[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":183},["ShallowReactive",2],{"team-member-nikolai-melnyk-en":3,"case-study-highlights-3-en":16,"reviews-all-all-home-en":64,"blog-highlights-en":119},{"id":4,"slug":5,"name":6,"image":7,"is_enabled":8,"show_on_team":8,"sort_order":9,"last_modify":10,"locale_code":11,"role":12,"bio":13,"meta_title":14,"meta_description":15},"01f442f3-a563-4c90-99f8-796feecb2b74","nikolai-melnyk","Nikolai Melnyk","team\u002Fnikolai-melnyk-1785510746756.webp",true,1,"2026-08-14","en","Founder & CEO","Nikolai Melnyk has been inside Amazon advertising since 2014 — long before \"Amazon PPC\" was a job title. He started with the first private-label brands and grew alongside the platform, launching and scaling **100+ products** across dozens of categories. Every campaign type, every report, every algorithm shift — he's worked through them in real accounts, with real budgets on the line.\n\nHe doesn't run ads in a vacuum. Nikolai reads a brand end to end — margins, catalog, logistics, conversion — so every PPC decision serves the business, not just a dashboard metric. His clients hear *\"we grew your profit by 15%,\"* not *\"we cut ACoS to 20%.\"* Advertising is a lever on the P&L, and he treats it that way.\n\nHis model is partnership, not billable hours. *\"I don't sell hours — I join your team.\"* He builds long-term relationships where his incentives are tied to the brand's growth, shares data openly, and turns down projects when the values don't match — because trust, not a contract, is what produces the result.\n\nWhere others chase formulas and quick wins, Nikolai looks for the logic that actually moves the numbers. Systems over chaos, clarity over noise, sustainable growth over spikes. He'd rather do fewer things better than spread a budget thin chasing every trend.\n\nAnd he's not a one-man show. A vetted PPC team with proven processes stands behind him, so clients get first-person expertise with the care of a boutique agency — and the reliability of a company that doesn't disappear when things get busy.\n\nHe's on a mission to prove that good products shouldn't lose on Amazon because of mediocre marketing — and to help ambitious brands compete with far bigger players through smarter, data-driven advertising.","Nikolai Melnyk, Founder and Amazon Expert","Meet Nikolai Melnyk, founder and CEO of Scaling Peak — 10+ years in Amazon advertising, 100+ product launches and a partner-first approach to growth.",[17,36,50],{"id":18,"slug":19,"cover_image":20,"brand_name":21,"is_anonymized":22,"niche":23,"period_months":24,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":9,"last_modify":10,"created_at":25,"updated_at":26,"locale_code":11,"title":27,"headline_metric":28,"summary":29,"meta_title":30,"meta_description":31,"service_ids":32},"0fab6b56-d943-41e4-8de3-a82447d4ed80","bubbly-belle","case-studies\u002Fbubbly-belle-1786633963628.webp","Bubbly Belle",false,"Health & Personal Care",12,"2026-07-29T15:51:04.641004+00:00","2026-08-14T08:43:13.682542+00:00","How Bubbly Belle grew Amazon revenue 363% and expanded into Canada","+363% revenue","A US-only self-care brand stuck at $47k per month rebuilt its catalog, listings and ads — and launched in Canada — to reach $218k in monthly revenue.","Bubbly Belle Case Study: +363% Amazon Revenue","How Scaling Peak grew Bubbly Belle's Amazon revenue from $47k to $218k per month and expanded the brand into Canada. Read the full case study.",[33,34,35],"c89127c7-631c-451f-bf13-3681edd0f3c4","b2229fd7-1f99-4a26-ad08-d1113955c798","a507b11d-88fb-4b74-98a2-0661de716593",{"id":37,"slug":38,"cover_image":39,"brand_name":40,"is_anonymized":22,"niche":41,"period_months":24,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":42,"last_modify":10,"created_at":25,"updated_at":26,"locale_code":11,"title":43,"headline_metric":44,"summary":45,"meta_title":46,"meta_description":47,"service_ids":48},"70d215ee-87b4-490a-80c3-19993961c126","levoit","case-studies\u002Flevoit-1786635423882.webp","Levoit","Home & Kitchen",2,"Scaling Levoit from $318k to $677k monthly revenue","+113% revenue","A high-volume Home & Kitchen brand doubled monthly revenue with a rebuilt PPC structure and Amazon DSP — while keeping profit intact.","Levoit Case Study: +113% Amazon Revenue","How Scaling Peak grew Levoit from $318k to $677k in monthly Amazon revenue using a rebuilt PPC structure and DSP — without sacrificing profit.",[33,49],"119e81ea-2a44-44f5-bd31-a47741039864",{"id":51,"slug":52,"cover_image":53,"brand_name":54,"is_anonymized":22,"niche":55,"period_months":24,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":56,"last_modify":10,"created_at":25,"updated_at":26,"locale_code":11,"title":57,"headline_metric":58,"summary":59,"meta_title":60,"meta_description":61,"service_ids":62},"04710b0c-ce84-40ce-808a-a47f690b092a","intelligent-labs","case-studies\u002Fintelligent-labs-1786635434978.webp","Intelligent Labs","Health & Household",3,"Doubling Intelligent Labs' monthly sales from $114k to $239k","+110% sales","A supplements brand doubled monthly sales by pairing benefit-led creative with a scaled, conversion-driven PPC strategy.","Intelligent Labs Case Study: +110% Sales","How Scaling Peak doubled Intelligent Labs' Amazon sales from $114k to $239k per month with benefit-led creative and scaled PPC.",[33,63],"07288de0-63ae-47b6-b6fc-eb6c6af8f16e",[65,75,83,91,99,106,113],{"id":66,"author_name":67,"company":68,"avatar":69,"rating":70,"source":71,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":9,"locale_code":11,"quote":72,"author_role":73,"metric":74},"6ee82c58-c49d-4da9-8fb7-8295d27f3a80","Danica","Pursalt",null,5,"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.youtube.com\u002Fwatch?v=iMyQAe8gIUw","We tried selling on Amazon ourselves, but it just wasn't working. Scaling Peak came back with a dozen ideas, and Amazon quickly became a reliable source of income. They fully cover our ads and act like a real partner — I'm impressed with the results in such a short time.","Marketing & Brand Manager","≈240K → 500K+ monthly ad sales · ACoS 49% → 37%",{"id":76,"author_name":77,"company":78,"avatar":69,"rating":70,"source":79,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":42,"locale_code":11,"quote":80,"author_role":81,"metric":82},"675746ac-abf2-4e83-9fbf-7f99675788ce","Alex","Kyolly","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.youtube.com\u002Fwatch?v=hq27w2PS0Hg","Selling on Amazon is a whole business of its own. Since working with Scaling Peak my sales are up and my customer service has improved. If you're a small business getting overwhelmed, turn to them — they know all the ins and outs of Amazon.","Owner","100K → 350K monthly ad sales · ACoS 52% → 30%",{"id":84,"author_name":85,"company":86,"avatar":69,"rating":70,"source":87,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":56,"locale_code":11,"quote":88,"author_role":89,"metric":90},"98bdb1ae-11f4-435f-9378-e2e9ff31d89a","Jane","Gentlehomme","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.youtube.com\u002Fwatch?v=jwQhQjWSLmQ","Amazon PPC had been a pain for years, and other providers didn't work out. Scaling Peak gives us the peace of mind that a critical area is handled. After eight months we've grown around 4× in sales and cut ACoS from 26% to 18% — a huge breakthrough.","Founder","≈4× sales in 8 months · ACoS 26% → 18%",{"id":92,"author_name":93,"company":94,"avatar":69,"rating":70,"source":95,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":96,"locale_code":11,"quote":97,"author_role":98,"metric":69},"cd4c841a-4e3b-40c4-b921-3da40fcb160d","Madison","Madisi","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.youtube.com\u002Fwatch?v=MLT3K3w_VhY",4,"Amazon keeps changing, and I was spending all my time on PPC instead of