Digital Media

Use this Swedish botanist's system to sell anything on Amazon

Batman & Robin (1997)

Carl Linnaeus developed his hierarchical system (1735) and set the standard for modern botanical naming in Species Plantarum (1753), allowing for the standardized classification of tree species. This form of supervised segmentation is directly related to techniques in modern predictive modeling used by companies like Amazon.

Whether you are shipping a pallet of organic energy drinks (FBA) or hitting “Publish” on a 100,000-word space opera (KDP), the moment you step into the Amazon Advertising console, you are no longer just a creator.

Most advertisers are just renting space on Amazon. They dump budget into campaigns and pray for a return, rather than building an underlying data architecture.

But after a decade of working hard and managing a wide variety of accounts, I’ve learned that having a healthy Amazon account is not just luck.

There are patterns, but you must first categorize the data using your media plan. In data science, a Random Forest is an ensemble of decision trees that work together to produce a better prediction than any single tree could. In the Noctua Forest media plan, your campaigns are those trees. They are biological organisms that need to be planted, watered, and pruned to survive.

Using this framework we will learn how to manage the Canopy, Jungle Floor, and the Root System to make them work together like a real Amazon rainforest.

1. Sponsored Products (SP)

Sponsored Products account for about 60% of most healthy forests.

For the author, this is where you win the “Dark Romance” search; for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) owner, this is where you win “Sugar-Free Energy Drink.”

In our taxonomy, SP campaigns are where you will store the data you harvest first.

Automatic is your scouting system. It goes out into the dark, finding exactly how customers are actually searching for you.
Manual is where you isolate the winners, and nurture your tests.

KDP/FBA Crossovers: In both worlds we have the same user interface for native advertising. Though, how we use Keywords & Competitors tactically in the structure is VERY different overall.

2. Sponsored Brands (SB)

Sponsored Brands ads are visual creatives. They are the “Storefront” and “Video” ads that stop the scroll.

For the Author, a Sponsored Brand Video ad showing a cinematic trailer for your book can arrest the attention of a reader who was just looking for “something to read.” For the CPG Brand Owner, this is your chance to show the lifestyle—the condensation on the can, the texture of the product.

For both, this ad unit can be very expensive and should only be activated once your funnel is mature for consideration & conversion traffic.

Use SB to dominate the top-of-search real estate. If you own the brand headline, a video ad in the middle of the page, and the SP slots below it, you can essentially block out any competition.

3. Sponsored Display (SD)

Sponsored Display is made for small business owners.

Its main job is protection and recapture, but shares a lot of the same properties as the next ad unit, the AMZ DSP. The following are a few ways you can use Sponsored Display. In 2026, the first three are being used less often but are fundamental.

Defensive (IPTA): You target your own product pages so your competitors don’t steal your customers at the last second.
Offensive (EPTA): You target the detail pages of competitors where you have an Adjacency Advantage. (e.g., If your CPG product has 1,000 reviews and the competitor has 50, or if your book has a 4.8 rating and theirs is a 4.1).
Category: You target your own niches to monitor the marketplace for new competitors, or to define your primary set.
More: Related to Advertised, Similar to Advertised, Like to purchase, Lifestyle, In-market

For authors, SD is vital for series Read-Through rates. For CPG, it’s about mostly about the Repurchasers lifetime value. If they clicked but didn’t buy, SD follows them around the internet (off-platform) until they come back to finish the job.

4. Amazon DSP

Eventually, your forest may reach the limits of the Amazon search results page, where growth is no longer about competing for existing intent but about manufacturing your own demand using the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP).

DSP is the enterprise-level programmatic brother of Sponsored Ads. It isn’t based on what people are searching for; it’s based on who people are.

It allows you to target someone because they are a “High-Protein Snack Buyer” or a “Frequent Kindle Mystery Reader.”
It puts your ads on Twitch, IMDb, Prime Video, and the open web.

As either a FBA/KDP Owner you will likely never need to use these ads unless you need to manufacture demand in-market, but from off-platform. Most small business owners use social media to achieve a similar affect at a more desirable cost-efficiency.

Naming Your Trees

You cannot manage a forest if you don’t know which tree is which.

Most new advertisers use names like “New Campaign2” which is not enough. It’s laziness in action and will kill your efficiency.

I teach a process similar to what data nerds call One-Hot Encoding. Every campaign name should be a piece of data or a parameter. This system uses the real-life Tree Classification system to map the organization of our campaigns. I reccomend using acronyms for long terms like Sponsored Product = SP.

Family = Ad unit

Genus = Portfolio

Species = Parent

Variety = Child

Cultivar = Ad-type

Selection = Segment

Hybrid = Placement

Clone = Creative

[Family] | [Genus] | [Species] | [Variety] | [Cultivar] | [Selection] | [Hybrid] | [Clone]
Example: SP | Dragon Series | Book1 | 10thAnv | Auto | NonBrand | ToS | Video

When your campaigns are named this way, you can filter for “SP” and “AUTO” and see your entire discovery engine across 100 books or 50 CPG SKUs in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. It also is the foundation for scaling your best seller ranking through the life if your campaigns, so keep your encoding consistent!

The Flywheel

Whether you are counting Royalties + Page Reads or Gross Margin + Repurchase Rate, the goal is the same.

You spend on ads to get sales velocity. Sales velocity improves organic rank. Organic rank leads to more “free” sales. Those sales provide the “water” (profit) to buy more ads.

The Noctua Forest isn’t about “getting lucky.” It’s about building a self-correcting, data-driven ecosystem. Stop guessing at keywords. Start planting trees.

Are you working through the long night to scale your catalog?
Join the Noctua Forest community for deep-dives like this of the mechanics of the Amazon auction.