Amazon PPC & Ads Management

Most Amazon ad accounts are not under-optimised. They are optimised for the wrong number.

If your agency reports ACoS, they are reporting a ratio that can improve while your bank account gets worse. Cut spend on your best-converting keyword and ACoS drops. So does revenue, so does organic rank, so does contribution margin. We have inherited dozens of accounts where the previous manager hit their ACoS target every month and the brand still lost money.

We are Amazon sellers first. Before Dayly Group managed $100M+ in client revenue, we scaled our own footwear brand past $2.5M on Amazon using the same playbooks. That means we build campaigns around the only number that pays your salary: contribution margin per unit after ads, fees, freight and returns.

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What Amazon PPC management actually includes

1. Margin model before media

We do not touch a bid until we know what a unit earns. We build a per-ASIN contribution model — price, referral fee, FBA fee, storage, freight-in, return rate, promo depth — and back out the true break-even ACoS for each ASIN. Some of your catalogue can profitably absorb 45% ACoS. Some cannot survive 12%. Averaged targets destroy both.

2. Campaign architecture built by intent, not by product

One campaign per intent tier, not one campaign per ASIN dumped into auto:

• Defensive: your brand terms, your ASIN, your competitor conquesting defence
• Harvest: exact-match terms with proven conversion history and known break-even ceilings
• Discovery: auto, broad and ASIN targeting, capped, whose only job is to feed the harvest tier
• Category assault: Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display against specific competitor ASINs where your review count or price wins

Search terms graduate from discovery to harvest on evidence — a conversion threshold, not a hunch — and get negated in discovery the moment they graduate so you stop paying twice for the same click.

3. Bid management with ceilings, not guesses

Every keyword gets a bid ceiling derived from its own break-even, its position value and its organic rank. Terms where you already hold organic page-one get reduced, not defended at any cost. Terms where you rank 15–30 and convert get funded aggressively, because paid velocity there buys organic rank you keep after the spend stops.

4. Dayparting and placement discipline

Placement multipliers and hour-of-day performance are where most accounts leak 10–20% of spend. We pull the placement report weekly, set top-of-search multipliers per campaign rather than per account, and suppress hours and days that historically convert below break-even.

5. Creative testing on Sponsored Brands, Video and STV

Headline, lifestyle image and video variants tested on a rotation, judged on new-to-brand orders and detail-page-view-to-order rate, not clicks. Video is now the cheapest incremental placement in most categories and the most commonly ignored.

6. Search-term waste elimination

Every week: search terms with spend and zero orders over a statistically meaningful click volume get negated. Duplicated keywords bidding against each other across campaigns get consolidated. In a typical first 60-day audit we find 8–22% of spend going to terms that have never produced an order.

7. Reporting you can act on

One weekly view: spend, sales, TACoS, contribution margin, organic rank movement on your priority keywords, and the three decisions we made and why. No 40-tab dashboard nobody opens.

How PPC compounds with the rest of the account

PPC alone has a ceiling. It gets moved by everything around it:

• Listing optimisation raises conversion rate, which lowers your effective cost per order on every keyword you already bid on. Fixing the listing is often cheaper than fixing the bid.
• Amazon SEO turns paid velocity into organic rank so you can eventually reduce paid share of voice on your core terms.
• Amazon DSP picks up the demand PPC cannot reach — lapsed buyers, competitor shoppers, in-market audiences off Amazon — once you are past roughly $100k/mo.
• Full account management keeps suppressions, stock-outs and case backlogs from silently capping every campaign you run.

Ads amplify. They do not fix.

Signals your Amazon PPC is being managed badly

• Reporting leads with ACoS and never mentions margin, TACoS or organic rank
• One campaign per ASIN, everything on auto, no negation history
• Bids changed daily on 7 days of data, or not changed for a month
• Branded terms bundled with non-branded so the blended ratio looks healthy
• Spend concentrated on 5 ASINs while 60% of your catalogue has never been advertised
• No one can tell you the break-even ACoS of your best seller

Who this is for

Brands doing $30k–$2M/mo on Amazon who already have product-market fit off Amazon and want the channel run like a profit centre. We take on a limited number of accounts because every one gets a dedicated strategist, operator and creative — not a pooled junior with 14 logins.

Typical engagement: gap analysis → 30-day rebuild → 90-day scale. Average client sees 55% sales growth, and our average time to a measurable result is 90 days. Over 90% of partners stay past year one.

Frequently asked questions

Q: How much should I spend on Amazon PPC? A: Start from TACoS, not a budget. For most established brands, total ad spend of 8–15% of Amazon revenue is a healthy operating band; launches and category attacks run higher on purpose and for a defined window. We model it per ASIN before we recommend a number.

Q: What is a good ACoS? A: The only useful answer is: below your break-even for that ASIN, at the rank position you want to hold. A 45% ACoS on a high-margin bundle can be excellent. A 15% ACoS on a thin-margin commodity can be a loss.

Q: Do you require a long contract? A: No multi-year lock-ins. We work in initial 90-day terms because that is how long it takes to prove the work, then continue month to month.

Q: Do you manage Sponsored Display and DSP too? A: Sponsored Display is included here. Full programmatic DSP is a separate service because it needs its own audience strategy and budget floor — see Amazon DSP.

Q: Can you work with our in-house team? A: Yes. Roughly a third of our engagements are a strategist layer over an internal operator. We are explicit about who owns which decision on day one.

Q: What happens in the first 30 days? A: Week 1: margin model and full account audit. Week 2: campaign restructure and negation sweep. Weeks 3–4: bid ceilings, placement and daypart rules live, creative tests launched. You get the audit findings whether or not you continue.

See it on a real account

How we grew Lemon Jelly on Amazon →

Or read the underlying method: Amazon PPC strategy, from bid management to TACoS and ACoS vs TACoS explained.

Book a Gap Analysis

45 minutes, no slides. We audit your account and your top three competitors and tell you where the revenue is hiding — including the parts you can fix without us.

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