Amazon put your ads somewhere new. I checked what it cost.
PPC Monday, issue 1. .
On 10 August, Amazon started showing Sponsored Products ads inside creator content: reviews, buying guides and editorial pages from people in the Amazon Influencer Program.
Your campaigns were enrolled automatically. Same bids, same budgets, no opt-in step, no notification. Amazon's wording is that advertisers "do not need to take any action."
That has produced a lot of angry commentary over the last few weeks, and the anger is fair. Being enrolled in a new placement without being told is not how this should work.
But angry commentary is not a number. So I pulled the placement report on one of the accounts I manage to see what it actually cost.
What it actually cost
Thirty days, one account, roughly $1,400 in ad spend.
| Placement | Clicks | CPC | Conversion rate | ACOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top of search | 330 | $0.74 | 25.2% | 13% |
| Rest of search | 607 | $1.00 | 7.7% | 57% |
| Product pages | 466 | $1.15 | 8.6% | 57% |
| Off Amazon | 15 | $0.45 | 6.7% | 29% |
Off Amazon is 15 clicks out of 1,418. One percent of traffic. Six dollars and change out of fourteen hundred.
The clicks are less than half the price of anything else in the account. They convert slightly worse than product pages and rest of search, and because they are so much cheaper, the ACOS still lands better than both.
One account, 15 clicks, one order. That is not enough data to conclude anything, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is enough to say what this is not: it is not a quiet drain on your budget, and it is not something to panic about on a Monday morning.
What I would actually do
Check it, do not assume it. Twenty minutes.
- Pull the Sponsored Products Placement Report. Campaign Manager, Measurement and reporting, Sponsored ads reports. Report type: Placement. Last 30 days.
- Find the Off Amazon row. Look at two numbers: cost per click, and conversion rate. Then look at what share of total spend it represents.
- If it is a rounding error, as it was here, leave it alone and check again in a month.
- If it is meaningful spend and converting badly, open the campaign settings. Two options: "Increase reach", the default, which allows these placements, and "Limit off-Amazon spend", which restricts them. Change the campaigns it is hurting, not the whole account.
One thing worth knowing before you reach for negatives: negating a search term suppresses it off Amazon and on Amazon both. You cannot cut the off-Amazon version of a term and keep the on-Amazon one. Use the placement setting for that.
The actual lesson
Not "Amazon did something to you." Amazon changes defaults, that is what platforms do. The lesson is that the default was chosen by Amazon, for Amazon's reasons, and nobody sent you an email about it.
Put a reminder in your calendar to read your campaign settings every couple of months. Not because something is wrong today, but because the next change will arrive the same way this one did.
And when the next piece of alarming PPC news lands, pull your own report before you act on it. Your account is the only evidence that matters.
From the site
- How to read your Amazon search term report
- What ACOS means and what a good one looks like
- The free course, start to finish, no signup
Thomas, PPC Tools