How to Launch a Product on Amazon in 2025 With Advertising (Part 2)

Launching is the “easy” part.

Once your product is live and ads are running, the real work begins. Launching the product is  where your momentum starts, and your job now is to use the data you’ve gathered to refine, optimize, and scale.

Most brands either overreact or underreact at this stage. They either cut back too quickly because performance doesn’t look “perfect,” or they let everything run untouched and burn through budget.

Neither works. The key here is intentional adjustments, guided by actual data and not panic or assumptions. dollar count

Step 1: Refine With Real Search Term Data

Auto campaigns are often underestimated, but during launch, they’re one of the more powerful sources of real insights. If your auto and broad match campaigns have been running since launch, you’ve already started building a data bank of actual shopper behavior. Now you have to put that data to work.

This is where search term reports become your best friend. These reports show you exactly what customers typed into Amazon before clicking on (and hopefully buying) your product. They strip away assumptions and give you raw data on how people are actually finding you.

What you’ll usually find is that it’s not just a handful of terms driving results. We’ve seen campaigns where over 1,000 unique targets drove at least one sale for a single ASIN in a single month. That’s not an exaggeration. The volume of paths leading to your product is almost always wider than you expect.

And guess what? The highest-volume, most obvious keywords aren’t always the most profitable. Many of those 1,000+ long-tail terms had lower CPCs and higher CVRs, which meant better RoAS overall. They just didn’t stand out individually. But together? They added up to significant volume.

So what should you do with this data?

• Pull your search term reports and identify your top-performing phrases (based on conversions and CVR)
  
• Transfer the best of them into manual campaigns especially if they weren’t in your original keyword list
  
• Use match types intentionally (exact for control, phrase for slight expansion, broad only if your budget allows)
  

If you’re using a platform like Helium 10, you can even layer in tools like Cerebro to compare how these terms rank against your competitors or use Magnet to explore variations.

But even without any tools, this step is non-negotiable. The better you get at harvesting it and structuring around it, the faster you’ll move towards building a scalable campaign.

Step 2: Cut Waste with Negative Keywords

Once you’ve figured out what’s working, the next step is cutting what’s not. Launching without regular cleanup is like trying to scale a campaign with a leaky bucket. Your budget is constantly dripping into terms that will never convert.

Negative keywords are how you patch some of those leaks.

Most brands wait too long to implement them, assuming it’s something they’ll deal with “later” once campaigns mature. But the earlier you start removing wasted spend, the faster your overall performance improves, especially your ACoS.

Start with your search term reports and look for:

• High spend, zero conversion terms
  
• Keywords with poor CVR (especially after 15–20 clicks with no sale)
  
• Irrelevant traffic that looks like a mismatch (i.e. shoppers are looking for something you’re not selling)
  

For example, if you’re selling a high-end protein powder but showing up for “cheap whey protein samples,” it doesn’t matter how much traffic it drives, those clicks won’t convert. Adding that as a negative saves your budget for people who are actually looking for your product.

Here’s how you can categorize negatives:

• Irrelevant searches (wrong product, wrong intent)
  
• Low-converting terms (high clicks, low sales)
  
• Unprofitable spenders (keywords that bring in sales but destroy your margins)
  

And keep in mind that negative keywords aren’t set it and forget it. They should be reviewed regularly, especially in the first 30–60 days post-launch. Keyword trends shift. Search behavior evolves. Something that didn’t convert last month might be worth testing again later on.

If you’re using the Targeting tab inside Amazon Ads, it’s one of the best places to audit quickly. Look at your top-spending targets and their conversion rates. If you’re pouring money into targets with weak results and no upside, it’s time to pause them or add negatives.

This is also where tools like Helium 10 Ads AI can help by flagging underperforming keywords based on conversion data and recommending automatic pauses or bid adjustments before they snowball. The fewer distractions in your campaigns, the stronger your returns become.

