18 Top Amazon PPC Strategies for Success: An Ultimate Guide

Are your Amazon ad dollars driving real profit, or just disappearing? This guide goes beyond basic bidding. We’ll break down the best-of-the-best Amazon PPC strategies that professional sellers are using right now to lower their ACoS and achieve profitable, long-term growth.

The following Amazon PPC strategies represent a comprehensive toolkit for Amazon sellers aiming to achieve profitable growth through advertising. They range from foundational campaign structures to advanced, data-driven optimization techniques.

Here are 18 Amazon PPC strategies to help you grow your business in 2025.

The ‘Trifecta’ Campaign Structure

The ‘Trifecta’ is a core Amazon PPC strategy using three campaigns that work together. It helps you find new keywords and make them profitable. This system includes an Automatic campaign, a Broad Match campaign, and an Exact Match campaign. 

First, the Automatic campaign uses Amazon’s algorithm to discover new customer search terms for you. After about one to two weeks, you’ll look at the Search Term Report to see which searches led to sales. You then “harvest” these winning terms.

You move the best search terms into your Broad and Exact match campaigns. This gives you precise control over your bids and budget for keywords that you know work. This cycle of discovering, testing, and scaling keywords is key to managing your ads effectively.

Defensive & Offensive Brand Campaigns

This Amazon PPC strategy uses two types of campaigns to protect your brand and gain sales from competitors.

Defensive campaigns involve bidding on your own brand and product names. If you don’t, competitors will place their ads above your products when customers search for you. You can also use this to advertise your other products on your own product pages, which helps cross-sell and blocks competitor ads. For these campaigns, use fixed bids to help ensure you always show up at the top.

Offensive campaigns are about growth. You bid on your competitors’ brand names and place your ads on their product pages (ASINs). This lets you catch shoppers right when they are about to buy from a competitor, offering your product as a better choice.

Adjusting Bids for Prime Day & Big Events

Adjusting your Amazon PPC strategy for high-traffic events like Prime Day requires you to adjust your ad budget and bids. More shoppers mean more competition. Not increasing your budget can cause your ads to stop running early in the day, missing peak sales hours.

Here’s a simple plan:

• 1-2 Weeks Before: Increase your daily ad budgets by at least 2 to 3 times the normal amount. You can use Amazon’s budget rules to schedule this automatically.
• During the Event: Check your budgets every hour. Be ready to add more if needed. Increase bids on your best-performing keywords by 10-15% or more to stay competitive.
• After the Event: Look at your data to see what worked best. This is also a great time to use Sponsored Display ads to retarget shoppers who viewed your product but didn’t buy.

Using ASIN Targeting

ASIN targeting is a precise Amazon PPC strategy that lets you place your ads directly on specific product detail pages. This is a very precise way to target customers.

You can use it in two main ways. Competitor Poaching involves placing your ad on a direct competitor’s product page. This works well if your product has a better price, more features, or higher reviews. You capture customers at the very last step of their buying decision.

You can also use it for cross-selling by placing ads for your accessories on your main product’s page. For example, show an ad for your camera case on your camera’s product page. This helps increase the customer’s total order value.

Mining Negative Keywords & Harvesting Winners

This is a key Amazon PPC strategy for constantly improving your ad campaigns. It’s one of the most important routines for long-term success.

Negative Keyword Mining is about saving money. You regularly check your Search Term Reports to find irrelevant search terms that are triggering your ads and costing you money. Adding these as negative keywords stops your ad from showing for those searches, which directly improves your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS).

Keyword Harvesting is about making more money. You find the high-performing search terms from your discovery campaigns (like Auto or Broad) and move them into a performance campaign (like Exact Match). This gives you total control over bids for keywords that are proven to get sales.

Dayparting and Geo-Targeting

These advanced strategies focus on when and where your customers are shopping.

Dayparting means scheduling your ads to run only during certain hours of the day or days of the week. If you notice your product sells best on evenings and weekends, you can adjust your bids to be more aggressive during those times. This focuses your ad spend when customers are most likely to buy.

Geo-Targeting means showing your ads to customers in specific locations, like states or ZIP codes. This is useful for products with regional demand, like selling winter coats in colder states. Note that advanced dayparting often requires third-party software, while detailed geo-targeting is mainly a feature of Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP).

