20+ Actionable Amazon Advertising Tips That Actually Work in 2025

Amazon advertising has entered a new era. Rising CPCs, shifting algorithms, and AI-powered competition have changed what it takes to win organic ranks and profit. The brands dominating 2025 aren’t throwing money at Sponsored Products only.

This guide breaks down 20+ proven tactics that leading advertisers are using right now to drive sales, lower ACoS, and scale smarter.

These strategies are for sellers who are serious about turning their ad spend into a predictable profit engine. For those aiming to truly learn PPC on Amazon, combining these tips with a solid campaign strategy can create a powerful growth loop.

Let’s start building campaigns that actually move the needle on your sales and organic rank. It’s time to fix what’s broken and make every ad dollar count.

1. Structured PPC Campaigns from Day One

A common mistake new advertisers make is dumping all their keywords into a single campaign. This quickly becomes an expensive, disorganized mess, making it almost impossible to see what’s working and what’s just wasting money. One of the most effective amazon advertising tips is to implement a structured, tiered campaign setup from the very beginning.

This strategy, often called the “waterfall method,” involves creating separate campaigns with clear goals.

The basic setup involves three campaign types, each feeding into the next:

1. Automatic Campaign (Discovery): This is your research tool. Amazon’s algorithm automatically targets keywords and products relevant to your listing. Your goal here is purely data collection, not immediate profit. Keep the budget low.
2. Manual Broad/Phrase Match Campaign (Testing): Once you find converting search terms in your auto campaign’s search term report, move them here as broad or phrase match keywords. This lets you test their performance with more control than an auto campaign.
3. Manual Exact Match Campaign (Performance): This is where your top-performing keywords live. After a keyword proves itself in the testing campaign, you move it here as an exact match. You can confidently set higher, more aggressive bids because you know these specific search terms drive sales.

By separating campaigns this way, you ensure your budget is precisely controlled. High-performing exact match keywords get the investment they deserve, while your speculative spend in auto campaigns remains low and managed. You can learn more about setting up an effective Amazon PPC campaign structure on ecombrainly.com.

2. Optimize Your Bid Strategy

Setting your bids too high can drain your budget with expensive, low-converting clicks. Setting them too low means your ads never get seen. Strategic bid management is one of the most important amazon advertising tips for balancing visibility with profitability, making sure your ads appear in valuable placements without killing your profit margins.

Effective bid optimization is more than just picking a number. It means choosing the right bidding strategy for each campaign’s goal, adjusting bids based on performance, and using placement modifiers to target high-value ad spots. This turns your bidding from a guessing game into a calculated, data-driven process.

A smart approach to bidding involves starting with control and gradually introducing automation as you gather data. Here’s a practical way to manage your bids:

1. Start with Manual Bidding: Begin with “Fixed Bids” or “Dynamic Bids – Down Only” to prevent Amazon from overspending while you learn how keywords perform. This gives you a clear baseline for cost-per-click (CPC) and conversion rates.
2. Analyze and Adjust Weekly: For the first 30 days of a campaign, review your search term and placement reports weekly. Identify keywords with a good Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) and increase their bids slightly to gain more impressions.
3. Use Placement Modifiers: If you find that “Top of Search” placements convert at a higher rate, use bid adjustments to increase your bids by a percentage (e.g., 25%) for that specific spot. This focuses your spend where it gets the best results.

Bid optimization isn’t a “set it and forget it” task. It’s an ongoing cycle of analysis and adjustment. By regularly refining your bids based on real performance data, you ensure your ad spend is always working efficiently.

This active management prevents wasted ad spend on underperforming keywords and placements. It also allows you to double down on what’s working, systematically improving your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) over time. For more on this, check out this info on Amazon ads management.

3. Optimize Your Product Listing First

Running ads to a poorly optimized product listing is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. You can spend a fortune on clicks, but if the page doesn’t convince shoppers to buy, your ad spend is wasted. One of the most important amazon advertising tips is to treat your product detail page as the final, and most important, step in your sales funnel.

A well-optimized listing directly improves your ad performance by increasing your conversion rate. This lowers your ACoS and increases your ROAS. For a clear guide to Amazon PPC success, it helps to start by understanding what ACoS stands for.

Your listing must answer customer questions and build trust. This involves a mix of high-quality visuals, persuasive copy, and brand storytelling through A+ Content.

