When Amazon PPC Stops Working: How to Fix It (Updated 2026)

It’s a feeling every Amazon seller dreads: your Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) is creeping up, your sales are stalling, and your once-profitable ads are starting to feel like a money pit. This is usually the point where panic sets in. A common scenario is that your click costs are rising, but your conversion rates aren’t keeping pace. Before you start slashing bids or pausing campaigns, it’s time to figure out what’s really happening.

Why Your Amazon PPC Is Failing

Your PPC campaigns were running smoothly, bringing in consistent sales and keeping your products visible. Then, without warning, the performance drops. Sales have either flatlined or dipped, while your ad spend keeps climbing. It’s a frustrating problem that makes your campaigns feel like they are suddenly working against you.

The impulse to make drastic changes is strong, but that’s a mistake. The first step is to diagnose the root cause with a clear head. This means digging into your fundamental metrics to understand what the data is telling you. A good starting point is understanding key advertising metrics like reach and impressions, as these can give you the first clues about your ad’s visibility and how shoppers are interacting with them.

1. Trouble Metrics

One of the most glaring signs of trouble is when your cost-per-click (CPC) starts outpacing your conversion rate. When this happens, your ACoS will inevitably spiral out of control.

In some competitive categories, CPCs on Amazon are jumping by 15–30%. The average conversion rate for Amazon Ads hovers around 9.96%. So, if your own rate is lagging far behind that benchmark, perhaps in the 3–5% range, every cent you overpay for a click is amplified.

Generally, a healthy ACoS for most categories falls between 25–36%. A good target for many sellers is around 30%. But when your ACoS climbs past 40–50% and stays there, you’re almost certainly losing money on every ad-driven sale.

A sustained ACoS above 40% is a clear indicator that your campaign is no longer profitable and requires immediate attention.

2. Areas to Investigate

Before you can fix anything, you need to know exactly where the leak is. Your investigation should start with a few usual suspects that are notorious for causing performance drops. A deep dive into your Amazon advertising reports is the only way to get the clarity you need to pinpoint the real problem.

To help you get started, here’s a quick checklist to quickly spot the symptoms and figure out what might be causing them.

3. PPC Health Checklist

This table provides a solid framework for your initial investigation. By matching the symptoms you see in your ad console to these potential causes, you can narrow your focus and start taking targeted, effective action instead of just guessing.

Here’s a breakdown of the primary areas to check first:

• Budget and Bidding: Are your campaigns constantly running out of money before the end of the day? This is a huge red flag. Or maybe your bids, which were competitive last month, are now too low to win decent placements, causing you to lose impressions to other sellers.
• Keyword Relevance: Take a hard look at your search term reports. Are you paying for clicks on keywords that are way too broad and attracting window shoppers instead of actual buyers? Look for those queries that are burning through your cash without a single conversion to show for it.
• Market and Competitor Changes: Sometimes, the problem isn’t you, it’s them. Has a new, aggressive competitor stormed into your niche with lower prices or a better product? A sudden dip in performance can often be traced back to external market shifts that have nothing to do with your account settings.

PPC Account Health Audit

Before you can fix what’s broken, you have to know exactly what you’re dealing with. When your Amazon PPC performance tanks, the answer is buried deep in your data. A full PPC account audit is the only way to uncover the root causes of the drop and stop the bleeding.

This isn’t just about finding problems. It’s about understanding why they became problems in the first place. You’ll be digging for wasted spend, missed opportunities, and structural flaws that are dragging your account down. Think of it as a doctor’s check-up for your ad account.

1. Search Term Report

Your Search Term Report is ground zero. This is the most important document in this whole process because it shows you the exact customer search queries that triggered your ads. It’s an unfiltered look at how shoppers are actually finding (or not finding) your products.

Start by sorting that report by spend. You’re looking for the search terms that have a high number of clicks but zero sales. These are your budget vampires, and they need to be handled immediately. More often than not, these terms pop up because a broad match keyword is just too generic, pulling in all sorts of irrelevant traffic.