building products. Scaling Peak improved our organic ranking and grew our sales, so I can finally focus on what I love — finding and developing new products.","CEO",{"id":100,"author_name":101,"company":69,"avatar":69,"rating":96,"source":102,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":70,"locale_code":11,"quote":103,"author_role":104,"metric":105},"0a0d7585-6d17-4f83-9fb4-5b933af5dee3","Dmytro","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.trustpilot.com\u002Freview\u002Fscalingpeak.com","Our overall sales have tripled in four months thanks to Scaling Peak. I can recommend this agency to any Amazon seller who wants to grow — the only downside for me was that fees got quite high once we scaled up.","Amazon Seller","3× sales in 4 months",{"id":107,"author_name":108,"company":69,"avatar":69,"rating":70,"source":102,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":109,"locale_code":11,"quote":110,"author_role":111,"metric":112},"d7d7d86b-8d42-47e8-a668-8afce97aa8af","Ganusya",6,"Working with Scaling Peak this past year has been a pleasure. Our store turned profitable and stopped losing money, and Nicholas and the team drastically decreased our ACoS. I'm happy with the outcomes and the leadership they bring.","Store Owner","Turned profitable in 2 months",{"id":114,"author_name":115,"company":69,"avatar":69,"rating":70,"source":102,"related_service_id":69,"related_case_id":69,"show_on_homepage":8,"is_enabled":8,"sort_order":116,"locale_code":11,"quote":117,"author_role":118,"metric":69},"f88f3fcd-b7d1-4e86-824a-b333d7bd2729","Hann",7,"I'm incredibly pleased with their team. Proactive, responsive, and most importantly, generating top results. Highly recommended.","Amazon Brand Owner",[120,142,162],{"id":121,"slug":122,"cover_image":123,"rubric_id":124,"author_id":4,"published_at":125,"last_modify":125,"is_enabled":8,"is_main_page":8,"sort_order":70,"created_at":126,"updated_at":127,"locale_code":11,"title":128,"excerpt":129,"body":130,"meta_title":131,"meta_description":132,"rubric_slug":133,"rubric_name":134,"author_slug":5,"author_image":7,"author_name":6,"service_ids":135,"tag_ids":136,"tags":138},"05427aa4-bcdc-4620-bbff-0ed1935d9cc7","amazon-ppc-explained","blog\u002Famazon-ppc-explained-1786695361909.webp","3cda968c-060d-48ee-9b78-053f984002b0","2026-07-16","2026-08-01T07:59:45.06774+00:00","2026-08-14T08:33:57.711613+00:00","Amazon PPC Explained: The Complete Guide for Brands","The auction mechanics, ad formats, targeting and reports behind Amazon PPC, written for brand owners who already spend real money on ads.","Amazon PPC is the pay-per-click advertising system inside Amazon's marketplace, where brands bid for placement in shopping results and on product detail pages and pay only when a shopper clicks. It is an auction, not a media buy: what you type into the bid field is a ceiling, not a price, and the ad that wins is rarely the one with the highest number attached to it. For a brand already doing meaningful volume, the interesting part is not \"how do I launch a campaign\" but how the auction decides, what the reports are actually measuring, and where the money quietly goes.\n\n## What Amazon PPC is, and what it isn't\n\nAmazon pay per click covers the self-service sponsored ad formats you run from Campaign Manager: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV. Amazon DSP sits next to them as the programmatic option that reaches audiences on and off Amazon, and it is bought differently — usually on a CPM basis, often through a managed service or an agency seat.\n\nThree things separate PPC in Amazon from search advertising elsewhere:\n\n- **The click lands on a transaction, not a landing page you control.** Your listing does the selling, so ad performance is capped by a conversion rate that lives outside the ads console.\n- **The advertiser and the retailer are the same company.** Amazon sees the sale, the return, the review and the repeat purchase, and uses that data in the auction. You see a filtered slice of it.\n- **Paid and organic share one ranking surface.** Ad-driven sales feed the same sales-velocity signal that moves organic position, so ads and SEO are not two separate budgets.\n\nThat last point is why campaign work that ignores the listing tends to plateau. If your detail page converts at half the category norm, no bidding strategy fixes the math.\n\n## How the Amazon ad auction actually works\n\n### Your bid is a ceiling, not a price\n\nAmazon runs a second-price style auction. You do not pay what you bid; you pay roughly what it took to beat the next-ranked competitor, plus a cent. Bid $2.00 against a next-best effective bid of $1.50 and you pay something close to $1.51, not $2.00.\n\nThis trips up a lot of accounts. Because the price is set by the competitor beneath you, shading every bid downward \"to be safe\" does not save money per click — it removes you from auctions entirely. You lose impressions long before you lose cost. A bid is a statement of maximum willingness to pay, set from unit economics rather than nerves.\n\nAmazon does not publish the exact computation, and no one outside the company sees competitors' bids or relevance scores. Treat any precise formula you read, including the model below, as a working approximation.\n\n### Relevance is the other half of the equation\n\nHighest bid does not win. Amazon ranks ads on a combination of bid and expected performance — how likely the ad is to be clicked and to convert for that specific query, inferred from your listing content and your sales history. A well-matched product with a strong conversion record can outrank a higher bid from a weaker listing, and pay less for the privilege.\n\nSo the effective bid that enters the auction is your typed bid modified several times over:\n\n| Layer | What it does | Who controls it |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| Base bid | Your maximum for that keyword or target | You |\n| Placement adjustment | Multiplies the bid for top of search, rest of search or product pages | You (campaign level) |\n| Dynamic bidding | Raises or lowers the bid per auction based on conversion likelihood | You choose the mode, Amazon applies it |\n| Relevance \u002F expected performance | Weights the ranked bid up or down | Amazon |\n\nAmazon documents the mechanics of the two middle layers. Placement adjustments are set per campaign and apply to every target inside it; increases of up to 900% are possible. Dynamic bidding has three modes: **down only** (lowers the bid when a conversion looks unlikely, never raises it), **up and down** (raises up to 100% for top-of-search placements and up to 50% elsewhere, and lowers on weak auctions) and **fixed** (your bid as typed, with manual placement multipliers still applied on top).\n\nOrder matters: the placement adjustment is applied to the base bid first, then dynamic bidding works on top of the adjusted number. A $1.00 bid with a 50% top-of-search adjustment on \"up and down\" can reach $3.00 in a single auction. That stacking is a common source of a CPC that looks nothing like the bid in the spreadsheet — the rules for handling it are a topic of their own, in Amazon bidding strategies and budgets.\n\n![How an Amazon PPC bid becomes the price you actually pay](blog\u002Famazon-ppc-explained-diagram-01-1786695361910.webp)\n\n### Why an ad gets zero impressions\n\nThree ordinary explanations, in the order worth checking: the bid sits below the floor for that query; the product is not considered relevant enough to enter the auction at all; or the campaign has run out of budget for the day and is simply not competing after mid-morning. A high bid does not rescue an irrelevant match — Amazon has no incentive to show a shopper something it expects them to ignore.