1. High-Quality Visuals: Your main image must be perfect, but your secondary images sell the product. Use lifestyle photos showing the product in use, infographics that highlight key features, and images that include size references to manage customer expectations.
2. Persuasive Copy: Your title, bullet points, and description should be keyword-rich yet easy for a human to read. Focus on benefits, not just features. Use bullet points to address the top three problems your product solves for a customer.
3. A+ Content (Enhanced Brand Content): For brand-registered sellers, A+ Content is your chance to build a brand, not just sell a product. Use comparison charts, brand story modules, and detailed feature callouts to create a better experience. This is especially effective for electronics or beauty brands using before-and-after images.

By investing time in your listing, you make every ad dollar work harder. A higher conversion rate means you can afford to bid more competitively for top ad placements, creating a powerful growth cycle. You can learn more by reviewing Amazon’s image requirements and best practices.

4. Aggressively Use Negative Keywords

Paying for clicks that never convert is one of the fastest ways to drain your ad budget. A critical amazon advertising tip is to strategically use negative keywords. This tactic stops your ads from showing up for irrelevant or low-intent searches, ensuring your money is spent only on shoppers who are genuinely interested in what you sell.

Think of negative keywords as a filter for your ad spend. By telling Amazon which search terms not to target, you stop wasting money on clicks from unqualified buyers. For instance, if you sell premium leather boots, you would add words like ‘cheap,’ ‘discount,’ and ‘vegan’ as negatives to filter out shoppers with the wrong intent. This directly lowers your ACoS and improves campaign efficiency.

Adding negative keywords isn’t a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process of refinement based on real customer data. Here’s a simple, effective approach:

1. Review Your Search Term Report Weekly: Download the search term report from your automatic and manual campaigns. This report shows you the exact search terms customers used before clicking your ad.
2. Find Irrelevant Terms: Look for search terms that are completely unrelated, suggest a search for a cheaper product, or mention features your product doesn’t have. If you sell an espresso machine for home use, a search term like ‘commercial barista machine’ is a perfect candidate for a negative keyword.
3. Add Negative Keywords: Add these irrelevant terms as either negative exact or negative phrase match keywords. Using negative phrase match (e.g., “for men”) is often more efficient as it blocks any search containing that specific phrase.

A disciplined negative keyword strategy turns your PPC campaigns from a broad net into a precision tool. You actively guide Amazon’s algorithm to focus on your most profitable audience, preventing budget waste before it happens.

This process is a core part of optimizing any campaign. By consistently pruning irrelevant search terms, you ensure your budget is concentrated on keywords that drive sales, not just clicks. This level of control is fundamental to building a profitable ad system. You can read more about how this fits into a larger strategy by checking out this guide on effective campaign management on ecombrainly.com.

5. Use Sponsored Brands for Top-of-Search Visibility

While Sponsored Products campaigns are great for capturing ready-to-buy shoppers, ignoring brand awareness is a costly mistake. Sponsored Brands campaigns are a powerful tool for building brand recognition and showing your product line to shoppers at the very top of the search results. An impactful amazon advertising tip is to dedicate a portion of your budget to this high-visibility ad type.

These campaigns appear as a banner with your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products or a video. They are great for telling a brand story, driving traffic to your Amazon Storefront, and grabbing shoppers’ attention before they scroll down to competitor listings.

Effective Sponsored Brands campaigns need a different mindset than conversion-focused product ads. Your goal here is brand building and audience engagement.

1. Creative is Everything: Your ad creative, including your logo, headline, and product selection, is your first impression. Use a high-resolution logo and a compelling headline that communicates your value, like “Durable Outdoor Gear Built for Adventure.”
2. Use Strategic Landing Pages: Don’t just send traffic to a generic product page. Link your ad to a well-designed Amazon Storefront page that showcases your best-sellers or a specific product category. A gaming peripheral brand could link to a “Pro-Level Keyboards” sub-page instead of their main store.
3. Test and Optimize: Create two or three variations of your ad creative. Test different headlines, product combinations, or custom images to see what resonates most with your audience. A/B testing is crucial for these top-of-funnel campaigns.

Sponsored Brands ads aren’t just for sales; they’re for building brand equity on Amazon. By targeting competitor keywords, you can position your brand directly in front of their customers. Reserve 15-20% of your total ad budget for these brand-building efforts.

