What's a Good ACOS for Amazon Sponsored Brands in 2026?

A good ACOS (advertising cost of sales) for Amazon Sponsored Brands campaigns in 2026 is 20% to 35%, alongside a typical click-through rate of 0.4% to 0.9%. That range runs higher than the ACOS target most sellers aim for with Sponsored Products, because Sponsored Brands is built for awareness and new-customer reach rather than pure bottom-funnel conversion.

Why Sponsored Brands Carries a Higher ACOS Target Than Sponsored Products

Amazon's ad formats aren't interchangeable, even though they compete for the same ad dollars. Sponsored Products campaigns target a shopper actively searching for a specific product and are optimized to drive an immediate sale, which is why sellers typically hold those campaigns to a tighter ACOS. Sponsored Brands, by contrast, shows a custom headline, logo, and multi-product showcase earlier in the shopping journey — often to shoppers who haven't decided on a specific product yet — which naturally converts at a lower rate and justifies a higher acceptable ACOS.

Match Your ACOS Target to the Campaign's Job

A Sponsored Brands campaign built to drive traffic to a brand's Store page or introduce a new product line is doing discovery and retargeting work, not closing a sale in one click, so judging it against a Sponsored Products-level ACOS target will make a perfectly healthy campaign look like it's underperforming. Sellers running Sponsored Brands specifically for new-customer acquisition should expect — and can typically justify — an ACOS toward the top of or even above the 20-35% range, since the value of a first-time customer extends well past that one order.

How This Fits Into Your Overall TACoS

ACOS only measures ad spend against ad-attributed sales, so a seller running Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display together should also watch TACoS (total advertising cost of sale), which measures total ad spend against total sales including organic ones. A brand that accepts a higher Sponsored Brands ACOS in exchange for organic sales lift and brand search growth is often making the right trade, even if the Sponsored Brands line item alone looks less efficient than Sponsored Products.

When a Higher ACOS Is a Warning Sign Instead

The 20-35% range assumes the campaign is actually doing awareness or new-customer work. A Sponsored Brands campaign running well above 35% with flat or declining branded search volume and no growth in Store page traffic isn't buying awareness — it's just an expensive campaign, and that's the point to pause and rework targeting or creative rather than assuming the higher ACOS is automatically justified. Checking branded search volume and repeat-purchase rate among Sponsored Brands-attributed customers a few weeks after a campaign launches is a more reliable health check than ACOS alone.

Bottom Line

Don't hold Sponsored Brands to the same ACOS bar as Sponsored Products — treat 20-35% as the healthy range for a campaign doing its actual job of building awareness and reaching new customers, and confirm the trade-off is working by watching TACoS and branded search volume alongside it.

Sources: Eightx, "Average ACOS by Amazon Category: 2026 Benchmarks"; GoTrellis, "Amazon Ads Benchmarks by Category and Ad Type (2026 Update)."