\n\n## The ad types and the job each one does\n\nThe formats are not interchangeable, and they are not a funnel you climb in order. Each does a different job.\n\n| Format | Pricing | Where it shows | The job it does |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| Sponsored Products | CPC | Shopping results, product detail pages | Capture existing demand; the workhorse of most accounts |\n| Sponsored Brands | CPC | Top of search, as headline, collection, Store spotlight or video | Own the branded query, present a range, send traffic to a Store |\n| Sponsored Display | CPC or vCPM | Detail pages, on and off Amazon | Defend your own pages, target competitors, retarget viewers |\n| Sponsored TV | CPM | Ad-supported streaming inventory | Upper-funnel reach for brands with demand to create |\n| Amazon DSP | Mostly CPM | Amazon-owned and third-party inventory | Programmatic reach, suppression and frequency control at scale |\n\nSponsored Products is where the majority of spend and nearly all of the diagnostic value sits, because it is the only format that reports the raw shopper query. Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display earn their budget once you have something to defend — a branded search volume worth owning, or competitor pages worth being on. The split between the three is a real decision with real trade-offs, covered in Sponsored Products vs Sponsored Brands vs Sponsored Display.\n\nSponsored TV and DSP belong to a later stage. If your Sponsored Products account still holds unharvested converting terms, upper-funnel media is buying reach you have not yet learned to convert.\n\n![The job each Amazon ad format does, from Sponsored Products to DSP](blog\u002Famazon-ppc-explained-diagram-02-1786695361911.webp)\n\n## Targeting: how you tell Amazon who to show the ad to\n\n### Automatic targeting\n\nAmazon matches your product to queries and pages using your listing content and sales data, across four named groups: **close match** and **loose match** (query-side — what the shopper typed) and **substitutes** and **complements** (page-side — what the shopper is browsing). Set a separate bid per group. They behave nothing alike, and averaging them hides both the winners and the waste.\n\nAuto campaigns are not a beginner setting you graduate from. In a mature account they stay on permanently as a discovery instrument — provided the terms you already scaled elsewhere are negated inside them.\n\n### Manual keyword targeting\n\nThree match types, from loosest to tightest:\n\n- **Broad** — the words can appear in any order, with plurals, variations and synonyms. Amazon has widened broad match semantically in recent years, so it now serves on related queries where your exact phrase never appears. Without a negative layer it behaves like a second discovery campaign, not a controlled one.\n- **Phrase** — all the components, in order, with words allowed around them.\n- **Exact** — matched word for word, in the same order.\n\nThe workflow that follows from this is unglamorous and durable: discover in auto and broad, refine in phrase, scale proven converters in exact, and negate each harvested term in the campaign it came from so the two never bid against each other. How to arrange that without campaigns colliding as the account grows is the subject of Amazon PPC campaign structure.\n\n### Product targeting\n\nYou can target individual ASINs, whole categories, or categories filtered by attributes such as brand, price range, star rating or Prime eligibility. This is the most under-used control in the accounts we audit: a category target with a price-and-rating refinement puts you in front of shoppers looking at products your item genuinely beats, which is a better use of a click than a generic head term.\n\n### Negatives\n\nNegative keywords and negative product targets are the cheapest optimization available. They do two jobs: stop spend on queries that were never going to convert, and stop your own campaigns competing with each other. The caution is symmetrical — negating on three clicks is guessing, and a high-ACoS term is not automatically a bad one if it holds a rank position you rely on.\n\n## What the console reports actually mean\n\nFour numbers do most of the work, and each has a caveat worth knowing.\n\n| Metric | Definition | The caveat |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| CPC | Ad spend ÷ clicks | An outcome of the auction, not a setting; it moves with competitors, not just with your bid |\n| CTR | Clicks ÷ impressions | Reads the main image, price and rating far more than the ad settings |\n| Conversion rate | Orders ÷ clicks | Belongs to the listing; ads can only send better-matched traffic |\n| ACoS | Ad spend ÷ ad sales | Measures the ad, not the business; break-even ACoS is set by your margin |\n\nACoS is the most misread number in the console, because a \"good\" figure only exists relative to your contribution margin and your goal for that product. The full treatment — formula, break-even, and where the benchmarks mislead — is in what ACoS on Amazon really is.\n\nTwo reports matter more than the campaign dashboard. The **Search Term Report**, downloaded from Campaign Manager, is the only place Amazon tells you which actual shopper queries consumed your budget and which produced sales. **Search Query Performance**, in Brand Analytics under Search Analytics for Brand Registry accounts, shows paid and organic together for a query: impression share, click share, cart-add share and purchase share. Read side by side they separate two problems. Fifteen percent impression share with five percent purchase share is a conversion problem; fifteen and fifteen is a visibility problem. The fixes are unrelated.\n\nAttribution windows also differ by format: Sponsored Products in a Seller Central account attributes clicks over seven days, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display over fourteen. Amazon additionally revised its attribution modeling at the start of 2026, tightening view-through windows — if reported view-attributed conversions dropped that year, that is a measurement change, not a performance one.\n\n## Where the budget actually leaks\n\nIn accounts we take over, waste is rarely a bidding error. It is structural, and it hides in predictable places.\n\n1. **Campaigns bidding against each other.** The same term live in auto, broad and exact with no negatives. You win your own auction and pay a competitive price for it.\n2. **Placement multipliers stacked on aggressive dynamic bidding.** Costs rise faster than anyone modeled, because the two layers multiply.\n3. **Budget-capped campaigns.** A campaign that exhausts its daily budget by 11am is not \"efficient\" — it is absent for the afternoon, and its ACoS reflects only the cheapest hours.\n4. **Ads running on out-of-stock or suppressed listings.** Spend continues, conversions do not.\n5. **Branded terms with no ceiling.** Some branded defense is rational; unlimited branded spend mostly buys sales you would have made anyway and flatters ACoS while doing it.\n6. **Averaged auto-campaign bids.** One bid across close match, loose match, substitutes and complements funds the weakest group at the price of the strongest.\n7. **Ad spend on products with broken unit economics.** No ACoS target rescues a unit that loses money after fees.\n\nNone of these are exotic. They are what an account drifts into after a year of changes made by different people with different goals. Working through them is what the first month of [Amazon PPC management](\u002Fservices\u002Famazon-ppc-management) mostly consists of, and it is also something you can do yourself with the Search Term Report, the placement report and a stock check — or with a [free Amazon audit](\u002Ftools\u002Famazon-audit) for a second pair of eyes.