Amazon PPC Advertising: Ad Types, Costs and Where to Start

TL;DR: Amazon PPC advertising means paying per click to show your products in Amazon search results and on product pages. Most brands start with Sponsored Products, add Sponsored Brands once they have Brand Registry, and use display ads for retargeting. Across 38 US accounts we manage, the median click cost $1.07 in the first half of 2026, at a 38% ACoS and 15% TACoS.

Most sellers who search for this already know Amazon sells ads. What they want to know is which ads to buy, what a click really costs, and how to keep the spend from running away. This page answers those three questions with numbers from accounts we run at SellerPlex and from Amazon’s own product pages.

What is Amazon PPC advertising?

Amazon PPC advertising is Amazon’s auction for ad placements, where you pay only when a shopper clicks. You choose keywords or products to target, set a maximum bid, and Amazon decides whose ad shows based on bid and relevance.

According to Amazon’s Sponsored Products page, there are no monthly or upfront fees. The more competitive your bid, the more likely your ad shows when it matches a shopper’s query. Professional sellers, vendors and KDP authors can advertise. Used, refurbished and adult products cannot.

The auction model has one consequence people underestimate. Your cost is set by the other brands bidding on the same terms, so it moves every month whether you change anything or not.

Which Amazon ad type should you run first?

Start with Sponsored Products, because it sells the exact product a shopper searched for. The other two formats build on it. Here is how the three compare on the points that decide where your first dollar goes.

	Sponsored Products	Sponsored Brands	Display ads (formerly Sponsored Display)
What it promotes	One product listing	Your brand, several products or a Store	A product, shown to audiences on and off Amazon
Where it shows	Search results and product pages	Top of search results and product pages	Amazon pages, Twitch, Fire TV, Echo Show and other sites
How you pay	Cost per click	Cost per click, cost per 1,000 viewable impressions, or a fixed reserved price	Set in the Amazon display ads console
Brand Registry needed	No	Yes	Check your account’s eligibility
Best job	Sales from shoppers ready to buy	New customers and brand searches	Bringing back people who viewed and left

Sponsored Products: the workhorse

Sponsored Products ads look almost like organic listings, which is why they convert. In our managed accounts they carry most of the budget for nearly every brand we onboard.

Amazon reports that video in Sponsored Products campaigns lifted click-through rate by 67% and conversion rate by 9% compared with campaigns without video. New sellers can also earn up to $1,000 in ad credits if they launch and spend on Sponsored Products within 30 days of their first campaign. Both figures come from Amazon’s own page, so treat them as Amazon’s averages rather than a promise for your category.

Sponsored Brands: once you own the brand

The Sponsored Brands page lists three formats: video, static image and collection ads that link to your Brand Store. You need to be enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.

You can pay per click, per 1,000 viewable impressions, or a fixed upfront price to reserve a share of top-of-search placements. That reserved option needs a spend commitment, while the click and impression models have no minimum. We usually add Sponsored Brands once Sponsored Products has shown which search terms convert, so the headline and products match proven demand.

Display ads: the retargeting layer

Amazon has folded Sponsored Display into its wider display ads offering, as its display ads page now explains. Existing campaigns keep running, and new ones are created in the updated console. Placements now reach Twitch, Fire TV, Echo Show and premium sites outside Amazon.

For most sellers under $20K a month in ad spend, display is a small retargeting budget at best. For larger brands that want reach beyond search, our comparison of Amazon DSP and sponsored ads covers when programmatic buying earns its place.

How much does Amazon PPC advertising cost?

A click on Amazon cost a median of $1.07 in the first half of 2026, based on 38 US accounts SellerPlex manages. Those accounts spent about $5.2 million on ads and drove $17.6 million in ad-attributed sales over the six months.

The middle half of accounts paid between $0.75 and $1.85 per click. Where you land depends mostly on how many brands bid on your category’s search terms.

Clicks also got more expensive through the year. The median CPC rose from $0.99 in January to $1.36 in June, a 37% climb in six months. If your budget stayed flat, you bought roughly a quarter fewer clicks by summer.

What the money buys

Here is what the median account in our Amazon PPC benchmarks achieved:

• ACoS of 38%, with the middle half between 25% and 53%
• TACoS of 15%, meaning ads cost 15 cents for every dollar of total sales
• ROAS of 2.6
• Click-through rate of 0.59% and conversion rate of 8.3%
• Ads drove 41% of total sales

Monthly ad spend ranged widely. The 10th percentile spent $1,500 a month, the median $6,500 and the 90th percentile $47,000. So there is no single right budget, only a right budget for your margin and your stage.

