4 brands. 4 turnarounds. Real numbers.

This supplements brand came to us at a standstill. Revenue had plateaued and, despite a product line with strong reviews and genuine demand, there was no clear path to scale. No active campaigns were generating consistent traffic, and organic rankings alone weren’t enough in an increasingly competitive category.

The founder was hesitant to invest. Previous attempts at Amazon PPC had produced inconsistent results and unpredictable costs. In supplements, margins are tight and a poorly structured strategy burns budget faster than it generates revenue. There was no room for “test and see.” It had to be profitable from the outset.

We mined the account’s historical organic search term reports, product-level conversion rates and purchase patterns, then harvested a focused set of non-branded keywords that had already proven they convert. Those became tightly targeted manual campaigns.

We prioritized new-to-brand acquisition (customer lifetime value in supplements is high), then layered controlled discovery campaigns that fed winners into the core structure and cut underperformers fast. Spend was only ever increased in proportion to demonstrated profitability.

A strong product line with absolutely no advertising engine behind it. Total ad spend: zero. Revenue relied on organic rankings and sporadic momentum, and it had plateaued.

The founder’s mandate was a hard ceiling: TACoS under 10% at all times. Starting from zero meant no historical data, no keyword history and no baseline. Every decision in the first 90 days carried outsized risk. We were building the airplane while flying it, and the fuel budget was non-negotiable.

Instead of burning budget on broad or auto campaigns to “discover” what works, we launched exact and phrase-match campaigns around researched, high-intent keywords, with granular ad groups and aggressive negative lists from day one.

Once a baseline existed, we layered tightly budgeted discovery campaigns with daily monitoring. Winning search terms graduated into the manual structure; everything else was negated immediately. Every dollar had to justify itself in real time.

This brand was hemorrhaging money at roughly 32% TACoS. Nearly a third of every revenue dollar went to ads, and sales were flat anyway.

There was no coherent architecture: duplicated campaigns, keywords overlapping across ad groups, match types mixed without strategy, no systematic negatives. The brand’s own campaigns were competing against each other. The resulting cashflow pressure left the founder choosing between fixing ads or slashing them.

First, stop the bleeding. A line-item audit of every campaign, ad group, keyword and search term found the brand bidding against itself on hundreds of keywords, broad terms with zero purchase intent, and product targeting on irrelevant ASINs. We cut all of it.

Then we rebuilt: dedicated exact-match campaigns for top performers, capped discovery campaigns, and competitor targeting only where the brand had a real edge. Recovered budget went into profitable campaigns and new-to-brand acquisition, timed to capture maximum Q4 share.

Meaningful revenue, but a hard growth ceiling and TACoS around 25%: unsustainable on thin CPG margins. Years of incremental additions had left duplicate ads, internal competition and budget spread so thin that hero products were underfunded.

Compounding it: 10,000+ units a month shipped via FBM. No Prime badge, lower conversion, weaker Buy Box position. The brand was paying for traffic that converted worse than it should. More ad spend didn’t solve the problem. It amplified it.

Two fronts at once. On ads, we dismantled the structure and rebuilt it around an Anchor SKU approach: hero products with the best conversion, reviews and margins each got a dedicated campaign set. Other SKUs earned their way in through strict performance thresholds.

On fulfillment, we migrated fast-selling ASINs from FBM to FBA. The Prime badge lifted click-through and conversion, improving return on ad spend across the account without changing a single bid. Better targeting plus higher conversion created a compounding effect.