\n\n## How paid and organic interact\n\nAd-driven sales count toward the sales velocity that influences organic rank. That is the mechanism behind the standard launch play: buy the query, convert it, earn organic position, then reduce paid dependence on it. It works, with two honest qualifications.\n\nFirst, the effect is downstream of conversion: clicks that do not convert build cost, not rank. Second, the direction runs both ways — as organic rank improves, ads on that term start cannibalizing sales you would now win for free, which is why ACoS alone stops steering well at scale and total ad cost of sales becomes the better view.\n\nThe AI layer changes the surface but not the logic. Amazon's shopping assistant — launched as Rufus and folded into Alexa for Shopping in May 2026 — assembles answers from listing copy, A+ content, Q&A and reviews, and Amazon has begun charging on a cost-per-click basis for sponsored placements inside those AI prompts. Same trade as always: better listing data earns cheaper attention.\n\nFor a brand at scale, this is the argument for treating ads and listing work as one program rather than two vendors. When we rebuilt the account for an [outdoor brand](\u002Fcase-studies\u002Foutdoor-brand-ppc-acos-reduction), ACoS moved from 44% to 21% while the business grew 68% — structure, negatives and listing conversion moving together, not a bid script running harder.\n\n## What \"good\" looks like, and why you should be careful with benchmarks\n\nPublished benchmarks are useful for orientation and dangerous as targets. The 2026 vendor datasets — Ad Badger, Autron and Trellis among them — cluster marketplace-wide average CPC around $1.10 to $1.25 and blended average ACoS in the low thirties. The category spread is more informative than the average: those same datasets put median CPC roughly between $0.40 in Books and $1.45 or more in Electronics, with beauty and supplements at the expensive end.\n\nTwo cautions. These figures come from tool and agency panels, not from Amazon, so methodologies differ and the numbers move year to year — your category's median is a better reference than the blended average. And no benchmark can tell you what your ACoS should be, because only your margin can. For the money side worked through properly, how much Amazon PPC costs covers CPC ranges, minimum viable budgets and how to derive your own threshold.\n\n## FAQ\n\n### Do I pay my full bid on Amazon PPC?\n\nNo. Amazon uses a second-price style auction, so you pay approximately what was needed to beat the next-ranked advertiser, plus a cent, not the amount you typed. Your bid is a maximum. This is why bidding defensively low usually costs impressions rather than saving money on each click.\n\n### Is a 30% ACoS good on Amazon?\n\nIt depends entirely on your contribution margin. If your product clears 40% after cost of goods and fees, a 30% ACoS is profitable; if it clears 25%, the same campaign loses money on every order. Calculate break-even ACoS from your own margin first, then decide whether you are buying profit or rank.\n\n### Does Amazon PPC help organic ranking?\n\nIndirectly, yes. Ad-driven sales contribute to the sales velocity signal that influences organic position for a query, which is why launch campaigns target rank rather than efficiency. The effect depends on conversions, not clicks: traffic that lands and leaves builds cost, not rank.\n\n### Why do my Amazon ads get impressions but no clicks?\n\nAlmost always the listing, not the campaign. Shoppers judge the main image, price, star rating, review count and Prime badge before anything else in the ad. If click-through is far below your category norm while impressions are healthy, fix the creative and price position before touching bids or match types.\n\n### How long should I wait before judging an Amazon PPC campaign?\n\nAt least one full attribution window plus a data buffer. Sponsored Products in a Seller Central account attributes clicks over seven days, and Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display over fourteen, so decisions made on three days of data are reading incomplete sales. Wait for volume, not just for time.\n\n### Should I run automatic or manual campaigns?\n\nBoth, permanently. Automatic campaigns discover queries and competitor products that keyword tools miss; manual campaigns scale what has already proven it converts. The connection between them is negation — every term you harvest into a manual campaign should be negated in the auto campaign that found it, or the two bid against each other.\n\n## Where to start\n\nIf you inherited an account and want a defensible first week, do these three things in order rather than rebuilding anything:\n\n1. Pull sixty days of the Search Term Report and split spend into converting terms, non-converting terms and terms already scaled elsewhere. That single table usually explains most of the ACoS.\n2. Check every campaign for a daily budget that runs out before the afternoon, and check every advertised ASIN for stock and listing suppression. Both are silent and both are trivial to fix.\n3. Write down the break-even ACoS for your top ten ASINs from actual margin. Until that number exists, every bid decision in the account is a guess dressed up as optimization.","Amazon PPC Explained: A Guide for Brands","How Amazon PPC really works: the second-price auction, the ad types, targeting, what the console reports mean and where ad budget quietly leaks.","amazon-ppc","Amazon PPC",[33],[137],"ed2c80bd-9802-4ede-abd3-667a0042027e",[139],{"name":140,"slug":141},"Sponsored Products","sponsored-products",{"id":143,"slug":144,"cover_image":145,"rubric_id":146,"author_id":4,"published_at":147,"last_modify":147,"is_enabled":8,"is_main_page":8,"sort_order":56,"created_at":126,"updated_at":127,"locale_code":11,"title":148,"excerpt":149,"body":150,"meta_title":151,"meta_description":152,"rubric_slug":153,"rubric_name":154,"author_slug":5,"author_image":7,"author_name":6,"service_ids":155,"tag_ids":156,"tags":158},"1dd42263-4c4c-4925-a20b-3e3377953fe6","what-is-acos-on-amazon","blog\u002Fwhat-is-acos-on-amazon-1786695361937.webp","fe8e0899-1c1c-4c9d-99b8-f3b0250c3f0d","2026-07-09","What Is ACoS on Amazon? Formula, Benchmarks and What a Good ACoS Really Is","ACoS is only meaningful next to your margin. The formula, a break-even ACoS worked from real unit economics, category benchmarks, and the misreadings that cost money.","ACoS (advertising cost of sales) is the share of your ad-attributed revenue that you spent on ads: ad spend divided by ad sales, expressed as a percentage. Amazon Ads defines it exactly that way — spend $50 to generate $100 in attributed sales and your ACoS is 50%. The number itself is neutral. It only becomes a decision when you compare it to the margin the product actually earns, which is where most accounts get it wrong.\n\n## What ACoS means on Amazon\n\nACoS answers one narrow question: for every dollar of sales that Amazon credited to your ads, how many cents went to Amazon Ads?\n\n### The formula\n\nThe calculation has no variants and no hidden coefficients.\n\n| Metric | Formula | Example |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| ACoS | (ad spend ÷ ad sales) × 100 | ($2,400 ÷ $8,000) × 100 = 30% |\n| ROAS | ad sales ÷ ad spend | $8,000 ÷ $2,400 = 3.33x |\n| Relationship | ACoS = 1 ÷ ROAS | 1 ÷ 3.33 = 30% |\n\nACoS and ROAS are the same fact stated in opposite directions. A 20% ACoS is a 5x ROAS, 25% is 4x, 33% is 3x. Teams that report both are not measuring two things — they are measuring one thing twice. Which of the two you should actually steer by, and where TACoS fits, is the subject of ACoS vs ROAS vs TACoS.\n\n### What counts as \"ad sales\"\n\nThis is where the definition gets slippery, and it is the reason two people can look at the same account and quote different ACoS figures.