"Advertising costs are rising, but orders have not shown significant growth." This is the most intuitive feeling of many Amazon sellers this year.

As platform competition continues to intensify, more and more sellers find that the ACOS, which used to be stably controlled at 20%-30%, now often exceeds 40%, or even higher. Advertising investment keeps increasing, but profit margins are being continuously squeezed.

Why does this happen?

Firstly, the competitive environment has undergone obvious changes. More and more sellers enter the same sub-category, and the bidding for hot keywords keeps rising. Keywords that originally cost only $0.5 per click may now have risen to $1 or even higher.

Secondly, some sellers rely too much on advertising to obtain traffic. When their natural rankings decline, they can only keep raising their bids to maintain exposure, eventually falling into a cycle of "the more you invest, the more expensive it gets".

Faced with high ACOS, many sellers' first reaction is to reduce advertising budgets. But in fact, blindly cutting advertising often leads to a further decline in sales. What really needs to be done is to improve advertising efficiency.

The first step is to check the search term report.

Many advertising expenses are actually wasted on ineffective traffic. Some keywords have a high number of clicks but do not generate orders over a long period. Such keywords should be promptly added to the negative keyword list to avoid continuing to consume the budget.

The second step is to distinguish between "traffic-driving words" and "conversion words".

Not all keywords are worth bidding high prices for. For core keywords with high conversion rates, the bid can be appropriately increased; for keywords that only bring exposure but are difficult to close the deal, the budget needs to be controlled.

The third step is to optimize the Listing conversion rate.

Advertising can only bring traffic, and whether a deal can be closed ultimately depends on the product page. If the main image lacks appeal, the title keyword layout is unreasonable, and the A+ page quality is low, even if a large number of clicks are obtained, it is difficult to form orders.

Many sellers only focus on ACOS but ignore the conversion rate. In fact, improving the conversion rate is often more effective than reducing the click cost.

The fourth step is to pay attention to the TACOS indicator.

ACOS reflects the relationship between advertising sales and advertising expenses, while TACOS reflects the impact of advertising on overall sales. For products in the growth stage, appropriately accepting a higher ACOS is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the overall profit is still controllable.

The fifth step is to establish a regular optimization mechanism.

Excellent sellers usually analyze advertising data every week, including click-through rate, conversion rate, search term performance, and bid changes. Instead of waiting until the advertising loss is severe before making adjustments.

In the future, Amazon advertising competition will continue to intensify, and the era of relying solely on raising bids to obtain traffic is coming to an end. For sellers, the core of advertising optimization has shifted from "how much money to spend" to "whether every penny generates value".

When advertising operation begins to focus on data and efficiency, rather than simply pursuing exposure, profits will naturally gradually improve.