For instance, if you’re selling a “leather dog collar,” a broad match campaign might be showing your ad for “dog training.” While the topics are related, the search intent is worlds apart. Find these non-converting terms and add them as negative exact match keywords. This one move will instantly stop your ads from showing for those queries and save your budget for shoppers who are actually looking to buy.

2. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is a sneaky but destructive problem. It happens when you have multiple campaigns or ad groups bidding on the very same keywords. You’re essentially competing against yourself, driving up your own Cost-Per-Click (CPC) with no real benefit. This quiet bidding war eats into your margins and makes your performance data a complete mess.

A classic example is having the same high-value keyword in a broad match, phrase match, and exact match campaign all running at the same time. Amazon’s algorithm might show any one of those ads, leading to inflated costs and inconsistent results.

The fix is to enforce a clean, clear campaign structure:

• Move your top-performing keywords into their own exact match campaigns. This gives you maximum control.
• Then, add those same terms as negative exact match keywords in your broader discovery campaigns (broad and phrase).
• This forces Amazon to show the right ad for the right search, which helps lower your CPC and improve your ad’s relevance.

You can also use tools right inside Seller Central to find deeper customer search trends and spot potential keyword overlaps. Diving into the insights available through our guide to Amazon Brand Analytics can show you what your top competitors are ranking for and reveal new ways shoppers are searching in your category.

3. Campaign Structure and Targeting

A disorganized campaign structure is another common reason for failure. Many sellers start with a simple automatic campaign and never evolve. As they scale, this leads to massive inefficiencies. Your audit needs to check if your campaigns are structured logically, perhaps by product category, brand theme, or a strategic goal like a new product launch.

A huge red flag is seeing a heavy reliance on broad match keywords without any disciplined process for harvesting converting search terms and negating the junk. Poor structure isn’t just messy; it’s expensive. In fact, industry analyses show that flawed ad practices can waste up to 30% of an ad budget and slash sales by 25–40%. For example, simply failing to use negative keywords can cause click-through rates (CTR) to plummet by 20% as your ads show up for totally irrelevant searches.

This audit is a blueprint for continuous optimization. By regularly checking these core areas, you can spot problems before they spiral out of control and keep your campaigns running efficiently.

Steps to Optimize & Relaunch Campaigns

You’ve done the audit and have a clear picture of what’s broken. Now comes the important part: stopping the bleeding and getting your campaigns back to work. This requires targeted, decisive action based on what the data told you.

Our first move is to plug the most obvious leaks in your budget. Once that’s handled, we’ll shift gears and start rebuilding your campaigns for stronger, more sustainable performance.

1. Wasted Spend

Your first priority is to stop paying for clicks that go nowhere. This requires a surgical approach, not a sledgehammer. Pull up that search term report again and let’s get to work.

• Add Negative Keywords: Go through and find every search term that’s racked up a significant number of clicks but zero sales. Add these as negative exact match keywords to their respective ad groups. This is the single fastest way to cut your ACoS.
• Pause Unprofitable Keywords: Look for keywords with high spend and an ACoS that’s way over your break-even point. If you’ve given them enough time to prove they’re not working (at least 2-4 weeks of data), just pause them. You can always reactivate them later if you make major improvements to your listing.
• Lower Bids on Underperformers: For keywords bringing in some sales but with an ACoS that is still too high, don’t kill them just yet. Instead, start nudging their bids down incrementally. You might lose some ad position, but you could also bring their ACoS back into a profitable zone.

By getting aggressive with negative keywords and pausing your worst offenders, you can often reclaim 10-20% of your ad budget within the first week. That’s cash you can immediately redirect to what’s actually making you money.

2. Bidding and Targeting

With the immediate fires out, you can now focus on your bids and targeting to build a healthier long-term foundation. This is where many sellers get stuck, often letting Amazon’s automated systems run wild without enough human oversight.

Taking back control is key. While automated bidding has its place, manual bidding gives you precise authority over your most important keywords. You can set the exact CPC you’re willing to pay, making sure you don’t accidentally overspend on the terms that drive the bulk of your sales. If you need a refresher, it’s worth reviewing the differences between automatic and manual targeting in Amazon PPC.