\n\n- **Ad sales are attributed sales, not incremental sales.** If a shopper clicks your Sponsored Products ad and then buys within the attribution window, that order counts as ad sales — whether or not the ad changed the outcome. Some of those buyers would have found you organically.\n- **The attribution window differs by ad type.** Third-party sellers get a 7-day click attribution window on Sponsored Products, and 14 days on Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. So a Sponsored Products campaign you judge on day three is showing you an incomplete numerator-denominator pair, and yesterday's ACoS will keep improving for a week as sales settle.\n- **Attribution scope differs too.** Sponsored Products reports same-SKU sales for the advertised ASIN; Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display include brand-halo sales — other products under your brand bought after the click. Comparing an SP ACoS to an SB ACoS is therefore not comparing like with like.\n\nNone of this makes ACoS a bad metric. It makes it a *campaign efficiency* metric with a defined scope, rather than a verdict on the business.\n\n![What ACoS measures on Amazon and what it leaves out](blog\u002Fwhat-is-acos-on-amazon-diagram-01-1786695361938.webp)\n\n## Break-even ACoS: the number that makes ACoS mean something\n\nA 25% ACoS is excellent on a product with a 45% contribution margin and quietly loss-making on one with a 20% margin. Until you know your break-even ACoS, \"good\" and \"bad\" are opinions.\n\n**Break-even ACoS is your contribution margin expressed as a percentage of price.** It is the ACoS at which an advertised sale contributes exactly zero — every point below it is profit, every point above it is subsidy. Amazon Ads makes the same point in its own guidance: there is no universal good ACoS, so brands should work from their margin and their break-even instead of a benchmark.\n\n### A worked example\n\nBelow is a single unit of a mid-priced supplement. The figures are **illustrative inputs, not benchmarks** — pull your own from the fee preview in Seller Central and your landed cost sheet.\n\n| Line | Per unit | Note |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| Sale price | $34.99 | Price the shopper pays |\n| Landed COGS | −$8.00 | Manufacturing + freight + duty, per unit |\n| Amazon referral fee | −$5.25 | 15% — the standard rate for most categories |\n| FBA fulfillment fee | −$6.20 | Size-tier and price-band dependent |\n| Returns and damages allowance | −$1.05 | 3% of price, modeled |\n| **Contribution margin** | **$14.49** | What one sale contributes before ad spend |\n| **Break-even ACoS** | **41.4%** | $14.49 ÷ $34.99 |\n\nSo on this unit, an ACoS of 41.4% means the ad paid for itself and nothing more. At 30% you keep about $4 per advertised unit. At 55% you are buying revenue with your own money.\n\nTwo things skew this table in practice, and both are worth checking before you trust the output. First, referral fees are not a flat 15% everywhere: Amazon's published schedule runs from around 8% on consumer electronics up to 17% on higher-priced apparel and 20%+ on jewelry, with tiered rates in several categories and a per-item minimum of about $0.30. Second, fulfillment fees changed shape in 2026 — Amazon now publishes standard-size fulfillment rates in price bands (under $10, $10–$50, over $50), so two physically identical units at different prices no longer pay the same fee, and a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge sits on top of every FBA fulfillment fee from April 2026. We unpack the full stack in Amazon FBA fees explained.\n\n### From break-even to target ACoS\n\nBreak-even is a ceiling, not a goal. Target ACoS is the number you actually manage to, and it depends on what you want each advertised sale to leave behind.\n\n| Scenario | Calculation | Target ACoS | Equivalent ROAS |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| Break even on the unit | $14.49 ÷ $34.99 | 41.4% | 2.4x |\n| Keep 12% net margin on ad sales | ($14.49 − $4.20) ÷ $34.99 | 29.4% | 3.4x |\n| Keep 25% net margin on ad sales | ($14.49 − $8.75) ÷ $34.99 | 16.4% | 6.1x |\n\nRead the table left to right and the trade-off becomes obvious. Every point of margin you protect is a point of ACoS headroom you give up — and headroom is what buys impression share. A brand managing to 16% ACoS on a product whose break-even is 41% is not being disciplined; it is leaving the top of the search page to competitors who understood the same math and chose to spend.\n\nWhere a target *above* break-even is legitimate: a launch phase where you are buying ranking velocity, a defensive brand-term campaign that protects a customer you already paid to acquire, or a product whose repeat-purchase rate makes first-order economics irrelevant. Each of those is a deliberate, time-boxed decision with an exit condition — not a permanent setting.\n\n## What is a good ACoS on Amazon?\n\nOnce you have your break-even, category benchmarks stop being a target and become a sanity check: are my costs structurally normal for this category, or am I fighting an unusual auction?\n\nThird-party benchmark aggregates published in 2026 put the cross-category average around 32–34% ACoS, with most accounts landing between roughly 25% and 40%. The spread by category is much more informative than the average. Autron's 2026 benchmark set, compiled from industry data and its own managed accounts, reports median ACoS roughly as follows:\n\n| Category | Median ACoS (2026 benchmark data) |\n| --- | --- |\n| Food & Grocery | ~23% |\n| Toys & Games | ~26% |\n| Books | ~26% |\n| Electronics | ~30% |\n| Beauty & Personal Care | ~31% |\n| Pet Supplies | ~31% |\n| Sports & Outdoors | ~31% |\n| Home & Garden | ~32% |\n| Health & Household | ~36% |\n| Clothing & Apparel | ~57% |\n\nTreat these as directional. Other aggregators publish narrower ranges for the same categories, and none of them know your price point, your review count or your competitive set. What the table does establish is that a 35% ACoS is a red flag in grocery and unremarkable in health and household — and that anyone quoting a single \"good ACoS\" number across categories is not looking at the data.\n\nBenchmarking has also become less of a guessing game recently: Amazon added competitive benchmark metrics to its Ads reporting in 2026, so category comparisons can increasingly come from inside the console rather than from third-party estimates.\n\n## The three most common ways teams misread ACoS\n\nIn audits of accounts in the $50k–$1M\u002Fmonth range, the same three misreadings account for most of the damage.\n\n### 1. Treating a falling ACoS as a win\n\nACoS is a ratio, and the cheapest way to improve a ratio is to shrink the denominator's expensive half. Cut bids, pause broad and phrase match, keep only branded and exact-match terms that were converting anyway, and ACoS drops within two weeks. So does new-customer acquisition, so does search-term discovery, and — with a lag of four to eight weeks — so does organic rank, because Amazon's ranking responds to sales velocity that the ads were partly supplying.\n\nThe tell is simple: if ACoS improved while total revenue was flat or falling, nothing was optimized. Spend was withdrawn. The honest scoreboard is ACoS *and* total sales, or better, ACoS alongside TACoS, which prices ad spend against the whole business rather than the ad-attributed slice.\n\nThe reverse is what a real improvement looks like. On an outdoor brand we took through a rebuild, [ACoS came down from 44% to 21% while revenue grew 68%](\u002Fcase-studies\u002Foutdoor-brand-ppc-acos-reduction) — the ratio and the denominator moved in the same direction, which only happens when conversion rate, targeting and placement bids improve together rather than budget being pulled.