How to Reduce ACoS on Amazon Without Losing Sales
The fastest way to reduce ACoS on Amazon is to stop paying for search terms that get clicks but no sales: review your search term report, add those terms as negative keywords, and move budget into exact-match campaigns for the terms that convert. After that, lower ACoS comes from bidding by placement, raising listing conversion rate, and setting targets per product from your break-even margin.
8 ways to lower ACoS
- Find the waste in your search term report. Sort the last 30–60 days by spend and look for terms with clicks and no orders. These are usually the biggest single source of high ACoS.
- Add negative keywords. Add irrelevant or non-converting terms as negative exact or negative phrase in the campaigns where they appear, so you stop paying for them.
- Separate match types. Keep exact, phrase, broad and auto targeting in separate campaigns. Then you can bid aggressively on proven terms and cautiously on discovery.
- Harvest winners into exact match. When an auto or broad search term converts well, add it to an exact-match campaign and negate it in the source campaign, so you control its bid directly.
- Bid by placement. Compare top of search, rest of search and product pages in the placement report. Raise the multiplier where conversion is strong and cut it where it isn't.
- Fix the listing before buying more traffic. A higher conversion rate lowers ACoS for every keyword at once. Check the main image, price against competitors, reviews and the first bullet.
- Set ACoS targets per product. Use each product's break-even ACoS (its margin before ads) instead of one target for the whole account. See ACoS vs TACoS.
- Check dayparting and budgets. If conversion drops at certain hours, lower bids then. Make sure your best campaigns aren't running out of budget while weaker ones keep spending.
What this looks like in a real account
A US supplements brand I took over had an ACoS of 125.4%: it spent $2,156.71 on ads for $1,719.69 in ad sales. In the first 30 days I restructured the account, separated match types, added proper negative keywords and launched single-keyword campaigns for selected terms. Ad spend dropped to $396.38, ad sales stayed at $1,719.71, and ACoS fell to 23.0%. (Full case study.)
For NewYork Cables, ACoS went from 20.65% to 13.46% in a month while ad sales grew 38%. Lower ACoS doesn't have to mean fewer sales.
Mistakes that make ACoS worse
- Cutting all bids across the board. It lowers spend on your best keywords too, so you lose sales and ranking along with the waste.
- Pausing campaigns without checking organic rank. Ads often support organic position. Watch TACoS and total sales, not just ACoS.
- Negating too broadly. A negative phrase match can block good searches. Check what a negative will catch before adding it.
- Judging too early. Amazon's attribution window means recent days are under-reported. Wait for a week or two of data before cutting a term.
Frequently asked questions
Remove search terms that spend without converting. Find them in the search term report and add them as negative keywords. In most underperforming accounts this cuts waste within days.
Not if you cut waste rather than cutting bids across the board. Removing non-converting spend can lower ACoS while ad sales stay the same or grow.
Removing obvious waste can show results within the first few weeks. Gains from restructuring and listing improvements build over one to three months.
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