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Amazon PPC
Chris Rawlings claims he launched a new $200+ Amazon Home & Kitchen bedroom product to $100,000 in revenue within 90 days at a 14% average ACOS using only Amazon PPC (no external traffic, email list, or influencers), and attributes this to a specific mix of campaign types — category targeting, semantic-intent-grouped phrase match, brand defense, and improved automatic targeting.
Launched a $200+ Home & Kitchen bedroom product entirely via Amazon PPC (no external traffic, email list, or influencers) to $100K revenue in 90 days at 14% average ACOS.
TACOS fell from 21% early in the launch to 6.5% in the most recent week, with weekly revenue around $12,000, framing the product as transitioning from an expensive launch to a lean 'cash cow.'
The top 5 campaigns by sales all showed healthy 'teens and 20s' ACOS, spread across four setup types: category targeting, semantic-family phrase match, brand defense (own ASINs), and automatic targeting.
Category-targeting campaigns ('bed frames' at 12% ACOS/$21,700 sales, 'beds' at 18% ACOS/$6,100 sales) produced the bulk of launch sales, outperforming a traditional exact-match keyword approach.
Phrase-match keyword campaigns are grouped by semantic/shopper-intent family (e.g., 'capsules,' 'powders,' 'muscle gain,' 'pain') rather than by search volume, to catch intent-specific issues.
Brand defense campaigns (targeting own ASINs, across keyword/product/category targeting and across Sponsored Products/Brands/Display) are framed as worth running even at zero sales, purely to block competitor ad space.
Automatic targeting campaigns, once dismissed as 'money pits,' are now presented as viable and lean if actively pruned with negative targets, using four match types.
Recommends 'dynamic bids – down only' and withholding placement modifiers until performance data accumulates, applied consistently across every campaign type shown.
Promotes a proprietary 'cheat sheet' distilling Amazon's near-infinite settings combinations into a handful of best-practice campaign setups, companion videos on bidding and budgeting, and an agency offer to partner on launches or PPC management.
ACOS (Average Cost of Sale) — Ad spend divided by ad-attributed sales for a given campaign or ad group. Apply: Compare ACOS across individual campaigns (e.g., 12%, 18%, 21%, 7% in the reviewed top 5) to judge which setups are running lean during a launch.
TACOS (True ACOS) — Total ad spend divided by total revenue across the whole account/product, not just PPC-attributed revenue. Apply: Track TACOS over the launch window to confirm overall profitability as it falls from an initial high (21%) toward a lean steady-state (6.5%).
Category-targeting sponsored product campaigns — A manual product-targeting Sponsored Products campaign where the target is an Amazon browse category (e.g., 'bed frames,' 'beds') rather than keywords or ASINs. Apply: Set up via Sponsored Products > manual targeting > product targeting > categories > pick category > set your own calculated bid > dynamic bids-down only > no placement modifiers at launch > set daily budget.
Semantic/shopper-intent keyword grouping — Organizing phrase-match keyword campaigns by semantic core/intent family (e.g., 'capsules,' 'powders,' 'muscle gain,' 'pain') instead of by search volume. Apply: Build a separate ad group/campaign per intent family so CTR per family reveals listing/image mismatches with that search intent, then fix the primary image to address it.
Ad/campaign naming rubric — A proprietary naming convention for labeling ad groups and campaigns consistently. Apply: Apply the rubric (available via the offered resource) whenever naming ad groups/campaigns to keep large account structures interpretable.
Brand defense campaigns — Campaigns across keyword, product, and category targeting, run across Sponsored Products/Brands/Display, aimed at occupying ad space near your own listings to block competitors rather than primarily to generate sales. Apply: Run all three targeting types across all three ad formats for every brand/product, treating any resulting sales as a bonus rather than the goal.
Brand defense targeting own ASINs — A Sponsored Products exact-match product-targeting campaign that targets your own other ASINs so ads appear on your own product pages. Apply: Sponsored Products > manual targeting > product targeting > individual products > enter your own other ASINs (all, or top ~12 if many) > exact (not expanded) > dynamic bids-down only, no modifiers > set daily budget > launch.