\n\n### 2. Reading ACoS at the wrong altitude\n\nAccount-level ACoS is an average of things that should never be averaged. A single number blends:\n\n- **branded terms** (typically low ACoS, often partly cannibalizing sales you would have had anyway) with **non-brand discovery terms** (higher ACoS, genuinely incremental);\n- **hero ASINs** at scale with launches deliberately running above break-even;\n- **Sponsored Products same-SKU attribution** with **Sponsored Brands and Display halo attribution** on a longer window.\n\nMove a dollar between any two of those and the account ACoS changes without a single decision having been made about profitability. ACoS is only actionable at the level where you can act on it: campaign, ad group, targeting, ASIN. That is also why campaign structure is a profitability question and not a housekeeping one — the separation between brand and non-brand is what makes the number readable at all.\n\n![Why a blended account-level ACoS hides the decisions that matter](blog\u002Fwhat-is-acos-on-amazon-diagram-02-1786695361939.webp)\n\n### 3. Judging ACoS before attribution has settled\n\nBecause Sponsored Products credits sales on the date of the *click* within a 7-day window, today's ACoS for yesterday is always the worst it will ever look. Teams that review a campaign 48 hours after a bid change routinely conclude it failed, cut the bid, and repeat the cycle — optimizing against noise.\n\nPractical rule: don't evaluate Sponsored Products performance on a window shorter than 8 days, or Sponsored Brands and Display on less than 15. Compare full weeks to full weeks so day-of-week effects cancel. And when you make a bid or budget change, note the date, then read the result once — not daily.\n\nThere is a fourth misreading that is really a category error: expecting ACoS to tell you about the *business*. It cannot. ACoS is blind to organic sales, to repeat purchase, to subscribe & save, to the sale a shopper makes 30 days later. Those live in TACoS and in contribution margin at the P&L level, and a brand that steers only by ACoS will systematically underinvest in the top of the funnel.\n\n## How to actually move ACoS\n\nOrdered by how much they typically move the number, and how quickly:\n\n1. **Conversion rate on the destination page.** ACoS falls when the same clicks produce more orders. Main image, price relative to the comparison set, review count and the first two bullets do more for ACoS than any bid change — and unlike bids, the effect compounds into organic rank.\n2. **Search-term hygiene.** Pull the search term report weekly, negate terms that spend past break-even without converting, and promote proven converters into exact match at a bid you set deliberately.\n3. **Placement and bid strategy.** Top-of-search placements convert better and cost more; whether that trade is worth it is an arithmetic question you can answer per campaign from the placement report.\n4. **Price and unit economics.** A $2 price rise or a renegotiated freight rate widens contribution margin, which raises break-even ACoS, which makes campaigns that were marginal profitable — without touching the ad account at all.\n\nIf you want to work through your own account before changing anything, the [free Amazon audit](\u002Ftools\u002Famazon-audit) covers the same ground we cover in the first two weeks of an engagement, and our [Amazon PPC management](\u002Fservices\u002Famazon-ppc-management) work always starts from the break-even table above rather than from a target ACoS someone inherited.\n\n## FAQ\n\n### Is a 30% ACoS good?\n\nIt depends entirely on your contribution margin. If a unit contributes 40% of its price after COGS, referral and FBA fees, then a 30% ACoS leaves roughly 10 points of profit per advertised sale — healthy. On a 25% margin, the same 30% ACoS loses money on every order. Calculate break-even first.\n\n### What does a 100% ACoS mean?\n\nIt means you spent exactly as much on ads as the ads generated in attributed sales — one dollar of spend for one dollar of revenue, before any product cost or Amazon fee. Every such sale loses money outright unless it is a deliberate launch investment or the product has strong repeat-purchase economics behind it.\n\n### How do I calculate break-even ACoS?\n\nSubtract landed COGS, the Amazon referral fee, the FBA fulfillment fee and a returns allowance from your sale price. Divide the result — your contribution margin per unit — by the sale price. That percentage is your break-even ACoS: the point where an advertised sale contributes exactly zero profit.\n\n### Why is my ACoS suddenly higher?\n\nCommon causes, in order of likelihood: a competitor raised bids in your auction, your conversion rate dropped (price change, lost buy box, review dip, out of stock variation), attribution has not settled for the period you are looking at, or budget shifted toward non-brand discovery campaigns that naturally run at a higher ACoS.\n\n### Is ACoS the same as ROAS?\n\nThey are the same relationship inverted. ACoS = 1 ÷ ROAS, so 25% ACoS equals 4x ROAS and 50% equals 2x. Amazon reports ACoS by default in Seller Central; agencies used to Google or Meta usually report ROAS. Neither contains information the other lacks.\n\n## Where to start this week\n\nPick your top five ASINs by ad spend and build the break-even table above for each one — real landed cost, real fee preview from Seller Central, a realistic returns allowance. Then compare each product's actual trailing 30-day ACoS to its own break-even, not to a category average.\n\nYou will usually find two things: a product being managed far below its break-even that could profitably absorb more spend, and one quietly running above it. Fixing that mismatch is normally worth more than a month of bid optimization.\n","What Is ACoS on Amazon? Formula & Benchmarks","What is ACoS on Amazon? The formula, a worked break-even ACoS calculation from unit economics, 2026 category benchmarks, and three ways teams misread it.","metrics-profit","Metrics & Profit",[33],[157],"2d98ed86-5a47-4f85-95e1-716d6a69a480",[159],{"name":160,"slug":161},"ACoS","acos",{"id":163,"slug":164,"cover_image":165,"rubric_id":166,"author_id":4,"published_at":167,"last_modify":167,"is_enabled":8,"is_main_page":8,"sort_order":9,"created_at":168,"updated_at":127,"locale_code":11,"title":169,"excerpt":170,"body":171,"meta_title":172,"meta_description":173,"rubric_slug":174,"rubric_name":175,"author_slug":5,"author_image":7,"author_name":6,"service_ids":176,"tag_ids":177,"tags":179},"bb48ae38-900e-44a8-ad91-d6934b8dd773","what-is-amazon-rufus","blog\u002Fwhat-is-amazon-rufus-1786695361940.webp","22c39cd1-eebc-40ca-ae98-e16ccf9c1219","2026-07-07","2026-07-31T16:47:19.171842+00:00","What Is Amazon Rufus? How Amazon's AI Changes Product Discovery","Amazon's AI shopping assistant now lives in the search bar, reads your listing as a source document and carries ads. How it works, and what it changes for brands.","Amazon Rufus is Amazon's generative AI shopping assistant: it answers a shopper's question in natural language and recommends specific products from Amazon's catalog, using the listing text, reviews and community Q&A as its evidence. It launched in beta in February 2024, and on 13 May 2026 Amazon renamed it **Alexa for Shopping** — most sellers, tools and search queries still call it Rufus. For a brand, the practical change is that a second layer now sits between a shopper's question and your product page, and it reads your listing as a document rather than as a bag of keywords.