1. The three ad types and when to use each

2. Know your break-even ACOS first

ACOS (advertising cost of sales) is ad spend divided by ad sales. Before running a single campaign, work out the ACOS at which an ad sale makes zero profit:

Set a target below break-even for profit, or deliberately above it for a launch where you are buying ranking and reviews - but decide which, per product, in writing. Most wasted ad money comes from never having decided.

3. A campaign structure that stays clean

• Auto campaign per product group - Amazon finds search terms for you. Treat it as research.
• Manual broad or phrase - discovery on terms you already know are relevant.
• Manual exact - only terms that have already produced orders, with your highest bids. This is where most profit comes from.
• Product targeting - your products shown on competitor and complementary product pages.
• Brand defence - a separate campaign for searches containing your own brand name, so you can see what it really costs.

Group products with similar price and margin in one campaign. One ad group with forty unrelated products makes it impossible to tell which product earned the sale.

4. Match types and negative keywords

Every week, move ("harvest") search terms that produced orders from auto and broad campaigns into exact campaigns, then add them as negative exact in the source campaign so the two do not compete for the same search.

Add negatives for terms that spend without selling. A sensible starting rule: a term with clicks equal to roughly two or three times your normal clicks-per-order and no order is a candidate negative. Use negative phrase for whole families of irrelevant searches (other brands you do not sell, wrong sizes, "free", "second hand").

5. Bids, bidding strategies and placements

• Dynamic bids - down only is the safe default: Amazon lowers your bid when a sale is unlikely.
• Up and down lets Amazon raise bids (up to double on top of search) when a sale is likely - use it on proven exact terms only.
• Placement adjustments raise bids for top of search or product pages. Check the placement report: top of search often converts at two to three times the rate of other placements, but costs more per click.
• Change bids in steps of 10-20%, then wait for enough clicks to judge. Changing every day on two clicks of data is noise.
• Bid from the numbers: target CPC = average order value × conversion rate × target ACOS.

6. Budgets

A campaign that runs out of budget by afternoon misses the evening, when many categories convert best. Profitable campaigns should rarely hit their cap; raise those first and fund them by cutting the campaigns above target ACOS - not by adding new money across the board. Plan extra budget before sale events such as Prime Day and the Great Indian Festival, when traffic and click prices both rise.

7. The weekly routine

1. Harvest converting search terms into exact campaigns; negate them in the source.
2. Negate terms that spent without selling.
3. Adjust bids on targets above or below target ACOS, with enough clicks to judge.
4. Check budgets - which profitable campaigns ran out?
5. Pause ads on products that are out of stock or about to run out, so you do not pay for clicks you cannot convert.
6. Check the placement report and adjust top-of-search modifiers.

Thirty to sixty minutes a week per account if done consistently - and it is exactly the work that stops happening when a seller gets busy.

8. ACOS vs TACOS

TACOS (total advertising cost of sales) is ad spend divided by all sales, organic included. ACOS tells you whether an ad is efficient; TACOS tells you whether advertising is building the business. If ad spend rises and TACOS falls, ads are lifting organic ranking - good. If TACOS keeps rising while total sales are flat, you are buying the same customers you would have got for free.

9. Common money leaks

• Bidding on your own brand name at high bids when you already rank first organically.
• Broad match with no negatives, left running for months.
• Advertising products with poor listings, few reviews or uncompetitive prices - ads amplify conversion, they do not create it.
• Judging campaigns by sales instead of profit.
• Duplicate keywords across campaigns bidding against each other.
• Ads still running on out-of-stock or suppressed products.

Frequently asked questions