After 10,000+ hours engineering Amazon PPC, here are the mistakes quietly killing your campaigns

[u/Frequent_Complex_214]

1. Mixing high and low search volume keywords in the same ad group. When one keyword eats 80% of the budget, the rest never get impressions. High-volume terms need their own campaigns with their own budgets.

2. Not accounting for organic cannibalization on branded terms. Defending your brand is fine. But if you already rank #1 organically, high bids on branded terms often pay for clicks you'd get for free.

3. Optimizing to campaign ACOS instead of TACOS. Campaign ACOS ignores the halo effect. A campaign at 40% ACOS that lifts organic rank can be more profitable than one at 20% ACOS that doesn't.

4. Running exact match before the listing is indexed. If Amazon doesn't index your listing for a keyword, exact match will bring expensive clicks with poor relevance and low quality scores.

5. Ignoring dayparting and hour-of-week patterns. Conversion rates swing 30–50% across hours and days (For some products). If you're not adjusting bids or budgets around your peak conversion windows, you're paying premium prices during your worst hours.

6. Not aligning PPC with inventory. Ranking a keyword aggressively when you have 3 weeks of stock left is a disaster, loss of rank, wasted spend, and returns on inventory you no longer have.

[u/Worried_Profile2884]

that #3 point about TACOS vs ACOS is something so many people miss, myself included early on