Picture this: a buyer lands on your Amazon listing. They scroll past the bullets. They scroll past the price. They scroll past the buy button. And then they see your A+ Content. Which is your founder's grandma's story, in a serif font, on a beige background. [Stares blankly.]
Reader, your grandma seems lovely. But Janet from Cincinnati is trying to decide between your $42 magnesium supplement and the one next to it. She does not need a brand origin story. She needs to know whether yours has fewer artificial fillers. That's what A+ Content is for.
Amazon's official A+ Content tool gives brand-registered sellers up to seven rich-media modules below the standard description. Done right, it can lift conversion 10–20% in most consumer categories. Done wrong — and most are done wrong — it just slows page load and contributes nothing to the buy decision.
This post is the version with sleeves rolled up. Which modules to use, in what order, with what copy and imagery, and why most A+ Content advice is technically correct but practically useless. [Cracks knuckles ominously.]
What A+ Content Actually Is (and Isn't)
Amazon A+ Content is the rich-media section that replaces the plain product description on listings owned by brand-registered sellers and vendors. It lets you add up to seven modules: hero banners, comparison charts, lifestyle imagery, brand stories, FAQ blocks, image grids, and (in Premium) video carousels.
Here's what A+ Content is not: an SEO booster. Amazon's A9 search algorithm doesn't index A+ Content text. The keywords you stuff into your hero banner don't help you rank. (Sorry to whoever sold you that idea.) What A+ does is improve conversion. And conversion is the biggest factor in organic ranking on Amazon — which means great A+ Content lifts rank indirectly.
This is an important distinction. Most brands treat A+ as decoration. The brands quietly winning page-one share treat it as the section of the listing that closes the sale. The math is simple: if A+ lifts your conversion rate from 12% to 14%, you're not just selling more units — you're also outranking every competitor whose A+ is just decoration.
A+ Content isn't your brand story. It's the part of your listing that closes the customer your bullets couldn't close on their own.
If you don't have Brand Registry yet, A+ Content isn't available to you — and that's the first thing to fix. Read our guide on Amazon listing optimization for the full breakdown of why Brand Registry is the prerequisite to almost every advanced listing tool.
Standard vs Premium A+ — Which You Need
Amazon offers two tiers of A+ Content, and most brands don't realize the second one exists:
Standard A+ Content is free, available immediately upon Brand Registry approval, and includes the 5–7 modules most sellers use. Comparison chart, image-with-text, single image with sidebar, three-image grid, four-image grid, brand story modules, etc. Standard A+ alone, used well, will get you 80% of the conversion lift available.
Premium A+ Content is also free — yes, free — but requires you to have at least 5 approved A+ Content submissions AND an active Amazon Brand Story. The unlock is significant: larger modules (up to 1464px wide vs Standard's 970px), shoppable comparison charts (clickable to other ASINs), interactive Q&A blocks, video carousels, hover-and-click modules, and bigger lifestyle imagery slots. It's the difference between a brochure and a flagship store.
Many brands have hit the eligibility requirements without realizing it. Check the A+ Content Manager in Seller Central — if "Premium" is unlocked, use it. If it's locked, count your approved submissions and create the brand story. Most brands are one or two modules away from unlocking it.
If you're serious about Amazon — and you should be, given you're past $5M — Premium is the right target. The visual real estate alone is worth the production investment. We've seen brands jump 15–25% in conversion after migrating well-built Standard A+ to Premium A+ in the same week. Same copy, same product, bigger modules. That's the entire change.
The 5 A+ Modules That Move Conversion
Amazon offers about 15 module options. Most brands either use 2 (and leave the page feeling empty) or use all 15 (and create a chaotic scroll). The sweet spot is 5–7 modules, in a deliberate order, each doing a specific job. Here are the 5 every A+ should have:
Comparison Chart Module (the close)
This is the single highest-converting module in A+. Side-by-side comparison of your product across all your variants OR against category-average specs. Buyers come to Amazon to compare; this module saves them from leaving your listing to do it.
Premium A+ unlocks a shoppable version that lets buyers click directly to other ASINs in your catalog. Use it. It cross-sells inside your own brand without making it feel like cross-selling.
Lifestyle Hero Module (the "this is for you")
One large lifestyle image with short, benefit-led headline copy. The image should show the product in the buyer's actual context — kitchen, bathroom, gym bag, whatever — not on a white studio backdrop. The headline answers "Who is this for?" in one sentence.