Here’s a practical way to approach this:

• Move Your Winners to Manual Campaigns: Isolate your highest-converting search terms and put them in their own exact match manual campaigns. This gives you complete control over their bids and budgets.
• Use Auto Campaigns for Discovery: Let your automatic campaigns do what they do best: unearth new, relevant search terms. Just keep their budgets on a tighter leash and regularly “harvest” the converting terms to move them into your manual campaigns.

3. Restructure for Better Relevance

A messy campaign structure is often the silent killer of PPC performance. If your ad groups are stuffed with dozens of unrelated keywords, your ad relevance takes a hit. That means lower click-through rates and higher costs. The fix is to restructure everything for clarity and relevance.

One effective method is using Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs) for your top keywords. In a SKAG, an ad group contains just one keyword in three match types (exact, phrase, and broad). This setup forces your ad copy to be perfectly aligned with the search term, which can seriously improve your relevance score.

For example, a SKAG for “red leather dog collar” would have an ad that specifically mentions that exact phrase. That level of precision nearly always beats a generic ad group with 50 different keywords when it comes to CTR and ACoS.

4. Fix Your Product Listing

Never forget that the world’s best PPC strategy can’t save a weak product listing. Your ads do the hard work of getting shoppers to your page, but it’s the listing that has to close the deal. Sometimes, a sudden drop in PPC performance isn’t about the ads at all; it’s about a change you made to the detail page.

Take a hard, fresh look at your listing, focusing on these critical conversion elements:

• Main Image: Does it stand out from competitors? Does it clearly show the product?
• Title: Is it easy to read and does it contain your most important keyword right up front?
• Price: Are you still competitive? A new, lower-priced competitor can completely tank your conversion rate overnight.
• Reviews: Have you received a string of bad reviews recently? A few one-star ratings can kill your momentum and send ACoS through the roof.

Your product detail page is the final, most important step in the customer’s journey. Making sure it’s polished and optimized is just as crucial as managing your bids and keywords.

Sometimes, the reason your Amazon PPC campaigns have gone off a cliff has absolutely nothing to do with your ads. You can have a perfectly tuned account with brilliant bidding strategies, but forces outside your campaign manager can still wreck your performance.

When your metrics suddenly tank and you haven’t touched a thing, it’s time to look beyond your ad account. The Amazon marketplace is a dynamic environment, and what worked yesterday can become useless overnight if you’re not paying attention to the bigger picture.

1. New and Aggressive Competition

A common culprit is a new, aggressive competitor entering the niche. A well-funded seller can storm the market with low introductory prices and a large ad budget, instantly jacking up the auction prices for your most important keywords.

Suddenly, the bids that used to secure your top-of-search placement are getting you nowhere. This new player isn’t just raising your costs; they’re also stealing impressions and clicks. If their product has a better offer, more reviews, or a more eye-catching main image, your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and conversion rate can plummet, even if your ads haven’t changed. You have to be regularly searching your main keywords to see who’s showing up.

2. Sudden Amazon Algorithm Changes

Amazon’s A9 search algorithm is constantly changing. While Amazon says these updates are for improving the customer experience, they can have serious consequences for sellers. One day, an update might give more weight to certain listing attributes or favor a different ad format.

For instance, an algorithm shift could suddenly start prioritizing listings that feature video content. If your products don’t have videos, your ads could lose relevance and impression share almost instantly. If all your campaigns suddenly stop performing, it’s worth a quick search on seller forums or industry news sites to see if a recent algorithm update has been reported. Staying informed helps you adapt your strategy instead of chasing ghosts in your campaigns.

3. Listing Suppressions and Policy Violations

A suppressed listing is a silent ad killer. If your product violates one of Amazon’s policies, it can get yanked from the search results, making it ineligible to be advertised. Your ads will just stop delivering, and you might not even get a notification. This can happen for many reasons: a main image that doesn’t meet guidelines, a prohibited claim in your bullet points, or even putting your product in the wrong category.