6. Retarget Shoppers with Sponsored Display

Many shoppers browse and leave without buying. Sponsored Display ads are your tool to bring those high-intent visitors back to your product page. This ad type goes beyond Amazon’s search results, reaching audiences on and off Amazon to re-engage potential customers who have already shown interest.

This is one of the most underutilized amazon advertising tips because it moves beyond keyword targeting into audience targeting. Instead of bidding on what someone types, you’re targeting the person themselves based on their recent shopping behavior.

Sponsored Display offers several targeting options, but its real power is in retargeting views. This approach focuses your ad spend on shoppers who viewed your product but didn’t buy.

Here’s how to set it up for maximum impact:

1. Views Remarketing: Create a campaign specifically targeting audiences who have viewed your product’s detail page. This is your core retargeting group.
2. Set a Lookback Window: For most products, a 14 to 30-day window is effective. This gives shoppers enough time to consider their purchase without causing ad fatigue.
3. Start with Lower Bids: Sponsored Display CPCs are often lower than Sponsored Products. Begin with bids around 50-60% of your average Sponsored Products CPC and adjust based on performance.
4. Keep Campaigns Separate: Don’t mix your retargeting audiences with prospecting audiences (like “Interests”) in the same campaign. Keep them separate to control budgets and analyze performance clearly.

By allocating just 10-15% of your total ad budget to these campaigns, you can create a powerful system that complements your keyword-focused efforts.

7. Know Your Target ACoS and TACOS

Pouring money into ads without tracking your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) is like driving with your eyes closed. You need to obsessively monitor your ACoS, the primary metric that tells you if your campaigns are making money.

ACoS is the percentage of attributed sales spent on advertising. A lower ACoS means higher profitability. Regular analysis helps you spot inefficient campaigns and keywords before they drain your budget. But don’t stop there. Also track your Total Advertising Cost of Sales (TACOS), which measures ad spend against your total sales (ad-driven and organic). TACOS shows if your ads are successfully lifting your overall sales, which is the ultimate goal.

Your goal is to keep your ACoS at or below your target ACoS, which is calculated based on your profit margin.

1. Calculate Your Target ACoS: First, determine your break-even ACoS, which is your pre-ad profit margin. If your product sells for $50 and your total cost is $35, your profit is $15. Your break-even ACoS is ($15 / $50) = 30%. To be profitable, your ACoS must be below 30%. A good target might be 20-25%.
2. Set Different Targets for Different Goals: A single ACoS target doesn’t fit all situations. A new product launch might have a high target ACoS (e.g., 40-50%) to gain visibility, while a mature product campaign should have a much lower, profit-focused target (e.g., under 20%).
3. Review and Optimize Regularly: Check your ACoS daily for new campaigns. For established ones, a weekly review is fine. If a campaign’s ACoS is running high, it’s time to pause and diagnose the problem. Shift budget away from high-ACoS campaigns and into your profitable winners.

ACoS is a lever. By controlling it, you turn advertising from a cost center into a predictable profit engine. You make data-driven decisions instead of guessing where your ad spend should go.

Consistently managing your ACoS ensures every dollar you spend is working toward your business goals. You can learn more about how to calculate and manage your target ACoS on ecombrainly.com.

8. Run Rigorous A/B Tests

Guesswork is the enemy of profitable advertising. Relying on intuition to choose keywords, bids, or ad copy is a fast way to burn through your budget. A crucial amazon advertising tip is to implement a systematic A/B testing methodology, which replaces assumptions with hard data.

This involves creating two variations of a single campaign element (like a headline or main image) and showing them to similar audiences to see which one performs better. By isolating one variable at a time, you can definitively identify what drives higher click-through rates, better conversion rates, and a lower ACoS.

Systematic testing allows you to make small improvements that compound over time. The key is to be methodical and patient.

1. Isolate One Variable: The golden rule of A/B testing is to test only one element at a time. If you change both the main image and the headline, you won’t know which change caused the performance shift. Test keywords, bids, product images, or bullet point copy one by one.
2. Run Tests for a Sufficient Period: Don’t jump to conclusions after a day or two. Run each test for at least 7-14 days to account for variations in shopper behavior. Ensure each variant gets enough clicks to gather a statistically significant data sample.
3. Prioritize High-Impact Elements: Start by testing the elements that have the biggest potential impact. For example, your main product image has a huge effect on click-through rate. Test keywords and images first, then move to copy.

