5 Amazon PPC Mistakes That Are Burning Your Ad Budget

Amazon advertising can deliver exceptional ROI — or it can silently drain your budget with little to show for it. Most brands fall into the same predictable traps. Here are the five biggest ones and how to avoid them.

• 1
  Running Broad Match Without Negatives. Broad match campaigns are great for discovery, but without aggressive negative keyword lists, you'll burn spend on irrelevant searches. Audit your search term reports weekly and add negatives continuously.
• 2
  Ignoring Placement Modifiers. Amazon lets you bid more (or less) for top-of-search, rest-of-search, and product pages placements. Most brands leave these at default, missing the chance to concentrate spend on the placements that convert best for their category.
• 3
  Setting It and Forgetting It. Amazon's auction prices shift constantly. A campaign that was profitable in January may be bleeding by March. Schedule a weekly review of your top campaigns' ACoS, impressions, and conversion rates.
• 4
  Not Separating Brand and Non-Brand Campaigns. Mixing branded and non-branded keywords makes it impossible to evaluate true performance. Brand campaigns almost always have better ACoS — and can mask the poor performance of your conquest or category campaigns.
• 5
  Optimizing for ACoS Instead of Profit. ACoS doesn't account for organic rank lift, brand awareness, or new-to-brand customers. A campaign with a 40% ACoS might be highly profitable if it's driving customers who repurchase at a 20% ACoS. Look at total advertising cost of sales (TACoS) as your north star metric.