The most catastrophic external factor that will shut down your PPC campaigns entirely is an account suspension. If you’re in that situation, getting your account back online is priority one. It’s critical to consult a resource like Master Amazon Account Suspension: A Step-by-Step Guide to Get Reinstated.

Make it a habit to check your Account Health dashboard for any policy warnings or performance notifications. A quick 30-second check can save you days of frustration.

4. Inventory and Feed Issues

This one should be obvious, but it trips people up all the time: your ads can’t run if you don’t have the product in stock. Running out of inventory is one of the fastest ways to bring your campaigns to a dead stop and lose all the ranking momentum you’ve built. This is why solid Amazon inventory management is directly linked to your advertising success.

Beyond stockouts, technical glitches in your product feed can be the problem. Errors or missing product data are cited by 48% of marketers as a major headache in eCommerce PPC. Even tiny listing issues can crush your relevance score and cause once-profitable campaigns to stall out, with some sellers seeing sales drop by as much as 40%. Regularly auditing your product data to fix missing attributes is a simple but powerful way to prevent this.

To wrap this up, it’s useful to separate the problems you can fix inside your account from the ones happening out in the marketplace.

Internal vs External PPC Problems

Here’s a quick table to help you distinguish between issues you can control directly and external factors you just have to monitor and react to.

Knowing where the problem is coming from is the first step. If you’ve checked all the internal boxes and things are still broken, it’s almost certainly one of these external factors at play.

Building a Resilient PPC Strategy for Long-Term Success

Fixing a broken Amazon PPC campaign is one thing. Building a strategy that’s tough enough to not break in the first place is the real win. Constantly putting out fires is exhausting and expensive. A proactive, resilient strategy keeps your campaigns humming along profitably, month after month.

This is a fundamental shift away from the “set it and forget it” mentality. It’s about creating a simple but consistent routine to monitor performance, catch negative trends before they snowball into disasters, and stay nimble in the constantly shifting Amazon marketplace.

1. Create a Routine Optimization

A solid review schedule is the bedrock of any durable PPC strategy. Without it, you’re just guessing. You don’t need to live inside your ad console, but you do need to block out time for regular check-ins to keep your campaigns on track.

Here’s a simple framework that works for many sellers:

• Weekly Check-In (30-60 minutes): This is your tactical tune-up. Your main focus should be the search term report. Dig in and negate any new, irrelevant keywords that are eating your budget. This is also the time to review bids on your top 20% of keywords and make small tweaks to either defend profitability or push for more visibility.
• Monthly Review (1-2 hours): Now it’s time for the strategic overview. How is your overall ACoS trending? Are certain product lines performing well while others lag behind? This is where you analyze broader campaign performance and make bigger decisions, like reallocating your budget or creating new campaigns for seasonal opportunities.

This steady rhythm helps you make small, informed adjustments over time, which is infinitely better than making huge, panicked changes when your sales suddenly tank.

Building a strong advertising presence goes beyond just PPC. For a broader perspective on how ads fit into your overall growth, explore our insights on building a complete Amazon digital marketing plan.

2. Diversify Your Ad Types

Many sellers get stuck in a Sponsored Products. While they’re the workhorse of Amazon PPC, relying on them exclusively is a huge missed opportunity and leaves you vulnerable. To build a truly resilient strategy, you need to engage shoppers at every single stage of their buying journey.

That’s where diversifying your ad types becomes important.

• Sponsored Brands: These top-of-search ads are phenomenal for building brand awareness and funneling traffic to your Storefront. Use them to target broader, category-level keywords to get your brand in front of new shoppers who are just beginning their search. A sharp, well-designed Sponsored Brands ad can make you stand out.
• Sponsored Display: This is your tool for bringing people back. It lets you retarget shoppers who checked out your product pages but didn’t buy. It’s a powerful way to stay top-of-mind and nudge interested buyers over the finish line. You can also get more proactive with Sponsored Display by using its audience targeting to reach shoppers based on their established interests and shopping habits.

When you use a mix of Sponsored Products, Brands, and Display, you’re creating a full-funnel strategy. This diversification acts as a buffer; if one ad type hits a slump, the others can carry the weight, ensuring you’re always connecting with customers from discovery to decision.

