Bidding on your own brand name on Amazon: what the search term report shows for small brands

A common piece of Amazon PPC advice is to run a separate campaign on your own brand name. The argument goes like this: people who search for your brand are ready to buy, the clicks are cheap, and if you do not take the ad slot, a competitor will.

We looked at how much of the ad traffic of small brands actually comes from their own brand name, and how those clicks perform next to everything else. The short answer: brand searches convert very well, but on a small brand they are a tiny part of the traffic. The number worth checking first is not their ACOS, but whether your brand word means something else on Amazon.

The data

The figures come from the Sponsored Products search term reports of 12 advertiser accounts, from March 28 to October 19, 2026, on Amazon in Europe and the US: 45,470 daily rows and 64,961 clicks.

We split every search term into four groups:

  • Own brand: the search contains the account's own brand name, including spellings without a space and obvious typos.
  • Name collision: the search contains the brand word, but the word also means something else (another, bigger brand or an everyday phrase).
  • ASIN: the "search term" is a product ID. These are clicks from product targeting, not typed searches.
  • Generic: everything else.

How much traffic comes from the brand name

  • Own brand searches brought 194 of the 64,961 clicks, which is 0.3%.
  • In 9 of the 12 accounts they were under 0.25% of the ad spend. The highest share was 1.27%.
  • 3 accounts had no own brand search with a click at all.
  • Only 3 of the 194 clicks came from an exact brand keyword. 145 came from auto campaigns, 38 from broad keywords, 7 from phrase keywords and 1 from product targeting.

So on these accounts, brand searches were reached mostly without a dedicated brand campaign. Auto targeting picked them up anyway.

How the brand clicks performed

  • Own brand searches converted at 21.1% (41 orders from 194 clicks). Generic searches converted at 5.2% (2,063 orders from 40,006 clicks).
  • Cost per click was lower on the own brand searches in all 9 accounts that had them.
  • 5 accounts got at least one order from an own brand search. In all 5, both the conversion rate and the ACOS were better than on the same account's generic searches. For example: 4.3% ACOS against 67%, 7.7% against 20%, 16% against 39%.

The sample is small and uneven: two accounts brought 35 of the 41 orders, and the four other accounts with brand clicks had 2 to 12 clicks each and no order.

The trap: a brand name that is not only yours

Two accounts had brand words that other shoppers use for something else:

  • One brand name contains a word that is also the name of a large cosmetics brand. Searches containing that word brought 12 clicks and no order.
  • Another brand name is an everyday phrase, the name of a car warning light. Searches containing it brought 10 clicks and no order.

From the word alone, these rows cannot be told apart from real brand searches, and together they had no order. If you build a brand campaign on such a word with a phrase or broad keyword, part of what you pay for is the other meaning's traffic.

What we could not see

The report shows what happened after the ad click, not what would have happened without the ad. Many of the people who searched for the brand would probably have found the product in the organic results anyway, so the 21% conversion rate overstates what the ad itself added. We also cannot see competitors' ads on the brand searches, so we cannot say how often a competitor took the slot when the seller did not. Orders are counted for 7 days after the click, and an order can be for a different product of the seller than the one in the ad. The brand word lists are ours, built from the brand names on the listings and the account names, and checked by hand.

How to check it in your account

  1. Download the Sponsored Products search term report for the last 60 days and filter the search term column for your brand name, its no-space spelling and its common typos.
  2. Add up the clicks and spend of those rows and divide by the account total. If the brand rows are under 1% of the spend, a brand campaign will not change your account much either way.
  3. Read every brand row and ask whether the shopper was looking for you. If your brand word is also another brand or an everyday phrase, add the other meaning's words as negative keywords before you bid on the brand word.
  4. Compare the brand ACOS with your generic ACOS, but do not let the brand rows pull the account ACOS down in your reporting. A good total that rests on brand searches hides how the generic searches are doing. The difference between ACOS and TACOS is in ACOS or TACOS.
  5. If you do run a brand campaign, use exact match with a low bid and check after two weeks whether competitors' ads show up on your brand search on the Amazon results page.

On a small brand, the brand name is a cheap and efficient corner of the account, not where the growth comes from. The generic searches are where the money goes, and where the work pays off.