9. Plan Seasonal and Promotional Campaigns

Failing to adjust your ad strategy for peak seasons like Prime Day or Q4 is a huge missed opportunity. A critical amazon advertising tip is to treat seasonal events not as a surprise but as a predictable surge you must prepare for in advance. These high-traffic periods can generate a significant portion of your annual revenue, but only if you have a dedicated plan.

A seasonal strategy involves much more than just increasing your budget. It requires a coordinated effort across bidding, ad creative, and inventory management. The goal is to capture heightened buyer intent by being more visible when millions of shoppers are actively looking to buy.

Your preparation should begin months, not days, before a major sales event. A well-timed plan allows you to build momentum.

1. Plan Early (60-90 Days Out): Start planning at least two months in advance. This gives you time to analyze past performance, identify top products, do seasonal keyword research, and create event-specific ad copy.
2. Ramp Up Gradually (2-4 Weeks Out): Begin increasing bids and budgets slightly in the weeks leading up to the event. This helps your campaigns gain traction and “warm up” Amazon’s algorithm, improving your ad placement when the main event starts. For example, raise bids by 10-30% two weeks before.
3. Execute Aggressively (During Event): During the peak period (e.g., Prime Day, Black Friday weekend), your campaigns should be fully funded and optimized. Monitor performance closely, using dayparting to bid higher during peak shopping hours like 6-10 PM. Be ready to adjust budgets and bids in real time.

10. Use Amazon Attribution for Off-Amazon Traffic

Siloing your Amazon ads from your other marketing channels means you’re not seeing the full picture. A customer might see a Sponsored Display ad, get an email reminder, and then search for your brand on Google before buying. One of the more advanced amazon advertising tips is to implement a cross-channel attribution model that accurately measures how all your touchpoints contribute to a final sale.

This approach moves beyond last-click attribution, which only credits the final ad a customer clicked. Amazon Attribution is a free tool that helps you see how your external marketing efforts (Google ads, social media, influencer marketing) impact your sales on Amazon.

Connecting the dots between platforms requires a strategic setup. Here’s a practical approach:

1. Track Off-Amazon Traffic to Amazon: Use Amazon Attribution to create unique tracking URLs for your external marketing channels like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or email newsletters. This allows you to see exactly which external sources are driving sales on your Amazon listings.
2. Monitor View-Through Conversions: For Sponsored Display ads, pay close attention to view-through conversions. These are sales that happen after a customer sees your ad but doesn’t click it. This metric shows the ad’s influence on brand recall.
3. Analyze Halo and Assisted Sales: Measure the “halo effect” where running ads for one product lifts organic sales for your entire brand catalog. Also, track assisted conversions, where an Amazon ad was one of several touchpoints in the journey.

11. Use ASIN Targeting to Defend and Attack

ASIN targeting is a core Amazon PPC tactic for both protection and competition.

• Defend your listings by targeting your own ASINs through Sponsored Products or Sponsored Display ads to cross-sell or upsell related products.
• Attack competitor ASINs with weaker reviews or higher prices to capture their traffic.
• Monitor ACoS and CVR regularly to optimize bids and placements for each target.

12. Use the Search Query Performance Dashboard

Amazon Brand Analytics provides the Search Query Performance dashboard to uncover keyword and performance gaps.

• Identify search queries with high impression share but low clicks to improve ad creative and ad relevance.
• Add underperforming yet high-intent queries into manual targeting campaigns for better control.
• Track conversion rate and ROAS to evaluate which search terms drive the most attributed sales.

13. Create Video Ads

Sponsored Brands Video campaigns can boost CTR and engagement across search results.

• Keep the video under 30 seconds and highlight the product’s core benefit early.
• Use clear branding and real product demonstrations for credibility.
• Add captions for mobile viewers who watch without sound.
• Direct traffic to your Brand Store or best-selling ASIN to maximize conversions.

14. Daypart Your Ads

Ad scheduling, or dayparting, helps control ad spend and increase campaign efficiency.

• Review hourly performance data in your Amazon Advertising Console.
• Increase bids during your peak conversion hours and reduce them during low-performing periods.
• Combine dayparting with dynamic bidding for real-time bid adjustments.
• Run A/B tests to validate which time slots improve ACoS and ROI.

