Amazon CPCs hit $1.22 this year. Ten cents higher than last year.
By Michael Erickson Facchin · September 5, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Amazon CPCs hit $1.22 this year. Ten cents higher than last year.
I've watched a lot of people read that number and draw exactly the wrong conclusion from it.
Here's the full picture from our benchmark data, and then what I actually think it means.
Average CPC: $1.22. Low of $1.02 in October 2025, high of $1.27 in May 2026.
Average ACoS: 29.6%, with a typical range of 25% to 36%. Peaked at 32.50% in January, bottomed at 28% in October.
Average CTR: 0.58%.
Average conversion rate: 11.1%.
By category:
Books: $0.38 CPC, 18.0% CVR, 19% ACoS
Food and Grocery: $0.58 CPC, 16.5% CVR, 21% ACoS
Beauty: $1.18 CPC, 15.2% CVR, 24% ACoS
Electronics: $1.45 CPC, 9.5% CVR, 29% ACoS
Clothing: $0.72 CPC, 8.6% CVR, 42% ACoS
THREE THINGS I THINK PEOPLE ARE MISREADING:
One. Rising CPC is not a reason to bid less.
Look at Electronics and Food side by side. Electronics pays $1.45 a click and converts at 9.5%. Food pays $0.58 and converts at 16.5%.
Cost per click is a vanity metric. A $2.40 click on a term converting at 14% beats a $0.90 click converting at 3%, every single time, and it isn't close.
The correct response to rising CPCs is tighter targeting so a more expensive click still clears your break-even. Not smaller bids on the same undifferentiated traffic, which just means you lose the auctions you should have won and keep the ones you shouldn't.
Two. The January spike is seasonal, not a failure.
ACoS peaked at 32.50% in January and bottomed at 28% in October. That's a predictable annual swing.
Every year I watch people panic cut bids in Q1 because their ACoS looks bad against a Q4 memory. They're comparing against their own best month and reacting to a pattern that was always going to happen.
Budget for the swing. Don't discover it.
Three. The platform average is close to useless as a target.
29.6% is an average of Books at 19% and Clothing at 42%. It describes nobody.
Benchmark against your category, then against your own break-even, then against your own last quarter. Those three numbers decide everything you need to decide. The platform average decides nothing.
WHAT I'D DO WITH THIS:
Pull your own CPC trend for the last twelve months and overlay it on the $1.22 line. If yours is rising faster than the platform, that's a targeting or Quality problem specific to you, not a market condition, and it's fixable.
If it's rising in line with the platform, that's just the cost of the channel going up, and the answer is efficiency elsewhere, not smaller ambitions.
Happy to hear what people are seeing in categories we don't cover well.