Rivals bidding on your brand name on Amazon: how to measure it and when to defend

Search for your own brand on amazon.co.uk and the first thing you see may not be your product. It may be a rival’s Sponsored Brands banner, or a row of their sponsored products, sitting above the listing a loyal customer came looking for.

It feels like theft. Usually it is allowed, and sometimes it costs you very little. The job is to find out which, because the standard answer, “always bid on your own name”, is often the most expensive line in an account. This guide covers how to see the problem, what Amazon’s rules actually say, how to measure what it costs you, and the cheaper fixes to try before you pay to defend your own name.

What Amazon allows rivals to do

Amazon’s help pages are clearer on this than most advice suggests.

• Rivals may target your brand and products. Amazon’s “Understand targeting” page says product targeting lets you choose “specific products, categories, brands, or other product features that are relevant to the product in your ad”. Its own example: an advertiser selling a “Brand A” shoe “may also target the brand “Brand B” because it’s a brand similar to “Brand A"“³. The same page says targets “must be relevant to the product being promoted"³.
• Rivals may not name you in their ad. Amazon’s moderation guide for Sponsored Brands and display ads says: “Ads on Amazon cannot explicitly call out your competitors by name.” It adds that advertisers “may include references to a “leading brand” or other generic phrasing"⁴.
• The policy pages are silent on brand keywords. We read Amazon Ads’ policies page and its targeting policy on 26 October 2026⁵⁶. Neither says that bidding on another brand’s name as a keyword is banned, and neither says it is allowed. We found no rule either way on those pages, so plan on the basis that rivals can and will do it.
• You cannot reserve someone else’s name. For reserved branded keywords, Amazon rejects keywords that “contain another company’s brand name or trademark"⁸. That rule covers the reserve product, not ordinary bidding.

So there is usually nothing to report. If a rival’s ad copy names your brand, the moderation guide is on your side. If they simply bid on your name, it isn’t an Amazon policy breach, so the answer is commercial.

How to see it

Two checks, one quick and one reliable. Run both.

1. Search your own name like a shopper. Open a private browser window, so your own history doesn’t shape the results, and search amazon.co.uk for your brand name, your brand plus each main product, and any common misspelling. For each search, write down:

• whose ads sit at the top, beside and below your products;
• where your first organic result appears, and whether it is your best seller;
• whether the product shown is sold by you, or by a reseller holding the offer on your own listing.

This is check 1 in our audit, search position on the brand’s money terms, and check 7, who controls the listing. In two proposals we wrote in October 2026 we found one of each: on one brand’s own name, rivals held the top sponsored placements; on another, resellers held the offer on about a third of the brand’s own listings.

A screenshot tells you a rival is there. It does not tell you whether shoppers go with them.

2. Read your share of branded purchases. Brand Analytics is only for sellers with “a brand representative role assigned to a brand in Brand Registry"¹. If that is you, open Search Query Performance in Brand Analytics. Amazon says the dashboard “surfaces query volume, impressions, clicks, add-to-basket and buys” for “a single query associated with your brand’s catalogue, aggregated for a selected time period"¹. Amazon’s US seller blog adds that it gives “a breakdown of your brand’s share of performance compared to overall query performance"².

Filter it to the searches containing your brand name. For each one, compare your share of clicks with your share of purchases, and compare both with the same weeks last year. On your own name you should take nearly all of the purchases. If your share of purchases on your own brand searches is falling while search volume holds, someone is taking sales that were yours.

One caution. Amazon says the queries “are selected based on their overall performance in search results, and includes organic and Sponsored Products originating from the search results page"¹. It doesn’t say whether Sponsored Brands clicks are counted, so read the shares as a strong guide, not a complete count of every ad slot. Our Brand Analytics guide shows how to read the dashboard column by column.

The honest maths: high ROAS, low incremental profit

Brand-name ads report the best numbers in almost every account. Shoppers searching your name already want you, so they click and buy at a high rate, and Amazon credits the ad with the sale.

The catch is that most of those shoppers would have bought from you anyway, through the organic result directly underneath. Paying for that click buys a sale you already had. This is the point our Amazon advertising guide makes with its own worked example: ranked by ROAS, own-brand terms look like one of the best campaigns in the account; ranked by incremental profit, they are among the worst. That guide also says to keep “enough brand defence to stop competitors taking your searches”. This guide is about finding out how much “enough” is.

