My Amazon Guy
Advanced Amazon PPC Strategies in 2026: The PPC Blueprint Amazon Sellers Need to Know
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Why is a new PPC strategy essential for Amazon sellers in 2026?
It's finally 2026. And that means that every single seller is going to be doing the exact same thing. Likely you are as well. You're going to be relooking at how your yearly PPC strategy is going to come about. And let me tell you firsthand, that is not an easy task.
Something I've had to do hundreds and hundreds of times, look at different brands and understand how we are going to grow and scale the business this year. Well, luckily for you, we came out with the perfect guide for you this year. We have just released our 2026 Amazon PPC guide.
And I thought I would take some time and go through a few key points in this guide, walk you through exactly how you should be setting up your ads this year and the common pitfalls that you are going to likely experience within your PPC PPC this year in 2026. Without further ado, let's dive into it. If you want to get your own version of this guide, go through the entire thing yourself.
I'll leave a link down this description where you can download your own personal PPC guide for 2026. So the major aspects of this guide that we have first and foremost is an intro our prelaunch PPC strategy. This is before you launch a new product 2026. I'm expecting a lot of people to be focused on expanding their product catalog. We talk about all sorts of things.
keyword research in the age of Cosmo listing optimizations and different campaign segmentation we also set up this year a month by month planner based on every single major selling holiday that Amazon has we have everything from January where everybody is resetting all the way up to the final Sprint in December so definitely something that I would go in and create your own planner for but this will give you a nice breakdown for exactly what you should be doing
We also go into the PPC campaign framework for 2026, our optimization schedule for 2026, how to monitor your PPC and then advanced tactics. If you wanna see again, how each one of these different sections works going into this year, I would really, really encourage you to go through, download this guide and look through each one of these sections and enact every single part of this.
We go into super, super detail, and this is one of the most advanced guides that we have released to date. Big thing I want to talk about today are the 10 common pitfalls to avoid in 2026. In January, one of the most common pitfalls that I see is the prep disaster. Basically, people are going to ignore the discontinuation of Amazon's prep services.
This is obviously going to be, I think, much more impactful for sellers who haven't already switched over to manufacturer barcode. But if you have not, it's a big thing that I've already seen several sellers come through to me, completely forget the fact that this was a thing. Amazon released this news months and months ago, and guess what?
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Chapter 2: What key components are included in the 2026 PPC guide?
It is definitely going to hurt you at the end of the day. So you're likely restocking from the holidays, might end up forgetting the fact that you can no longer send in products and have Amazon label it for you. And so therefore you're going to be left with inventory sitting at the door and not having anything go on.
So definitely if you are somebody who is sending in that inventory reminder to you that Amazon discontinued that prep service and you are going to have to label everything yourself or pay the consequences. Unfortunately. Number two, ignoring the fee squeeze. This is, I think, a very, very common one. We saw bid prices and PPC in general get more expensive in 2025 than any year in history.
I think in 2026, we're going to see more of this happen. The biggest one is the fulfillment increases. So again, Amazon is in March going to be essentially going through and increasing all of their fulfillment fees.
I did an entire video breakdown, which you can check out either in the description or somewhere around here, you can click on it and go watch that video where I break down every single one of the different fees that Amazon is going to be coming out with for their fulfillment and FBA this year now. And so that is one of the major things I would go look for.
If you are somebody who is really focused on increasing profitability this year, then that is going to be a key and crucial, crucial area for you to look through. The third is keyword stuffing, the Cosmo penalty. So without digging too far into this yet, for those that are uninitiated, Cosmo essentially is this new version of Amazon's algorithm that is focused around AI attributes.
Cosmo is not yet necessarily rolled out to the entire ecosystem, but it is getting tested in certain areas. And a couple of key things that we're seeing within these tests, first and foremost, is that Cosmo does not like the idea of multiple keywords being stuffed in title, then stuffed in bullets, then stuffed in description.
This is something that for years, if you wanted to index really fast, you would throw on some form of keyword in a bunch of different places. You would throw it in that place a bunch of different times. So we saw the start of this last year when Amazon said, hey, you can only have one keyword up to three times within your title. No more than that or else we will change your title for you.
This is the secondary aspect of that. So what we're actually going to be seeing here, the trap, putting strings like, you know, keywords like best gift, dad, father, Christmas, basically stuff that doesn't make sense. Incoherency, right? So we don't care about the actual content of it, just the stuffing of it.
And what this will end up doing is having Cosmo view your product as a lower quality and more spammy. And this is actually going to end up hurting overall your indexability, your ability to actually rank even further.
