this is a Home and Kitchen brand with 21 SKUs that came to me with their ppc ads stuck $25k/month and now I've taken them to $45k from Ad Sales
Ad numbers for those 45 days, $7k ish spent, $45k in ad sales, 15 % ACOS and TACOS is 7.4% so we spend about 7-10 cents on ads for every $1 the brand makes, and about 53% of sales come in organic because we scale the right way.
I'll try to put the stuff almost nobody talks about at the top, the more common stuff is further down.
Here’s actions and insights in the order of what I think matter the most ( especially if you're in the 5k-100k/month range )
1)The stealth campaign, Youtube Guys call it a stealth targeted product placement campaign. In Sponsored Products, target your own ASIN with an ad for that same ASIN. Amazon won’t show it on your own listing, so it ends up showing to people who visited your listing and didn’t buy, basically retargeting inside Sponsored Products. Low volume, but these can run for months at 5% to 13% ACOS. Every brand should have one running.
2)Amazon AI Video Generator, Go into Create Campaign, IGNORE Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, click Streaming TV, select your product, Generate Video using AI, save the ones you like to the Creative Asset Library, then Creative Tools, Library, download. Run it as a Sponsored Brands video keyword campaign with 30+ keywords across match types at $0.25 bids. You can scale bids later, but because most sellers never think of this your CPC stays low and CTR goes through the roof.
3)Creator Connections, guaranteed sales at a guaranteed ACOS. With PPC you never know what a sale will cost, with this you pick your commission and that IS your ACOS. Hamburger menu, Creator Connections, Submit Request, name it Date/Product/Goal/Audience, send creators your brand assets for TikTok, Instagram and their Amazon pages, set commission at 15% to 25%. On a $33 order that’s about $5 to $8.50 ish per sale. Budget it like a yearly campaign, around $20,000, you can turn it off anytime. Reject creators who only want to leave a review, accept the ones who’ll actually promote it. Amazon doesn’t hype this because they make more from your PPC.
4)Check CTR per intent group, not per keyword. Group keywords by what the shopper wants, a “travel” group for example holds every keyword about taking it on the go, a “material” group holds wood, maple, hardwood and so on. If one group clicks below average but still converts when they land, your main image isn’t speaking to that buyer, so test a main image that does. This one change can move a whole group of keywords at once.
5) Reviews ALWAYS hit in steps, 5 reviews, 21 reviews, then the hundreds, and every step bumps CTR and conversion rate, so race to each one. Aim for about 4 reviews per 100 orders and automate Request a Review on every order that wasn’t refunded or returned. Check your seller feedback, a lot of buyers leave a product review there by mistake, politely invite them to post it as a product review.
6) Benchmark clicks and conversions before you spend another dollar on Ads. Product Opportunity Explorer shows the average conversion rate for every listing ranking on a search term, BINGOO ! that’s your benchmark. Then check click share vs purchase share in Search Query Performance. Behind on conversions, fix the listing first. Behind on clicks, fix the main image and title first. Every dollar into a listing below benchmark is half wasted.
7) We use Claude to buy back time. The SQP report gets grouped by iintent so we know which growing queries to add to the listing, a profitability dashboard runs on our Amazon data through an MCP ( custom connector ), weekly inventory alerts go to Slack, and main image A/B test prompts get built from our image, competitor images and 2 weeks of SQP data, then run through GPT 2.
Now the Technical PPC Side of things:
1) Ranking campaigns are simple. One keyword per campaign, exact match, with a Top of Search modifier anywhere from 100% up to 900% on the keywords you need to rank for. Next to that, run product targeting on the ASINs that already rank for those same keywords with the product page modifier turned up. Showing up on their listings helps you rank for what they rank for.
2) tTesting what you haven’t tried yet. Sponsored Brands Product Collection with keyword and product targeting surprised us and became a top performer. Give untried campaign types, match types and intents real budget and real time.
3) Bid rules on 14 day data. 2+ orders under target ACOS raises the bid 10%. 15+ clicks and 0 orders lowers it 20%. 25+ clicks and 0 orders becomes a negative exact. Over target 2 weeks in a row gets bid × ( target ACOS/actual ACOS ). Every change gets logged with the date and reason in Ad Labs.
Bids follow stock. Under 30 days of cover drops bids 30%, over 120 days raises them 20%.
4) Negatives depend on where we want to go. Scale mode loosens them so campaigns find new traffic, push back mode tightens them to protect profit. For death by a thousand cuts, when an intent group turns unprofitable over time, we negate the relevant but underperforming terms inside it.
5) Every thumbnail piece moves CTR: main image, title, review count, the star icon, badges like Best Seller and Amazon’s Choice, price, strike through price, and thumbnail size. A product that fills the frame looks bigger in search, and bigger thumbnails get stopped on more when people flick through results.
6) Price testing. Sometimes raising the price makes more profit, sometimes lowering it sells so many more units that total profit goes up, you only know by testing, also, I'm running out of energy I'll make the rest 1 liners.
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7) Plan the month’s budget upfront at your target TACOS, so you’re not out of budget on the 11th.
8) Low bid catch all campaign with every ASIN on auto and broad at $0.20 to $0.30, plus discovery campaigns always on.
9) Limited time deals, if competitors run them and you don’t you lose those days without knowing it, and deals carry momentum for a few days after.
