What does Amazon PPC management cost in the UK?
By Monjur HossainFounder & Amazon Strategy Lead
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UK Amazon PPC management typically costs £400 to £2,500 a month as a flat retainer, or 10% to 20% of advertising spend on a percentage model. Media spend is separate and paid to Amazon directly. Below roughly £2,000 a month in ad spend, management usually costs more than it saves.
What are the real fee ranges?
| Monthly ad spend | Typical flat fee | Typical % model | What you should expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under £2,000 | £400 – £700 | 15 – 20% | Monthly optimisation, light reporting |
| £2,000 – £10,000 | £700 – £1,500 | 12 – 18% | Weekly optimisation, search term work, monthly call |
| £10,000 – £30,000 | £1,500 – £2,500 | 10 – 15% | Full campaign management, Brands and Display, fortnightly reporting |
| £30,000+ | £2,500+ | 8 – 12% | A named team, custom reporting, multi-marketplace |
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.
- "What happens to your fee in a month where the right call is to spend half as much?"
- A good answer acknowledges the conflict and says how they handle it. A defensive answer tells you something too.
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.
| Where | What it looks like in the report | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Unmanaged automatic campaigns | A long tail of search terms with clicks and no orders | Harvest the converting terms into exact match, negate the rest |
| No negative keywords | The same non-converting term appearing month after month | A weekly negation routine, not an occasional clear-out |
| Campaigns competing with each other | One ASIN winning the same term in three campaigns | One term, one placement — the whole point of a keyword map |
| Paying for your own brand unnecessarily | High spend, very high ACoS-free conversion on branded terms | Defend where competitors are bidding on you; stop where nobody is |
| Advertising a listing that does not convert | Good click-through, poor unit session percentage | Fix the listing first — advertising a weak listing pays Amazon to prove it |
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:
- 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.
- Spend split by campaign intent. Discovery, performance, brand defence and competitor targeting behave differently and should be judged differently.
- The changes made, dated. Negatives added, terms harvested, bids moved, budgets shifted — with the reason.
- 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.
Questions people also ask
How much does Amazon PPC management cost in the UK?
Typically £400 to £2,500 a month as a flat retainer, or 10% to 20% of advertising spend on a percentage model. Media spend is separate and paid to Amazon directly. Fees scale with spend and catalogue size rather than with results.
Is Amazon ad spend included in the management fee?
It should not be. Advertising spend is paid to Amazon from your own Seller Central account so you keep full visibility. If an agency runs media spend through its own account, ask why and check whether it is marked up.
Is percentage of ad spend a fair way to charge?
It is common but it creates a conflict: the agency earns more when you spend more, including in months when spending less is the right decision. A flat retainer removes that conflict, which is why we use one.
At what ad spend is PPC management worth paying for?
Roughly £2,000 a month in ad spend is the point where a management fee starts to pay for itself, because below that there is rarely enough waste to recover. Above £5,000 a month, a badly structured account almost always contains more waste than the fee costs.
What should a monthly Amazon PPC report include?
Total advertising cost of sale as well as ACoS, spend split by campaign intent, a dated list of the changes made and why, and wasted spend stated as a number. A report that shows ACoS improving while total sales fall is describing a shrinking account, and a report with no list of changes is monitoring rather than management.
What is the difference between ACoS and TACoS?
ACoS compares ad spend to the sales that advertising produced. TACoS compares ad spend to your total sales, organic included. ACoS tells you whether a campaign is efficient; TACoS tells you whether advertising is buying durable organic position or simply renting sales month after month.
Written by Monjur Hossain, Founder & Amazon Strategy Lead at MotionTrust Digital, from the agency’s day-to-day work on client Amazon accounts and checked against the primary documentation listed under Sources below. Primary sources for this guide: Amazon Ads, Amazon Seller Central UK and MotionTrust Digital.
Every figure attributed to Amazon or to another named organisation links to that organisation’s own page, with the month it was accessed. Anything drawn from our own client accounts is labelled as ours rather than presented as an industry figure, and where no primary source publishes a number this guide says so instead of estimating one. Last reviewed .
- Amazon Ads — Amazon Ads help centre (UK), accessed August 2026.
- Amazon Ads — Amazon Ads (UK), accessed August 2026.
- Amazon Seller Central UK — Fee schedule, accessed August 2026.
- MotionTrust Digital — published pricing, August 2026.
Monjur Hossain
Founder & Amazon Strategy Lead, MotionTrust Digital
Monjur incorporated MotionTrust Digital in September 2022 and leads Amazon strategy across the client base. Eight years in e-commerce and marketplace marketing, now on Amazon only — keyword strategy, listing architecture and advertising structure for growing brands.
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