You’re spending money on Amazon ads. You’re watching the dashboard. You might even feel like you’re doing everything right.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most Amazon sellers are bleeding ad spend without realizing it. Not because they’re careless, but because the platform is designed to make spending easy and optimizing hard.
After managing over $50M in Amazon ad spend across 100+ brands, we’ve seen the same mistakes show up again and again. These aren’t beginner errors. These are the silent killers that eat into margins while your ACOS report looks “acceptable.”
Mistake 1: Running Auto Campaigns Without a Harvest Strategy
Auto campaigns are powerful for keyword discovery. But most sellers launch them, set a budget, and forget about them. The result? Amazon decides where your money goes, and Amazon’s priority is Amazon’s revenue, not yours.
The fix is simple but requires discipline. Run auto campaigns with the sole purpose of harvesting converting search terms. Move winners into manual campaigns with exact match targeting. Negate the rest. This isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of every profitable PPC structure we build.
Mistake 2: Ignoring Placement Adjustments
Amazon gives you the ability to bid differently for top-of-search, rest-of-search, and product page placements. Most sellers never touch these settings.
Top-of-search placements typically convert 2-3x higher than other placements. If you’re bidding the same everywhere, you’re overpaying for low-converting impressions and underbidding where it actually matters. We routinely see 30-40% ACOS improvements just from optimizing placement modifiers.
Mistake 3: Treating ACOS as the Only Metric That Matters
ACOS tells you how much you spent relative to what you earned. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re growing. It doesn’t tell you if you’re capturing market share. It doesn’t tell you if your organic rank is improving because of your ad spend.
The metric that matters is TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale). It measures your ad spend against total revenue, including organic. A rising ACOS with a declining TACoS means your ads are doing exactly what they should: building organic momentum. If you’re cutting campaigns because ACOS looks high without checking TACoS, you’re sabotaging your own growth.
Mistake 4: Not Separating Brand and Non-Brand Campaigns
Your branded keywords (your own brand name) will always have the lowest ACOS. They’re people already looking for you. Mixing branded and non-branded keywords in the same campaign inflates your perceived performance and hides the real cost of customer acquisition.
Separate them. Always. Brand campaigns protect your listings from competitors. Non-brand campaigns drive new customer discovery. They serve different purposes and need different budgets, bids, and expectations.
Mistake 5: Launching Products Without a PPC Runway
New products have no reviews, no sales history, and no organic rank. Expecting them to perform like established ASINs with the same PPC strategy is a recipe for disappointment.
New launches need aggressive, loss-leading PPC for the first 30-60 days. The goal isn’t profitability. The goal is velocity, reviews, and rank. Once you’ve established organic momentum, you pull back and optimize for efficiency. Trying to be profitable on day one means you’ll never get to day sixty.
Mistake 6: Setting Bids and Walking Away
Amazon’s marketplace is dynamic. Competitors adjust bids daily. Seasonality shifts demand. New products enter your category every week. A bid that was perfect last month might be hemorrhaging money today.
We adjust bids weekly at minimum, daily during peak seasons. The sellers who treat PPC as a “set and forget” system are the ones who wonder why their margins keep shrinking while their spend keeps climbing.
Mistake 7: No Negative Keyword Strategy
Every click that doesn’t convert is money wasted. And Amazon’s broad and phrase match types are generous with what they consider “relevant.” Without an aggressive negative keyword strategy, you’re paying for searches that will never convert.
We maintain negative keyword lists that are often longer than our target keyword lists. Every week, we review search term reports and negate anything that’s spending without converting. It’s tedious work. It’s also the difference between a 25% ACOS and a 15% ACOS.
Amazon PPC isn’t complicated. But it is unforgiving. Small mistakes compound over time, and by the time you notice the damage, you’ve already lost thousands in wasted spend.
The brands that win on Amazon aren’t the ones spending the most. They’re the ones spending the smartest.
If your ad spend feels like it’s going into a black hole, it probably is. And the fix isn’t spending more. It’s spending better.
Ready to stop bleeding ad spend? We audit Amazon PPC accounts every day. If you want to know exactly where your money is going and where it should be going, let’s talk.
