Advertisers who start using Sponsored Products see 34% more sales growth on average than those who do not, four weeks after adoption, according to Amazon Ads internal data. That is the upside. The downside is that a badly built campaign can spend a month’s budget in a week on clicks that never convert.
Most guides stop at “click Create campaign.” This one walks through the decisions that actually determine whether Amazon PPC campaigns make money: which products to advertise, how to structure campaigns, how to set bids, and what to do once data starts coming in.
Competition for those clicks keeps growing. Amazon’s advertising revenue reached $68.6 billion in 2025, up 22% year over year (Marketplace Pulse), which means more advertisers bidding on the same search terms every quarter.
It is written for sellers and brand teams who already have products live on Amazon and want to run campaigns properly, whether for the first time or after a messy start.
What an Amazon PPC campaign actually is
Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) means you pay only when a shopper clicks your ad. Every campaign sits inside a simple hierarchy:
Getting this hierarchy right at the start makes every later optimization easier. Getting it wrong means you cannot tell which keyword, product or placement is driving results.
The three main campaign types
Amazon’s data shows why each one matters. ASINs saw an average weekly lift of 31% in glance views and 50% in units ordered within the first year after launching a Sponsored Products campaign. Sponsored Brands advertisers saw an 84% increase in sales with top-of-search impression share, and Display advertisers saw up to 74% of ad-attributed sales come from new-to-brand customers (Amazon Ads).
For a deeper look at every format, see our guide to the types of Amazon ads you can run.
Before you launch: four checks that save money
PPC amplifies whatever your listing already is. If the listing does not convert, ads just help you lose money faster.
- Listing quality: Clear main image, benefit-led title and bullets, A+ content where available, and enough reviews to compete on the first page.
- Profit math: Know your break-even ACoS, which is your profit margin before advertising. If a product earns 30% margin before ads, an ACoS above 30% loses money on that sale.
- Inventory: Enough stock to support increased sales. Running out mid-campaign hurts both ad performance and organic rank.
- Buy Box: You should hold the Buy Box on the ASINs you advertise; ads generally do not show without it.
Our Amazon product listing ads best practices cover listing readiness in more detail.
Step-by-step: how to run an Amazon PPC campaign
Step 1: Choose which products to advertise
Start with products that already sell organically, have healthy margins and strong reviews. These convert best and give you clean early data. Avoid advertising every variation at once; pick the best-selling child ASINs first.
Group similar products together. A single ad group should contain products that can sensibly share the same keywords, such as different sizes of the same item.
Step 2: Start with an automatic campaign
An automatic campaign lets Amazon match your ad to relevant searches and products based on your listing. It is the fastest way to discover the search terms shoppers actually use.
Amazon splits automatic targeting into four groups, each with its own bid:
- Close match: searches closely related to your product
- Loose match: searches loosely related to your product
- Substitutes: product pages for items similar to yours
- Complements: product pages for items that pair with yours
Bidding separately on these groups gives you more control than one bid for the whole campaign. Amazon notes that it automatically updates the search terms used for automatic targeting over time (Amazon Ads).
Automatic targeting also scales across marketplaces. One brand CEO featured in an Amazon Ads case study described it this way:
“By using auto targeting, it’s really easy to run ad campaigns in multiple marketplaces.”
— Carly Mo, CEO of an apparel brand featured by Amazon Ads
Source: Amazon Ads case study
Step 3: Add manual keyword campaigns
Manual campaigns let you choose the exact keywords you bid on. Amazon reports that advertisers who start using manual targeting in Sponsored Products for the first time see an average 74% increase in sales in the following month, compared with advertisers who do not (Amazon Ads).
Build your keyword list from three sources: search terms from your automatic campaign, keyword research tools, and Amazon’s suggested keywords in the campaign builder. Then assign match types:
A common structure is to run broad and phrase for discovery and move proven terms into exact match campaigns with their own budget.
Step 4: Add product targeting
Product targeting lets your ad appear on specific competitor product pages or within categories. Target products where you have an advantage: a better price, more reviews, higher ratings or a clearer benefit. Amazon’s guidance describes product targeting as targeting products relevant to your advertised items (Amazon Ads).
Step 5: Set your daily budget
A daily budget is the average amount you are willing to spend per day on a campaign. Set it high enough that the campaign does not run out early in the day, or you will miss evening shoppers and get skewed data.
A simple starting point is to estimate the clicks you need: if you want at least 10 clicks a day and expect a cost per click of about $1, budget at least $10 for that campaign. Check your category’s typical CPCs in our Amazon advertising benchmarks.
Step 6: Choose a bidding strategy
Sponsored Products offers three campaign bidding strategies:
You can also add placement adjustments of up to 900% for top of search, rest of search and product pages, as documented by BidX. Amazon applies placement adjustments first and dynamic bidding second, so large modifiers combined with up-and-down bidding can push CPCs up quickly, as Emplicit explains. Start with modest adjustments.
