Right now, everyone is saying the exact same thing: "Turn on auto-bidding, trust
By Michael Erickson Facchin · May 30, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Right now, everyone is saying the exact same thing: "Turn on auto-bidding, trust Amazon’s algorithms, and let AI do all the work for you."
But I'm going to say something unpopular.
If you rely 100% on algorithms in a competitive niche, you are just voluntarily giving away your margin to Amazon.
Here is what we’ve seen in practice: algorithms are ruthlessly great at optimizing for clicks and spending your budget.
But here is what they are completely blind to:
• They don’t know your actual business goals.
• They don’t know your exact profit margins after all the FBA fees.
• And they definitely don’t know when your warehouse is three days away from running out of stock.
When we let AI completely take over the bidding for one of our brands, the campaigns quickly started eating into our profits. The algorithm was outbidding competitors at any cost just to win the auction.
So, what did we do? We took a step back to an "outdated" method. Just look at the screenshot.
We completely toggled OFF automated bidding. Instead, we took back strict manual control with a specific rule:
𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐝𝐬 𝐛𝐲 𝟑𝟎% 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡.
Why pay premium prices for lower-tier placements? We force our budget into the top-of-search spots that actually convert and aggressively slash bids everywhere else.
We kept automation caged up only for low-budget discovery campaigns to find new keywords. But for all of our main keywords that bring in 80% of our sales, we went back to strict manual control.
This hybrid approach won. We got our spending back under control, cut out the unprofitable clicks, and brought our profit margins back to normal.
AI is a great tool, but it shouldn't be your CFO.
What about you? Have you completely handed things over to auto-bidding, or do you still keep your main campaigns on manual control?