What is a good ACoS for Amazon PPC?
Short answer: there isn't one number. A "good" ACoS is whatever sits at or below your break-even point, and that changes by product and category.
Why there's no single "good" ACoS
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) is ad spend divided by ad-attributed sales. A 30% ACoS is disastrous on a product with 20% margin, and comfortable on one with 55% margin. Benchmarks you see quoted online average across categories with wildly different margins, which is why they rarely apply cleanly to your account.
Find your break-even ACoS first
Your break-even ACoS is roughly your gross margin before advertising costs. Spend above that on a sustained basis and ads are subtracting from profit rather than adding to it. Use the ACoS and TACoS calculator to get your number from your own spend, sales and margin.
Then decide your target relative to break-even
- Below break-even: profitable growth — the zone most "maintain" and "reduce" strategies aim for.
- At break-even: acceptable for a launch phase, where the goal is rank and reviews rather than immediate profit.
- Above break-even, briefly: sometimes justified to clear aging stock or push a launch, but not sustainable.
Watch TACoS too
ACoS only measures ad-driven sales. TACoS (ad spend ÷ total sales including organic) tells you whether advertising is growing your whole business or just recycling spend into sales you'd have gotten anyway. A falling TACoS over time, even with a flat ACoS, usually means your organic rank is doing more of the work.
Automating around your number
Once you know your target, the daily work is holding bids inside a band around it — the exact job target ACoS automation is built for.
Let BidBison hold your target ACoS automatically.
Free during launch, no card required.