Campaigns, keywords & other entities

Everything in MerchDash, tables, automation rules, reports, operates on the same seven entities. If you know how they nest, every page in the app makes sense.

The hierarchy

• Campaign, owns the daily budget, bidding strategy, and placement bid adjustments. Metrics roll up from everything inside it.
• Ad group, groups keywords/targets with the products they advertise, and carries the default bid used by anything without its own.
• Keyword, a search phrase you bid on, with a match type (exact, phrase, broad) and a bid.
• Target, product targeting: a specific ASIN, a category, or Amazon's auto-targeting expressions (close-match, loose-match, substitutes, complements).
• Product ad, the advertised product itself (ASIN/SKU) inside an ad group.
• Search term, not something you create: the actual shopper query that matched one of your keywords or targets. Search terms are the raw material for harvesting and negation.
• Portfolio, an optional folder for campaigns; useful for grouping by brand or product line and as an automation filter. It can also carry a budget cap: the most all its campaigns may spend together, either per calendar month or over a date range. Rules can set that cap, remove it, rename, pause or archive the portfolio, see the language reference.

Keywords vs. search terms

The distinction drives most optimization: a keyword is what you bid on; a search term is what a shopper typed. One broad keyword can match thousands of search terms, some profitable, some junk. Harvesting promotes the winners into their own exact keywords; negation blocks the losers. That whole loop is what a search-term rule automates, the cookbook has both halves, harvesting and negation.

Ad-type support (SP / SB / SD)

MerchDash is built Sponsored-Products-first, which is where Merch and KDP advertising lives. The adType field lets rules and filters scope explicitly, e.g. campaign.adType = "SP".