Rearrange it and you get the number that matters before you test anything:

The pause test, step by step

You can’t run a split test on your own name inside Amazon, so you compare periods. The method is the same holdout our Amazon Marketing Cloud guide describes, applied to one question.

Two details make or break the test. First, your generic campaigns must not pick up your brand searches while the brand campaigns are paused, or the pause measures nothing. Add your brand name as a negative in discovery and category campaigns a few days before you start; our negative keywords guide shows how, and how long a new negative takes to apply. Second, judge the result on total branded purchases. Ad-attributed sales fall to near zero in any pause; that number tells you nothing.

A worked example

This is an illustration with invented figures. A brand spends £1,200 over four weeks on ads for its own name. Amazon credits them with £14,400 of sales, ex-VAT: a ROAS of 12.0. The average selling price is £20 ex-VAT, so that is 720 attributed units. Margin before advertising is 30%, or £6 a unit.

On the dashboard this looks like £14,400 × 30% − £1,200 = £3,120 of profit from ads. The break-even is £1,200 ÷ £6 = 200 units: the pause has to lose more than 200 units for the ads to pay.

The baseline: 1,000 purchases on branded searches over four weeks. During the four-week pause, purchases on non-branded searches rose 2%, so without the pause you would expect 1,000 × 1.02 = 1,020 branded purchases. Here are two possible outcomes.

In the first case the pause lost 80 units, well under the 200-unit break-even. The brand ads were costing £720 every four weeks, and pausing them keeps that money. In the second, rivals took 260 units the moment the brand stepped back, so defence earned £360 more than it cost. Same ROAS, same spend, opposite decisions. The only thing that tells them apart is the test.

When defence pays

In our experience, defending your own name is worth paying for when at least one of these holds, and the test confirms it:

• Rivals are actually taking branded purchases. Your share of purchases on your own name falls when you pause, by more than the break-even.
• Your first organic result is not what the shopper wants. A brand search that shows an old product, a variation or a bundle first can lose the sale to a cleaner rival ad. A brand ad lets you choose what they see.
• You are launching. A new product won’t rank on your brand name yet. Paying for it for a set period is a launch cost, so give it an end date.
• You run a range. Shoppers who search your name may want a different product from the one ranking first. A Sponsored Brands collection or a Brand Store page can show them the range.

If the test says defend, decide how. Ordinary Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products bids on your exact brand terms are the default. The alternative is reserve share of voice: Amazon describes it as “a fixed, upfront price for top of search visibility for your branded keywords without having to bid in auction”, for “5 to 1,000 branded keywords for your own brands”, in a campaign “between 30 to 92 days"⁷. Amazon says it strives “to deliver 95% SOV at the campaign level” when the campaign is set up with relevant creative, and the goal is not available in Spain⁷. Your brand must be in Brand Registry, and keywords that are too broad, contain misspellings, or use a brand name shared by more than two brands are rejected⁸. A fixed price is easy to budget, but it is still spend: run the same break-even before you commit. Our Sponsored Products, Brands and display guide covers the other Sponsored Brands goals and formats.

Cheaper fixes to try first

Several causes of “lost” brand searches cost nothing in ad spend to fix. Check them before you raise a bid.

• Resellers on your own listings. If another seller holds the offer on your product, your ads and your organic result send shoppers to their offer. Our Featured Offer guide covers what you can and can’t do about resellers under UK law.
• Your own campaigns bidding on your name. Automatic and broad campaigns often spend on your brand searches without you noticing. Add your brand as a negative in those campaigns so brand searches only go to campaigns you judge on brand terms. Our PPC strategy guide explains why each campaign should have one job.
• The listing a shopper lands on. A rival ad wins against your organic result when it shows a lower price, a better main image or more reviews. Fix those and the same rival ad gets fewer clicks. Our listing checker is a quick first pass.
• A Brand Store worth landing on. A good Store gives brand searchers somewhere better than a single product page, and your own Sponsored Brands ads can send them there. Our Brand Store design guide covers the page tree.
• Watch, don’t react. One rival ad on your name is not an emergency. Check Search Query Performance each month; act when your share of purchases moves, not when a screenshot annoys you.

A one-page plan

If you want us to look at who sits on your brand searches, it is one of the first checks in every Profit Audit, and How we measure sets out how we work out each £.