Working out your own break-even

Your break-even ACoS is your profit margin before ad spend. A product with a $30 price and $12 of margin after fees and landed cost breaks even at 40% ACoS. Run above that and every ad sale loses money, unless you are deliberately buying rank on a launch.

Set targets per product. One blended ACoS goal across a catalog with different margins will scale your least profitable SKU, which is one of the quiet ways ad budget leaks in accounts we audit.

How should you structure your first campaigns?

Separate discovery from proven terms so you can bid on each with its own logic. A simple setup that works for most catalogs:

1. Auto campaign per product group. Low bids, broad reach. Its only job is to find search terms you would not have guessed.
2. Broad and phrase campaign. Your researched keywords, at moderate bids, to test which ones convert.
3. Exact match campaign. Terms that have already converted move here with higher bids and their own budget.
4. Product targeting campaign. Ads on competitor and complementary product pages where your price and reviews hold up.

Every week, harvest converting search terms into exact match and add them as negatives in the discovery campaigns. Add non-converting terms as negatives too, once they have had enough clicks to judge. On a $6,500 monthly budget, that weekly review is usually worth more than any bid change.

Where Amazon PPC goes wrong

The same handful of problems shows up in almost every account we take over. None of them is exotic.

Advertising a listing that does not convert

Ads send traffic. They do not fix a weak main image, thin bullets or a 3.6 star rating. If a product converts below 5.4% from ads, the bottom quarter of our benchmark accounts, look at the listing before you touch the bids. Our guide to Amazon product listing optimization is the place to start.

Spending into a stockout

Pushing budget on a product with three weeks of stock left wins rank you will lose the day it goes out of stock. Ad plans should read the inventory plan, which is why our PPC team works alongside our supply chain team.

Reading ACoS on its own

ACoS only counts ad sales. A launch campaign can run at 70% ACoS while organic rank climbs and TACoS falls. Watch TACoS and total sales next to ACoS, every week.

Letting automation run unchecked

Rule-based bidding is useful arithmetic. It still optimizes toward whatever target you set, so a wrong target gets scaled efficiently.

Is Amazon PPC advertising worth it?

For most sellers, yes, because ads drove 41% of sales in the median account we manage and organic rank on Amazon follows sales velocity. The real question is whether your margins can carry the cost of a click.

Take a $25 product with a 15% margin: it earns $3.75 per sale, so at a $1.36 click it needs a conversion rate above 36% just to break even. The same product at a 40% margin earns $10 per sale and breaks even at 13.6%. Run the break-even math before you scale, and pause products that cannot pass it.

If you want help with this

SellerPlex has managed more than $4M in Amazon ad spend, and AdLabs ranked us the highest ROAS agency of 2025 across every agency on its platform. Our Amazon PPC management team runs Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display and DSP campaigns, with daily bid work and a weekly report on spend, sales, ACoS and what changed.

You keep full access to your ad account. The first month follows a set plan: strategy call, full account audit, restructure plan, rebuild with negatives, daily optimization, then the first report.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Amazon PPC advertising work?

You pick keywords or products to target and set a maximum bid per click. When a shopper searches, Amazon runs an auction and shows the ads with the best mix of bid and relevance. You pay only when someone clicks, and there are no monthly or upfront fees for Sponsored Products.

How much should I spend on Amazon PPC per month?

Start from your margin. Across 38 accounts we manage, the median spent $6,500 a month, with the 10th percentile at $1,500 and the 90th at $47,000. Whatever you start with, scale only the search terms that sell inside your break-even ACoS.

What is a good ACoS on Amazon?

A good ACoS sits below your profit margin before ad spend. The median in our managed accounts was 38% in the first half of 2026, with the middle half between 25% and 53%. Launches can run higher on purpose. Judge the account on TACoS too, where the median was 15%.

Do I need Brand Registry for Amazon ads?

Not for Sponsored Products, which any professional seller can run on eligible products. Sponsored Brands needs Amazon Brand Registry, because the ads feature your logo, headline and Brand Store. If you own your trademark, enrolling opens video ads, Stores and better protection for your listings as well.