Marketplace ads
Amazon and marketplace advertising
On a marketplace, the buyer already has a card in hand and is comparing three listings. Ads decide which three. We run them on profit, and we fix the listing first, because no ad can sell a page with dark photos and two reviews.
Advertising inside someone else’s shop
On Amazon and other large marketplaces, the platform owns the customer. You see orders, search terms and ad results, and very little about who bought. You cannot easily follow up with those buyers yourself.
That shapes the strategy. The levers are the listing, the price, the stock, the reviews and the ads, and they pull on each other. An ad that wins a click for a listing with weak images wastes the click. A listing that sells well climbs in organic results, which lowers how much advertising it needs.
So an ad is worth what it adds to total sales, organic included, after margin. That is the number we optimise and report.
Ad types we manage
Sponsored Products
Single products in search results and on product pages. The core of most accounts.
Sponsored Brands
Your logo, a headline and several products, or a video, near the top of search results. Sellers need Brand Registry for it.
Sponsored Display
Product-page placements and retargeting of shoppers who viewed your products, on and off Amazon.
Amazon DSP
Display and video bought with Amazon’s shopping data, for larger budgets and brands with a wide range.
Other marketplaces
Walmart, eBay and others run their own ad tools, with the same logic and different rules. We check which ones matter for your products.
How we run marketplace advertising
Check the listings first
Titles, images, bullet points, A+ content, reviews, price and stock. Ads go on listings that can convert.
Harvest search terms
Automatic campaigns find the words shoppers use. Terms that sell move into manual campaigns with their own bids; terms that waste money become negatives.
Structure by product role
Best sellers, launches, defence of your brand terms, attacks on competitor terms. Each has its own target.
Bid on margin
Each product’s break-even point is set from its margin, and bids follow it. A best seller with thin margin gets less room than a niche product with a fat one.
Watch total sales
TACoS, organic rank and total sales by product, so ads that only buy sales you would have had anyway get cut.
ACoS, ROAS and TACoS in plain words
| Metric | How it is calculated | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| ACoS | Ad spend divided by ad-attributed sales | How expensive your ad sales are. Compare it with your margin |
| ROAS | Ad-attributed sales divided by ad spend | The same figure the other way up, as Google and Meta report it |
| TACoS | Ad spend divided by total sales, organic included | Whether ads grow the business or only buy sales you would have made |
What we report
Profit after ad spend
By product, using the margins you share with us.
TACoS over time
Falling TACoS with rising sales means ads are lifting organic sales. Rising TACoS means the opposite.
Organic rank on key terms
Where your main products sit without ads, month by month.
New-to-brand customers
How many ad-driven orders came from people who had not bought your brand before.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good ACoS?
One below your margin before ad spend. If ads cost a larger share of each sale than your margin, every ad sale loses money, unless the ads also lift organic sales enough to make up for it. Our ROAS calculator works out the break-even point.
Do we need Brand Registry?
For Sponsored Brands and brand-level features, yes. Sponsored Products works without it. If you own your trademark, registering is usually worth doing before you scale advertising.
Should we send Google or Meta traffic to Amazon?
Sometimes, for a launch or to lift a new listing. Amazon offers attribution tags that show the sales this outside traffic brings, so it can be judged like any other channel. For your own shop, Google Shopping is the closer comparison.
Which marketplaces do you work with?
Amazon first, and others where your products sell and the marketplace has an ad platform we can measure. We check that for your market and category before proposing anything.
Should we sell on marketplaces or on our own site?
Often both. Marketplaces bring buyers who are ready; your own shop keeps the customer relationship and the margin. Our ecommerce page covers how the two fit together.
Last updated · By the Napexy team
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