7 Proven Strategies to Improve Your Amazon Ads in 2025

Updated for 2025

Advertising on Amazon can still be a tough cookie to crack. Between your Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and whatever new feature Amazon has introduced this year, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of. And they all have an impact on how well your ads perform and, ultimately, how much you are paying to acquire customers.

The fundamentals have not changed. You still need qualified traffic and then you still need that traffic to convert. What has changed is how much more data-driven and competitive everything now is. Amazon’s tools have evolved, competition is stronger, and automation plays a bigger role than ever. So in 2025, improving your Amazon ads is no longer just about fiddling with bids or pushing a few more keywords. You now need better conversion data, smarter keyword harvesting, cleaner campaign structures and proper visibility on what customers do before and after they click.

Since the subject is such an expansive one, for now, we are going to focus on seven core elements which will help improve your advertising for Amazon or, rather, how you advertise with Amazon.

Key Takeaways

• Why Unit Session Percentage is still one of the best signals for ad performance
• How automatic campaigns help you find profitable keywords that manual campaigns can scale
• Why single-ASIN campaigns make your budgeting and reporting far easier to manage
• Where Amazon’s AI bidding tools actually help and where you still need a human
• How Amazon Attribution and the Brand Referral Bonus support organic ranking
• What Amazon Marketing Cloud can tell you about the full customer journey
• Why patient, long-term optimisation still beats jumping in and out of your ads every day

1. Measure and Optimise Conversion Data Using Business Reports

Nearly all sellers face two major challenges when running Amazon ads: drawing traffic to their listings and converting that traffic into paying customers. To measure how well you are doing on that front, you still need to look at your sessions and your unit session percentage, otherwise known as traffic and conversion rate.

If your unit session percentage is poor then chances are your ad performance will suffer. This will inevitably lead to your listing not selling at all or simply not selling as well as it could, because there is either not enough traffic going to it or that traffic is not converting fast enough to customers.

Your first stop is still the Business Reports section of Seller Central. Look at your top traffic listings and see how well they are converting. Anything with more than 100 sessions a month and a conversion rate below, say, 8 percent is usually a big opportunity.

You now also have more tools in 2025 than you did a few years ago. Brand Analytics lets you see which search terms are driving impressions and conversions. Search Query Performance shows you where you are gaining traction and where you are missing out. Amazon Marketing Cloud gives more advanced sellers the ability to see how shoppers move between different touchpoints before they buy.

Here is a simple example.
If a listing is converting at 7 percent and you improve your images, tidy up your bullets, sharpen your A+ Content, try a small price change and sort out your main keywords, and that conversion rate moves up to 10 percent, the maths on your ads changes instantly. For the same ad spend, you now sell more units, your ACoS comes down and your RoAS goes up.

So:
• Use Business Reports every month
• Use Brand Analytics and Search Query Performance to confirm indexing and demand
• Look at your click-through rate
• Prioritise any listing with traffic but weak conversion

Once your listings convert consistently, every pound you invest in Amazon PPC has a much better chance of coming back.

2. Run Automatic Campaigns to Discover Keywords, Then Optimise Manually

Keywords are still the building blocks of your Sponsored Products campaigns. Extracting and utilising the correct keywords is a critical part of every PPC strategy. And in 2025, you have more data than ever to help you do it.

Although there are plenty of apps promising to help you harvest the best keywords, letting Amazon show you what customers actually type into the search bar is still the most reliable method. This is where automatic campaigns shine.

Run both automatic and manual campaigns for the same product listing for at least two or three weeks. After you have run your automatic campaign for a while, download your Search Term Report and look for keywords that generated good sales with a low ACoS.

If your automatic campaign shows that “beard shampoo and conditioner” generated strong sales at a low ACoS, add that term as an exact match keyword in your manual campaign. That helps you maximise conversions and reduce wasted spend.

Long-tail keywords are often useful. A phrase like “sulphate free beard shampoo for dry skin” may get lower volume, but intent is high and competition is usually low, which means your click costs stay down.

In 2025, you also have more to work with:
• Search Query Performance
• Brand Analytics
• Helium 10 Cerebro

This workflow gives you a reliable way to keep your manual campaigns supplied with fresh, high-intent, real-world search terms.

3. Use One ASIN per Campaign Group

Why? Because this will help you filter your keywords and relevancy and keep your data clean.

If you are grouping your products, do not. Creating a single setup per ASIN gives you the best control over your targeting, your budget and your Amazon CPCs.

Let us look at it another way.

Whether or not you can group your products depends on the product’s diversity and quantity. Products can only really be grouped if they share:
• The exact same keywords
• The same profit margin
• Very similar conversion behaviour

For instance, you might have a donut-shaped float and an avocado-shaped one. Both are novelty swimming pool floats that look like foods. You can imagine someone looking for one and ending up buying the other.

Well, does that mean they should be in the same ad group?

Definitely not. They are not interchangeable. The qualities that make them both unique will be reflected in distinct search terms. If the donut float is more popular, your competitors will likely bid more aggressively for those keywords. This drives up CPC for the entire group. You do not want to be advertising an avocado if you are paying for a donut.

