To decrease ACOS on Amazon, tighten your keyword targeting with exact match campaigns, add negative keywords weekly, improve your listing conversion rate with high-quality video and images, lower bids on underperforming terms, and audit your campaigns every 72 hours for wasted spend. Most sellers can decrease ACOS by 25-35% within 30 days.
Every Amazon seller hits the same wall: you launch campaigns, sales come in, but the numbers do not add up. Your ACOS is eating into margins and you are not sure which lever to pull first. The problem is not that ACOS is hard to understand. It is that most advice is too vague.
This guide gives you specific, actionable tactics. No theory. Each section ends with something you can implement today.
Broad and phrase match campaigns cast a wide net. That net catches a lot of irrelevant searches that cost you money without converting. Exact match targeting is your precision scalpel.
When you use exact match, your ad only shows when a customer searches that exact keyword or a close variant. This eliminates spend on loosely related terms that were never going to convert. Most sellers see an instant ACOS drop of 10-20% on keywords they switch from broad to exact match.
Action step: Take your top 20 converting keywords from the last 30 days. Create a new exact match campaign with those keywords. Set bids 15% higher than your broad campaign. Move budget from broad to exact gradually and watch ACOS fall.
Negative keywords are the fastest way to decrease ACOS. Every click from an irrelevant search is money that could have gone to a converting ad. The fix takes ten minutes per week.
Download your search term report every Monday. Filter by clicks > 10 and orders = 0. Every term on that list is draining your budget. Add all of them as negative exact match keywords at the campaign level.
Common negative keyword categories to preemptively add:
Your ACOS is the direct result of how many clicks turn into sales. A listing converting at 5% needs twice the ad spend to generate the same revenue as a listing converting at 10%. The single highest-impact change you can make to your conversion rate is adding a professional product video.
Amazon data consistently shows that listings with video content convert 15-30% higher than those without. Videos help customers understand the product, see it in action, and build trust before purchase. A better conversion rate means every click works harder, and your ACOS drops without touching a single bid.
Blindly lowering bids is not the answer. But strategic bid reduction on specific placements and keywords is a powerful ACOS tool.
Identify keywords where your ACOS is above 50% but you are getting meaningful sales volume. Instead of pausing, reduce bids by 20% and re-measure for one week. Many keywords still deliver sales at a lower bid; the auction just needed recalibrating.
For top-of-search placement, check your placement report. If top-of-search ACOS is above your target, reduce the placement premium by 10-20%. The lower placement cost often yields a better overall ACOS even if conversion rate drops slightly.
Higher conversion rate = lower ACOS. VEONIB creates professional ecommerce videos from any product URL in 60 seconds. No equipment, no editing skills needed.
Create Your Product VideoFollow this sequence to systematically decrease your ACOS over the next 30 days.
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