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Chapter 3: What are the best practices for pre-launch PPC strategy and keyword research?
Number four, neglecting negative keywords. So this is a very, very common one that I see just very new sellers, age sellers, every single person do, and that is just neglecting negations, relying entirely on AI bidding to filter out bad traffic without human oversight. a age old saying is never negate a good keyword, always negate it back.
And a lot of people look at negations as something that is tricky. They look at it as something that they worry about. So what I'm going to encourage every single person to do is go through. If you have a keyword or you have a search term that has 15 to 20 clicks and no sales, negate it. Go back through once per month, review all of your current negations and look at their lifetime value.
If you negated something that has a high lifetime value in one campaign, but low in the other, then I would really, really encourage you to look at specific campaign negations versus a widespread negation. I see a lot of people who create negation lists and that negation list goes towards every single campaign they do.
They don't think about the nuance of how each negation will play within each campaign. Focus on your negations this year. Don't neglect doing them, but also at the same time, don't overdo it. I really, really don't want to see people just destroy the history of campaigns and really well-performing campaigns because they negate the wrong keyword. Number five, set and forget in an hourly market.
I think this is just the most obvious pitfall everyone has ever seen, right? PPC on Amazon is not set and forget. Doesn't matter if you're just running auto campaigns. Doesn't matter if you have a algorithm or a software or an AI that is doing bid optimizations. Amazon PPC is not set and forget. Say it with me.
It is one of those things that I see so many people think that, oh, I have this software that has rules and bidding adjustments, right? And I have this ability of just auto campaigns running everywhere. Doesn't
matter it's not set and forget at any point in time you have to be optimizing all the time and a lot of times even these softwares that theoretically optimize for you are not fine-tuned and tailored to every single category they're not fine-tuned and tailored to understand the full nuance of the campaigns right they don't understand that one search term is potentially again good in one campaign and bad in another and they don't look at negating things they turn it off entirely
So one thing I would really, really encourage every single seller to do, even if you're using a software, make sure it's not set and forget. Be looking and optimizing your campaigns any chance that you can and look through to see to make sure that the software is actually also optimizing correctly.
You don't want to get into a situation where one of your highest relevancy keywords has a really bad weekend and then your software decides, I'm going to negate this keyword forever from now moving forward. So I see it very often. Make sure you don't consider even software to be set and forget. For number six, we have overlapping campaigns.
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Chapter 4: What are the 10 common PPC mistakes to avoid in 2026?
I'm going to decrease my budget. That hurts your overall ad campaigns. You don't want to do that. That will hurt your attribution. It'll hurt the history of the campaign and it confuses the algorithm. So instead, what I always encourage, if you are running low on stock, Don't touch your campaigns. Increase your price.
At the end of the day, you likely are going to have, yeah, a little bit less conversion if you keep slowly increasing your price. But what it will help you do is, one, decrease how fast you're selling through that product so you can get more product in stock. And two, increase your profitability during that time.
So there's no reason at the end of the day to destroy a campaign by messing up all of the settings, just to try and make sure you stay in stock.
At the end of the day, it's much, much better to run out of stock while you are just selling through a bunch of product, especially at more profitable margin than it is to just destroy any hope you have of once you are back in stock, getting your product to be sold again through those same campaigns. We have failing to track and optimize campaigns.
there's a bunch of different ways you can do this. You can be doing manual approach. Amazon has their new ads agent that can be doing a bunch for you. There are softwares out there. There are so many different ways that you can track and optimize campaigns. And what I'm always going to encourage people to do here is do what works best for you.
Do I personally believe that software is the best way to go with Amazon ads? No, I personally prefer a manual approach. What I will say is anybody that is strictly using Amazon's ads agent this year to try and optimize their campaigns, I would stay very far away. Amazon's ads agent is not great.
In my opinion, it's really good for getting just impromptu data and understanding of different campaigns, but it is definitely not at the point where it can just run your campaigns for you, nor can it just optimize all of your campaigns for you. It does not have the granularity or touch needed to understand relevancy, for instance, within campaigns.
that is one of the major areas that i would always hit on and hone in on anytime you're looking at how to optimize within this year and especially don't forget whenever you're going through and doing this to actually check and do bulk files bulk files are going to be your best friend if you're not using software and you're not using the ad agent you probably already use them but bulk files are so so easy to use and if you're somebody who doesn't know how to use bulk files
I really encourage you to take the time this year and learn them in depth as they are one of the most crucial things you can learn whenever you are doing PPC. Now, last but not least, we have not using Amazon's seasonal features. This is, I think, a controversial one, and it will really depend on product category.
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