“What is a good ROAS” is one of the most common questions we hear from our clients when we’re getting started on a new Amazon advertising project. It’s a simple enough question, but like many things in the ecommerce space, it doesn’t have a simple answer.
Though ROAS is still one of the clearest ways to judge whether your advertising is pulling its weight, there’s no single number that will work as a good benchmark for every brand. Setting yourself the right target depends on your margin, your campaign objectives, and how aggressively you’re planning to grow.
With UK digital ad spend having hit £40.5 billion last year, understanding your brand’s position in the Amazon ads landscape is crucial if you want to stay competitive on the world’s biggest ecommerce marketplace.
In this guide, we’ll explore why monitoring your ROAS is important, show up-to-date ROAS benchmarks for various ecommerce niches, and some of the key techniques you can use to improve your ROAS over time.
Our PPC optimisations achieved a 147% increase in ROAS and a 64% increase in sales in just one month for dancewear brand Capezio. Check out the full case study here.
ROAS isn’t just a reporting metric. When it’s understood correctly, it can be a highly valuable decision-making tool that shows you where to spend, where to cut, and the variables you should be testing to inform your strategy.
Some of the key ways that monitoring your ROAS provides real value include:
Need help improving your ROAS? Our advertising experts will assess your advertising performance, cut waste, and make sure you’re only paying for ads that convert.
Having clear benchmarks to measure your own ROAS against is crucial for any campaign. However, answering the question “what is a good ROAS?” depends heavily on your brand’s product niche, and the behaviours of different audience segments once they click on an ad.
To help contextualise your own data, here are some up-to-date 2026 ROAS benchmarks for Amazon categories, and ecommerce categories from across the digital advertising landscape.
Supplements / Health - 3.57
Electronics / Gadgets - 5
Home & Kitchen - 4
Apparel & Accessories - 3.03
Beauty & Personal Care - 3.57
Toys & Games - 4
Sports & Outdoors - 4
Pet Supplies - 4.35
Grocery & Gourmet - 5
Data collated by leading ecommerce analytics platform Polar across 2,700+ client accounts.
Food and Beverage - 1.43
Health and Wellness - 1.75
Beauty and Personal Care - 2.15
Pets - 2.24
Gifts and Occasions - 2.31
Home and Garden - 2.92
Toys and Hobbies - 3.02
Business and industrial - 3.06
Sports and Outdoor - 3.14
Apparel and Accessories - 3.85
Consumer Electronics - 5.16
A “good” ROAS on Amazon only makes sense in context. Campaigns with a seemingly strong ROAS can still be limiting your margins if they’re not maximising reach for a new product. On the other hand, a weaker ROAS can be perfectly acceptable if you’re buying a share in a competitive niche, defending a branded term, or clearing a strategic stock position.
Here are some useful checks to carry out to ensure you’re judging your numbers properly.
Being able to understand and benchmark your ROAS will give you a complete picture of your Amazon advertising performance. However, you’ll need to engage in real, proactive improvements to ensure you’re pushing your campaigns to fulfill their potential.
Here are 6 effective tactics we use in our own campaigns to achieve a healthier ROAS for our clients and help them hit their advertising goals.
One of the most common mistakes we see brands making is trying to mix several different objectives into a single campaign. All this will do is make your data harder to interpret, and muddy the waters when you’re trying to determine how well your campaigns are actually performing.
For a more effective approach, you should segment your campaigns by branded defence, non-branded discovery, competitor conquesting, and launch activity, so that you can evaluate each campaign against how it’s achieving its own commercial objectives.
When your advertising account structure mirrors intent, you’ll be able to see which portions of your budget are producing real, efficient sales, and the parts that are supporting reach, awareness, and new customer acquisition.
To achieve this, you should:
Amazon’s search term report lets you see the exact queries that shoppers entered before interacting with your ads, making it one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal for improving your ROAS.
This report will help you identify converting terms to promote, weaker keywords to exclude, and changes in search intent that you might otherwise overlook. In practice, a big chunk of your ROAS gains will come from pruning irrelevant traffic, and moving proven search terms into more controlled campaigns. Think orthodoxy, not clever new tricks.
Just remember that these decisions should be informed by quality data. Make sure a keyword has received at least 20 clicks before you decide whether to negate it, and leave any negative keywords in place for at least two weeks before you decide to change strategy.
