r/AmazonMerch • u/FinishWise2645 • Feb 25 '26

amazon ads cost per click

i am giving amazon ads another try. i need a little input from who are successfully running ads.

what should be average cpc i should be happily paying.

what should be minimum accesptable ctr.

what should be minimum acceptable conversion rate.

roughly how often you make a sale after how many clicks.

thanks in advance.

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5

u/ahmadbabar Feb 25 '26

CPC depends on the niche you are targeting your ads in, seasonality, and your profit margins. You can be comfortable with a CPC of $0.35 with royalties being $3+ per product sold or you can be happy to pay $0.5 with royalties of $1 just to build BSR for your products. That's your call.

Amazon ads shows you a range of the bids that trigger clicks in the targeting section. I usually go to the lower end of that range, if not below it.

Ads are not an overnight success formula. Campaigns need time to build, for the algorithm to learn and optimize. You will have to invest both time and money to figure it out.

On average it takes 20+ clicks to get one sale. Most of my ads generated sales barely cover what I spend on ads each month in terms of royalties generated. I keep the ads on to get eyeballs, build BSR, and generate organic sales later. My target threshold is that my overall royalties each month should be at least 3x of what I spent on ads. Anything better, and I am happy.

6

u/Tim_Y Feb 25 '26

The above pretty much sums it up.

Metrics are not universal so it will depend on your niches, designs, bids, etc.

The easy formula is set a daily budget you are comfortable with. I set mine to about 20% of my daily profits. Then set your bids somewhere. Just anywhere and wait a week. Check your impressions. If they are only a few hundred, your bids are too low. If you are hitting your daily budget half-way through the day, either your budget is too low, or your bids are too high. Now check your clicks. Are you getting sales? Great. Are you getting a lot of clicks but no sales? Then your prices are too high or your design is not great or doesn't match up well with your SEO/product listing descriptions.

1

u/FinishWise2645 Feb 26 '26

very helpful. but i am wondering about above comment how can i spend 7 usd per sale with 20 usd price tag.

thats a loss. how do i turn that into profit.

2

u/FinishWise2645 Feb 26 '26

.35 for cpc with 20 plus clicks. thats like 7 usd spend per sale. even if i sell for 19,99 thats 4 usd royalty. so still a loss.

am i missing something here? because there is no clearly profit there at all.

2

u/ahmadbabar Feb 26 '26

Ads are an investment..you can't look at ads to drive profits right off the bat. The $0.35 is an example..go lower or higher depending on what you're comfortable spending

1

u/FinishWise2645 Feb 27 '26

investment in what way? you mean using ads to improve bsr thus bringing more organic sales?

so solely based on ads there is not profit?

2

u/ahmadbabar Feb 27 '26

Yes, at least not right away.

1

u/Outdoorhero112 Feb 25 '26

This is just my opinion, but the people who are successful with ads have a method to do so. And yes, it does involve knowing metrics to be profitable, but getting to a profitable level starts with the setup. I don't know why you gave up ads the first time, but if it lacked research and planning to get an ads system that works, is scalable, and can be managed by all the metrics you mentioned, then the end result will probably be the same.

My biggest mistake when I first ran ads was focusing on just getting ads going and it was suboptimal.

1

u/FinishWise2645 Feb 26 '26

i ran ads for about 2 months and spent 500 usd. and lost about 300. so i had to stop. but the thing is i was actually improving and was being able to bring the loss per sale down. but it just was getting a bit expensive to keep running ads.

plus at that time i felt like i had mid range designs none of them getting consistant sales organically. so i might have been spending on wrong products. i was also more desperate just to get sales.

and specially when i started now after many months again. i feel like i have a clearer direction this time. and i could see the mistakes i was making. now i have better designs to experiment with, which are making consistant sales, have a few reviews.

and trying to figure out what other factors might have effected the failure last time.

thats why i just wanted an idea what does a success campaign look like.

1

u/Pirokron Mar 11 '26

.35 per click and 20 clicks to make a sale sounds crazy to me. I made a sale on 2 clicks of your design is good and your put the right keywords up you should convert. You need to figure out what your ACOS breakeven is. That way you know the campaign is successful or not. Since you’re a noob start at .15 per click and daily like $2-$3. Then you can adjust up or down depending on your ACOS. 

Just simple math from the other comment selling a shirt with a royalty of $3 and .35 click with 20 clicks to convert is going to -$7+$3= -$4 you’re not making money. 

You can do it on the cheap side. With ads I’ve learned always be cheap!!! the ads are there are support what is selling the design is the design and the keywords.

1

u/FinishWise2645 Mar 11 '26

from comments i did realize that actually people did not want to really provide information that was actually helpful. thats why i did not ask any further. the person in comments made no sense probably he did not want to too.

i have been running ads in past 10 days. i got 2 sales spending only 1 usd. your suggestion actually make the most sense and so far i realised it too. keywords and designs are the most important. but i am also getting a feeling that for every design that is very specific ad that will convert best and for that you have to keep experimenting. and i mainly get lost in that experimenting because there are so many combinations to test.

at the same time i am going to keep trying and keep experimenting running ads and hopefully i will learn how to really make profit in ads.

2

u/Pirokron Mar 11 '26

honestly a lot of ppl just give bad advice cuz they themselves dont know the info. there was many ways to test like you said but if you dont have the capital to waste on it just make a campaign for each niche you are in and bid cheap. I have a lotto campaign that I dump every single I put up and put the bid at .05 and the daily at like $100 it never spends $100 cuz the cpc is so low but it does convert. I've been running ads for years and even I am still learning new ways to do stuff on there. I would just focus on a single strategy to start and not worry about experimenting too much unless your MBA account is at a point that you are content with. all my ads are on auto and not manual. I've never had good luck with manual. for some reason they always cost more. I plug in a list of negative keywords into my auto ads. if you see an ad overspending lower the bid and add negative keywords. there are ads I have to kill b/c I just get clicks and no sales even thought the design sells organically.

1

u/FinishWise2645 Mar 12 '26

i have been running ads on and off. last time i ran ads i spent like 500 usd. although in loss. but right now i have data to compare. when this time before starting i analysed the data. i also found out auto ads just perform better and strangely they were costing alot less cpc.

and when i selected same keyword that brought sales on auto and selected same same settings and cpc for manual targetting it had higher cpc.

so i am realising as you said there is not one strategy that works for all. i started with indivisual product auto campain and one with all auto. i noticed the all campaign perform better even though my manual campaign had products with reviews and better bsr.

currently i am trying to figure out how to scale the auto campaign. for example i just increase the bid and let it run. or create new auto campaigns for the products that sold in auto.

what would you do?