Your Amazon Bids Are Probably Wrong

Published on May 25, 2026

About this video

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Are your Amazon PPC bids actually doing anything? In this video, I walk you through two straightforward techniques to check whether your bids are too low, hitting the ceiling, or sitting right where they need to be depending on your campaign goals.

Whether you are running Amazon sponsored products campaigns for profitability or pushing for higher organic ranks, these methods apply across all scenarios. I break this down using real campaign examples so you can see exactly what to look for inside your Amazon ads account.

The first technique is the quickest way to get a read on your bidding situation. It is not the most precise method, but it tells you right away whether you need to dig deeper. The core idea is simple: compare your bid to your actual cost per click. If those two numbers are very close to each other, you are already hitting the maximum you set for that campaign. That means Amazon is using your full bid on almost every auction you enter, and you are likely missing a large portion of placements because your bid is capped.

For example, if your bid is set at $0.96 and your average cost per click over 99 clicks comes in at $0.95, that is a signal that you are consistently maxing out. You are entering auctions at your ceiling every time. On the other hand, if your bid is $3.00 and your cost per click is coming in around $1.40 or $1.50, that tells you your competition is not bidding nearly as aggressively, and you have room to either hold that bid or revisit it depending on your ACoS targets.

I also walk through a manual Amazon sponsored products campaign example where a bid of $2.82 results in a cost per click of exactly $2.82 across four clicks, which means every single click hit the bid ceiling. That is a clear indicator there is room to increase, and this is where Amazon ads campaign management gets important.

For the second technique, I show you how to use the Sponsored Products Search Term Impression Share report, which is one of the most underused reports in Amazon advertising. This report gives you your search term impression share rank and your actual impression share percentage for each search term you are targeting.

If your rank is 13 for a given search term, that means 12 competitors are ranking higher than you for that term. In the example I go through, a search term with a rank of 13 is only pulling in 1.98% impression share with a cost per click of $0.81. That low cost per click is a strong signal that the bid on that keyword is too low, which directly explains the poor impression share.

I also cover an exact match campaign example where the search term impression share rank is 11 with just under 3% impression share, but the cost per click is already at $5.00. Since that is set up as a ranking campaign, profitability is not the priority. Getting enough sales volume to rank organically is the goal, so the focus shifts to whether bids need to go even higher.

Once you spot a keyword with low impression share, the report also shows you the exact campaign and ad group so you can go directly there, check conversion rate and ACoS, and make a confident decision on whether to increase the bid.

Using both of these techniques together gives you a solid picture of your Amazon ppc advertising performance across your full campaign list without having to guess.

Contents: 0:00 Introduction to the two bidding techniques 0:34 First technique: comparing bid to cost per click 1:41 Manual campaign example and suggested bids 3:52 Introduction to the Search Term Impression Share report 4:29 Reading impression share rank and what it means 5:19 Exact match ranking campaign example 5:53 How to act on what you find in the report

