Ancient + Brave: three years of compounding growth on Amazon.

Advertising into a page that does not convert buys traffic and very little else, so the page came first. Main images were rebuilt to work like ads rather than pack shots, A+ Premium went onto the main lines, and the brand store was rebuilt to sell rather than to look like a website. Alongside that we ran regular customer polling, so the content answered the questions buyers actually ask instead of the ones a brand team assumes they ask.

In a supplement account the thumbnail has to carry format, dose and benefit at roughly the size of a postage stamp, which is a harder brief than most categories set. That argument is made in full in its own post, and what happens after the click, which is a different job measured by a different number, is set out here.

Organic position is what makes advertising affordable later, so the ranking programme came before the budget went up. Priority products were moved into the top five, new launches were managed rather than listed and left, and the subscription base was built underneath the whole account until subscriptions were running at 25 to 30% of monthly revenue.

That subscription number is the one a wellness brand should read first. Supplements are a repeat-purchase category, so subscription share compounds in a way it never does for a one-off purchase. It is the difference between an account that has to buy every sale and one that opens each month with a base already in it. How the same discipline plays out across the category is on our page for Amazon growth for supplement and wellness brands.

The US and Europe were launched from that position rather than into it. The sequencing we use is to get the home marketplace ranking and profitable first and expand from strength, with catalogue, content and advertising built for each marketplace instead of listings flipped live and left to find their own level.

With the pages converting and the priority products ranking, the advertising could be built as an architecture rather than a set of campaigns. Video Sponsored Brand ads, hourly dayparting so budget goes to the hours that convert, and a deliberate split between defending branded search and buying non-branded growth.

That split is where the efficiency number is won or lost, and it is the single most tempting place to flatter an account. Branded search is the cheapest traffic in any account and most of it was arriving anyway, so spending more of the budget there lowers the headline cost of sale without selling anything extra. How to size the split, and how to test it with a holdout rather than an opinion, is the mechanic behind holding 14.6% while the topline doubled.

Programmatic came last because it earns its place only when there is enough demand to retarget and enough margin to fund prospecting, and both of those are made by the three stages above it. On this account it is where the step change happened: RippleTarget custom audiences bringing in new customers at a positive return, retargeting to bring existing customers back, Fire Tablet and Prime TV placements, and imagery built for programmatic rather than cropped from the listing.

We do not publish a DSP-specific figure for this account and we are not going to estimate one here. Retargeting and prospecting are two different jobs and a blended return hides which one was done, which is the argument in our post on when Amazon DSP is worth it and when it is not. What the published record supports is the sequence and the direction, not a number attached to this stage alone.