The $10K Mistake I Made in Amazon PPC (And How to Fix It)

Amazon PPC can be a powerful tool to scale your brand, but if you’re not careful, it can also be a black hole for lost sales. I learned this the hard way when a simple oversight cost me over $10,000 in lost revenue—every single month. Here’s what happened and how you can avoid making the same mistake.

The Costly Oversight

Back when I was doing high six figures, pushing close to seven, I thought my PPC strategy was solid. I had my campaigns dialed in, was optimizing my bids, and had a decent ACOS. But what I didn’t realize was that my competitors were quietly siphoning sales away from me—right under my nose.

They were:

✅ Running Sponsored Brand (SB) Ads on my brand name keywords

✅ Flooding my product pages with their own Sponsored Display and Sponsored Product ads

I wasn’t defending my own turf, and my competitors were capitalizing on my mistake.

The Wake-Up Call

A fellow seller friend casually mentioned, “Hey, do you know [Competitor X] is running ads on your brand name? I see their product every time I search for your brand.”

That hit me like a truck. I pulled up my brand name search terms, and sure enough, my competitor was not only bidding on my brand name but dominating the results with multiple headline ads.

I also checked my own listings and saw that instead of showcasing more of my own products, my competitors’ ads were everywhere. I was literally giving them prime real estate on my own product pages!

The Fix: Defend Your Brand

I immediately set up two types of PPC campaigns:

Sponsored Brand (SB) Ads on my brand name keywords – If someone is searching for my brand, I should be the first thing they see, not my competitors.
Sponsored Product and Sponsored Display Ads targeting my own products – Instead of letting competitors sneak in and steal my traffic, I made sure that my other products appeared as recommended alternatives on my listings.

The Results: An Easy $8K-$10K Sales Boost

Once I launched these campaigns, the difference was instant:

📈 An extra $8,000 to $10,000 in PPC sales per month – Without increasing overall traffic.

📉 Low ACOS (Under 10%) – Because people searching for my brand were already looking to buy.

🚀 More visibility across my product line – Customers browsing one of my products would now see other products I sold, increasing the chance of cross-selling.

The Lesson: Protect What’s Yours

If you’re not running ads on your own brand name, you’re handing sales to your competitors on a silver platter. You worked hard to build your brand—don’t let someone else profit off of your mistake.