My Automated PPC campaign is great. My manual PPC campaign is not.

The first campaign is set up was a Manual Sponsored Products one at the end of last year. Blew through $100 in a few days with 0 sales so turned it off.

I had a automated campaign going as well which was bringing me in more sales for a fraction of the clicks. Where the manual campaign was bring in 0 sales for 30 clicks, the automated was on average 1 sale every 5-6 clicks, with cheaper CPC too.

I recently had a session with an Amazon specialist who convinced me to try again with a manual campaign using the most successful keywords from the automated. But I still seem to get significantly less sales and spend significantly more (if following the bidding amount guidelines).

Am I just setting them up wrong, or is automated the way to go?