Amazon Ads best practices come down to a few habits that compound: a clear campaign structure by product and intent, regular search term harvesting and negation, bids set from each product’s margin, placement adjustments based on data, listings that convert before you scale traffic, and judging success on total sales and TACOS, not ad-attributed ACOS alone.
Build structure around products and intent
A clean structure is what makes every later optimisation possible. Group campaigns by product or close product family, then separate them by targeting intent.
- Auto discovery campaigns: find new search terms and products to target.
- Manual exact match: proven keywords with controlled bids.
- Manual phrase or broad match: controlled expansion around proven themes.
- Branded keywords: your own brand terms, kept separate so they do not hide category performance.
- Product targeting: competitor ASINs, complementary products and categories.
Consistent naming, such as SP_Kettle_Exact_Category, makes reports readable when you have dozens of campaigns.
How should you harvest and negate search terms?
The search term report is the most useful data in the advertising console. Review it every week or two.
- Move converting search terms from auto and broad campaigns into exact match campaigns.
- Add those terms as negative exact in the source campaign so they are not bid on twice.
- Negate terms with clicks and no orders once they pass a threshold based on your normal conversion rate.
- Negate irrelevant terms immediately, such as ‘free’, ‘used’ or wrong product types.
Over time this loop moves budget from guessing toward proven keywords, and it is the single habit with the largest effect in most accounts.
Which ad types should you run?
Each Amazon ad type does a different job.
- Sponsored Products: ads for individual listings in search and on product pages. The core of most accounts and the best place to start.
- Sponsored Brands: headline ads with your logo, a custom headline and several products or a video, linking to a Store page or product. Useful for brand visibility and category keywords.
- Sponsored Display: retargeting and product-page targeting on and off Amazon.
- Amazon DSP: programmatic display and video using Amazon’s audience data, usually for larger budgets.
Start with Sponsored Products, add Sponsored Brands once you have Brand Registry and a Store, then test Sponsored Display for retargeting and competitor targeting.
Sponsored Brands video
Sponsored Brands video ads autoplay in search results and often stand out. Short videos showing the product in use, with captions and a clear view of the product in the first seconds, tend to work best. They need no audio to make sense.
How should bids be set?
Bids should follow economics, not habit. Calculate break-even ACOS for each product (profit margin before advertising) and set target ACOS based on the goal: higher for launches, lower for mature products defending rank.
From a target ACOS you can work out a target bid: average order value multiplied by conversion rate multiplied by target ACOS. For example, a product with a 30 USD average order value, a 10 percent conversion rate and a 25 percent target ACOS gives a target cost per click of about 0.75 USD. Use that as a starting point and adjust with real data.
Placement and bidding strategy
Check the placement report for each campaign. If top of search converts better, add a top-of-search bid adjustment. Choose the bidding strategy deliberately: fixed bids for control, dynamic bids down only to reduce waste, and up and down only where you are confident the campaign is profitable.
Make listings ready before scaling
Advertising amplifies whatever the listing already does. Before raising budgets, check the product detail page.
- Main image clear at thumbnail size and compliant with image requirements.
- Title with brand, product type and key attributes in plain language.
- Bullets answering the questions shoppers ask in reviews and Q&A.
- A+ Content with comparison chart for cross-sells.
- A competitive price and enough stock to cover increased demand.
- A rating and review count that hold up against competitors on the same search page.
Track TACOS alongside ACOS
ACOS shows ad efficiency; TACOS (ad spend divided by total sales) shows whether advertising grows the business. Track both monthly per product. A falling TACOS while total sales grow suggests ads are lifting organic rank. A rising TACOS with flat total sales suggests ads are buying sales you would have had anyway.
For example, a pet food brand might see ACOS improve after cutting branded keyword bids, while total sales stay level. That suggests branded ads were mostly capturing shoppers who would have bought organically, and budget can move to category keywords.
Plan for seasonal peaks
Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and category-specific seasons raise both competition and conversion rates. Increase budgets ahead of peaks, check stock, and use budget rules or schedules so campaigns do not run out early on the busiest days. After the peak, return bids and budgets to normal levels gradually.
Weekly and monthly routine
- Weekly: search term harvesting and negation, budget check for campaigns out of budget, stock check for advertised ASINs.
- Every two weeks: bid adjustments based on ACOS against target per keyword.
- Monthly: TACOS review per product, placement analysis, ad type tests and listing improvements.
- Quarterly: structure review, break-even recalculation after cost or price changes.
What common habits hold accounts back?
Knowing what not to do is as useful as the practices themselves. These habits appear in many underperforming accounts.
- Launching dozens of keywords in one ad group with a single bid, so strong and weak terms share the same price.
- Pausing campaigns for a few days to save money, which can hurt organic rank and restart learning.
- Bidding on every competitor brand without checking whether those clicks convert.
- Ignoring negative product targeting, so your ads appear on cheap alternatives where shoppers will not pay your price.
- Reading results daily, before the attribution window has closed.
Each of these is easy to fix once spotted. A monthly review of structure and settings, separate from the weekly bid and search term work, is usually where they come to light. Write down what you check so the review is the same every month, regardless of who runs it.
Good practice also includes working with the rest of the business. Price changes, stock-outs, new product launches and promotions all change ad performance. A shared calendar between the advertising and operations teams prevents surprises, such as ads running hard on a product that is about to go out of stock.
Where to start this week
Calculate break-even ACOS for your top five products and write it next to their current ACOS. Then run a search term harvest on your largest auto campaign: move the best converting terms to exact match and negate the clear losers. Those two steps put the most important Amazon Ads best practices into action and give you a baseline to measure everything else against.
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