Three-Image Grid (the proof)
Three smaller images showing: (1) closeup of texture/material/ingredient, (2) the actual use case, (3) a certification or third-party validation. This is your "show, don't tell" module. Each image gets a short caption — under 15 words.
FAQ Block (the objection-handler)
Four to six common questions with short answers. This is the highest-leverage copy module in A+. Pull questions from your real low-star reviews and your customer service emails. Address the objections that are killing conversion. Done right, this module alone can lift conversion 5–10%.
Brand Story (briefly, at the end)
This is where the grandma story goes — but in 60 words or less, not 600. The brand story belongs last, not first, because nobody buys on the brand story. They buy on the comparison chart and the FAQ. Save the story for after they've decided to buy.
Notice what's missing: no "Made With Premium Ingredients" floating module. No "Our Mission" page. No 1200×600px banner of your founder. Those are the things brands love and customers ignore.
The A+ Hierarchy: What Goes Where
The order of your A+ modules matters as much as which modules you use. Amazon shows A+ Content below the bullets, which means buyers see it after they're already 60% sold. Your job is to seal the deal — fast — before they bounce.
The order that converts:
- Module 1: Lifestyle Hero. Reinforces "this product is for someone like me" within two seconds.
- Module 2: Comparison Chart. Removes the need to leave your listing to compare with competitors or variants.
- Module 3: Three-Image Grid (Proof). Closeup detail + use case + third-party validation. Trust signals.
- Module 4: FAQ Block. Addresses the last 3–5 objections that are killing conversion. (Most brands skip this. Most brands have lower conversion.)
- Module 5: Brand Story. Only NOW does anyone care who you are.
The biggest A+ mistake is leading with the brand story. The buyer wants to know if your product solves their problem, not who you are. Save the founder mythology for after the comparison chart.
Writing A+ Copy That Sells (Not Storytells)
A+ copy is not blog copy. It's not website copy. It's not even Amazon bullet copy. It's the shortest possible version of a salesperson handling the customer in front of the shelf. Three rules:
Rule 1 — Headlines do the work. Most buyers will read the headlines of each module and skip the body copy. So write headlines that are full sentences, not labels. "Made With Premium Ingredients" is a label. "Third-party tested for purity — 99.4% in 2026" is a headline that closes a sale. Same fact. Different impact.
Rule 2 — Body copy gets 20 words max per module. Buyers scrolled past your bullets to get here. They're not going to read another 200 words. Every module should have headline + 20 words of supporting body + the image. Stop there.
Rule 3 — Sell benefits, prove with features. "Sleep through the night" is the benefit. "400mg of high-absorption magnesium glycinate" is the feature that proves it's possible. Both go in the headline. The benefit gets the bigger font.
5 A+ Mistakes That Quietly Hurt Conversion
When to Refresh Your A+ Content
A+ Content doesn't expire, but it does drift. The version you launched two years ago is now operating in a category that's moved past it. Three triggers should prompt an A+ refresh:
For most brands past $5M, this means a quarterly review of your top 10 ASINs' A+ Content with structural updates every 6–12 months. Anything more frequent is over-investing. Anything less frequent is letting the listing rot.
That's the playbook. Five modules, in a deliberate order, with copy that closes the sale instead of telling the brand story. Done right, A+ Content lifts conversion 10–20% — and conversion lift drives ranking, which drives traffic, which drives more conversion. The flywheel is real if you build the listing right.
If you want the broader context, our Amazon Listing Optimization playbook covers titles, bullets, images, backend keywords, and the quarterly refresh routine that catches drift before it costs you rank. And if you suspect A+ is one of your conversion leaks but you're not sure how much it's costing you, the free 2-minute Profit Leak Audit will surface the size of the gap.
[Closes laptop with a flourish.] Now go look at your top ASIN's A+ Content. Count the modules. Check the order. Find the comparison chart. (You probably don't have one. Most brands don't. That's the easy win, right there.)
What ACoS Actually Means (and What It Doesn't)
ACoS — Advertising Cost of Sale — is the percentage of ad-attributed revenue your ad spend ate. Spend $100, drive $400 in ad-attributed sales, your ACoS is 25%. Amazon defines it the same way. Simple math, but it carries a giant asterisk.
The asterisk: ACoS only counts revenue Amazon attributes to those specific ads. If your ads built brand awareness and someone bought you organically next week, ACoS does not see that. If your sponsored campaigns lifted your keyword rank and you're now winning page one organically, ACoS does not see that either.