The Low-Bid “Catch-All” Campaign

This strategy uses a separate campaign to target a wide range of keywords with very low bids, often around $0.10 to $0.15 per click. The goal isn’t to drive a lot of sales directly. Instead, it acts as a low-cost safety net to capture extra sales from unexpected or long-tail keywords. Because the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is so low, any sales you get are usually very profitable.

This campaign also works as a wide-net research tool. It can help you uncover new keyword ideas that you can later move into your main performance campaigns. Set it up in its own campaign with a small daily budget and let it run.

Sponsored Brand Video Strategy

A robust Amazon PPC strategy incorporates Sponsored Brand Video ads. These ads appear in very visible spots in search results and grab a shopper’s attention better than a static image.

A good video shows your product in action and tells a story that makes you stand out. The main goal of the video is to get a curious shopper to click through to your product page, where your listing can complete the sale.

Keep your videos short, between 15-30 seconds. Design them to be understood with the sound off, using on-screen text. Make sure the first 3 seconds are engaging and show the product immediately.

The Two-Week Test-and-Scale Rule

This is a simple rule for testing new campaigns or keywords. Run any new test for two weeks before deciding to scale it, change it, or turn it off. This prevents you from making quick decisions based on just a day or two of data.

Here is the four-step process:

1. Launch: Start the new test campaign with a small daily budget (e.g., $10).
2. Monitor: For two weeks, check for any obviously bad keywords to make negative, but don’t make big changes.
3. Analyze: After two weeks, review the data to see how it performed.
4. Decide:
   • If it got clicks but no sales, pause it.
   • If it got sales but the ACoS is too high, optimize by lowering bids.
   • If it’s profitable, scale it by slowly increasing the budget and bids.

Using Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) Data STREAM

Utilizing Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) data is an advanced Amazon PPC strategy that gives you ad performance data every hour, instead of making you wait 24-48 hours. This near-real-time data allows for much faster optimization.

With hourly data, you can do things that are impossible with standard reports. You can automatically change bids during the most profitable hours of the day or get instant alerts about campaign performance. For example, you could automatically increase your budget if a campaign is doing well and is about to run out of money mid-day.

Using this strategy requires technical skills. You’ll need an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and the ability to work with the Amazon Ads API to process the data stream.

Optimizing Your Dynamic Bidding Strategy

Amazon gives you three automated bidding options. Choosing the right one helps you meet your campaign goal.

• Dynamic bids – down only: This is the safest choice for new or profit-focused campaigns. Amazon will only lower your bid if a click is less likely to lead to a sale. It helps you control costs.
• Dynamic bids – up and down: This is an aggressive strategy for growth. Amazon can increase your bid by up to 100% for top-of-search placements if a click is likely to convert. Use this for product launches or during big sales events.
• Fixed bids: Amazon uses your exact bid and never changes it. This gives you the most control and is perfect for brand defense campaigns where your goal is to always own the top ad spot for your brand name.

Optimizing Bids by Ad Placement

Your ad can appear in different places: Top of search, on Product pages, or in the Rest of search. Clicks from the top of the search are often more valuable. Placement bid adjustments let you bid more to win those better spots.

Here’s how to use this strategy correctly. 

First, run a campaign for at least two weeks with no placement adjustments. 

Then, go to the “Placements” tab in your campaign to check the performance data for each spot.

Only increase your bid for a placement that is already performing well. For example, if the “Top of search” placement has a great ACoS, you could add a +25% bid adjustment to win that spot more often. Avoid adding big adjustments without data, as this can quickly waste your budget.

Sponsored Display Retargeting

Retargeting is a powerful way to re-engage shoppers who have already shown interest in your product. It almost always results in a higher conversion rate than advertising to new customers.

There are two key audiences to target. Views Remarketing shows your ad to shoppers who viewed your product detail page in the last 7, 14, or 30 days but didn’t buy. This is a simple reminder to bring them back to your page.

Purchases Remarketing shows your ad to people who have bought from you in the past. This is great for products that people buy again, like supplements, or for cross-selling related items to your existing customers.

>>> Read more: Amazon Sponsored Display Ad: A Complete Guide to Boost Sales

Managing the Keyword Lifecycle

This Amazon PPC strategy matches your ad tactics to your product’s stage in the market: Launch, Growth, Maturity, or Decline. This ensures your ad goals are realistic for where your product is right now.

