← E-commerce VA: Amazon & Shopify Lesson 3 of 6 · ~4 min

Amazon PPC fundamentals

The premium lane, explained without mystery

Amazon PPC is the skill that carries this niche's ~$50/hr ceiling, and it's less mysterious than its reputation. Sellers bid in an auction to appear in search results; most run their ads on autopilot and quietly bleed money; the specialist who reads the reports and adjusts with discipline is rare enough to name their rate. The barrier isn't genius — it's that the work is arithmetic plus patience, weekly, forever. Good news: you can learn the arithmetic in one lesson.

Key idea: PPC management is a loop, not a launch. Structure → collect data → mine search terms → adjust bids → repeat. The loop is the deliverable.

The three campaign types

Type	What it is	When it matters
Sponsored Products	Your listing placed in search results and on product pages	The workhorse — 80%+ of most budgets lives here
Sponsored Brands	Banner with logo + several products (brand-registered sellers)	Brand building, defending your own branded searches
Sponsored Display	Retargeting shoppers on and off Amazon	Later-stage; after Products is profitable

Within Sponsored Products: auto campaigns (Amazon picks the searches — your research scout) and manual campaigns with three match types — broad (loose), phrase (contains your phrase), exact (that search only). The classic structure a VA maintains: auto campaign discovers converting search terms; winners graduate into a manual exact campaign at controlled bids.

ACOS and TACOS: the two numbers that run everything

ACOS = ad spend ÷ ad-attributed sales. TACOS = ad spend ÷ total sales (organic included) — the health metric sellers watch long-term. Worked example, one campaign, last 30 days:

$300ad spend

$1,200ad-attributed sales → ACOS 25%

$4,000total sales → TACOS 7.5%

Is 25% good? Depends entirely on margin. If the product's pre-ad profit margin is 30%, then breakeven ACOS is 30% — at 25% the ads make money. If margin is 20%, that same campaign loses a nickel per ad dollar. This is why "what's our breakeven ACOS per product?" is the first question a competent PPC VA asks — and why generic advice like "keep ACOS under 20%" marks an amateur. Context: launch campaigns often run above breakeven on purpose to build rank; mature products should run below it.

Negative keywords: where the wasted money hides

Open the search term report weekly and you'll find the leaks: searches that spend and never convert. A garlic press getting clicks for "garlic seeds" — every click is wasted spend until someone adds "seeds" as a negative keyword. The weekly ritual: sort search terms by spend, find terms with (say) 10+ clicks and zero orders, add irrelevant ones as negative exact/phrase, and graduate the converters into your manual exact campaign. Thirty minutes a week, and it's often the single highest-ROI task in the entire account.

Bid adjustments: cadence beats cleverness

Work in 7-14 day windowsAmazon attribution lags and daily data is noisy. Reacting to two bad days is how amateurs wreck good campaigns.

Raise what winsKeywords converting below target ACOS with strong impression share left: nudge bids up 10-20%, not doubles.

Cut what loses — graduallyAbove target ACOS: lower the bid before you pause. High spend + zero orders after real click volume: negative it.

Log every changeDate, keyword, old bid, new bid, reason. When the seller asks "why did sales dip in week 3?", your change log is the answer — and your credibility.

Reality check: the playbook's named failure mode is running PPC on autopilot — automated bid tools without a human reading ACOS and the search term report just automate the waste. Tools like Adtomic and Perpetua are legitimate co-pilots (lesson 6), but the judgment loop is the job you're paid for.

Do this now

Twenty minutes of arithmetic that doubles as interview prep. In a doc titled PPC Math Drill, work this scenario: product price $25, landed cost + fees $17.50, campaign spent $450 last month with $1,500 ad sales; total sales $5,000. Compute: (1) profit margin and therefore breakeven ACOS; (2) actual ACOS; (3) TACOS; (4) verdict — profitable or not, in one sentence. Then decide three moves: keyword A (ACOS 12%, high impression share available), keyword B (ACOS 55%), search term "garlic seeds" (18 clicks, $22 spend, 0 orders). Write the action and reason for each.

Answers you should reach: margin 30% = breakeven ACOS 30%; actual ACOS 30% = breakeven exactly; TACOS 9%; raise A, trim B's bid, negative the seeds. If you got those, you just did real PPC management.

Tip: use your ← → arrow keys.