If both products sit inside the same campaign, you cannot allocate a precise budget to one product alone. And if their margins differ, you will not be able to read your ACoS in an accurate way.

In 2025, you also have Portfolios to keep everything organised. Instead of mixing ASINs into one campaign, keep your single-ASIN campaigns inside a Portfolio and keep everything clean.

4. Use Amazon’s AI Tools for Bid and Budget Automation

Amazon has been rolling out more automation and AI-powered recommendations over the years and now, in 2025, they are everywhere. Dynamic bidding, performance recommendations, budget advice, scheduling, it can all feel overwhelming at first. Used sensibly though, these tools can support your PPC strategy rather than getting in the way of it.

You now have three main bidding options: fixed bids, dynamic down only and dynamic up and down. Fixed bids mean Amazon will not touch your bid. Down only lets Amazon lower your bid if it thinks a click is unlikely to convert. Up and down lets it adjust your bid if it believes the conversion likelihood changes.

Budget automation is also worth paying attention to. You do not want your strongest campaigns going dark midway through the day because they hit the daily cap. Amazon will warn you if a campaign regularly runs out of budget and suggest increases that match your historic traffic patterns.

You can also experiment with scheduling, sometimes called dayparting. This simply means running your ads during the hours or days where your audience tends to convert most often.

Automation should support your decisions, not replace them. Keep an eye on your reports and understand where your money is going.

5. Track Off-Amazon Impact with Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution is a free tool for brand-registered sellers that lets you measure external advertising performance. When it was first introduced it felt like a helpful extra. In 2025, it is now an important part of many sellers’ PPC strategies.

Using Amazon Attribution, you can measure the impact of social ads, Google ads, email marketing and even influencer content. You see how customers discover, research and eventually purchase your products on Amazon, even when the journey starts outside Amazon.

There is also the Brand Referral Bonus. By sending external traffic with Attribution links, you can earn up to around 10 percent of the sale price back as a credit. At the same time, external traffic can help improve your organic keyword rankings and your overall seller rank, as long as that traffic converts.

So, once you optimise your external campaigns, you can drive that traffic to your Amazon listings to:
• Boost your seller rank
• Improve organic keyword visibility
• Gather more insights into your customers
• Earn referral bonuses

If you are advertising off Amazon, it makes little sense in 2025 to do so without Attribution.

6. Leverage Amazon Marketing Cloud for Data-Driven Insights

Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, can sound intimidating at first, but it is simply a more advanced way to look at what customers do before, during and after they see your ads. It is a secure environment where you can combine data from your Amazon advertising with certain off-Amazon data if you choose.

Standard Seller Central reports usually show you the last click. AMC can show you the full journey. For example:
• Someone might see a Sponsored Display ad
• They might later search and click a Sponsored Product ad
• They might finally buy after seeing a Sponsored Brands ad

AMC can show you how many interactions customers need before they buy, how long it takes for them to return and which ads influence later conversions.

Smaller sellers will not be building dashboards themselves. That is fine. Agencies and partner tools exist for that. If you want to understand more than ACoS, AMC is where the deeper answers live.

7. Test, Iterate, and Scale with Long-Term PPC Data

Continue to monitor and review your ad reports regularly, adding, subtracting and tweaking keywords as needed. What you should avoid is making big decisions day by day. You need at least a week, and ideally fourteen days, to see the impact of your changes.

Effective Amazon advertising in 2025 is all about patience and consistent iteration. You test, you measure, you adjust and you repeat.

A few ideas:
• Let new campaigns run long enough to gather meaningful data
• Use A/B tests on images and titles
• Read your placement reports
• Use Portfolios to sort campaigns so you can move more budget into the strong ones

When you launch a new product or PPC structure, you may still want to set daily budgets and default bids higher for the first couple of weeks. You are buying data. Once you have it, you can scale back or lean further in.

The important thing to remember is that PPC improvements stack slowly. A stronger conversion rate here, a few wasted terms removed there, one or two better match types, it all compounds. The brands that win are the ones who turn up every month and make smart, consistent adjustments.

FAQs

How often should I optimise Amazon PPC campaigns?

You should monitor your campaigns most days, but only make real optimisation decisions once you have at least seven to fourteen days of data.

What is a good ACoS benchmark for 2025?

There is no universal ACoS target. Many brands now focus on RoAS and total account profitability. The key thing is making sure your ACoS still leaves you with enough profit to scale.

Does external traffic improve Amazon rankings?

Yes, but only if it converts. Amazon likes new customers who arrive from outside the platform and still buy your products.

Is Amazon Marketing Cloud suitable for smaller sellers?

AMC is mainly used by brands with higher ad spend, but smaller sellers can still benefit through agencies and partner tools.

Conclusion

While the fundamentals of Amazon advertising remain the same, the way you approach PPC in 2025 needs to be smarter and far more data-driven. The sellers who get the best results are the ones who pair strong conversion foundations with automation, attribution and deeper analytics. If you take the time to test, refine and understand the journey customers take before they buy, your ads become far easier to scale and far more profitable in the long run.