The Ultimate Amazon PPC Guide 2025
Sellerise Team, Contributor
13 min read -
Updated:A well-executed Amazon PPC campaign not only boosts visibility but also drives highly targeted traffic. However, real success isn’t just about getting more clicks; it’s about attracting profitable traffic that maximizes your sales and long-term growth.
In this guide, we fast-track you through the key essentials of Amazon PPC guide, including minimizing ad spend waste, outmaneuvering competitors, and building a self-sustaining strategy that drives consistent profitability.
Let’s kick off this PPC cheat sheet by breaking down the three key pillars of a successful Amazon PPC strategy.
The Core Pillars of a High-Performing Amazon PPC Strategy
To create a robust Amazon PPC strategy, you need to focus on the following foundational elements:
1. Keyword Profitability
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as an Amazon seller is to focus solely on driving high traffic without considering profitability. Not all clicks are equal—some bring in revenue, while others drain your ad budget with little return. To maximize Amazon PPC effectiveness, you must prioritize profit per click over raw traffic volume.
Here’s how you can optimize for keyword profitability:
- Bid Smartly: Focus on keywords that yield a strong return on ad spend (ROAS) and positive profit margins rather than chasing broad or high-volume terms that eat up your budget.
- Segment your keywords: Group keywords based on intent—high-converting, brand awareness, and discovery—to ensure each campaign serves a specific goal.
- Negative keywords matter: Continuously refine your campaigns by adding negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic and improve conversion rates.
2. The Ad-to-Organic Flywheel
Many sellers make the mistake of relying on PPC as their primary revenue generator, but the real power of Amazon PPC lies in how it strengthens organic visibility over time.
When done right, Amazon PPC creates an ad-to-organic flywheel. Here’s how:
- Ads drive immediate visibility for your products;
- More visibility leads to higher sales velocity and engagement;
- Higher engagement improves your organic ranking for key terms;
- Improved organic ranking means lower reliance on PPC over time.
To leverage the ad-to-organic flywheel, you need to:
- Prioritize best-converting keywords;
- Optimize your listings;
- Use PPC to launch and scale;
- Reduce dependence on ads over time.
3. Lifetime Value (LTV): Maximizing Customer Retention & Profitability
A winning Amazon PPC strategy doesn’t stop at the first sale. The true measure of success lies in how many customers keep coming back. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) determines how much revenue a single customer generates over their entire relationship with your brand. The higher your LTV, the more you can afford to invest in PPC while maintaining profitability.
Here’s how you can boost LTV through Amazon PPC:
- Retargeting & Sponsored Display Ads: Re-engage past buyers with complementary products or special offers to increase repeat purchases;
- Leverage Sellerise SQP Insights: Use customer insights to identify purchasing patterns and create hyper-targeted ad campaigns;
- Upsell & Cross-Sell Strategies: Promote bundles or complementary products in ads to increase order value;
- Encourage Brand Loyalty: Drive external traffic to your Amazon Storefront and engage with customers through follow-up emails and brand promotions.
How to Structure Your Amazon PPC for Maximum Efficiency
A poor campaign structure can drain your budget and weaken performance. To fix this, you need a well-organized approach that gives you control and maximizes efficiency.
Let’s break it down:
1. Segment & Structure Based on Your Goals
Without proper segmentation, you have zero control over performance, and your best-performing keywords get buried in the mix. To prevent this, you need to break down your PPC campaigns based on specific goals and product groupings.
Here’s how:
By Product Category
If you sell multiple types of products, group them separately. For example, if you sell hair styling tools and hair care products, keep them in distinct campaigns to avoid budget overlap.
By Match Type
Structuring campaigns by match type (exact, phrase, and broad) ensures better control over keyword bidding and budget allocation.
