AdArchitectRealistic Amazon PPC Benchmarks by Launch Phase
2026-08-06 · By Andreas K.
The 90-day spend plan covers how launch-week spend and ongoing budget control fit together over your first three months. This is the deeper version of one piece of that: what ACOS and ROAS should actually look like at each stage, so you can tell whether your account is on track or genuinely behind, instead of guessing against a number that was never meant for where you actually are.
Why a single benchmark number is misleading
Most benchmark advice quotes one number, something like "aim for 25-30% ACOS," without saying which stage of a listing's life that number applies to. A brand-new listing with zero reviews and a year-old listing with hundreds of reviews are not competing on the same footing, and holding them to the same number sets one of them up to look like a failure for a reason that has nothing to do with how the campaigns are actually being run.
Expected ROAS trajectory by stage
Mina Elias lays out a concrete progression: a brand-new listing with few reviews should expect to launch around breakeven, roughly 1x ROAS, spending a dollar to make a dollar back, and that's normal, not a warning sign. As reviews and organic rank build over the following months, that number should climb in stages, something like 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, working up toward 3-4x for an established listing. The ads usually aren't getting meaningfully better week to week during this climb. The listing underneath them is, through review count, organic rank, and general trust signals building up. If ROAS isn't climbing despite reviews growing, the problem is more often the listing itself than the campaigns pointed at it.
A consolidated ACOS and TACOS reference table
Riley Bennett Amazon's numeric anchors across all four core metrics, worth treating as a rough single-agency reference point rather than a universal standard, since they say so themselves:
| Metric | Launch phase (normal) | Good | Great |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACOS | 50-100% | 25-30% | 20-25% (established product) |
| TACOS | 25-50% | 15-20% | 10-15% |
| CTR | n/a | 0.5-1% | above 1% |
| Conversion rate | n/a | ~10% (platform average) | ~20%+ |
The platform-wide average ACOS, from published data rather than any single source's own client base, sits around 30%. Worth knowing as a general anchor, separate from the launch-phase-specific numbers above.
What this means in practice
A 60% ACOS in week one isn't a red flag. It's inside the normal launch-phase range in the table above. The same 60% ACOS on a listing that's been live for eight months, with a healthy review count and established rank, is a real signal something needs attention. The number that matters isn't the number itself, it's the number relative to what stage the listing is actually at.
If your numbers are worse than the benchmark for your actual stage, check total account sales and profit before assuming a specific campaign is broken, since per-campaign attribution inside Amazon's own reporting isn't fully reliable on its own.
Treat these as anchors, not targets to force
These ranges come from real practitioner experience, not a controlled study, and they vary by category, price point, and margin. Use them to sanity-check whether your account looks roughly on track for its actual stage, not as a number to chase at the expense of profit. A campaign that's clearing a real profit at a "worse" ratio than the table suggests is still doing its job.
Getting the underlying structure right is what makes these numbers mean something in the first place. The free campaign structure check tells you what that structure should look like for your specific catalog. The $16 plan turns it into a real bulk-upload file. See how it works →