If ROAS is your primary advertising KPI on Amazon, you’re cannibalizing organic
By Jasonlandro · November 3, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
If ROAS is your primary advertising KPI on Amazon, you’re cannibalizing organic sales
On Amazon, your advertising sales influence your organic rank
It’s extremely different than Google Ads, paid social, and how your own website works
Essentially, if you drive paid traffic on a search term and convert well for that search term, it signals to Amazon’s algorithm that you’re highly relevant for that term
Then Amazon will move you up in the organic rankings for that search term, which usually increases your organic sales
Therefore, your ads can influence organic rank and sales, and ROAS doesn’t measure that at all
In addition, you can use Amazon’s ad products to generate new-to-brand customers and measure the lifetime value of each customer using AMC
So if your ROAS target is 6 while running a campaignat a 4 ROAS for a product with a CLV of $150 with a $10 customer acquisition cost, which is profitable, you’d erroneously shut the campaign off
Instead, you should benchmark to these KPIs depending on your business goals
-customer acquisition cost relative to customer lifetime value
-total advertising cost of sale
-relative market share (to competitors and growth/decline of the market segment)
The reality is that brands that have high ROAS goals almost always overspend on branded search which is cannibalizing organic sales these brands would have gotten anyway if the ads hadn’t been running
It’s the only way to get a really high ROAS, typically
At the same time, generic category terms have a lower ROAS but are fully incremental
The branded ROAS is used to balance them out
You can measure this by correlating ad spend with search query performance data for branded keywords (and generic terms)
On Amazon, ROAS should only be used to measure the performance of an individual keyword or as a secondary or tertiary evaluation for campaign health compared to other campaigns
If you forget about your ROAS on Amazon, you’ll be better off, I promise