Amazon PPC
How to Lower Your ACoS Fast Using Negative Targeting on Amazon (2026 Guide)
Feb 15, 2026
If you're paying for clicks that don't convert, your ACoS problem isn't a bidding problem — it's a relevance problem. Most Amazon sellers try to fix rising ACoS by adjusting bids or restructuring campaigns. But after managing PPC for 50+ brands scaling from $100K to $3M per month, I can tell you: the real issue is almost always ads showing up where they shouldn't be.
This guide breaks down exactly how we use negative targeting to lower ACoS fast — the same process that helped one supplement brand go from $84K to $160K per month with significantly higher margins.
Why Your ACoS Is Creeping Up
I typically see ACoS rising for five specific reasons:
Irrelevant or low-intent search triggers — Your ads show up for searches that have nothing to do with your product
Broad and phrase match keywords hiding waste — They look decent on the surface, but the search term report tells a different story
High spend without conversions compounding silently — Small daily waste adds up to thousands per month
Scaling spend before fixing relevance — Throwing more money at a leaky bucket
Poor keyword segmentation — Not understanding how to allocate spend across top, middle, and bottom of funnel
Here's what most sellers miss: you don't have an ACoS problem. You have a spend allocation problem. You're putting budget where it doesn't belong, and that's dragging your entire account down.
"My ROAS is like 4.5 with PPC. So it's like, horrible." — This is what we hear on sales calls every week from brands doing $100K-$500K/month who haven't fixed their negative targeting.
What Negative Targeting Actually Does
Negative targeting blocks Amazon from showing your ads on searches that don't convert. It sounds simple because it is. But the downstream effects are massive:
Fewer wasted clicks → Higher conversion rate on remaining traffic
Budget flows to profitable keywords → Your winners get more spend naturally
ACoS drops without touching bids → You're not fighting the algorithm, you're cleaning the data
We call this spend control — and it's the foundation of every scaling system we build.
Where to Find the Waste: The Search Term Report
The waste lives in your search term report. This report reveals exactly which queries are draining your spend without generating sales.
Here's what to look for:
Non-converting search terms — Any term with significant spend and zero sales
Irrelevant terms — Searches that have nothing to do with your product
Low-intent keywords — Terms where the searcher isn't ready to buy
If you're spending money on non-converting phrases, the odds of being able to scale those keywords profitably is almost zero. And leaving those terms active forces you to overcorrect with bids — creating a vicious cycle where you keep lowering bids to control ACoS while your best keywords get starved of budget.
How We Apply Negatives: The GigaBrands Process
Here's the exact process we use across our 50+ brand portfolio:
Step 1: Negate at the Correct Match Level
Non-converting search terms get negated at the right match type. A broad negative and an exact negative serve different purposes — applying the wrong one either blocks too much or too little.
Step 2: Clean Broad Campaigns First
Before scaling any other campaign type, broad campaigns must be clean. These are where most of the waste hides because Amazon has the widest latitude in matching your ads to searches.
Step 3: Protect the Winners
As you negate waste, you're also protecting your top-performing keywords. The budget that was going to junk searches now flows to your proven converters. This creates cleaner data and clearer decision-making for every optimization that follows.
Real Results: Supplement Brand Case Study
One of our clients — a supplement brand — was stuck at $84K per month with rising ACoS. They'd been with multiple agencies before us, and every team kept adjusting bids instead of blocking the waste.
What we did:
Audited their complete search term history
Applied negatives properly across all campaign types
Protected their highest-converting keywords
The result:
Revenue went from $84K to $160K per month in four months
Significantly higher margins despite the volume increase
In the supplement category — one of the most expensive on Amazon
The previous teams were treating the symptom (high ACoS) instead of the cause (wasted spend on irrelevant traffic).
"After working with 4-5 Amazon agencies with zero real growth, I didn't expect much." — This is what we hear constantly from brands who come to us after being burned by agencies that avoid cutting spend because they're paid on a percentage of it.
How Negative Targeting Fits Into the Bigger Scaling System
Lower ACoS is a result of relevance, not a goal you chase directly. Negative targeting is foundational — not advanced.
Here's why it matters more as you scale:
At $100K-$200K/month, waste hurts but it's manageable
At $1M-$3M/month, every 1-2% efficiency gain is massive for your margin and bottom line
Clean traffic is the foundation for scale. Without it, every dollar you add to ad spend has diminishing returns.
You have two choices:
Keep paying Amazon to test random traffic
Only let your best keywords show
Negative targeting isn't rocket science. It comes down to consistency — reviewing search terms regularly and negating waste before it compounds.
What To Do Next
If you're doing over $50K/month on Amazon and want a second set of eyes on your account, here are two options:
Download our Amazon Scale Playbook — The exact systems we use to take brands to the next level. Study it, plug it into ChatGPT, learn how we think about scaling.
Book a 20-minute strategy call — My team will analyze your metrics, product, IP, team structure, and scaling history. If I believe we can scale you, we'll map out the exact play-by-play to get you to the next level.
Hunter Harris is the founder of GigaBrands, an AI-assisted Amazon growth agency managing 50+ brands with over $205M in total Amazon sales. Featured in Forbes, Yahoo, Tampa Bay Times, and Apple News.