This is why obsessing over ACoS without context is like judging a movie based on the trailer — yes, that's the marketing, but it's not the whole experience. (We'll come back to this. I promise.) For the broader view, you want TACoS — Total Advertising Cost of Sale, which divides ad spend by your total Amazon revenue, organic included. ACoS tells you if individual campaigns are efficient. TACoS tells you if your whole ad investment is building the business.
Now that the definitions are out of the way, let's talk about why your ACoS is climbing.
7 Reasons Your ACoS Is Probably Too High
These are the offenders we see in roughly 80% of brand-owned ad accounts when we open the hood for the first time. None are exotic. All are fixable. Most are the kind of thing that makes you go "oh, right, I knew that."
You're paying for search terms you'd never approve in writing
Auto and broad match campaigns are matching to queries you've never seen. Your negative keyword list hasn't been updated since the Obama administration. Most of the "wasted spend" hiding in your account lives here.
Broad match bids are equal to your exact match bids
Amazon's broad match is famously aggressive. Bidding $2 on a broad keyword is like opening your wallet on a busy street and walking away. Broad bids should sit 20–30% below exact bids on the same theme.
Branded and non-branded keywords are in the same campaign
Brand terms always perform well (your customer was searching for you specifically). Non-brand terms always perform worse (they're discovery). Mixed together, the brand performance masks how badly your non-brand campaigns are doing. Separate them. Always.
Your placement modifiers are at zero
Top of Search converts 2–3× better than other placements in most categories. If your modifier sits at 0%, you're paying the same CPC for every placement and Amazon decides where your money goes. That's not strategy — that's a coin flip.
You set the bids in 2024 and never came back
Conversion rates change. Competitors change. Listing performance changes. A bid set 14 months ago is a bid set for a market that no longer exists. (And yes, I know you've been busy. So has everyone else.)
Daily budgets are flat across all campaigns
Your best campaigns hit their cap at noon and your worst campaigns spend their full allocation on irrelevant clicks until midnight. You're literally capping winners and funding losers equally. Cute.
You're optimizing for ACoS while ignoring TACoS
An efficient campaign that's not building anything is still just an efficient campaign. A "high ACoS" campaign that's driving rank and organic lift is profitable when measured properly. Decide which one each campaign is — then decide what to optimize for.
The Lower-ACoS Playbook (6 Levers)
[Cracks knuckles.] Here's where we stop diagnosing and start operating. Pull these six levers in roughly this order and most accounts will see ACoS drop 15–30% within 60–90 days. The first lever does about half of the work all by itself.
FAQ
Amazon A+ Content (formerly Enhanced Brand Content) is a rich-media product description section available to brand-registered sellers. It replaces the standard plain-text description with up to 7 modules including comparison charts, lifestyle imagery, brand story, FAQ blocks, and video. A+ Content doesn't directly affect SEO rankings, but it lifts conversion rate — and conversion rate is the biggest driver of organic rank on Amazon.
Indirectly, yes. A+ Content text isn't indexed by Amazon's A9 search algorithm — meaning keywords in your A+ modules won't make you rank for those terms. But A+ Content lifts conversion rate, sometimes by 10-20%, and conversion rate is the dominant factor in Amazon's organic ranking. So great A+ Content boosts rankings by making more buyers convert, not by stuffing keywords into modules.
Use all 5-7 available slots in standard A+ Content, but pick modules that serve different jobs: one hero/comparison, one lifestyle, one brand story, one objection-handling FAQ, one use-case grid. Premium A+ Content (available to brands with 5+ approved A+ submissions) unlocks larger modules and video carousels — use that tier if you qualify.
Standard A+ Content is free for brand-registered sellers and vendors. Premium A+ Content (which unlocks larger modules and shoppable comparison tables) is also free but requires having at least 5 approved A+ Content submissions and an active Amazon Brand Story. The cost isn't in Amazon fees — it's in design and copy production, which a small brand can do in-house or outsource for $500-$3000 per ASIN.
Standard A+ Content typically takes 24-72 hours for approval. Rejections happen when content violates Amazon's policy — most commonly: claims about being "the best" without third-party evidence, references to competitors by name, contact information or external URLs, or low-resolution imagery. Read the rejection email carefully — Amazon usually tells you exactly which module failed.
Yes, if you have Brand Registry — A+ Content is free, lifts conversion in nearly every category, and gives your listing the visual depth needed to compete with bigger brands. The only exception is ASINs with very low traffic where the production cost isn't justified by potential lift. For any ASIN doing meaningful volume, A+ Content should be considered table stakes, not a nice-to-have.