Key best practices to bear in mind include:
Within the Amazon PPC platform, you have access to placement controls and bid adjustments, letting you treat top-of-search, rest-of-search, and product page exposure separately, instead of bidding across the board.
This is important as high-intent placements typically behave very differently from low-intent ones. Amazon’s own bid control documentation notes how placement adjustments can be used alongside bidding strategies, and how placement-level reports can show you where performance is actually coming from.
In many of the client accounts we work on, a small number of high-value placements carry the lion’s share of efficient revenue. For better advertising efficiency, it’s crucial to find these placements, fund them, and stop spending on placements that look cheap but rarely convert.
Some good habits to bear in mind include:
Optimising your ROAS doesn’t begin and end with your ad campaigns. On Amazon, your listing content quality has a direct impact on how efficient your paid traffic is, and we always recommend that our clients make sure their listings are fully optimised before they invest heavily in PPC.
It’s essential to bear in mind that your media work and content optimisation are inextricably linked. If your listing page doesn’t convert, then your PPC campaign will be forced to spend more just to generate the same revenue.
Best practices to follow include:
Sponsored Brands Video is one of the strongest Amazon ad formats available for combining pure impressions with useful visual storytelling. These kinds of ads can increase visibility in desktop and mobile shopping results, target shoppers through keywords, categories, and products, and send high-intent traffic to product pages or your Amazon Storefront.
When it comes to improving your ROAS, the value of this tactic is twofold. First, the video format is able to capture high-intent shoppers earlier in the journey. Second, it can improve the quality of traffic flowing to your listing page or storefront, especially if your content optimisation is well-executed and it’s easy for shoppers to understand the product.
Some key ways to get the most out of Sponsored Brands Video include:
Though Amazon ROAS is certainly a useful metric, it doesn’t give you the whole picture. Wherever possible, it’s important to expand your visibility with additional tools, and contextualise Amazon as part of a wider paid media ecosystem.
Amazon Attribution gives you a free measurement solution for seeing the on-Amazon impact of non-Amazon marketing activity across search, display, social, video, email, and other channels like influencer or affiliate activity. Amazon Marketing Cloud is another measurement solution, which takes your analytics further by offering cloud-based custom analytics and audience segmentation.
These kinds of off-Amazon solutions are crucial to consider, as these days the strongest ecommerce businesses treat Amazon as part of a broader ecommerce ecosystem, and not an isolated silo. If you’re hyper-focused on platform ROAS, you could end up under-investing in other channels that create demand upstream.
Some of the best tactics for getting the full picture include:
In 2026, a good ROAS on Amazon is one that aligns with the benchmarks in your product niche, and makes sense after your fees, margins, and campaign goals have all been accounted for. A product launch campaign, branded defence campaign, and a profitability campaign all call for different targets. For the best long-term results, you should avoid chasing a single magic number, and instead build a more complete measurement system that considers ROAS, ACOS, listing quality, placement performance, and incrementality.
We hope this guide has given you a better understanding of what a good ROAS is in 2026’s Amazon landscape, and how you can apply it to your own advertising strategy for stronger results. For more support with your upcoming campaigns, be sure to check out our other blog posts, or discover how our bespoke Amazon advertising services can help you reach your targets.
A 3:1 ROAS can be good on Amazon, but only as a rough starting point. Whether £3 in ad revenue for every £1 spent is a “good ROAS” depends on your margin, fees, and campaign objective. For some brands, especially in tighter-margin categories like apparel and accessories, you’ll need to aim for a much higher threshold.
ROAS may decrease after increasing spend because scaling your campaigns can lead to you reach beyond your most efficient traffic. When expanding budgets, placements, and keyword coverage, lower-intent traffic can enter the mix. This might reduce efficiency if your bid controls, search term management, and placement optimisation aren’t sufficient.
Though ROAS and ACOS both measure advertising efficiency, they present it in different ways and are more useful in different contexts. ROAS is usually easier for commercial teams to interpret quickly, while ACOS is often better when you’re working with Amazon-native reporting and profitability thresholds.
To improve your Amazon ROAS quickly, start with search term reports, negative targeting, and auditing your product listing content optimisation. This combination usually empowers you to remove waste quickly, and improves the conversion rate of the traffic you get from your ads. From there, the most efficient activities are reviewing your placement performance, then graduating into more advanced measurement with Amazon Attribution and AMC if you’re investing in external traffic too.