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Transcript

I'm going to show you two simple techniques on how you can determine if you're bidding aggressively or you're just somewhere in between and all of that in different scenarios. If you're aiming to get higher organic ranks or profitability, this is applicable for all possible scenarios. So, I prepared several examples for you. In this first example, this is the easiest method on how to spot it. It's not the the most precise, but it really gives you information if should should you dive deeper into that or not? And towards the end of the video, I'll show you what the deep dive looks like. So this is the sponsor product auto campaign. And you can see the cost per click in last 30 days is at 0.95. It's only been 99 clicks or not. I suppose it's enough. But anyway, you want to compare your bid to your cost per click. If those two are similar as in this case 0.96 and 0.95 that means that you're already hitting the ceiling with your bid because cost per click is average click. So on average after 99 clicks your average cost per click is just 1 cent below your bid maximum bid that you've set over here. So what actually happens in reality is that every time you want to bid for the auction to win the placement, you're essentially bidding always the maximum you allowed it to. So it's always 96 cents and in reality what happens is that you're missing probably majority of auctions and majority of placements because you limited your bid. Now of course that could be because you're optimizing for a cost and this is sponsored product order campaign depending on the goal. Is it a harvesting one or is it aim for profitability? But that's one example. Let's move forward. This is the manual campaign. It's only been a few clicks because it's a new campaign, but you can see the perfect example. We are bidding 2.82 cents here, and the cost per click is exactly 2.82 cents because this is an average of four clicks. It's an easy math that every single click we paid 2.82 cents, meaning there's definitely room to go higher than that. Of course, there's the suggested bit that you can also take as a reference. And you can see some of these are pretty amazing. $8 $10 and there are these categories with really high competition. But regardless of the suggested bid because that changes and it's not that static of course because it's just a simple snapshot of the current suggested bid. Meaning for example in reality there can be 10 competitors who all have their automations set and whenever somebody tries to bid higher and wants to overthrown them they enable their ads. they increase their budgets, increase their bids and this can easily go up to 15 or three times more than you what you're seeing. So it doesn't make any sense. But in your let's say little bubble you're just starting out and you want to just know are you bidding enough and for for the different placements this could be maybe rest of search campaign specifically your product display pages campaign and then also it's a different environment where you are peering and this one is also perfect example but you get the idea already. So we are bidding $3 here. After 23 clicks, we are 296. So that's already close to to what we're bidding. So definitely we could uh improve it a little bit. And same goes for all the others. And then this one, 15 clicks, we're bidding $3. Cost per click 296. $3 29. So already at the top. So I've dig these examples just for you to understand. If you see something like this, this is the point where you realize that you need higher bids. You need probably more budget for this. In majority of cases, you will see that your bid is for example $3 and your cost per click is maybe 2 point something or 1 point something. That means that you're ready to bid $3, but your competition is not that fierce and that only willing to spend for example 1.4 1.5. Now, let me show you how to find more information about that. So this is the Excel file that I've pulled. This is the sponsor product search term impression share report. It's an amazing report and a lot of people are not using it but I encourage you to start doing that because you will get a little bit of a competitive advantage. So what you get with this report is that for each of the search terms that you have on the left and for the targeting you will see your search term impression share rank and search term impression share. What that actually means is that if you're ranked number one with the for your search term, that means you're basically winning the best possible impression here. Now, this is the branded one. So, it's not uh a surprise that we are having 97.46. But for example, take a take a look at this one. If you have anything less than one, for example, 13, it means that 12 competitors are ranked higher than you for this specific search term. And let's see what are the bids for this in this example. So, we are only paying 0.81 81 cent per solid click to rate 1.84. So it means that it's a low cost per click. Most probably you are bidding low for this one. And that's why with the search term impression share rank of 30 and you're only getting 1.98% of impression share which is ridiculously low. What you want to go then go into the specific campaign is going to be shown over here up here in the the columns but you will see the exact campaign and exact ad group and you want to go there and see what is the situation. What's the conversion rate? What's the A cost? And then you can definitely increase more. Then the second example in here. So it's an exact match campaign. Search term impression rank 11 only slightly less than 3% of search term impression share. Since it's in the exact most probably it's a ranking campaign. Cost per click is already at $5, which is pretty high. But if it's a ranking campaign, we don't want to uh look at the profitability. If it gets enough sales to rank properly, you want to increase that. So impression share report is much bigger than than this part that I shared. I've recorded that on our YouTube channel. So you can head over there and see uh the detailed explanation about it. Anyway, these techniques will enable you to go through your campaigns and check if you're bidding high enough or you are under bidding. Anyway, depending on your specific goals for specific campaigns, you should be adjusting this every other day or so, depending again of the pace of the campaign. Let me know if you have any further questions about this and see you tomorrow in the next video. Bye-bye.

Frequently asked questions

How can you quickly tell whether your Amazon PPC bid is too low just by looking at Campaign Manager?

Compare your maximum bid to your average cost per click for that campaign. If the two numbers are very close to each other (for example a bid of $0.96 with an average CPC of $0.95, or a bid of $2.82 where every click costs exactly $2.82), it means you are hitting your bid ceiling on nearly every auction you enter. In practice this means Amazon is using your full allowed bid each time, which limits how many auctions you win and how often your ads appear. The further your average CPC falls below your bid, the more headroom you have and the less competitive that particular keyword or placement is.

What is the Sponsored Products Search Term Impression Share report and what does it reveal about bidding?

The Search Term Impression Share report shows, for each search term you are targeting, your Search Term Impression Share Rank (your numeric position among all advertisers competing for that term, where rank 1 is the highest) and your actual impression share percentage. A rank of 13 with only 1.98% impression share means 12 competitors are capturing more of the available impressions for that term. When combined with the CPC data for that term, a very low CPC alongside a poor rank is a strong signal that your bid is too low to compete effectively, and raising it would directly improve your share of impressions.

How should you interpret impression share data differently for a ranking campaign versus a profitability campaign?

For a ranking campaign, the priority is generating enough sales volume on a specific keyword to improve organic position, so a low impression share with room to bid higher is a clear action signal regardless of the CPC level. In the example from the video, a rank of 11 with under 3% impression share at $5.00 CPC in a ranking campaign is a signal to consider going higher because the goal is volume, not profit efficiency. For a profitability campaign, the same low impression share would prompt you to also check conversion rate and ACoS before increasing bids, to confirm that winning more of those impressions would generate profitable sales rather than just additional spend.