Why us
Anyone can pull your ACOS down. Pause everything except your brand name and it will look excellent while your sales collapse. Here is what we do instead, and why our clients stay.
Reason one
Amazon gives every advertiser the same free metric, and it is the wrong one. ACOS is advertising spend divided by attributed sales. It knows nothing about your royalty band, your cost of goods, your referral fee, your fulfilment fee or your return rate. An agency optimizing to "under 30% ACOS" is optimizing against a number that has never seen your accounts.
You are not paid the retail price, you are paid a royalty. A $4.99 Kindle title on the 70% band earns roughly $3.40 a sale. At 30% ACOS you are spending about $1.50 to earn $3.40 — workable. Drop the same title to the 35% band, or move to a $12.99 paperback where print cost eats the margin, and that identical ACOS becomes a loss. The number did not change. The business did.
Then there is read-through. A book one in a series can justify losing money on every single sale if the rest of the series earns it back. No ACOS target can express that. We build it into the plan explicitly, per series, using your own sell-through figures.
Your real constraint is contribution margin: retail price, minus landed cost of goods, minus the referral fee, minus the fulfilment fee, minus returns and storage. On a typical private-label product that leaves far less headroom than the ACOS conversation implies. We calculate it per ASIN, agree a break-even advertising cost with you, and then set targets underneath it with a margin of safety — separately for launch, for defending your own listings and for taking share from competitors, because those three jobs can never share one target.
You get margin in currency, not a ratio. "This month advertising spent €4,180 and produced €7,940 in royalties, leaving €3,760." That is a sentence you can take to your accountant. "ACOS 28%" is not.
Reason two
The industry standard is a percentage of ad spend, usually 10–15%. Look at what that pays for. If we cut €3,000 of wasted spend out of your account, a percentage-based agency has just cut its own fee. If we push your budget up whether or not it is profitable, that agency gets a raise. The incentive points the wrong way, and everyone in the industry knows it.
We charge a flat monthly retainer, agreed before we start, based on the size of your catalog and the number of marketplaces. It does not move when your spend moves. Killing waste costs us nothing, so we do it on day one instead of quietly leaving it there.
Your advertising spend is billed by Amazon directly to your own payment method on your own account. We never take custody of your budget, and there is no mark-up on media between you and Amazon.
Reason three
Almost every Amazon agency is built around physical products and treats books as a small, awkward version of them. The economics are not the same. Royalty bands create hard price thresholds that change the maths at $2.99 and $9.99. Series read-through changes which titles are worth losing money on. Category and comparison placements behave differently for books than for consumer goods, and the targeting that works on a competitor's product listing is not the targeting that works on a competitor's book.
We came to this from publishing, running advertising on our own catalog before we ran it for anyone else, which is why the book side is the part we are known for. The FBA side gets the same method — margin first, deliberate structure, measured changes — applied to a different cost stack.
If you run both, and plenty of our clients do, you get one team and one report rather than two agencies blaming each other.
Reason four
When we take over an account, the first thing we usually find is not bad bidding. It is campaigns competing with each other for the same keyword, no defence on the client's own listings, and one auto campaign quietly absorbing half the budget.
Broad and automatic targeting whose only job is to surface search terms worth having. Deliberately tolerant on cost, tightly capped on budget, harvested on a schedule.
Exact-match campaigns holding the terms that have proven they convert, bid at what your margin can actually carry, and negatived out of discovery so they stop bidding against themselves.
Your own brand, author name and series, held cheaply so a competitor cannot buy the customer who was already looking for you. Skipping this is the most common and most expensive mistake we find.
Targeting on competing products and categories, chosen on weakness — worse ratings, higher price, thinner listings — never on your own catalog, which would just make you pay for a sale you already had.
Each of those blocks has its own budget and its own target, because their jobs are different. Blending them into one account-wide ACOS goal is how accounts end up spending well on the wrong thing.
Reason five
An account with a hundred titles across two marketplaces is thousands of individual decisions a month. Done by hand in the advertising console, some of them will simply not get done — and the ones that get skipped are always the boring ones, like negative-keyword maintenance and budget pacing, which is exactly where the money leaks.
We built our own software to take that off human memory. It runs the same checks on every account on a fixed cadence: harvesting converting search terms, negativing the ones burning budget, applying our bid ladder by price band and performance tier, flagging campaigns that hit their cap early or never spend at all. A campaign manager still makes the decisions. The software makes sure they are actually carried out, on every campaign, every week.
Reason six
Some agencies run your ads from an account they own, or on a tool that holds your history. Leave, and you start from nothing. That is a retention strategy, not a service.
| Common agency model | How we work | |
|---|---|---|
| Fee | Percentage of ad spend | Flat monthly retainer, fixed in advance |
| Optimized against | An ACOS or ROAS target | Royalties or contribution margin, per title and per ASIN |
| Reporting | Ratios and dashboards | Margin in currency, plus what we changed and why |
| Account ownership | Sometimes the agency's | Always yours; our access is revocable |
| Books | Run like small physical products | Royalty bands, price thresholds and series read-through built in |
| Consistency | Depends on the assigned manager | Same checks on every account, every week, by system |
| Onboarding | Sign first, audit after | Written review first, at no cost, then you decide |
| Promises | Guaranteed ROAS, earnings screenshots | No guarantees, no earnings claims, written scope |
This describes patterns we routinely find when taking over accounts. Plenty of agencies work differently, and some are excellent — the point is to be explicit about our own model so you can compare it against whoever else you are speaking to.
We turn work down, and we would rather do it before you have paid us than after. We will decline if the margin on your catalog cannot support advertising at any bid, if the listings or covers are the actual problem and ads would only pay to show them to more people, if your budget is too small for the data we would need to make decisions, or if what you want is a guaranteed return, which nobody can honestly sell you.
In each of those cases we will tell you what we think you should fix first, even though it does not lead to an invoice.
The restructure happens in the first two to three weeks. Meaningful data on the rebuilt campaigns usually takes another four to six, because bid decisions made on a handful of clicks are guesses. Anyone promising a transformation in the first fortnight is either lucky or selling.
Yes, provided the advertising budget is large enough to generate decisions from. Below a certain spend there simply is not enough data to manage, and paying us a retainer would be worse for you than running it yourself. We will say so at the review stage.
Delegated user access to your advertising account, at the permission level needed to manage campaigns. Nothing more. We do not need your KDP or Seller Central login, and we do not touch pricing, inventory or listings.
We do not produce them, but we will tell you when they are the reason advertising is not converting, because it very often is. Traffic cannot fix a listing that does not sell.
We do not accept two clients competing directly in the same narrow category. Where we already work in a category, we will tell you before you commit rather than after.
Yes, as long as we agree in writing which campaigns are ours and which are yours. What does not work is two parties bidding in the same campaigns, because neither of us can then read the results.
You give notice, revoke our access, and everything we built stays in your account and keeps running. We hand over our documentation and delete your data on request. There is no exit fee.
Send your catalog and your current advertising numbers. You get a written assessment of where the budget is going and what we would change — whether or not you go on to hire us.