Every quarter, someone asks me when CPCs will come back down. My honest answer:
By Gabriel Caceros · October 29, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Every quarter, someone asks me when CPCs will come back down.
My honest answer: plan as if they will not.
Amazon is expected to report Q3 earnings this week.
Whatever the exact number, the advertising line has grown year over year, quarter after quarter, for a long time.
That growth is not abstract.
It is more brands, with more budget, bidding on the same search results pages.
Ad dollars keep going up.
The shelf does not get much bigger.
There are only so many sponsored slots on the first screen of a phone search.
When more money chases a fixed number of slots, the price of each slot moves in one direction.
January still gives you a break from December.
But across the accounts we manage, each January has tended to land higher than the January before.
A supplement brand we work with spent most of last year waiting.
Holding budgets.
Running the same structure.
Expecting a normal CPC to return.
By September, CPC was up 18% year over year.
ACOS was up by roughly the same amount, because nothing else in the system had changed.
Waiting is not a strategy.
It is a slow price increase you agree to.
So we stopped asking the auction for a discount and found the efficiency in the account:
→ Conversion: images, A+, and offer, so each click turns into more orders
→ Structure: exact campaigns with a job, so budget stops leaking into terms that never convert
→ Contribution per click, not ACOS, as the bid ceiling
→ Top-of-search bought on proven terms, not on every term
→ Organic rank protected, because every organic order is a click you did not have to buy
Six months later, CPC was still up.
Cost per order was down 9%, because conversion rose faster than CPC did.
The auction did not get cheaper.
The account got better at using it.
I do not know what Amazon's ad revenue number will be this week.
I know which direction it has been going.
Plan for clicks that stay expensive.
Then make each one worth more.
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