By Goal
Not all campaigns serve the same purpose. Segment based on objectives:
- Brand defense: Protect your brand name from competitors bidding on it;
- Product launch: Focus on visibility for new products;
- Sales growth: Optimize for conversions with high-performing keywords;
- Competitive targeting: Bid on competitor brand names or complementary products.
By Performance Levels
You should separate high-performing keywords from experimental or discovery campaigns. This prevents profitable keywords from being diluted by underperforming ones.
2. Focus on SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups)
Most Amazon PPC campaigns lump multiple keywords into a single ad group. This leads to unpredictable ad spend and reduced control over individual keyword performance.
Enter SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups)—one of the most powerful ways to laser-focus your ad budget on top-performing keywords.
Using SKAGs gives you:
- Maximized control;
- Better keyword-level insights;
- Higher relevance;
- Lower wasted spend.
3. Match Type Strategies
Amazon’s match types (exact, phrase, and broad) determine how closely a shopper’s search needs to match your keywords before your ad is triggered. A proper match type strategy ensures you’re targeting the right audience without wasting spend on irrelevant clicks.
Here’s everything you should be doing:
- Separate match types into different campaigns/ad groups to prevent
budget cannibalization. - Use a tiered bidding approach:
- Exact Match (highest bid) → For highly relevant, high-converting keywords;
- Phrase Match (moderate bid) → For medium-range targeting with controlled reach;
- Broad Match (lowest bid) → For discovery and expanding keyword reach.
In order to find what keywords are high-converting on Amazon, check Keyword Hunter.
3. Eliminate keyword overlap with negative keywords. For this, you should:
- In your phrase match campaign, add the exact match keyword as a negative keyword
- In your broad match campaign, add both exact match and phrase match keywords as negative keywords
This ensures that each search query triggers only one keyword instead of multiple, preventing self-competition.
Budget Allocation Strategies
Running Amazon PPC without a solid budget strategy is like pouring water into a leaky bucket—you’re spending, but you’re not maximizing returns. A strategic budget allocation plan ensures your ad spend goes exactly where it delivers the highest impact.
Here’s what you should consider:
The Pareto Principle: Investing Where It Counts
Not all campaigns are created equal. In fact, most of your profits will likely come from a small portion of your ads. That’s where the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) comes in—80% of your results come from just 20% of your campaigns.
Here’s how you apply the 80/20 principle to PPC budgeting:
- Segment Campaigns into Portfolios: Separate your campaigns into categories like “Top Performers” (proven winners) and “Testing” (new experimental campaigns). This way, you can shift budgets fluidly based on performance.
- Allocate 80% of the Budget to the Top 20% of the Campaign: Focus most of your budget on campaigns that consistently deliver high ROI. These are the keywords and products already bringing in sales, so scaling them up makes sense.
- Keep 20% for Testing & Expansion: Every winning campaign started as a test. Dedicate a smaller budget to experimenting with new keywords, match types, and product placements. If a test campaign shows promise, move it into the Top Performers category and scale accordingly.
- Avoid Overfunding Pitfalls: Just because a campaign is performing well doesn’t mean throwing more budget at it will always increase sales. Monitor saturation points—if increasing spend isn’t improving conversions, it’s time to reallocate funds elsewhere.
Spend More When and Where Shoppers are Ready to Buy
Not all hours of the day are equal when it comes to conversions. If you’re running ads 24/7 without adjusting for peak traffic times, you’re likely burning your budget when shoppers aren’t actively buying.
Dayparting (or ad scheduling) allows you to adjust bids and budgets based on when your audience is most active and ready to convert.
Here’s how you can optimize your Amazon PPC Budget with dayparting:
- Identify the top states/locations where shoppers make purchases: Use SQP Insights to spot high-demand regions and optimize your targeting strategy.
- Analyze Shopping Patterns: Use SQP Insights to identify peak shopping hours and adjust bids accordingly. Common peak times for many categories include lunchtime, evenings, and weekends.
- Increase Bids During High-Converting Hours: Once you know when your customers are most active, increase bids during those hours to capture maximum opportunity.
