Already running Amazon Ads? How the engine works alongside your campaigns
What happens to the campaigns you already run when you start the ad engine, how to hand products over gradually, and how to avoid bidding against yourself.
TL;DR: The engine builds and runs its own campaigns, grouped in an Autron AI portfolio, and never edits campaigns you created. Start it on a few products, then either pause your own campaigns on those products or accept that the two will compete for the same clicks.
Starting the ad engine does not touch what you already run. It creates its own campaigns — one per keyword or target, grouped in a portfolio named Autron AI in your Amazon Ads console — and optimises only those. Campaigns you or your agency built are left exactly as they are.
Hand over one product at a time
Open Goals. Every product has its own switch, so you decide what the engine takes over and what you keep running yourself. Start it on a handful of products, leave your own campaigns running alongside, and add more once you can see how it is doing against each target.
Two sets of campaigns on one product compete
Amazon runs one auction per search. If your own exact-match campaign and the engine's campaign both bid on the same keyword for the same product, they bid against each other: you pay more than you needed to for the click, and the engine's campaigns lose the impressions they need to learn from. It never wins that argument, because the other side is you.
So for each product you switch on, pick one:
- Pause your own campaigns for that product — in Amazon Ads, or ask the agent to. Cleanest. The engine takes over the keywords and learns from a clean slate.
- Keep specific campaigns running deliberately — a launch you are running your own way, a Sponsored Brands campaign the engine does not build. Campaigns in the Autron Strategic portfolio are deliberately left alone by the engine, so that is where a campaign you want to keep belongs.
What you should not do is leave everything running and compare the two after a week. Neither will look good.
What the engine reads from your history
Your existing campaigns are not wasted. Their search-term history is what the engine studies on day one: which terms have converted, which have spent without selling, and where your brand terms sit. That history shortens its learning phase, which is why an account with a year of campaigns settles faster than a new launch.