Amazon PPC: 7 Mistakes That Are Burning Through Your Budget

Amazon PPC is the fastest way to sales — and also the fastest way to burn through your budget without results. Here are seven mistakes we most often find in account audits.

1. No negative keywords

Automatic campaigns without regular search term cleaning spend 20–40% of their budget on irrelevant queries. Review your search term report every week and add negatives.

2. One campaign for everything

Mixing products with different margins and conversion rates in one campaign makes meaningful bid management impossible. Structure campaigns by product groups and goals.

3. Ignoring TACOS

The ACOS of an individual campaign says nothing about the health of the entire business. Monitor TACOS (Total ACOS) — the ratio of total advertising spend to total revenue, including organic.

A healthy TACOS for an established product is 8–12%. If you are consistently above 15%, your campaigns are subsidizing sales that would have come organically anyway.

4. Bids set once and forever

Amazon is a real-time auction. Competition, seasonality, and conversion rates change week to week — your bids should too.

5. Underestimating Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Products are essential, but Sponsored Brands video formats often have 30–50% lower CPC with comparable conversion. Most Czech sellers don't use them at all.

6. PPC without an optimized listing

Sending paid traffic to a listing with bad photos and three reviews is a waste of money. First, optimize the conversion rate, then scale PPC.

7. No testing

Without A/B testing main images and prices, you'll never know if you're paying for clicks that would convert better with different creative.

What to do about it

Start with an audit: download your search term report for the last 60 days and calculate how much you spend on queries without a single order. For most accounts we take over, this is 15–30% of the budget.