Amazon PPC strategy is four jobs in a fixed order: find the search terms that convert, move them somewhere you control the bid, stop paying for the ones that never convert, and decide how much of the budget defends demand you already have. That list does not change with the size of the account. What changes is which of the four is your constraint, and how much structure you can carry before you lose sight of the account. This is written for a brand owner doing £20,000 a month or more on Amazon UK, or $50,000 a month or more in the US, with a catalogue rather than one hero product. Almost every published strategy guide, Amazon's own included, is written for the account below that, and none of them says so. One boundary before the rest: this is about what the account is made of and what runs inside it. What to do when the numbers are wrong is a different question, what counts as a good number is another, and how much should sit on your own brand name is a third. Structure is the one that gets skipped, because it is the least satisfying thing to change and the most expensive to undo.
ACOS is ad spend divided by ad revenue, so there are only three ways to lower it: pay less for a click, convert more of the clicks you buy, or stop buying the clicks that were never going to convert. Everything written under this heading is a version of one of those three. The awkward part is that the fastest way to lower ACOS is to advertise less, which is why the number falls so reliably in accounts that are quietly shrinking. One distinction before the rest, because it is most of the reason the question gets asked at all. ACOS only sees the sales your ads touched, while total advertising cost of sale divides your whole ad spend by your whole revenue, organic included. Move budget onto your own brand name and ACOS improves while TACOS does not, because you have bought sales you already had. What counts as a good number is a different question with its own post. This one is about how you move it.
Amazon listing optimisation is usually sold as a checklist: title, bullets, images, A+ Content, backend keywords. The checklist is not wrong so much as incomplete in a way that costs money. Conversion on Amazon is orders divided by sessions, so half of the number is not the listing at all. It is who arrives. The same page will report a different conversion rate depending on what the advertising sends to it, with nothing on the page having changed. Before rewriting anything, work out whether you have a listing problem or a traffic problem, because the two are indistinguishable in the number and have opposite fixes.
Amazon DSP is worth it when you already have more demand than sponsored ads can catch: enough people looking at your products to be worth retargeting, and enough margin to fund prospecting that will not pay for itself this month. It is not worth it as a rescue. If the listing does not convert, or the sponsored account has never been split between defending your own name and buying new demand, DSP will spend faster and teach you less. One clarification before the numbers, because the search results make it necessary: this is Amazon's demand-side platform, the programmatic advertising product. Amazon also runs a Delivery Service Partner programme for van fleets, which shares the initials and owns most of page one for this question.
RippleEffect is now listed at number 8 in Nova's Best Amazon Agencies directory, a ranked list of 119 agencies, with a full review page covering what we do, what we charge and the brands we are built for.
The Amazon agency red flags worth acting on are the checkable ones: a price you cannot learn without sitting through a sales call, a fee that rises with your ad spend and no clause covering what happens when spend should come down, a guarantee of rank or revenue, reporting built on advertising sales rather than total sales, and any arrangement that leaves your seller account or your brand registry in the agency's name. The softer signals tell you very little. A slick deck and a wall of logos are the cheapest things an agency owns, and the published red-flag guides are at their least reliable on the one test they all reach for.
An Amazon account audit should cover five things: the catalogue, the listings, the advertising, account health, and the inventory and Buy Box position sitting underneath all of it. That list is not controversial, and every agency offering a free audit will claim all five. What separates an audit worth reading from a lead magnet is narrower than coverage. It is whether the findings come back in priority order, whether each one names the number it is meant to move, and whether whoever wrote it will tell you which of your problems is not worth fixing yet.
There is no split that is right in general, and the published guidance proves it. For a mature brand, Ad Badger says branded spend should end up below 10% of total ad spend, while Olifant Digital puts a scaled account at 20% to 25%. Both are describing the same kind of business. On a £10,000 monthly ad budget that is £1,000 against £2,000 to £2,500; on a $10,000 budget it is $1,000 against $2,000 to $2,500. The two figures cannot both be right, so the question worth asking is narrower: what is your branded spend buying that you would not have got anyway?
For most UK brands the comparison is not close, and the fee is not the reason. Build Grow Scale puts the point where building in-house becomes economically justifiable at $15m to $20m in annual Amazon revenue, which is far above where most brands asking the question actually sit. The difficulty below that line is not that good people are expensive. It is that one hire cannot cover the job, and the salary that buys real seniority costs more than the channel can carry.
Total advertising cost of sale is your total ad spend divided by your total sales, organic sales included, which makes it a truer read on what advertising costs you than ACOS, since ACOS only sees the sales the ads themselves touched. There is no single good number. The published benchmarks put good anywhere between 5% and 20%, they contradict each other, and none of them cites a study, so the answer worth having comes from your own margin rather than from someone else's table.
For a mid-market UK brand most Amazon agency retainers land between £1,500 and £5,000 a month, with smaller accounts nearer £500 to £1,500 and US full-service agencies commonly quoting $1,500 to $5,000 a month or more. Read those ranges with some suspicion, because almost every published figure in this market comes from an agency describing its own market. The more useful question is not what the number is but which of three structures it sits inside, since each one bills you for something different.
Most agencies make you sit through a discovery call to learn what they cost. We put a calculator on the website instead. Set your SKU count, your marketplaces and your monthly sales, and the fee is on the screen before you have spoken to anyone.
On Amazon your main image is not packaging. It is the ad your shopper sees in the search results, at thumbnail size, next to six competitors. Most brands design it like a pack shot and wonder why the click never comes.
Any account can grow if you are willing to lose money doing it. Push spend hard enough and the topline moves. The harder version, and the only one that survives a budget review, is growing while efficiency holds.
