Companion to the lesson "Your Launch: Buying Your First Ranking."
1. The three campaigns
Campaign
Setup
Your bid / budget
Automatic, low bid
Amazon matches your listing to searches on its own. Cheap clicks, useful data.
$
Manual, exact match
Your 5-10 best keywords, bid near suggested level.
$
Automatic, normal bids
Discovery engine for keyword ideas you never guessed.
$
Benchmarks: average CPC about $1.18-1.22; healthy ACOS 30-32% with launches running well above; healthy TACoS 5-15% at maturity.
2. Launch math check (from the lesson)
Line
Worked example
Yours
Cost per click
$1.20
$
Clicks per sale (at 10% conversion)
10
Ad cost per sale
$12.00
$
Launch ACOS on a $24.99 product
~48%
Break-even ACOS (from your calculator)
~37%
Deliberate loss per ad sale during launch
~$2.70
$
Labeled example arithmetic on verified inputs (CPC band, conversion benchmark). Painful and normal: that is the purchase price of rank. Expect weeks of ads that lose money or break even.
3. Weekly search-term harvest (run every week for the first couple of months)
☐ Download the search term report.
☐ Move converting search terms into the manual exact-match campaign.
☐ Cut spend on terms that click without buying, no negotiation.
☐ Log new keyword ideas from the discovery automatic campaign.
4. ACOS vs break-even log
Week
ACOS
Break-even ACOS
Above / below
1
2
3
4
5
6
5. TACoS trend tracker
TACoS = total ad spend / total revenue (ads and organic together). The launch signal: TACoS falling while sales hold means organic rank is carrying you and the launch worked.
Week
Ad spend
Total revenue
TACoS
Sales holding?
1
2
3
4
5
6
6. Budget-cap countdown
Launch ad budget cap (set before day one, treated as tuition): $
Pattern: roughly equal to inventory cost, spent over the first 6-8 weeks
Week 1 spend $
Remaining $
Week 2 spend $
Remaining $
Week 3 spend $
Remaining $
Week 4 spend $
Remaining $
Week 5 spend $
Remaining $
Week 6 spend $
Remaining $
Week 7 spend $
Remaining $
Week 8 spend $
Remaining $
Two months in, read it: sales holding with falling TACoS = you have a product. Sales dying with rising ACOS = you have information; the loop decision is how to spend it.