\n\n## Rufus, Alexa for Shopping, and why the name still matters\n\nAmazon's original announcement page for Rufus now carries a banner stating that on 13 May 2026 Rufus was renamed Alexa for Shopping. Amazon folded the standalone Rufus chat panel into a single assistant that lives in the main search bar and merges the shopping assistant with Alexa's assistant layer. The rebrand shipped in the US first; other marketplaces have been slower, and it is normal in mid-2026 to see the Rufus name still in the interface outside the US.\n\nI keep using \"Rufus\" in client conversations for a simple reason: it is what the ecosystem indexes on. Seller Central documentation, third-party tools, agency reporting and the searches your team runs are all still built around the Rufus name. Underneath, the thing you optimize for did not change on 13 May — the retrieval engine, the data sources and the listing signals are continuous across the rename.\n\nWhat did change is scope. The assistant is no longer a side panel you have to open on purpose; it answers inside the search bar, generates overviews above conventional results, and runs side-by-side product comparisons. Amazon has also pushed it toward agentic behavior — scheduled repeat purchases, price tracking, and buying on the shopper's behalf. The direction of travel is that fewer shopping journeys pass through a plain ten-blue-links results page.\n\n### How big it actually is\n\nAmazon disclosed in its Q4 2025 earnings materials (published February 2026) that the assistant drove roughly **$12 billion in incremental annualized sales**, ahead of the $10 billion pace Andy Jassy described on the October 2025 call, and that **more than 300 million customers** used it during 2025. Amazon also states that shoppers who use the assistant during their journey convert at rates more than 60% higher than those who don't.\n\nTreat that last number as Amazon's framing, not a causal law. Shoppers who ask an assistant three questions about a product are further down the funnel than shoppers who don't — correlation is doing some of that work. The honest read is not \"Rufus lifts conversion 60%\" but \"a large and growing share of high-intent shoppers now pass through an AI layer before they reach your detail page.\"\n\n## How Rufus answers a shopper\n\nAmazon Science has published the architecture, so this part doesn't need guesswork. Rufus is built on a custom large language model trained on shopping-specific data — the Amazon catalog, reviews and community Q&A — combined with **retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)**: before it writes an answer, it retrieves information it considers reliable and answers from that, rather than from model memory alone. Amazon names the retrieval sources explicitly: customer reviews, the product catalog, community questions and answers, and calls to relevant Stores APIs.\n\nThat mechanic has three consequences that matter more than any tactic:\n\n1. **The answer is assembled at query time.** If your listing text changes, the evidence available to the assistant changes with the next index pass — this is not a model that has to be retrained to notice your new bullet points.\n2. **Missing information is a hard failure, not a soft one.** If a shopper asks whether a product is safe for a specific use and nothing in your listing, A+ modules, Q&A or reviews addresses it, the assistant cannot invent a yes. A competitor who answered that question in a bullet gets recommended instead.\n3. **The unit of relevance is the question, not the keyword.** The retrieval step is semantic. \"Which of these is quiet enough for a nursery\" and \"low decibel humidifier baby\" land on the same evidence, and the listing that reads like an answer wins both.\n\n![How Amazon Rufus assembles an answer from listing data](blog\u002Fwhat-is-amazon-rufus-diagram-01-1786695361941.webp)\n\nAmazon also runs a semantic layer known as **COSMO**, a commonsense knowledge system that maps queries to intents and product attributes. Amazon has published research on it, but it has never documented COSMO as a ranking control sellers can act on, and most of what circulates about \"optimizing for COSMO\" is inference. The practical advice that survives the uncertainty is the same either way: describe use cases, contexts and compatibility explicitly instead of assuming the algorithm infers them.\n\n## Where Rufus pulls its data from\n\nThis is the part brands consistently get wrong — they optimize the title and treat everything else as decoration. The table below separates what Amazon has confirmed as a retrieval source from what is well-supported practitioner observation.\n\n| Source | Status | What it does for you |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| Product catalog: title, bullets, description | Confirmed by Amazon | The primary evidence for what the product is, who it's for, and what it does |\n| Customer reviews | Confirmed by Amazon | Third-party corroboration; the assistant quotes and summarizes them |\n| Community Q&A | Confirmed by Amazon | Direct question-to-answer pairs, the closest match to how shoppers ask |\n| Stores APIs (price, availability, delivery, variants) | Confirmed by Amazon | Filters your product in or out of \"available now\" style answers |\n| A+ Content and Brand Story | Widely observed, not formally documented | Structured detail — materials, sizing, compatibility, comparison tables |\n| Structured attributes in the backend | Widely observed | Fills the fields the assistant filters on; empty fields are silent nos |\n| Images and on-image text | Observed | Read via vision\u002FOCR; overlaid claims become retrievable text |\n| External web content | Confirmed as part of training \u002F stated in Amazon's launch material | Context for fresh or technical questions the catalog can't answer |\n\nTwo implications are worth spelling out.\n\n**Your listing is a source document.** Whether a section is \"SEO copy\" or \"brand copy\" is a distinction that exists only inside your team. The assistant reads all of it as evidence. A comparison table inside an A+ module is more useful to it than a fifth keyword-stuffed bullet.\n\n**You do not control all of the evidence.** Reviews and Q&A are retrieved with the same standing as your own copy, and where they contradict your claims, the shopper-generated version is what the assistant has to reconcile. That makes review quality and answered questions a discoverability asset, not just a conversion asset. The lever you hold is making sure your copy is specific and verifiable enough not to be contradicted.\n\nIf you want the tactical version of this — bullets phrased as answers, attributes to fill, what to put in A+ — that's the 12-point checklist for optimizing a listing for Rufus. It's the companion piece to this one.\n\n## Ads inside the assistant: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands prompts\n\nThis is the most concrete change of 2026 and the one most brands are paying for without knowing it.\n\nAmazon Ads launched **Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts** into general availability on **25 March 2026**, US only. Prompts are AI-generated suggested questions that appear in shopping results and on product detail pages; clicking one either opens a dialog in the assistant or answers the shopper directly on the page, drawing on Amazon's first-party signals from your detail page, Brand Store and campaign data.\n\nThree properties of the format define how you should think about it:\n\n- **Enrollment is automatic.** Existing Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns were enrolled using their current parameters, with no setup step. If you were running ads in the US in spring 2026, you have been serving prompts.\n- **Amazon writes the creative.