3. Seasonality and Market Trends

Your PPC strategy can’t live in a bubble. It has to adapt to seasonal demand and what your competitors are doing. The exact strategy that worked wonders in Q2 could be a total dud during the Q4 holiday season.

The key is to plan ahead. Look at the calendar and build your campaigns around major sales events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and other holidays that matter in your niche. That means prepping your budgets and bids in advance to grab your share of the increased traffic.

It also means keeping an eye on your competition. Are they launching new products? Getting aggressive with promotions? Tools like Amazon Brand Analytics are invaluable for monitoring what others are up to. If you see the market shifting, you have to be ready to adjust your own strategy, whether that’s defending your position or pivoting to a new opportunity. A static strategy is a weak one. A dynamic strategy is built to last.

Got Questions About Your Amazon PPC?

1. How long should I wait before deciding my PPC campaign isn’t working?

Patience is a virtue in PPC, up to a point. You need to give any new campaign, or one you’ve just tweaked, at least two to four weeks to gather enough data to tell a real story.

Performance can be unpredictable at first as Amazon’s algorithm figures out where your ads fit best. The key is to avoid knee-jerk reactions based on a bad day or two. What you’re looking for are consistent negative trends over that two-to-four-week window. If your ACoS is steadily climbing, your Click-Through Rate (CTR) is stubbornly low, or you’re just burning cash with zero sales day after day, that’s your cue to step in and start optimizing.

2. What is a good ACoS for Amazon PPC?

This is a common question, and the honest answer is: it depends. There’s no magic number. A “good” ACoS is completely tied to your product’s profit margin and your advertising goal.

While you’ll hear benchmarks like 25-30% thrown around, that’s just a general guideline.

The number that truly matters is your break-even ACoS. This is the point where your ad spend perfectly matches your profit margin on a sale. Anything below this number means you’re making money.

For instance, if your product sells for $50 and, after all costs, you have $15 in profit, your break-even ACoS is 30% ($15 profit / $50 price). An ACoS of 25% is great, you’re profitable. An ACoS of 40% means you’re losing money on every ad sale.

But context is everything. If you’re launching a new product, you might be fine with a much higher ACoS, perhaps 40-60%. You’re not aiming for profit; you’re investing in sales velocity and gathering those first crucial reviews. For a mature, profitable product, however, you’ll want to keep that ACoS comfortably below your break-even point.

3. Should I pause a campaign that’s performing poorly?

Hitting the pause button on an entire campaign should be your last resort. Before you consider pulling the plug, you need to dive in and optimize.

Here’s what to do:

1. Get into your Search Term Report. Be ruthless. Find every irrelevant, high-spend search term that hasn’t made a single sale and add it as a negative keyword. This step alone can often turn a failing campaign around.
2. Tweak your bids. Look at the individual keywords that are underperforming or have a sky-high ACoS. Don’t just pause them. Try lowering the bid first; sometimes a small adjustment is all it takes to bring them into a profitable zone.
3. Check the listing itself. Is the campaign really the problem? Or did a string of negative reviews just pop up? Did a competitor slash their price? Sometimes the ads are working fine, but something on your product page is killing your conversion rate.

If you’ve done all that and the campaign is still a money pit, then it’s time to consider pausing it. This frees up that budget to fuel your campaigns that are actually working.

4. When should I consider hiring a PPC agency?

You should start thinking about bringing in an agency when you hit one of two walls: you’re out of time, or you’re out of your depth.

It might be time to call in the experts if you find yourself saying:

• “I’ve tried all the standard fixes, but my ACoS is still out of control.”
• “My ad spend is now so high that a small mistake costs me thousands of dollars.”
• “I’m spending so much time buried in the ad console that I’m neglecting other critical parts of my business.”
• “I feel like I’ve maxed out what I can do. I don’t know the advanced strategies to scale from here without tanking my profits.”

A good agency doesn’t just save you time. They bring dedicated management, access to powerful software, and the kind of deep experience that only comes from navigating countless accounts in competitive markets.