An uncomfortable thing I've had to tell a lot of people:
By Michael Erickson Facchin · September 6, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
An uncomfortable thing I've had to tell a lot of people:
Your ads aren't broken. Your product economics are.
I'd estimate a meaningful share of the accounts that come to us looking for better PPC don't have a PPC problem at all. They have a problem that shows up in PPC, which is a very different thing, and it's the one place it becomes impossible to ignore.
Here's the pattern.
Advertising is the fastest, most honest audit of a business you can buy.
You put money into it and within weeks you find out exactly what your conversion rate is, what your true margin is, whether your listing communicates, whether your price is competitive, and whether people who see your product actually want it.
Most businesses have never had that feedback delivered that clearly. And when it arrives, the instinct is to blame the messenger.
THREE THINGS THAT MASQUERADE AS PPC PROBLEMS
One. Margin.
If your break-even ACoS is 18%, you don't have a bidding problem, you have a pricing or a sourcing problem. No amount of optimization creates room that doesn't exist. I've had this conversation many times and it is never the one the client wanted to have.
Two. The listing.
Ads buy the click. The detail page converts it. Amazon's average conversion rate is 11.1%. If you're sitting at 4%, the ad account is doing its job and handing traffic to something that isn't doing its.
You'll feel this as expensive clicks. It isn't. It's cheap clicks and a page that wastes them.
Three. Category reality.
Category benchmarks are wildly different and most people never check. Books average about 19% ACoS. Apparel averages 42%. Same platform.
An apparel seller at 35% is beating their category by seven points. A bookseller at 35% is nearly double theirs and quietly bleeding.
Same number. Opposite verdict. I've seen both people conclude the wrong thing about their own account.
WHAT I ACTUALLY RECOMMEND
Before you change a single bid, answer three questions.
1) What is my break-even ACoS, per ASIN, from real margin?
2) What is my detail page conversion rate against the 11.1% average?
3) What is my category's benchmark, not the platform's?
If any of those three is the problem, PPC work will not fix it. It will just make the problem more expensive to keep having.
I know this is a strange argument for someone who sells PPC software to make. But I'd rather tell someone their issue is upstream than take their money to optimize around a wall.
The people who hear this and go fix the upstream thing come back and do very well.