- Reduce Spend in Low-Converting Timeframes: Midnight hours and early mornings often see lower conversion rates but can still drain your budget. Reduce bids or even pause campaigns during these times.
- Test Different Time Periods: Shopping behavior varies by category. Test different dayparting schedules to see what works best for your specific audience.
- Instead of manually adjusting bids throughout the day, use Amazon’s Portfolio Budgets to automate and optimize ad spend across high-performing campaigns.
Advanced Keyword Research & Selection
While basic keyword research can help you get started, you need advanced techniques to give you that edge. Let’s dive into how you can uncover high-converting keywords and make them work for you.
1. Do Competitor Research
Why start from scratch when you can analyze and leverage your competitors’ winning strategies? Analyzing their listings and ad strategies helps you pinpoint the keywords that drive their sales success—then refine your approach to outperform them.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Conduct weekly and bi-weekly reverse ASIN research by gathering a list of top competitor ASINs and importing them into the Sellerise Keyword Re-Ranker tool.
- This tool deconstructs the semantic core of competitor listings, identifying the exact keywords fueling their sales.
- Apply Conversion Rate and Market Availability filters to separate high-value keywords from those that merely drive traffic without conversions.
2. Unlock Keyword Clusters
You shouldn’t stop at competitor insights—your brand’s data holds even more power. Mapping out entire clusters of related, high-converting keywords can maximize your reach while keeping bids efficient.
- Regularly monitor Brand Analytics and Search Query Performance (SQP) reports to track keywords with increasing click share and growing share-of-voice.
- Feed these high-potential keywords into the Sellerise Keyword Hunter tool to uncover all possible keyword clusters, including:
- Semantic variations;
- Long-tail opportunities;
- Hidden conversion-driving terms.
By filtering these keyword clusters based on sales volume, conversion rate, and competition level, you can pinpoint the best-performing terms and integrate them into your manual campaigns for maximum impact.
Optimizing Underperforming Targets
Even the best campaigns will have underperforming keywords, ASIN targets, or ad placements that need adjusting. The key is knowing when to fix, when to lower bids, and when to cut losses completely.
A disciplined approach to troubleshooting, refining, and removing wasteful spend is essential to protecting your profit margins and keeping your ad spend efficient.
Let’s break it down:
Step 1: Define Your “Kill Threshold” (When to Pause or Adjust Bids)
Not every high-ACoS keyword is a lost cause. Some just need adjustments, while others need to be eliminated entirely. To decide what stays and what goes, first define your break-even ACoS using this formula:
Break-even ACoS = 1 ÷ Profit Margin
Example: If your profit margin is 30%, your break-even ACoS is 30%. You should aim to keep your target ACoS below this level for sustained profitability.
💡 Key Rule: Don’t pause a target immediately if it crosses your break-even ACoS—troubleshoot first!
Step 2: Troubleshoot Underperforming Keywords
Here’s everything you should be doing:
Check Your Search Term Report
Many high-ACoS campaigns suffer from budget drain due to irrelevant search terms. To fix this:
- Identify wasteful search terms that are racking up spend but not converting;
- Add them as negative keywords in their respective campaigns to prevent further budget drain;
- If a broad or phrase match keyword is leading to poor-quality traffic, consider moving it to an exact match manual campaign for tighter targeting.
Adjust Bids Instead of Eliminating Keywords
Instead of eliminating a struggling keyword completely, try reducing bids first.
- Lower bids by 10-20% on borderline keywords to see if they can become profitable with a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
- Test for another 7-14 days before making a final decision.
Optimize Ad Placements
Some ads may underperform because they’re showing up in the wrong placements.
- Analyze placement performance (Top of Search, Product Pages, Rest of Search);
- If one placement is performing better, increase the bid percentage in its favor;
- Reduce bids for underperforming placements that are wasting ad spend.
