Amazon Ads for Latin American sellers: where to start

Amazon is where users arrive with the highest purchase intent: they are already looking for a product with their card in hand. For a brand from the region selling on amazon.com, amazon.es or other Amazon marketplaces, advertising is the fastest way to show up in front of that demand.

The formats to start with

• Sponsored Products: ads for individual products that appear in search results and on product pages. It is the starting point for almost any account.
• Sponsored Brands: ads featuring your brand and several products, useful for capturing category searches and defending your brand.
• Sponsored Display: ads to re-engage people who viewed your products and to appear on competitor products.

Within Sponsored Products, a common structure combines automatic campaigns, which help uncover real search terms, with manual campaigns on the terms that have already proven they sell.

ACOS: what it measures and how to read it

Amazon defines ACOS as ad spend divided by the sales generated by the ads, expressed as a percentage. If you spend USD 50 and sell USD 100, your ACOS is 50%. ROAS is the same ratio the other way round: sales over spend.

Amazon itself notes that ACOS should not be the only metric you watch. That is why we add TACOS —ad spend over the product’s total revenue, including sales that do not come from ads— to understand the effect of advertising on the whole business.

What to expect from a launch

A new product has no sales history or reviews, so ACOS is usually higher at first. It is worth setting a budget and a timeframe for that stage before demanding campaign-level profitability, and tracking total sales as well as ACOS.

A high ACOS at launch is not always a problem: it is the cost of starting to sell. What matters is that it has a timeframe and a goal.

Common mistakes

1. Pausing campaigns over a high ACOS in the first weeks, before collecting data.
2. Leaving all spend in automatic campaigns without moving winning terms into manual ones.
3. Advertising product pages that do not convert: title, images and reviews directly affect ACOS.
4. Running out of stock mid-campaign.

How we handle it at Semcial

We audit the campaign structure, keywords and current ACOS, build Sponsored Products, Brands and Display campaigns according to each product’s stage, and optimise bids and budget to scale sales. If a product page is holding the ads back, we flag it so your team can fix it.