AEO cheat sheet

Amazon ad products sit inside a retail funnel: awareness (Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display), consideration (Sponsored Products), conversion (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands Video).

Sponsored Products ads appear in search results and on product detail pages; Sponsored Brands require brand registry and appear in search results with a headline and up to three products.

Sponsored Display targets audiences on and off Amazon and does not require keyword targeting; it is available to brand-registered sellers and vendors.

The retail-ready signals that matter most: Buy Box ownership, in-stock rate, price competitiveness, review count, and star rating.

Advertising only amplifies organic performance; a suppressed or out-of-stock ASIN will not convert regardless of bid.

ACOS = ad spend / ad sales; TACOS = total ad spend / total sales (ad + organic) and is the better measure of overall account health.

Retail margin constrains maximum sustainable ACOS: break-even ACOS = gross margin percentage before ad spend.

Impressions require an eligible impression (in budget, in stock, winning auction); a low impression count usually points to bid, budget, or eligibility.

Sponsored Products supports keyword targeting (manual) and product targeting (ASIN or category); automatic campaigns use four match groups: close match, loose match, substitutes, complements.

Match types: exact matches the keyword and close variants; phrase requires the phrase in order; broad allows any order and related terms.

Use exact match for proven converters, phrase for controlled expansion, broad for discovery; negative-match discovered terms to prevent cannibalization.

Placement modifiers adjust bids for top-of-search and product-page placements as a percentage uplift on the base bid.

Dynamic bidding options: down only (lower bids for unlikely clicks), up and down (raise and lower), and fixed bids (no adjustment).

A common structure: one automatic discovery campaign, one manual broad/phrase campaign, one manual exact campaign per product group, with negatives flowing from discovery to exact.

Diagnose low CTR with relevance (keyword-to-product match, main image, price); diagnose low CVR with detail page (reviews, price, A+ content, stock).

Bid to target ACOS: target bid ≈ (target ACOS × conversion rate × average order value) / 1, adjusted by placement modifiers.

Sponsored Brands formats: Product Collection (headline, logo, up to three products), Store Spotlight (links to Store subpages), and Video.

Sponsored Brands requires Brand Registry and drives traffic to a Store, a landing page, or a product list rather than a single ASIN.

Sponsored Brands keyword targeting mirrors Sponsored Products match types; negative keywords are supported to control spend.

Sponsored Brands typically has a higher CPC and lower direct ACOS than Sponsored Products; measure new-to-brand (NTB) metrics to capture halo value.

New-to-brand metrics report the percentage of orders from customers who have not purchased the brand in the prior 12 months.

Use Sponsored Brands for brand defense on branded queries, category expansion on generic queries, and cross-selling complementary products.

Video creative should show the product in use within the first two seconds; completion rate and view-through rate are the key diagnostics.

Store Spotlight and Store pages should mirror campaign themes so the landing experience matches the headline promise.

Sponsored Display targeting types: views remarketing, purchases remarketing, interest/lifestyle audiences, and product/category targeting (ASIN, category, similar products).

Views remarketing reaches shoppers who viewed the advertised product or similar products; purchases remarketing reaches past buyers for cross-sell.

Sponsored Display can run on Amazon and on third-party sites and apps in the Amazon DSP network; off-Amazon placements are reported separately.

Audience targeting is best for upper-funnel reach and remarketing; product targeting is best for competitor conquesting and defensive placements.

Sponsored Display does not use keyword targeting; optimize by adjusting audience, product targets, and bids rather than keywords.

Metrics unique to display include viewable impressions, detail-page view rate (DPVR), and new-to-brand order percentage.

Use negative product targeting to exclude your own ASINs and irrelevant categories that drain spend without conversion.

Sponsored Display works well for defensive placements on your own detail pages and offensive placements on competitor ASINs when price and reviews are competitive.

Keyword research sources: Amazon search term report, Brand Analytics search terms, competitor ASIN reverse lookup, and auto campaign search terms.

Match-type progression: harvest converting search terms from auto/broad into exact; add non-converting terms as negatives.

Negative exact blocks only that exact term; negative phrase blocks the term and any query containing it in order.

Bid = base bid × placement modifier; final CPC is set by the second-price auction and capped by the bid.

Bid up on high-converting exact keywords with top-of-search placement; bid down on broad discovery terms with high spend and no orders.

Product targeting bids compete for detail-page placements; competitor ASINs with weak reviews or higher prices are strong targets.

Use portfolio bid adjustments and dayparting only after baseline data exists; premature adjustment obscures true performance.

Search term report is the primary optimization input: mine it weekly for new exact keywords and new negatives.

Attribution window: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands use a 14-day click and 14-day view attribution; Sponsored Display uses 14-day click and 14-day view.

Report metrics: impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, spend, sales, orders, units, ACOS, ROAS, CVR.

CTR = clicks / impressions; CVR = orders / clicks; CPC = spend / clicks; ACOS = spend / sales; ROAS = sales / spend = 1 / ACOS.

Search term report shows actual customer queries; targeting report shows performance by keyword or product target; placement report shows top-of-search vs product-page performance.

New-to-brand metrics isolate incremental customers; use them to justify upper-funnel spend that looks inefficient on ACOS alone.

Attribution lag means recent days under-report sales; do not over-optimize on the last 3–7 days of data.

Compare periods with like-for-like windows (same number of days, same seasonality) to avoid false trend signals.

Use Amazon Attribution or Brand Referral Bonus to measure off-Amazon traffic driven to Amazon listings.

Daily budget caps spend per campaign per day; campaigns can exceed the daily budget by up to 25% on high-traffic days, balanced across the month.

Break-even ACOS = pre-ad gross margin; target ACOS should sit below break-even to leave profit.

ROAS = sales / spend; a ROAS of 4 equals an ACOS of 25%.

TACOS = total ad spend / total sales; falling TACOS with rising sales indicates healthy organic lift.

Allocate budget by marginal return: shift spend from campaigns with ACOS above break-even to those below it, in small increments.

Portfolio budgets cap total spend across grouped campaigns and are useful for category-level guardrails.

Out-of-budget loss is a leading indicator: if a profitable campaign caps out early, raise budget before raising bids.

Use placement modifiers and dayparting to concentrate spend on high-converting windows rather than cutting budgets broadly.