Example: If Top of Search has a high conversion rate, increase bid adjustments for that placement while reducing bids for underperforming placements like Product Pages.
Is the Issue Your Listing?
Sometimes, the problem isn’t the ad—it’s the product listing itself. If a keyword or campaign has low conversions, ask yourself:
- Does my main image stand out? – Your product needs to be visually appealing in search results.
- Is my price competitive? – If competitors are priced lower, shoppers may be clicking but not buying.
- Are my bullet points and descriptions optimized? – Weak copy = lost conversions.
- Check reviews & ratings. A product with low reviews or poor ratings will struggle to convert Amazon PPC traffic into sales.
Step 3: The "Red Alert" Rule
If a keyword or ASIN target exceeds 2x your break-even ACoS for 14+ days, despite adjustments, it’s time to pause or significantly lower the bid.
Example:
- Your break-even ACoS = 30%.
- If a target’s ACoS is 60%+ for 14 days straight, with no signs of improvement, it’s most likely a budget drain.
- Either pause it or drop the bid to the lowest possible level and re-test.
🔹 In competitive niches: You may need to shorten the monitoring period to 7 days instead of 14.
Search Term Report Management: Maximize Profitable Keywords
Your Search Term Report is gold, but only if you use it effectively. Every week, you should be:
Harvesting High-Converting Keywords
Download the Search Term Report and filter for:
- Search terms with at least one sale;
- ACoS at or below your break-even point.
Move these winning search terms into exact match hyper-targeting manual campaigns. This lets you bid more aggressively on proven winners while maintaining control.
Eliminating Wasteful Search Terms
We’ve already covered the importance of checking your Search Term Report to identify wasteful keywords. Now, let’s take it a step further and focus on how to completely eliminate budget-draining terms to maximize efficiency.
To minimize budget drain, identify search terms that:
- Have zero conversions but have spent at least as much as your product price;
- Have more than 10 clicks with no sales.
Add these as negative exact match keywords to prevent further wasted spend.
💡 Pro Tip: Managing bulk Amazon PPC operations? Duplicate targets across multiple campaigns can lead to keyword cannibalization (bidding against yourself). To streamline this:
✔️ Use deduplication macros in Excel or AI-based tools like ChatGPT to avoid overlap and optimize budget allocation.
Premature Campaign Optimization: The Dangers You Didn't Know
Amazon PPC isn’t a sprint—it’s a marathon. Yet, many sellers panic when they see keywords underperforming for a day or two and rush to cut bids or pause campaigns. Remember that Amazon has a 48-hour attribution lag—which means that the sales you’re expecting to see today might not show up in your reports until two days later.
In other words, premature optimization can do more harm than good. Here’s how:
Wasted Ad Spend
Lowering bids too early leads to weaker ad placements, which means fewer impressions and even fewer conversions. And when conversions drop, your ACoS spikes, and profitability takes a hit.
Loss of Historical Data
Every campaign builds a performance history that Amazon’s algorithm uses to determine where and when to show your ads. If you shut down a campaign too soon, you’re basically hitting the reset button—and forcing Amazon to relearn everything from scratch.
How to Optimize Smarter
Instead of reacting to day-to-day fluctuations, focus on longer performance trends to make more informed decisions.
Use Weekly or Bi-Weekly Analysis
- A keyword that looks like a “budget drain” today might be profitable over a 7-day period;
- Track week-over-week performance to see patterns in conversions rather than reacting to short-term dips.
Beware of Over-Reliance on Automated Rules
Automated bid rules can be helpful, but they come with risks—especially if they don’t account for the attribution window.
The problems with aggressive automated rules:
- If a rule pauses or lowers bids before sales are fully attributed, it can kill a campaign that’s actually working
- Some rules conflict with manual optimizations, creating erratic bidding behavior that reduces consistency
If using bid automation, ensure it waits at least 48 hours before making reductions based on conversion data.
