Amazon and marketplace ads

The three ad types and what each one is for

Sponsored Products are the core. They place individual products in search results and on product pages, they carry most marketplace ad spend, and they are the only format available to every seller. If budget is tight, this is where all of it should go first.

Sponsored Brands need brand registry and show a logo, a custom headline and multiple products in a banner above search results. They buy category presence rather than a single sale, and they earn their place when you have a range worth showing rather than one product. Sponsored Brands video is often the strongest performer within this group, because a short demonstration in a text-heavy results page stands out.

Sponsored Display reaches shoppers on and off Amazon, including on competitor product pages and across the wider web. Its most useful setting is product targeting on competitor listings, which puts you in front of someone already looking at an alternative. Its second use is retargeting people who viewed your product and left.

• Sponsored Products: the foundation, available to all sellers
• Sponsored Brands: category presence for sellers with a range
• Sponsored Brands video: high visibility in a text-heavy page
• Sponsored Display: competitor product pages and view retargeting

Campaign structure that keeps the data clean

The structure that scales separates discovery from harvesting. Automatic campaigns and broad match campaigns exist to find search terms you did not know about. Exact match campaigns exist to buy the terms you have already proven. Keeping them apart means you can bid aggressively on what works without paying the same rate for exploration.

The routine that makes it work is harvesting. Read the search term report, find terms that converted in the automatic or broad campaign, add them as exact match keywords in the performance campaign, and add them as negatives in the discovery campaign so it stops spending there. Discovery keeps discovering, performance keeps performing.

Group products carefully. Products that share a keyword set and a price point can sit together. Products with different margins should not, because you cannot set a sensible bid for both. And keep your best selling products in their own campaigns, because they will otherwise absorb the budget and hide everything else.

• Automatic and broad campaigns to discover terms
• Exact match campaigns to buy proven terms at a proper bid
• Negate harvested terms from discovery so budgets do not overlap
• Separate campaigns by margin, not just by product category

Setting ACoS and TACoS targets that mean something

ACoS is ad spend divided by ad revenue. It answers a narrow question: what did this advertising cost relative to what it directly sold. Your break-even ACoS is your profit margin, so a product with a thirty percent margin breaks even at thirty percent ACoS. Anything below that is profit, anything above it is investment.

That framing is why blanket ACoS targets are unhelpful. A launch justifies running above break-even to build sales velocity and reviews, because early rank is worth paying for. An established product should sit comfortably inside margin. A product you are clearing can run wherever it needs to.

TACoS, total advertising cost of sales, divides ad spend by total revenue including organic. It is the more useful long-run number because it shows whether advertising is building an organic business or propping one up. Falling TACoS with steady sales means organic rank is doing more of the work. Rising TACoS with flat sales means you are buying sales you used to get free.

Bids, placements and where the money really goes

Amazon bidding has three modes. Down only lowers your bid when a conversion looks unlikely. Up and down raises it by up to a hundred percent for likely conversions. Fixed ignores both. Down only is the safe starting point on a new campaign, because up and down can multiply your costs while you are still learning what a good bid is.

Placement adjustments are the lever most sellers underuse. You can bid separately for top of search, rest of search and product pages. Top of search almost always converts best and costs most, and the placement report tells you whether the premium is worth paying for your specific products. Sometimes a large top of search modifier transforms a campaign. Sometimes product page placements are quietly the profitable ones.

Bid changes should be gradual and evidence-led. Amazon campaigns respond over days rather than hours, and daily bid tinkering produces noise rather than improvement. We review on a weekly cadence with enough click volume behind each decision to trust it.

• Start on down only bidding, move to up and down once proven
• Read the placement report before adjusting placement modifiers
• Change bids weekly on real click volume, not daily on impulse
• Watch the share of spend going to product page placements

Why the listing decides how well the ads perform

Advertising on Amazon buys the click. The listing converts it, and a weak listing makes even perfect campaign management look bad. Main image quality, title clarity, bullet points that answer buying objections, A+ content and review count all decide whether the click you paid for becomes an order.

Review count and star rating carry particular weight, because shoppers compare listings side by side and the numbers are right there. A product with a handful of reviews sitting next to competitors with hundreds converts worse at the same price, which pushes up your cost per sale regardless of bidding skill.

Price and availability matter too, in ways that catch sellers out. Losing the buy box stops your ads serving. Going out of stock kills the campaign's momentum and the organic rank that came with it. We check stock and buy box status as part of routine campaign management, because they explain more sudden performance drops than bid changes ever do.

Defending your brand and attacking competitors

Bidding on your own brand terms feels like paying for traffic you already have, and sellers often resist it. The reason to do it anyway is that competitors will bid on your brand, and their Sponsored Products ad will sit above your organic listing. Defending brand terms is usually cheap, because your relevance is high, and it protects the sales you worked to earn.

The reverse is product targeting on competitor listings. When a shopper is on a competitor product page, they are deep in a buying decision and comparing. An ad placed there with a clear advantage, whether price, size, rating or a feature they lack, can convert well. It performs best when your listing genuinely wins the comparison, so pick targets carefully.

Both of these are ongoing rather than one-off. Competitor sets change, new sellers enter, and the products worth targeting shift with price and stock. Reviewing targeting against the current shelf every month keeps this working.

• Defend brand terms, they are cheap and someone else will buy them
• Target competitor listings where your product wins the comparison
• Refresh competitor targets monthly as the shelf changes
• Watch which competitors are targeting you and respond deliberately