Our Amazon PPC bidding strategies guide goes further.
Step 7: Set starting bids
A practical way to set an initial keyword bid is to work backwards from your target ACoS:
Starting bid = average order value × expected conversion rate × target ACoS
For example, a $30 product with a 10% conversion rate and a 25% target ACoS gives $30 × 0.10 × 0.25 = $0.75. Compare that with Amazon’s suggested bid range. If the suggestion is far higher, the keyword may be too competitive for your current margins.
Step 8: Add negatives from day one
Negative keywords and negative products prevent your ads showing on irrelevant searches. Add obvious mismatches immediately, such as “free,” “used” or competitor brand terms you do not want, and add your exact-match keywords as negatives in your discovery campaigns so campaigns do not compete with each other.
Step 9: Name campaigns clearly
Use a consistent naming convention, for example: Product | Ad type | Targeting | Match type. Clear names make reports readable and make it obvious where to optimize later.
A simple starter structure
Budget shares are starting points, not rules. Shift money towards whatever converts profitably once you have a few weeks of data.
Adding Sponsored Brands once Sponsored Products is working
If your brand is enrolled in Brand Registry, Sponsored Brands is the natural second campaign type. It offers formats that showcase several products, your Brand Store or a video in prominent search placements.
The most efficient way to start is to reuse what Sponsored Products has already proven. In an Amazon Ads case study, agency eStore Factory took the best-performing keywords from Vitasei’s Sponsored Products automatic campaigns and reused them in Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands video. Combined with Sponsored Display product and category targeting, the brand saw a 1,800% increase in PPC sales, with 70% of orders from new-to-brand customers, and a 423% increase in organic sales (Amazon Ads).
Results like that are not typical, but the method is sound: let Sponsored Products find the winning search terms, then extend them into brand formats. Our Amazon video ads guide covers Sponsored Brands video in detail.
Why consistency matters more than intensity
Amazon’s own research into what separates top-performing advertisers points to consistency. When Amazon clustered advertisers by growth, the top cluster kept both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns running for a higher median number of weeks than other advertisers, and over 80% of them saw their number of customer reviews increase (Amazon Ads research).
The same research found that 84% of advertisers who used Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands to support a product launch or new locale saw sales growth within the first year, and cited a CPC Strategy study finding that 80% of Amazon customers use Amazon to discover new products and brands.
The lesson for running campaigns: switching ads on and off with every budget scare breaks the momentum that builds reviews, rank and sales history. Keep core campaigns always on and adjust bids rather than pausing.
The first 30 days: what to do and when
Be patient with judgments. A keyword with eight clicks and no sales may simply not have enough data yet. Many teams wait for roughly the number of clicks it would normally take to get one sale before cutting a keyword.
Metrics to watch
ACoS on its own can mislead. A rising ACoS during a launch may be fine if TACoS is falling because organic sales are growing. Our guides on ROAS on Amazon and monitoring Amazon ads performance explain how to read them together.
Common mistakes when running Amazon PPC campaigns
- Advertising products that do not convert organically. Fix the listing first.
- One campaign for everything. You lose control over budget and bids.
- No negatives. Irrelevant searches quietly drain budget.
- Changing bids daily on thin data. Wait for enough clicks to judge.
- Budgets that run out by midday. You miss later shoppers and get incomplete data.
- Ignoring inventory. Ads on low-stock items waste money and can damage rank when you sell out.
- Judging success on ACoS alone. Watch TACoS and total sales too.
Growing beyond the basics
Once Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are profitable, larger brands often add Amazon DSP for audience targeting on and off Amazon. Amazon reports that DSP customers saw a 34.1% increase in return on ad spend and a 12.6% upswing in click-through rates after upgraded capabilities (Amazon Ads). DSP is not a starting point, but it is where many mature accounts go next.
Amazon Marketing Cloud adds measurement across ad types, including new-to-brand rates and purchase paths. Our Amazon Marketing Cloud guide explains when it becomes worth using.
When to run campaigns yourself, and when to get help
Running a handful of campaigns for a few products is manageable in-house. As catalogs, marketplaces and ad types grow, the work multiplies: search term reviews, bid changes, placement tuning, inventory coordination and reporting.
Amazon itself reports that small businesses saw 26% of their sales, on average, driven by Amazon Ads (Amazon Ads). When advertising drives that much of the business, the cost of slow or inconsistent optimization becomes significant.
Xneeti is a multi-marketplace AI platform built by ex-Amazon category managers and ex-Google engineers. Its AI adjusts bids hourly across Sponsored Products, Brands, Display and DSP, mines search terms continuously to add negatives, and pauses ads automatically when FBA stock runs out, while a dedicated strategist owns the account. Across 80+ accounts it averages a 50% TACoS reduction and 30% revenue growth, for a flat $999 to $1,999 per month with no percentage of ad spend.
See our Amazon PPC services, try the free wasted ad spend tool, or book a demo.
