An internal audit of Amazon advertising accounts by Sellers Umbrella found that 34% of audited ad spend between January and May 2026 went toward keywords that generated no sales, highlighting a persistent weakness in how sellers manage automated campaigns, search-term data and negative keywords. The audit covered accounts across 11 Amazon marketplaces, although Sellers Umbrella did not disclose the total number of accounts or the methodology used to calculate the aggregate figure.
Amazon advertising has become increasingly important to brands competing for visibility on the marketplace, but the growing complexity of Sponsored Products and other ad campaigns is also creating more opportunities for inefficient spending.
Sellers Umbrella, an Amazon SPN Partner and Amazon Ads Verified Partner, says an internal audit of accounts across 11 global marketplaces found that 34% of advertising spend between January and May 2026 went to keywords that generated no sales.
The company says the pattern appeared across different product categories and budget levels. Its explanation is less about a single bad campaign than about accounts that were launched, automated and then left largely unchanged.
That distinction matters.
Amazon’s advertising system is designed to find additional opportunities for advertisers. Automatic targeting, broad-match keywords, suggested bids and budget recommendations can all help campaigns reach more shoppers. But those mechanisms can also expand spending faster than an advertiser’s conversion data can justify.
In the accounts reviewed by Sellers Umbrella, automatic campaigns reportedly continued running for months without consistently moving successful search terms into more controlled manual campaigns. Broad-match targeting also generated queries that sellers considered irrelevant, while negative keyword lists were not updated frequently enough to keep pace with campaign activity.
The result is a familiar performance-marketing problem: an account can continue generating sales while quietly becoming less efficient.
A seller may see revenue holding steady while advertising cost of sales, or ACOS, gradually rises. If the response is simply to increase budgets, more money can flow into the same inefficient targeting structure.
The search-term report becomes the control point
The most important diagnostic tool in this scenario is not necessarily another optimization feature. It is the Amazon search-term report, which shows the actual queries associated with advertising activity.
Sellers Umbrella recommends that advertisers pull the report for the previous 60 days, sort terms by spend and identify queries that have accumulated meaningful costs without producing orders. The company also recommends checking when negative keyword lists were last updated.
That process becomes particularly important for brands operating across multiple Amazon marketplaces.
According to the audit, waste was more concentrated in some secondary marketplaces, where campaigns had been duplicated from a primary market and subsequently received less attention. Campaign structures that make sense for one country can produce different search behavior, conversion rates and irrelevant queries elsewhere.
The broader market backdrop makes that operational discipline more important.
U.S. advertisers are expected to spend $71.09 billion on retail media in 2026, up from $60.32 billion in 2025, according to EMARKETER. Amazon Ads is expected to account for 79.7% of U.S. retail media spending in 2025, illustrating the platform’s outsized role in commerce advertising.
Amazon’s advertising business is also expanding beyond traditional marketplace search. EMARKETER estimates that Amazon’s U.S. advertising revenue will reach $56.71 billion in 2026, growing 17.9% year over year, as the company combines marketplace advertising with Prime Video, DSP capabilities and other inventory.
That scale changes the stakes for advertisers. Amazon is no longer simply a place to buy Sponsored Products; it is increasingly functioning as a broader retail media platform where first-party commerce data, search advertising, display, video and programmatic buying intersect.
Automation creates a management problem, not just an optimization opportunity
The challenge for advertisers is therefore not whether to use automation. It is where automation should stop.
Amazon’s automated recommendations can help advertisers expand reach, but the advertiser ultimately has to determine whether additional impressions and clicks are producing commercially useful outcomes. Gartner recently predicted that more than 70% of global ad spend will flow through self-serve advertising platforms in which AI materially influences media buying, cost and outcomes by 2028. The research firm specifically warned that advertisers need stronger independent measurement as platforms exert greater influence over campaign decisions.
That trend extends well beyond Amazon. Google, Microsoft, Meta and other major advertising platforms increasingly automate bidding, targeting and optimization. For enterprise marketing teams, the emerging skill is not simply learning how to operate an advertising interface. It is establishing governance around automated decisions.
On Amazon, that can mean maintaining clear campaign roles: automatic campaigns for discovery, manual campaigns for proven search terms, negative targeting for waste control and bid management based on conversion performance rather than platform suggestions alone.
Sellers Umbrella says its own Amazon PPC management practice follows a weekly operating cadence built around search-term audits, negative-keyword expansion, search-term harvesting and conversion-based bid adjustments.
The agency’s founder, Nirav Bhatt, argues that the distinction is between spending and managing. His point is significant even if the 34% figure should be viewed as an internal audit finding rather than a market-wide benchmark: advertising waste can remain invisible when an account is still producing revenue.
For brands already using agencies or freelancers, that creates a straightforward accountability test. Instead of asking only for the current ACOS, advertisers can ask when the search-term report was last reviewed, which terms were negated, which converting queries were moved into manual campaigns and how bids changed as conversion data accumulated.
The answers reveal much more about campaign management quality than a headline performance metric alone.
The central lesson is not that Amazon advertising is inherently inefficient. It is that increasingly automated retail media requires increasingly deliberate human oversight.
As more advertising decisions move into platform algorithms, the competitive advantage may belong less to advertisers willing to spend the most and more to teams capable of continuously separating useful discovery from expensive noise.
Market Landscape
Amazon sits at the center of an increasingly concentrated retail media market. EMARKETER forecasts that U.S. retail media spending will grow 17.8% in 2026, with Amazon and Walmart capturing the overwhelming majority of incremental spending.
At the same time, Gartner’s 2026 research points toward a broader shift in advertising: AI-driven self-service platforms are taking a larger role in media buying and optimization. That creates an important tension for brands. Automation can make campaign execution faster and more scalable, but it also increases the need for independent measurement, budget controls and human review.
For Amazon sellers, that translates into a practical operating model: automate discovery, but continuously audit what the automation discovers.
Top Insights
- Sellers Umbrella’s internal audit found 34% of audited Amazon ad spend produced no sales, exposing potential waste across automated and broad-match campaigns.
- The finding highlights search-term reporting, negative keywords and campaign harvesting as critical controls for brands managing increasingly automated Amazon PPC programs.
- Amazon’s expanding retail media dominance is increasing the value of advertising while simultaneously raising the financial consequences of inefficient targeting and unmanaged campaign expansion.
- Gartner expects AI-influenced self-service advertising platforms to handle more than 70% of global ad spend by 2028, increasing the importance of independent campaign oversight.
- Enterprise sellers and agencies should evaluate Amazon PPC management by optimization actions taken from conversion data, not ACOS or revenue metrics alone.
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