Automatic targeting campaigns — Sponsored Products campaigns where Amazon's algorithm selects targets automatically instead of manual keyword/product selection, said to have improved recently. Apply: Set up one targeting group per campaign for control, then actively prune irrelevant matches with negative targeting rather than avoiding auto campaigns.
Auto-targeting match types (close match, loose match, substitutes, complements) — The four sub-types within automatic targeting: close match/loose match are keyword-based (tight vs. broad relevance), substitutes/complements are product-based (similar vs. complementary listings). Apply: Prioritize close match and substitutes first since they tend to perform best, then layer in loose match and complements once those are working well.
Negative targeting strategy — Two approaches to excluding irrelevant auto/broad campaign targets: proactively negative-exact-matching keywords already targeted elsewhere, or letting Amazon run and adding negatives as data comes in. Apply: At minimum, add negative keywords/phrases for other brand names or clearly irrelevant terms (e.g., negative phrase match 'metal' on a wooden phone stand listing), refining further over time.
Dynamic bids – down only — An Amazon bid strategy setting that only allows Amazon to lower, never raise, your bid based on conversion likelihood. Apply: Select this as the default bid strategy across category-targeting, brand-defense, and auto-targeting campaign setups.
Placement modifier deferral — The practice of leaving placement bid modifiers unset when a campaign first launches. Apply: Wait to add placement modifiers until performance data shows which placements convert best.
Phrase match (Amazon keyword match type) — A keyword match type where Amazon must keep the entered keyword/phrase intact but may prepend or append extra words. Apply: Use phrase match for semantic-family keyword campaigns, excluding generic category keywords and adding only curated keywords from keyword research or PPC search-term reports.
Grouping keyword campaigns by semantic/shopper-intent family rather than search volume turns CTR data into a listing-diagnostic tool: a low-CTR intent segment (e.g., 'powders') signals the primary image/title doesn't visually match that search intent, fixable by changing the main image.
Brand defense campaigns are pitched as worth funding even with zero resulting sales, reframing ad spend justification around occupying competitor-adjacent ad space rather than direct ROI.
TACOS (ad spend ÷ total revenue) is used as the real success metric of the launch rather than ACOS alone, since it nets spend against total revenue instead of only PPC-attributed revenue.
Automatic targeting is reframed as improved specifically because of recent changes to Amazon's algorithm, contradicting older seller conventional wisdom that auto campaigns waste money.
Deliberately giving Amazon 'leeway' via broad/auto/category targeting during launch, instead of tightly controlled exact-match campaigns, is presented as counterintuitive but cheaper for building sales velocity.
«We just launched this brand new product on Amazon and made $100,000 in 90 days profitably.»
— 00:00
«Tacos means true average cost of sale, meaning what's your ad spend divided by your total revenue. What it represents is basically what portion of your revenue are you spending on ads.»
— 01:23
«It's just a cash cow. We continue to feed it, take more market share, and continue to pull cash out of it just like a real estate asset.»
— 02:02
«Giving Amazon more leeway through broad match, through automatic targeting, through things like category targeting and product targeting can actually work a lot better during a launch period to drive sales velocity in a lean way.»
— 04:11
«We would actually pay to have these ads live, even if they produced zero sales at all, solely for the purpose of pushing out the space for competitors to take our sales.»
— 10:36
«Some people don't use these campaigns cuz they're afraid of cannibalization or whatever. That's totally ridiculous.»
— 10:49
«If you were to combine all of the different settings you could do inside Amazon Seller Central, it would come out to like hundreds of millions of different combinations of different settings of campaigns.»
— 11:37
«Don't overthink this. You can add these as time goes on when you look at the data.»
— 16:34
«And those are the top campaigns that allowed us to launch a product and make $100,000 in the first 90 days profitably, very profitably.»
— 16:44
Reception
Viewers are largely enthusiastic and share strong personal results from the strategy, with active engagement around getting the resources, though one negative comment cites a poor paid consulting experience.
A promotional case-study/tutorial hybrid whose campaign-structure breakdown (category targeting, semantic phrase-match grouping, brand defense, improved auto-targeting) is specific and actionable, but whose headline $100K/90-day and ACOS/TACOS figures are self-reported and unverified, and which functions as a funnel toward a lead-magnet cheat sheet and paid PPC/launch services.
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