** The prompt copy is generated from your listing and campaign signals. You do not author it, and the quality of it is downstream of the quality of your detail page — another reason listing content is now an advertising input, not just an organic one.\n- **It bills as CPC.** From general availability, Amazon charges for prompt clicks under the same CPC bidding and billing parameters as the parent campaign. The free-pilot period some coverage describes was the beta phase, not the current state.\n\n![Where Sponsored Products prompts appear in an Amazon shopping journey](blog\u002Fwhat-is-amazon-rufus-diagram-02-1786695361942.webp)\n\nOn the Q1 2026 earnings call Amazon said that nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with a brand's prompt continue the conversation about that brand — which is the strategic point of the format from Amazon's side, and a reasonable reason to leave it running rather than fight it.\n\n## How to measure it in the console\n\nAs of Q3 2026, prompt performance has its own reporting. Amazon exposes a **Prompts report** through the Ads Console and the Advertising API, containing the prompt text, the associated ad, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost per click, spend, sales, ACOS, ROAS, and 7-day orders and units. In Seller Central the same data is reachable under Advertising → Reports, and there is a Prompts view inside the campaign structure alongside the other placement reports.\n\nWhat you can and can't do with it:\n\n| You can | You can't |\n| --- | --- |\n| See spend, clicks and attributed sales by prompt | Bid separately on prompt placements |\n| Read the exact prompt text Amazon generated | Write or edit the prompt copy |\n| Compare prompt ACoS against your other placements | Target specific prompts or questions |\n| Disable prompts on a campaign | Get organic (unpaid) assistant impressions as a reported metric |\n\nThat last row is the honest limitation. There is no \"Rufus traffic\" line in Seller Central for organic assistant answers the way there is for a sponsored placement. If your product is recommended inside an answer and the shopper clicks through, it appears as ordinary detail-page traffic. Anyone selling you a precise organic Rufus attribution number is selling you a model, not a measurement.\n\nWhat you can watch instead, on a monthly cadence: the share of your converting search terms that read like questions or long descriptive phrases rather than head keywords; unit-session percentage on the ASINs whose listings you rewrote for question coverage; and prompt-level ACoS versus the rest of the campaign. Treat prompts like any other placement — if the ACoS is materially worse and there is no incremental order volume behind it, turning them off on that campaign is the only lever you have.\n\n## What Rufus does not change\n\nBecause the topic attracts a lot of noise, it's worth being explicit about the parts that are unchanged.\n\n**Conventional ranking still runs the results page.** The assistant is a layer on top of Amazon search, not a replacement for it. Sales velocity, conversion rate, relevance, price competitiveness, availability and review profile still determine where you appear when a shopper types a keyword and scrolls, which is still the majority of sessions. If you're rebuilding fundamentals, start with how Amazon ranking actually works — Rufus optimization sits on top of that, not instead of it.\n\n**There is no separate \"Rufus algorithm\" to game.** The assistant retrieves from the same catalog everyone else can see. There is no submission process, no schema to add, no hidden field. Listings that get recommended are listings that answer questions completely and are corroborated by reviews.\n\n**Bad unit economics don't become good.** An AI layer that surfaces your product more often to better-qualified shoppers amplifies whatever your detail page already does. If the page converts poorly or the margin doesn't survive the ad cost, more qualified traffic just moves the problem faster.\n\nThe work itself is unglamorous: fill the attributes, answer the questions shoppers actually ask, make A+ carry information rather than mood, and keep the Q&A section alive. In our [listing SEO work with a pet supplements brand](\u002Fcase-studies\u002Fpet-supplements-brand-listing-seo), that combination — question-led listing rewrites plus Rufus-oriented content — moved organic sales +187%. It's the same discipline as classic [Amazon listing SEO](\u002Fservices\u002Famazon-listing-seo), applied with the assumption that a machine reads the page before a human does.\n\n## FAQ\n\n### Is Amazon Rufus still called Rufus?\n\nNot in the US. Amazon renamed Rufus to Alexa for Shopping on 13 May 2026 and folded the standalone chat panel into the main search bar. Outside the US the rollout has been staged and the Rufus name may still appear in the interface. The underlying assistant, data sources and optimization work are the same.\n\n### Does Amazon Rufus affect search rankings?\n\nNot directly. Rufus doesn't rank the conventional results page — Amazon's search algorithm still does that, driven by relevance, sales velocity, conversion rate and availability. Rufus is a retrieval layer that recommends products inside answers. The indirect effect is real: listings written to answer questions tend to convert better, which feeds ranking.\n\n### Can you opt out of Amazon Rufus ads?\n\nPartly. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands prompts auto-enrolled existing US campaigns when they reached general availability in March 2026, and they bill under your normal CPC parameters. You can disable prompts at the campaign level, but you cannot bid on them separately, target specific prompts, or edit the copy Amazon generates.\n\n### Which countries is Amazon Rufus available in?\n\nRufus launched in the US in 2024 and has since expanded to major European marketplaces, Canada and India, with further markets rolling out. Feature parity lags outside the US — new capabilities usually appear in the US mobile app first. The 2026 rename to Alexa for Shopping also shipped in the US ahead of other locales.\n\n### How do I know if Rufus is sending me traffic?\n\nFor paid placements, use the Prompts report in the Ads Console or Advertising API: it shows prompt text, impressions, clicks, CPC, spend, sales, ACOS and ROAS. For organic assistant recommendations there is no separate metric — those clicks land as ordinary detail-page sessions. Watch question-shaped converting search terms and unit-session percentage as proxies.\n\n### Does Rufus read A+ content?\n\nIn practice, yes. Amazon confirms retrieval from the product catalog, reviews and community Q&A; A+ modules are widely observed to be used as a structured knowledge source, and Amazon's own comparison features draw on A+ content. Treat A+ as information architecture — specs, sizing, compatibility, comparison tables — rather than as brand mood imagery.\n\n## Where to start\n\nPick your top five ASINs by revenue and, for each one, write down the ten questions a shopper actually asks before buying — then check whether the listing, A+ modules and Q&A answer all ten in plain text. Most brands find three or four unanswered, and those gaps are exactly where an assistant recommends someone else. Then open the Prompts report for your US campaigns and see what Amazon has been writing on your behalf; if you'd rather have someone look at the whole account first, the [free Amazon audit](\u002Ftools\u002Famazon-audit) covers listing coverage and ad placements together.\n","What Is Amazon Rufus? A Guide for Brands","What Amazon Rufus is, how it answers shoppers, where it pulls listing data from, and what its 2026 rename to Alexa for Shopping changes for brands.","amazon-seo","Amazon SEO & Rufus",[34],[178],"473accef-8ec5-44b3-8ade-76683954109f",[180],{"name":181,"slug":182},"Rufus","rufus",1786850221312]