Amazon Marketing Cloud How Sponsored Display with 383% ACoS Drives Sales

Published on December 24, 2025

About this video

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Amazon PPC campaigns can show misleading performance when you only look at individual campaign metrics. In this video, I break down a real US account case study showing how Sponsored Display campaigns with 383% ACoS were actually driving profitable results when analyzed through Amazon Marketing Cloud data.

I walk through actual campaign data from a US Amazon account, focusing on Sponsored Display campaign performance. The individual Sponsored Display campaigns showed terrible results with close to 60% ACoS overall, and the non-retargeting campaigns (category targeting and product targeting) had an shocking 383% ACoS.

Using Amazon Marketing Cloud overlap reports, I reveal the true performance story. The data shows that customers who saw all three campaign types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display) had the highest purchase rates despite being the smallest audience segment. This bucket generated the majority of product sales even though it had the lowest unique reach.

The analysis reveals that Sponsored Products alone reached 86% of customers but generated way below the sales of combined campaign exposure. Customers exposed to multiple ad types consistently showed higher conversion rates and total product sales, proving that campaign synergy matters more than individual ACoS metrics.

This Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis demonstrates why you need to invest more in Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns, regardless of their standalone ACoS performance. The key is watching overall campaign performance rather than isolated metrics.

Contents: 0:00 Introduction to Amazon PPC Campaign Analysis 0:11 Sponsored Display Campaign Export Data Review 0:38 Individual Campaign Performance Breakdown 1:25 383% ACoS Non-Retargeting Campaign Results 1:48 Amazon Marketing Cloud Overlap Report Analysis 2:42 Multi-Campaign Exposure Performance Data 3:27 Investment Strategy Based on Cross-Campaign Data 4:15 Key Takeaways and Next Steps

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Transcript

Hi guys, let's talk about some funky stuff in Amazon PPC. This is the export of the actual campaign for one US account. I've sorted only sponsored display campaigns. What I want you to remember here, I will show you what is the performance of sponsored display campaigns when you look at them in campaign manager and then I will show you what's the overall result of all the campaign types together. What's the overall a cost and how do these campaigns work together? Take a look at this. Now I marked in blue two campaigns which are not retargeted campaigns. All the others are retargeting and have slightly better results than these two. These these two are one is the category targeting one is product targeting. When you look at the overall results of the whole sponsor display um campaign type as a whole, you will see that we have close to 60% of a cost. Terrible terrible results. Then when we take a look at these two which are not retargeting campaigns but more general ones for attacking competitors and and some broader reach our a cost is 383%. How about that? So almost everyone would go ahead and pause limit the budget limit lower the the bid and whatnot. So there are many ways how to make this result better. But what's happening in a more holistic way? What what would be the case? Again, Amazon marketing cloud to the rescue. This is the same date range, same account, month-to- date in December. How each campaign type is performing and how are they performing together. in Amazon Marketing Cloud. You can find that like overlap report. It's pretty easy and I covered that in my previous videos. You can check them out on our YouTube channel. So here we can see again whenever somebody saw sponsor brand ad, sponsor display ad, sponsor product ad, our purchase rate grows tremendously. You can see that this bucket has the lowest unique reach. That's the lowest number of people that we reached who managed to see all of our three campaign types and still the majority of product sales happened from this bucket. So people who saw three type of ads are the ones who are spending the most buying the most. Then uh you can compare that to the people who saw sponsored brands and sponsored product type of ads and sponsored display together with sponsored products. Again much bigger than the biggest chunk currently. Still the biggest chunk of people that we reach is through sponsored products. And you can see that the unique reach is huge but total product sales is way below the other other three uh buckets. reach percent for sponsor products only is 86%. What this tells us is that we need to in invest more in sponsor brands need to invest more in sponsor display. So it's not that you need to watch only on a the AOS values not only the total a cost values that's completely different thing. It's not like Akos doesn't matter. It does matter because you can um watch your profitability on the product level by by watching a cost. Still when you look into Amazon marketing cloud analytics then you can see these gems of data where you can clearly see what's the strategy forward. Yes, you need to invest in sponsor display. You need to invest more in sponsor brands regardless of the a cost. You need to watch the overall result of your campaign performance. Let me know if this sparked uh certain questions in your head. I think it will because you know anybody who sees the a cost of 383% could go nuts and I don't judge them you know but there's a deeper level of all of this data. Let me know what you think in the comments and see you tomorrow in the next video. Bye-bye.

Frequently asked questions

Why would you keep running a Sponsored Display campaign that shows 383% ACoS in Campaign Manager?

The ACoS reported in Campaign Manager reflects only last-touch attribution, meaning it credits a sale only to the final ad a shopper clicked before purchasing. A Sponsored Display campaign used for category or competitor product targeting often serves as an awareness touchpoint earlier in the journey, not the closing click. When you look at the same account through Amazon Marketing Cloud's overlap report, you can see that shoppers exposed to all three campaign types, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display, generate the highest purchase rates and account for the majority of total product sales, even though they represent the smallest audience segment.

What does the AMC campaign overlap report show that Campaign Manager cannot?

The overlap report in Amazon Marketing Cloud shows purchase rates and total product sales broken down by which combinations of ad types a shopper was exposed to, for example Sponsored Products only, Sponsored Products plus Sponsored Brands, or all three together. In the real account example from the video, shoppers who saw only Sponsored Products had by far the largest reach at 86% of unique users, but their total product sales were significantly lower than the much smaller group who had seen all three campaign types. Campaign Manager has no way to surface this cross-campaign synergy because it reports each campaign in isolation.

What strategic conclusion should sellers draw from AMC overlap data showing higher purchase rates with multi-campaign exposure?

The data supports increasing investment in Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display even when their standalone ACoS looks poor, because their true contribution is in lifting conversion rates for shoppers who also see Sponsored Products. Rather than cutting or capping upper and mid-funnel campaigns based on their individual ACoS, sellers should use the overlap report to understand how many buyers were touched by multiple campaign types before converting, and size their Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display budgets accordingly to maximize that combined effect.