Amazon PPC management cost: what sellers really pay in 2026

What are the real fee ranges?

Our own PPC management is sold on its own from $799 a month, and it is part of the Growth and Scale retainers at $1,999 and $3,499 a month, all published on the pricing page with what is included at each level.

Flat fee or percentage of spend — which is better?

The models are not equivalent, and the difference is about incentives rather than arithmetic.

A percentage of ad spend pays the agency more when you spend more. In a month when the correct decision is to cut spend on a losing campaign, that decision costs the agency money. Most agencies are honest enough to make it anyway — but you should not have to rely on that.

A flat retainer removes the conflict entirely. The agency is paid the same whether your spend goes up or down, so the only way to keep the account is to make it work.

At what ad spend is management worth paying for?

The break-even is easier than it looks. A £700 monthly fee has to produce at least £700 of additional contribution. On a 25% contribution margin, that means roughly £2,800 of extra monthly revenue, or a saving of about £700 in wasted spend.

Below roughly £2,000 a month in ad spend, there is rarely £700 of waste to recover — the account is simply not big enough. Between £2,000 and £5,000, it depends on how bad the current structure is. Above £5,000 a month, a badly structured account almost always contains more waste than the fee.

You can test this on your own account for free: paste your search term report into our PPC audit tool and it will total the spend that produced no sales.

What should the fee include?

Six things. If a proposal is missing more than one, ask what you are paying for.

• Campaign structure separated by intent — discovery, performance, brand defence, competitor targeting.
• Weekly search term work: negatives added, converting terms promoted to exact match.
• Bid and placement management against a target you agreed in advance.
• A target ACoS calculated from your margin, not from a category benchmark.
• Monthly written reporting against that target, broken out by campaign type.
• Your data, in your account. Search term reports belong to you.

Media spend should never be included. It is paid to Amazon from your own account, and an agency that invoices it through their own account has made your costs opaque.

How should the target ACoS be set?

From your numbers, not from a benchmark. Selling price minus VAT gives net revenue; subtract cost of goods, inbound shipping, the Amazon referral fee and the FBA fee, and what remains is contribution. Divided by net revenue, that is your break-even ACoS.

A brand on a 45% contribution margin can profitably run 30% ACoS. A brand on 20% cannot. Any agency quoting a target before seeing your margin is guessing, and the guess is usually the category average.

Our profit and break-even ACoS calculator does this in about thirty seconds, and what is a good ACoS explains where the figure comes from.

Where does wasted ad spend actually hide?

Most wasted Amazon ad spend sits in five places, and four of them are structural rather than tactical — which is why raising or lowering bids rarely fixes them.

The last one is the expensive one, because it looks like a bidding problem and is not. If your conversion rate is below the category norm, every additional click costs the same and converts less, so the account gets worse as it scales. Diagnose that before you touch a bid — how to optimise an Amazon listing covers the order, and the free listing checker will tell you quickly whether the listing is the constraint.

To quantify the first four on your own account, export the search term report from Amazon Ads and paste it into the PPC audit tool. It totals the spend that produced no sales, which is the number worth putting next to any management fee you are being quoted.

What does a cheap PPC service actually get you?

Under about £400 a month, the economics only work if one person manages many accounts to a template. In practice that usually means: automatic campaigns left running, few or no negatives, bids adjusted monthly by a rule rather than a decision, and a dashboard link instead of a report.

That is not always the wrong choice. For a seller spending £1,000 a month on ads, a cheap service that stops the worst waste may be better than nothing and better than doing it yourself badly. Just buy it knowing what it is, and do not expect it to find the £800 of leakage a proper audit would.

What should a monthly PPC report contain?

A useful report answers four questions in writing: what changed, what it cost, what it produced, and what happens next. A dashboard login answers none of them, because a dashboard shows state rather than decisions.

The four numbers worth insisting on, in this order:

1. Total advertising cost of sale, not just ACoS. ACoS measures advertised sales against ad spend. TACoS measures ad spend against total sales, including organic — which is the only way to see whether advertising is buying rank or renting it.
2. Spend split by campaign intent. Discovery, performance, brand defence and competitor targeting behave differently and should be judged differently.
3. The changes made, dated. Negatives added, terms harvested, bids moved, budgets shifted — with the reason.
4. Wasted spend, stated as a number. Clicks with no orders, totalled. If it is not falling month on month, the optimisation is not happening.

Two report habits are worth treating as warnings. A report that only shows ACoS improving while total sales fall is describing a smaller account, not a better one. And a report with no list of changes is a description of the account rather than a record of the work — which is the distinction between paying for management and paying for monitoring.

Agree the target the report is written against before the engagement starts, calculated from your own margin using the profit and break-even ACoS calculator rather than from a category benchmark. What the reporting looks like in practice is set out on the PPC management page, and there is more on the fee itself in what an Amazon agency costs in the UK.

Agency, freelancer, software or in-house: how does Amazon PPC management cost compare?

The fee on a proposal is only part of your Amazon PPC management cost. The bigger question is who does the thinking each week. Each option below charges differently, and each leaves a different gap. Here is what the published numbers say, in US dollars first.

The real cost of managing PPC in-house

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for marketing specialists at $78,760 a year in May 2025. That is about $6,560 a month before benefits, software and training. It makes sense once ad spend is large enough to keep one person busy. Below that, you pay for a full salary and get part-time attention. For most sellers, that makes in-house the highest Amazon PPC management cost of the four.

Software and freelancers: cheaper, but check the gaps

Bid software automates the repetitive work. It does not decide your target ACoS or fix a listing that will not convert. Perpetua's Growth plan also adds a percentage of spend above $10,000 a month, so the fee rises as you scale.

Freelancers can be excellent value. Ask how many accounts they run, how many hours you get, and who covers when they are off.

Hidden costs to check before you sign

• Set-up fees for the first audit and rebuild. Ask whether they are credited against month one.
• Minimum terms and notice periods. Ask how long you are tied in and how much notice you must give.
• Extra marketplaces, often charged per country.
• DSP fees. Amazon says sponsored ads carry no demand-side fees, but Amazon DSP adds a technology fee as a percent of media cost.

Does VAT apply to fees in the UK?

If you sell on amazon.co.uk and your agency is UK VAT-registered, expect 20% VAT on its invoice. Buy from an overseas agency and you usually account for VAT yourself under the reverse charge. Confirm with your accountant.

If you want to compare before you commit, see our Amazon agency pricing, read what our Amazon PPC management services include, or start with a free Amazon PPC audit.

Questions people also ask

Last reviewed 11 July 2026. We update articles in place rather than republishing at a new URL, so the link you have keeps working.