Amazon's advertising business generated over $68 billion in revenue in 2025. That number is not going down.

Every brand that woke up to Amazon's potential over the last three years added their budget to an auction-based system with a finite number of placements. More bidders. Same shelf space. Higher prices. This is not a trend, it is the structure of the platform. Average CPCs have been rising roughly 10 to 15 percent year over year, and categories like supplements, beauty, and electronics regularly exceed €2 or €3 per click.

Most brands respond to this in one of two ways. They spend more, hoping volume compensates. Or they pull back, watch their visibility crater, and then spend more anyway when sales drop. Neither is a strategy.

Here is what is actually happening to the brands that are managing this well.

They stopped optimizing for ACoS in isolation

ACoS is a useful metric. It is not the only metric. A brand defending market share in a competitive category will run higher ACoS on certain keywords deliberately, because the alternative is ceding that position to a competitor. The question is not "is my ACoS high?", it is "is this spend serving a purpose at my margin structure?" TACoS (total advertising cost of sale as a percentage of total revenue, including organic) is a more honest picture of what advertising is actually costing the business.

They treat different campaigns as doing different jobs

A Sponsored Products campaign defending a top-ranking keyword is not doing the same thing as a campaign testing a new product launch. Applying the same ACoS target to both is like putting the same fuel budget in a race car and a delivery van. The brands spending efficiently understand the purpose of each campaign and measure accordingly.

They fixed the listing before scaling the spend

Advertising spend on an underoptimized listing is a tax, not an investment. Every click that does not convert is money spent on data you already have, that the listing is not working. The sequence matters: listing first, ads second.

They diversified ad formats

Sponsored Brands Video is consistently showing the best ROI for most sellers in 2026, combining visual engagement with purchase intent at lower CPCs than standard Sponsored Products in many categories. Brands with video assets that are not running this format are leaving efficiency on the table.

The harder truth

Amazon advertising is no longer a low-cost channel where smart targeting alone is enough to outperform competitors. It is a retail media platform where profitability requires the whole system to work: traffic cost, listing conversion, margin structure, and inventory availability, all together.

Brands that treat ads as a standalone channel will keep watching their returns erode. Brands that treat ads as one part of a channel operation will find the rising costs manageable, because their conversion rates are doing work that their competitors' listings are not.

Rising CPCs hit everyone. They don't have to hit your margin the same way. FUSTA manages advertising as one part of a full channel operation, not a standalone budget line. Talk to us about where your spend is actually going.