Warning: Check Your Sponsored Products Campaigns NOW
Thanks to this forum post, I just discovered that Sponsored Products campaigns now have “Increase reach – off Amazon” auto-enabled by default. Unless you manually switch each campaign to “limit off-Amazon spend”, your ads will run on junk apps and sites where nobody is shopping.
From what I can tell, this change started in early 2025.
Did anyone actually receive an email or notice from Amazon about this? If I’d seen such a notice, I would have disabled the setting across every campaign on day one.
If Amazon really rolled out this costly, damaging change with no clear notice, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a deliberate cash grab at sellers’ expense.
Warning: Check Your Sponsored Products Campaigns NOW
Thanks to this forum post, I just discovered that Sponsored Products campaigns now have “Increase reach – off Amazon” auto-enabled by default. Unless you manually switch each campaign to “limit off-Amazon spend”, your ads will run on junk apps and sites where nobody is shopping.
From what I can tell, this change started in early 2025.
Did anyone actually receive an email or notice from Amazon about this? If I’d seen such a notice, I would have disabled the setting across every campaign on day one.
If Amazon really rolled out this costly, damaging change with no clear notice, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a deliberate cash grab at sellers’ expense.
0 replies
Seller_aNryBfYO3DTmL
Yeah. I noticed some of my auto campaigns started going from under 30% acos to over 100% and that's when I discovered this. The fact that this is the default and they never even announced it or put up a notification on the top of the ad console is scummy at best and illegal at worst.
Seller_xo4Akj7FBBnfC
By the way, you can check how much of your Sponsored Products budget Amazon has been pushing off-site.
Go to Advertising → Campaign Manager → Reports → Create Report, pick Sponsored Products and Placements, then download it. In the file you’ll see an “Off Amazon” row next to “Top of Search,” “Rest of Search,” and “Product Pages.”
In our case, over the last 90 days those off-Amazon ads returned exactly zero orders. Every ad that resulted in a sale was shown on Amazon.
Seller_U153PovWr91gQ
I STAY AWAY FROM THAT SCAM, THE CHARGED ME OVER $500.00 IN ONE DAY!!!
Seller_lCX40xAkSs1xm
No they did not alert users, it is sneaky and terrible.
Dougal_Amazon
Hello Sellers,
Dougal from the Community Manager Team here and I provided some info on the Your Thoughts on Critical Guardian Article: Exaggeration or Valid? thread that was linked in the original post. I located the announcement about this that went our on 8/16/25 linked below:
I also connected with the team to confirm a path to opt out and you can open a case with Ads Support and request to be removed from this.
Hope this helps.
Best, Dougal
Seller_NbYSGJ8Tehgbv
Dear God. I can see about 10 campaign settings and every single one of them auto changed to "Increase reach".
This is the most malicious thing I have ever seen.
Fortunately, it works perfectly for me but I got lucky. I do not understand how this is going to be beneficial for Amazon only sellers. This is clearly a cash grab leveraging the fact that its not going to be regulated by anybody.
Seller_xo4Akj7FBBnfC
BuzzFeed? Really? That’s some appallingly bad filler placement — mixed in with the premium space on Amazon that most sellers assume they’re paying for.
Seller_8ESHZD3bXlVUv
Good god, I noticed our ad spend spiking and could not for the life of me figure it out. Our account manager couldn't figure it out also - we blamed Rufus - which I'm sure caused some of it too... Now I know the rest. Thank you.
@Dougal_Amazon I also want to fully opt out of off-amazon spend as our intended demographic is not using these apps/services. When you have results for @Seller_7yza5TpHY1OqD please tag me as well. I'd also appreciate you passing along my comments to the team in charge of this below:
Being forced to "reduce" instead of opt out fully is unacceptable, and to turn it on by default and NOT make the impact clear to your ads customer (US! We are the customer!) is pretty sleazy. Amazon, do better.
