Amazon PPC Management
Amazon advertising is not difficult to switch on. It is difficult to stop it quietly eating your margin. Most accounts we look at are spending real money on search terms that have never converted, in campaigns nobody has restructured since launch.
We build and run Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns against a profit target you set — not against a vanity ACoS number that looks good in a report.
The two numbers that matter
Almost every argument about Amazon advertising comes down to confusing these two. Getting the distinction right changes what you optimise for.
ACoS
AD SPEND ÷ AD SALES
Measures how efficient the advertising is on its own. Useful for judging a campaign, a keyword, or a placement.
Useless on its own for judging a business. A 15% ACoS on an account that advertises 5% of its sales tells you almost nothing about profitability.
TACoS
AD SPEND ÷ TOTAL SALES
Measures what advertising costs the whole business, including the organic sales advertising helped create.
Falling TACoS with flat or rising revenue is the pattern you want: advertising is buying rank, and rank is doing more of the work over time.
We report both, plus the actual contribution margin after Amazon fees, cost of goods and ad spend. A campaign can hit target ACoS and still lose money on a low-margin product, and you should be able to see that.
Where advertising money usually leaks
Before rebuilding anything, we look for the same handful of leaks. They are common because they all look fine on the surface.
Search terms nobody has looked at
Broad and auto campaigns pick up traffic that will never convert — wrong size, wrong compatibility, competitor brand names, plain misspellings of other products. Without a regular negation pass, that spend just keeps running.
Campaigns fighting each other
The same keyword live in three campaigns at three bids means you are bidding against yourself and Amazon is happily taking the higher price. Clean structure exists to stop this, not to look tidy.
Advertising a listing that cannot convert
If the images are poor, the price is uncompetitive, reviews are thin or the product is out of stock, advertising accelerates the loss rather than fixing it. Traffic is not the problem on a page that does not convert.
Placement and bid adjustments left at default
Top-of-search placement converts very differently from rest-of-search and product pages, and the right modifier varies by ASIN. Defaults are rarely right for anyone.
Dayparting and budget caps that hide the problem
Campaigns that run out of budget by lunchtime look efficient. They are just switched off for the half of the day you were not measuring.
How we structure campaigns
There is no single correct structure, but there is a correct principle: every campaign should have one job, and you should be able to say what that job is in a sentence. Ours usually break down like this.
- Discovery — auto and broad, deliberately loose, small budget
- Harvest — exact-match terms proven by discovery data
- Defence — your own brand terms, protected cheaply
- Attack — competitor and category ASIN targeting
- Ranking — specific keywords being pushed for organic position
- Catch-all — long-tail volume at controlled bids
Discovery finds terms. Proven terms graduate into harvest campaigns at controlled bids. Ranking campaigns run deliberately above target ACoS for a defined period, because you are buying organic position rather than buying that sale — and that is a decision you should be making on purpose, with a stop date.
Sponsored Brands, Display and video
Sponsored Products does most of the work in most accounts. The other formats earn their place in specific situations rather than by default.
Sponsored Brands
Worth running when you have Brand Registry, a Store worth sending traffic to, and a range where the headline can sell the brand rather than one product. Video placements in particular tend to hold their cost-per-click well.
Not worth running to drive traffic to a single ASIN you could target more cheaply with Sponsored Products.
Sponsored Display
Best used narrowly: defending your own product pages against competitor ads, and retargeting viewers who did not buy. Broad Display targeting spends quickly with results that are hard to attribute.
We start it small and only scale what shows a measurable return.
What the reporting looks like
Monthly, in plain language: spend, ad sales, ACoS, TACoS, contribution margin after fees and cost of goods, what was changed during the month, what it did, and what we intend to do next. Plus the search terms we negated and why, because that is where the money quietly goes.
We do not send a raw data dump and call it a report. If you cannot tell from a report whether the month was good, it is not a report.
What we need from you
Cost of goods per ASIN, your target margin, and any product you do not want advertised — an ASIN you are running down, or one with a supply problem. Advertising decisions are margin decisions, and without your true costs we would be optimising against a number that only looks like profit.
Honest limits
Advertising cannot fix a product nobody wants, a price that is not competitive, or a listing with fifteen reviews at 3.4 stars. It also cannot deliver a fixed ACoS in a category where competitors are bidding above their own margin to hold position. Where that is happening, we will tell you and recommend where the money would work harder instead.
Common questions
What ACoS should I be targeting?
There is no universal number. Your break-even ACoS is your contribution margin after Amazon fees and cost of goods — advertising above that loses money on the sale, which is sometimes still the right call if you are buying rank deliberately.
We work out your break-even per ASIN first, then set targets against it. Any agency quoting a target ACoS before seeing your costs is quoting a number that means nothing.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. A percentage of spend rewards the agency for spending more of your money, which is the wrong incentive. We charge a flat monthly fee based on catalogue size and campaign complexity.
How long until the campaigns are profitable?
A restructure typically needs two to four weeks to gather enough data before meaningful optimisation, and around 60 to 90 days to settle. Accounts with existing history move faster because there is data to harvest from day one.
Will you pause my existing campaigns?
Not immediately, and not blindly. Existing campaigns carry performance history that is genuinely valuable. We keep what is working, rebuild what is not, and migrate spend gradually so you do not lose ranking during the transition.
Do you manage advertising on eBay and Walmart too?
Can I keep control of the budget?
Always. You set the monthly ceiling and we work inside it. Any recommendation to increase spend comes with the reasoning and the expected effect, and it is your decision.
Find out where your ad spend is going
Send us your storefront link. The free audit comes back as a video covering your campaign structure, the search terms costing you money, and what we would change first.