Where Is Your Amazon PPC Budget Actually Going?
Most Amazon PPC reviews start with ACoS. That's a mistake. Before you look at ACoS, look at where your money is actually going.
Most Amazon PPC reviews start with ACoS. That's a mistake. Before you look at ACoS, look at where your money is actually going.
In almost every account we take over, a large share of ad spend ends up concentrated in a small number of campaigns and search terms. Sometimes ten percent of the campaigns are eating seventy percent of the budget. That's not necessarily a problem. But it's important to understand whether that concentrated spend is producing consistent results, or whether it's just consuming budget efficiently on the way to nowhere.
If you don't know where your budget concentrates, you can't optimize the account. You can only optimize campaigns one at a time, in the dark.
The four questions we ask every week
When we do a weekly PPC review on a client account, we start with the money.
Which campaigns are consuming the largest share of the budget?
Sort your campaigns by spend, descending. Look at the top five. In most accounts, those five will represent forty to seventy percent of total spend. If you don't know why those specific campaigns are eating the budget, that's the first thing to figure out. Sometimes it's your best converter. Sometimes it's a campaign that hasn't been touched in months.
Are your top-spend search terms producing steady orders, or mostly clicks?
Pull your search term report for the past thirty days. Sort by spend. The top ten search terms in almost every account tell you the truth about the account. If those search terms are converting at or below your target CPA, great. If they're converting well below the account average, you have a leak.
Are strong campaigns losing visibility because they run out of budget early?
Amazon's budget throttling is real. If a high-converting campaign runs out of daily budget by 2pm, you're leaving high-intent evening traffic on the table. Check your budget utilization on the campaigns that are converting well. If they're regularly at 95-100% by mid-day, they need more budget or better bid pacing.
Is most of the budget going to discovery, scaling, or defensive campaigns?
Discovery campaigns (broad match, auto campaigns) find new terms. Scaling campaigns (exact match on proven keywords) drive volume. Defensive campaigns (branded terms, category defense) protect what you have. A healthy account has all three, but the ratio matters. If ninety percent of your spend is on discovery, you're probably not scaling what's working. If ninety percent is on defense, you're not growing.
Why this matters more than fixing individual campaigns
You can optimize one campaign at a time forever and never move the needle if the account-level allocation is wrong. Understanding the shape of your spend gets you to leverage faster.
The accounts that grow steadily are the ones where the budget goes where the conversions are, and stays out of places where they aren't. The accounts that stall are the ones where the budget got locked into a structure that made sense two years ago and has been drifting ever since.
What to do this week
Pull your top five campaigns by spend and your top ten search terms by spend. Ask yourself for each: is this concentration justified by the results, or is it a habit? If you can't defend the spend with the numbers, you have your first optimization to make.