Step 3: Shift Ad Spend Toward What’s Working

Once you’ve cleaned up what’s not working, it’s time to go all in on what is.

This is one of the biggest differences between campaigns that plateau after launch and those that scale. Brands that actively shift spend toward top-performing keywords, ASINs, and audiences are the ones that consistently see stronger results over time.

It sounds obvious, but most don’t do it.

Instead, they keep spending evenly across everything or let their campaigns run untouched for weeks. But if your goal is growth, you need to intentionally feed your winners.

What to look for:

• Keywords with consistently strong CVR (conversion rate)
  
• Targets with low CPC but high RoAS
  
• Search terms that may be lower volume but show high buying intent
  

These are the terms you should raise bids on and allocate more budget to.

One of the biggest things you can do is doubling down on long-tail keywords. These would be the ones that might only drive a few orders a month each, but convert way better than broad, high-competition terms.

Take this stat from one of our campaigns: 1,408 unique targets drove fewer than 2 orders each but had an average RoAS of $6.70.

That kind of performance doesn’t show up if you’re only focused on the “top 10” keywords. But when you scale across those 1,000+ smaller wins, you build a campaign that’s both profitable and defensible.

What to do:

• Create a new campaign just for your high-converting long-tail terms
  
• Increase daily budgets for the campaigns driving the highest RoAS or NTB (New-to-Brand) sales
  
• Use exact match on top-performing terms for tighter control
  
• Consider segmentation by CVR or ACoS thresholds to allow for smarter bid scaling
  

Feed what’s working, trim what’s not, and keep going.

Step 4: ACoS VS. TACoS – and Why It Matters

After a few weeks of data, most brands get laser-focused on ACoS. And while that’s an important metric, it’s also one of the most misleading when viewed in isolation, especially post-launch.

Why? Because ACoS only tells you how your ad spend is performing in relation to ad-attributed sales. But it tells you nothing about the big picture.

Enter TACoS: Total Advertising Cost of Sale. It compares your ad spend to your total revenue, including both ad-driven and organic sales. And if you’re doing things right, TACoS is where you start to see the long-term lift from your advertising strategy.

Let’s break that down real quick:

Why TACoS matters during optimization:

• If your ACoS is stable, but TACoS is decreasing, this could mean your ads are helping lift organic rank (a good sign).
  
• If your TACoS is increasing, but sales are flat, you’re likely overspending or not seeing enough organic return on your ad efforts.
  
• If most of your sales are ad-attributed, it’s a red flag for weak organic visibility. That makes your brand more vulnerable to rising CPCs or competitive pressure.
  

We’ve seen that healthy TACoS benchmarks vary by brand type and stage:

• 10-15% – Fast-growing brands aggressively trying to scale
  
• 7-10% – Established brands with solid organic rank and some branded search
  
• 5-8% – Mature brands focused on profitability over aggressive growth
  
• 20-25% – New brands just launching (short-term investment to improve organic)
  

If you’re only looking at ACoS, you might pause a campaign that’s actually helping you rank organically and lift long-term profitability. That’s why we treat TACoS as one of the core optimization levers in post-launch strategy.

Use ACoS to stay lean, but watch TACoS to stay strategic. If your total sales are growing and TACoS is moving in the right direction, your strategy is working, even if your ACoS isn’t picture-perfect.

Part Two Wrap Up: 

Launching your product is only step one. What you do in the weeks that follow is what shapes performance, good or bad.

At this stage, success comes down to how well you’re paying attention. Are you making adjustments based on real data? Are you scaling what’s working and cutting what’s not? Are you looking at the full picture and not just the ACoS?

The brands that succeed:

• Refine campaigns with actual search term data
  
• Eliminate wasted spend quickly
  
• Shift budget to targets that are converting
  
• And they track the impact across total sales, not just the ad account
  

This doesn’t have to be overcomplicated, but it does need to be intentional. The more you build structure around your optimization process, the easier it becomes to make decisions that actually get you to where you want to be.