15. Use Portfolio Budgets

Portfolio budgets improve budget allocation and simplify campaign management.

• Group campaigns by brand, product line, or goal (e.g., awareness or conversions).
• Assign monthly or seasonal caps to maintain spending control.
• Analyze ad performance across the entire portfolio to reallocate budget toward top-performing campaigns.

16. Harvest Keywords from Multiple Sources

Keyword research drives every profitable Pay-Per-Click campaign.

• Use tools like Amazon Brand Analytics, Helium 10, and Jungle Scout to find high-volume and long-tail keywords.
• Review your search term report weekly for fresh keyword ideas.
• Analyze competitor listings, customer Q&A, and reviews for buyer language.
• Add strong keywords to manual campaigns and use negative keywords to eliminate poor performers.
• Continuously refine match types to balance traffic and ACoS.

17. Don’t Ignore Your Search Term Report

Your search term report is essential for ongoing campaign optimization.

• Identify converting queries and add them as exact match keywords.
• Negate irrelevant search terms that waste ad spend.
• Adjust bids for top-performing keywords to maintain profitable ACoS.
• Track impression trends to uncover new opportunities and prevent performance drops.

18. Align Ad Spend with Inventory

Linking advertising activity to stock levels prevents wasted spend and lost sales velocity.

• Pause ads for products with limited inventory or upcoming restocks.
• Redirect budget to fully stocked items with stable sales history.
• Use campaign budget rules to automatically adjust spend based on product availability.
• Monitor sell-through rates and align ad performance goals with inventory turnover.

19. Use a “Rinse and Repeat” Launch Method

A structured, iterative approach helps new products scale efficiently.

• Start with one automatic campaign and one manual campaign using phrase and broad match keywords.
• Analyze the search term report after 10–14 days to identify profitable search queries.
• Move winning terms to exact match, add negatives for irrelevant ones, and optimize bids.
• Repeat this process every two weeks to maintain consistent performance and lower ACoS.
• Scale budgets once conversion rate and organic ranking improve.

20. Optimize for Mobile

Since most Amazon traffic comes from mobile users, your ads and listings must be mobile-friendly.

• Ensure product titles (first 70 characters) and images are clean, bold, and readable on small screens.
• Create seperate mobile versions of Premium A+ content modules.
• Optimize ad creative to capture attention quickly within mobile search results.

21. Test Sponsored Display Audiences

Sponsored Display campaigns expand reach beyond search through advanced audience targeting.

• Test in-market, lifestyle, and remarketing audiences to find the best fit for your category.
• Use Amazon DSP data to refine custom audiences and increase new-to-brand sales.
• Segment audiences by purchase intent and adjust bids based on performance metrics.
• Monitor CTR and CPA closely to balance reach and efficiency.
• Combine Sponsored Display with Sponsored Products for full-funnel coverage.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a good ACoS for Amazon PPC?
There’s no single “good” ACoS. It depends entirely on your profit margins. A good starting point is to calculate your break-even ACoS (your profit margin before ad spend). A profitable ACoS will be anything below that number. For a product launch, a high ACoS (even above break-even) can be acceptable to drive initial sales and reviews. For a mature product, you’ll want it to be well below your break-even point.

How long does it take for Amazon ads to become profitable?
It typically takes 2-3 months for a new ad account to become consistently profitable. The first month is about data collection (finding what works and what doesn’t). The second month is about initial optimization (adding negative keywords, adjusting bids). By the third month, you should have a refined set of high-performing keywords and a more stable, profitable ACoS.

Should I use automatic or manual campaigns?
You should use both. They serve different purposes. Automatic campaigns are for discovering new, high-converting customer search terms. Manual campaigns are for controlling your spend and bidding aggressively on the proven keywords you discovered through your auto campaigns and other research.

How much should I spend on Amazon ads?
A common starting point is to allocate 10% of your total revenue to ad spend. For a new product launch, you may need to invest more heavily (20-25% of expected revenue) to gain initial momentum. Once your products are established, you can adjust the budget based on your profitability goals and TACOS.

How do I find keywords for my Amazon PPC campaigns?
Start with your automatic campaign’s Search Term Report—it’s the best source of real customer search terms. Also, use keyword research tools like Helium 10’s Cerebro to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for. Finally, look at customer reviews and questions on your own listings and competitor listings to understand the language and problems shoppers have.