 20–30p, adjusted by category, specifically to chase cheap clicks. All four auto targeting categories stay switched on: close match, loose match, substitutes, and complements. Some advertisers turn one or two off and compare performance, but because the whole point is cheap clicks, all four tend to perform decently regardless.

Across a couple of client accounts, catch-all campaigns have landed around 15% ACOS, against those same brands’ typical 30–40% ACOS elsewhere — a genuinely strong number for what is effectively leftover traffic.

Negating Keywords Works Differently Here

On a typical campaign, you’re targeting one specific product, so judging relevance is straightforward. On a catch-all campaign, you don’t know which specific product is showing for which search term, so you only negate terms that are clearly irrelevant across the board — not ones that are merely off-target for a single SKU. In practice, a term racking up something like 50 clicks with zero sales is a candidate to cut, though volume rarely climbs that high given how low the bids are. The main category worth negating is wrong-material or wrong-use-type terms that would be irrelevant to every product in the campaign — a metal parcel box campaign showing up for “wooden parcel box” searches, for example.

Cannibalisation of your SKC campaigns is rarely an issue in practice. A catch-all campaign isn’t competing for the high-search-volume, high-click keywords those campaigns are built around — it only picks up traffic where a dedicated campaign has run out of budget, or where Amazon simply surfaces a different keyword than the one being deliberately targeted. It’s also worth remembering that Amazon’s auto-targeting engine has come a long way — auto campaigns aren’t just a “burn money for discovery” tool anymore. Done properly, they can be genuinely strong performers.

The Bid-Laddering Tactic

One way to squeeze more out of this approach: start with a low bid — say 30p — and a daily budget of £50. If that campaign spends its full £50 daily budget at 30p while holding good ACOS, that’s actually a sign the bid isn’t low enough yet. Rather than raising the budget, set up a second, identical catch-all campaign with the max bid dropped to 20p and a smaller budget, say £30, and keep laddering down each time a version performs well but burns through its budget too fast. Leave the well-performing higher-bid version running and layer the lower-bid version alongside it. This captures more of the genuinely cheap traffic without pushing bids up just to spend the daily budget.

Why You (Usually) Shouldn’t Harvest From It

Catch-all campaigns aren’t a harvesting source. You don’t know exactly which keyword converted for which product within the campaign — attribution is too fuzzy. Occasionally a search term is specific enough that it’s obviously tied to one product, and in that narrow case you could pull it out, but as a rule, harvesting stays the job of your dedicated research and broad-match auto campaigns. A catch-all campaign’s job is simply to run and generate cheap clicks and cheap sales — not to feed your SKC structure.

The Mistake to Watch For

A catch-all campaign will always make your account-level ACOS look good, because it’s consistently generating cheap clicks and cheap sales. The problem is it doesn’t move anything forward in terms of ranking or meaningful organic growth — it’s just a good cost-per-click and a good ACOS number sitting on top of, and potentially masking, other campaigns that are genuinely underperforming. This isn’t usually a deliberate trick — it’s just an easy blind spot. If you’re working with a freelancer or an agency, it’s worth understanding exactly what campaigns make up your account and how much of your blended ACOS is actually coming from catch-all traffic versus campaigns doing real strategic work. It’s a fair thing to raise before you sign, too — it belongs on the same list as the other questions to ask before hiring PPC help.

A related variant is the broad or exact match “scavenger” campaign: going into a product, selecting every available keyword, and setting bids around 10p to pick up similar cheap traffic. This isn’t a mistake — it’s a different flavour of the same idea. The one caveat is not to apply it across your entire catalogue in a single campaign; keep it to specific, deliberate product ranges rather than wiping every product into it. Beyond that, there’s not much reason to avoid running some version of a catch-all campaign — it’s consistently cheap traffic, and if profitability is the priority, it reliably helps the numbers.

Catch-All vs. Research Auto vs. SKC

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