• Launch Stage: The goal is discovery. You use Auto and Broad campaigns with higher bids to find what works. A high ACoS is expected.
• Growth Stage: The goal is to scale up. You move winning keywords to Exact match campaigns to improve efficiency and lower your ACoS.
• Maturity Stage: The goal is profit and defense. You manage bids tightly in your Exact Match campaigns and protect your best keywords from competitors.
• Decline Stage: The goal is to sell remaining inventory. You use ads to drive traffic to your discounted product, and ACoS is less of a concern.

Portfolio Bidding Strategies

Portfolios in Amazon Ads help you group campaigns together to set a shared budget. You can also use a feature called Rule-Based Bidding for eligible campaigns.

This allows you to set a target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) for a group of campaigns. Amazon’s algorithm will then automatically adjust the bids on your keywords to try and hit that target. This automates a lot of the work of bid management and uses machine learning to optimize for your goal.

Targeting by Shopper Behavior

Sponsored Display Audiences let you target shoppers based on their general shopping habits, not just what they are searching for right now. This helps you introduce your brand to new customers.

Two key audience types are In-Market Audiences and Lifestyle Audiences. In-Market targets shoppers whose recent activity shows they are actively looking to buy in your category. Lifestyle targets shoppers based on their long-term interests, like “Fitness Enthusiasts” or “Eco-Friendly Shoppers.”

Product Variation & A/B Testing

A/B testing means systematically testing one change at a time to see what works best. This replaces guesswork with real data.

You can test different ad headlines, main images, or video clips to see which gets a better Click-Through Rate (CTR). You can also test different bidding strategies against each other. For products with variations like color or size, you can test putting all variations into a single ad. This combines all the reviews onto one ad, which can increase conversions.

To run a good A/B test, only change one thing at a time. Let the test run for at least 2-4 weeks to get enough data to make a reliable decision.

The “Catch-All” Auto Campaign

This is different from the auto campaign in the ‘Trifecta’ structure. A “Catch-All” Auto campaign runs with a very low bid (e.g., $0.10 or less) and targets a large group of your products.

This campaign acts as a low-cost safety net. It’s designed to pick up sales from very specific or unexpected search terms that you aren’t targeting in your other campaigns. Because the bids are so low, any sales it generates are usually very profitable. It’s a simple way to add to your overall sales with minimal cost.

What are the Benefits of a Structured Amazon PPC Strategy for Sellers?

A structured Amazon PPC strategy gives you control over your ad spend and turns advertising into a predictable way to grow your business. It provides clear data that shows what works, so you can stop guessing and start scaling profitably.

Control Your Ad Spend

A plan for your ads lets you see exactly where your money is going. You can test new keywords without messing up the campaigns that are already working. This structure makes it easy to find what works and quickly cut what doesn’t.

This control helps lower your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS). Your ACoS is the percentage of sales you spent on advertising to get those sales. It also raises your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), which measures the revenue you earn for every dollar you put into ads.

Boost Your Total Sales

A smart ad strategy does more than just get sales from clicks. It helps boost your organic sales, too. This is tracked with a metric called Total Advertising Cost of Sales (TACoS), which measures your ad spend against all your sales, both paid and organic.

The main goal is for your TACoS to go down over time. This is a powerful signal that your ads are successfully improving your product’s organic rank. A higher organic rank leads to more sales that you don’t have to pay for directly.

Reach More Shoppers

Shoppers search in different ways. Some are just browsing, while others are ready to buy now. A structured plan lets you reach all of them. With nearly two-thirds of U.S. product searches starting on Amazon in 2025, being visible at every step is crucial.

You can use broader ad campaigns for people just starting their search. For shoppers who are ready to purchase, you can use very specific ads that target exact keywords or even competitor product pages. This full coverage helps you capture more market share.

Learn What Customers Want

Think of your ad campaigns as a research tool. A structured approach gives you clean data, showing the precise words and phrases customers use to find and buy your products. This information is incredibly valuable.

This data isn’t just for improving ads. You can use these exact keywords in your product title, bullet points, and description. This practice, known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), helps more customers find your product organically. It turns your ad spend into powerful market knowledge.

FAQs about Amazon PPC Strategy