I hate placement percentages with a vehement passion. In my experience they're o
By Elizabeth Greene · October 19, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I hate placement percentages with a vehement passion. In my experience they're one of the biggest root causes of insane, awful volatility in Amazon ad accounts.
I keep running into the same setup. Same keyword, split into a top of search campaign with a big modifier and a rest of search campaign, across the whole account.
And then the algorithm gets weird. There are weird fluctuations, cost per clicks kind of go, and the bids underneath are too low to win enough auctions anyway.
It's messy and it doesn't perform.
I've rarely seen it work.
I have good friends in this space who disagree with me.
The pushback I get most is some version of "you have to own top of search to rank."
I say back, "Get a high enough bid that you actually get velocity.
Put your ranking keywords in their own campaigns, 1 to 3 keywords each.
Let your autos and broad pick up the cheaper placements.
Then, if a ranking campaign lost top of search impressions, test a 10, maybe 15% bump."
Placement percentages should only move when something is performing better or you need to push velocity a little.
Holding this means I'm the hardline one in a lot of rooms.
I get it.
But I feel this strongly because I've traced it back to root causes in accounts time after time.
If Amazon ever lets us turn a placement off, I'll be the first one on that bandwagon and we'll change strategy overnight.