Metrics and Insights You Can’t Afford to Ignore
If you’re only looking at ACoS, you’re missing two key pieces of the puzzle:
- Product Profit Margin (after Amazon fees, COGS, shipping, etc.)
- Conversion Rate (how often clicks actually turn into sales).
That’s why TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) is a much better indicator of long-term profitability. But beyond TACoS, there are deeper metrics that force you to face the real ROI of every keyword—one of the most useful being Profit Per Click.
Profit Per Click Formula
Profit Per Click = (Product Profit × Conversion Rate) − CPC
Example:
- Product Profit: $10 (after all costs)
- Conversion Rate: 15% (0.15)
- CPC: $1.50
Profit Per Click = ($10 × 0.15) − $1.50 = $0
Here, you’re just breaking even—not losing money, but not making any either. To turn a profit, you’d need to lower CPC, improve conversion rate, or increase product margins.
If you’re doing manual bid optimization, this formula is a game-changer. It forces you to track conversion rates at the keyword level (not just campaign level, like most sellers do) and ensures your Amazon PPC strategy is built for scaling profitably—not just chasing gross sales.
Target ACoS, Break-Even ACoS and Target Bids
Every seller tweaks bids differently, but knowing your break-even ACoS is the key to making profitable adjustments. Here’s how to calculate it:
Profit Margin (%) = (Sale Price – Total Costs) ÷ Sale Price × 100
Break-Even ACoS = 1 ÷ Profit Margin
For example, if your profit margin is 30%, your target ACoS should be ≤30% to stay profitable.
Once you know your break-even ACoS and target ACoS, use them to calculate your maximum target bid:
Target Bid (Max CPC) = Target ACoS ÷ (Current ACoS × Current CPC)
This helps you set bid limits that align with your profitability goals rather than just blindly increasing or decreasing bids.
Other Must-Track Metrics for Smarter Ad Decisions
- Organic Rank Impact: A 10% improvement in rank can lead to a 20% reduction in ACoS—so always track how your ad spend affects organic visibility.
- Average Order Value (AOV): Higher AOV means more revenue per sale. Monitoring this helps you see how ads influence buying behavior.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Knowing your true customer acquisition cost lets you assess ad profitability beyond just ACoS.
Remarketing & Audience Targeting
Most shoppers don’t buy on the first visit. They browse, compare, and sometimes abandon their carts. But that doesn’t mean they’re lost forever—remarketing ensures you stay on their radar until they’re ready to purchase.
Here’s how to make the most of Amazon’s remarketing tools:
Sponsored Display
Leverage views remarketing and purchase remarketing to retarget potential buyers who have either viewed your product or previously made a purchase. Use 30-day and 60-day lookback windows to re-engage warm audiences who are more likely to convert.
DSP (Demand Side Platform) and AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud)
Unlike Sponsored Display, DSP gives you access to off-Amazon audiences, allowing you to capture shoppers who may not be actively browsing Amazon at the moment. However, DSP isn’t self-serve—you’ll need to work with an Amazon rep or an agency to get started.
For even more precision, use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to create custom audience segments. This allows you to:
- Retarget visitors who viewed your product but didn’t buy
- Reach past Prime Day shoppers who are likely to return for future deals
- Combine Amazon’s purchase data with DSP insights to build highly targeted, data-driven campaigns
By layering these strategies, you can keep your brand in front of high-intent shoppers, maximize conversions, and turn more interest into sales.
Final Takeaway: Your Roadmap to Amazon PPC Success
If you want to win at Amazon PPC, you don’t need to spend more—you need to spend smarter.
With the right strategy in place, you are well on your way to turning every click into a profitable opportunity rather than just another expense.
We hope this Amazon PPC guide has given you the blueprint to optimize, scale, and outmaneuver competitors while keeping ad spend in check. Now, it’s time to put it into action—analyze, refine, and keep optimizing until your campaigns run like a well-oiled machine.
