Service 02
Retail media management
The right advertising strategy might lower your ROAS. Total sales and profit growth are the real goal.
The problem
Ad tools can make spend look profitable when it isn't.
Some ad-attributed sales would have happened anyway. Some spend is wasted outright. A lot of strong-looking ROAS is held up by ads on your own brand terms, on searches where you already rank well organically, and on top sellers with little room left to grow.
Optimize every campaign to the same ROAS target and everything looks efficient on paper while real growth stalls.
Incrementality
Not every ad is supposed to win the same way.
Branded search
Many of these shoppers would have bought regardless. A great ROAS here can still be bad spend if it's cannibalizing organic sales.
Competitor conquesting
A lower ROAS can be very valuable when it's taking share from competitors.
Upper funnel and DSP
Sponsored Brands, Display and DSP start new-to-brand journeys. Last-click attribution undervalues them, so we credit them properly.
How we decide
Questions we answer before moving budget.
- 01
Would they have bought anyway?
We use Search Query Performance data to check your purchase share on non-branded terms before paying to advertise against them.
- 02
How much cannibalization?
A top seller with strong organic rank usually gives back more to ads than an item that ranks lower. We set targets accordingly.
- 03
What's the right target?
Each tactic gets its own ROAS goal, corrected for cannibalization and last-click attribution, so budget goes where it creates sales.
The basics, done properly
There's still a lot of lazy advertising out there.
When accounts shift toward incrementality, ROAS often holds or improves anyway, because so much basic work has been skipped. On the accounts we take over we regularly find:
No bid adjustments
Bids set once and left alone, with no use of placement modifiers.
Spend with no sales
Search terms with hundreds of dollars spent and zero sales.
Budget-capped bid increases
Bids raised on campaigns that are already running out of budget.
Catch-all campaigns
The entire catalog in massive auto campaigns, and no Sponsored Brands, Display or DSP.
Signal over noise
We don't react to the last four hours of a dashboard.
If an item converts at 10%, it won't make a sale every ten clicks. Sometimes it takes five, sometimes twenty. Most daily swings are variance, and real category shifts show up slowly in historical data.
We track the events that matter directly: lost Buy Box, suppressions, inventory issues, unexpected demand. That's how we see them before the numbers move. Dayparting and other intra-day changes are based on historical patterns, not this morning.
Steady beats spikes
Keep the flywheel turning.
Amazon is a mature channel that rewards consistency. Brands that push hard for momentum, then pull spend back for profit, or discount steeply and lose the Buy Box afterwards, watch traffic, conversion and share drift to competitors within weeks. We plan for steady, profitable growth.
Looking ahead
Ready for where Amazon ads are going.
Audiences over keywords
We build custom and Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences in DSP, then bring them back into Sponsored Ads as modifiers to reduce cannibalization.
Discovery as well as search
We check what Amazon's AI shopping assistant, Rufus, says about your products and fix what it highlights through ads and product pages.
Flexible tools
We favor tools that work with new AI-agent capabilities and avoid black boxes that force one method. When ad management gets automated, strategy is the advantage.
Every major marketplace
Amazon, Walmart, Target and Instacart, with one point of view on your brand.
Results
Numbers beat adjectives.
+61% ad-attributed sales with ROAS up 11% in 30 days for an established consumer brand. +163% ROAS with sales up 30% for a major national brand. −54% spend with +11% sales through an ad-system transition.