The 5-Step PPC Process. Designed to compound your sales.
If your account has plateaued, lost steam after a strong start, or grown only by spending more, there is usually a structural reason. What follows are the five disciplines we apply to fix that, on every account, every 72 hours, enforced by our own proprietary in-house software.
Most of your potential customers never see your ads. Here's what we do about it.
The Amazon customer journey has four phases: Awareness (people who don't know your brand yet), Consideration (people deciding what to buy), Purchase (people on your listing now), and Loyalty (people who already bought from you). Most agencies and freelancers run keyword-based Sponsored Products in Consideration and call it strategy. That covers a quarter of the funnel. The other three quarters is where your account's growth ceiling sits.
Awareness brings in customers who weren't actively looking for your brand. Sponsored Display category targeting and Amazon's pre-built audiences put your products in front of people who would never have searched for you. If your sales are only coming from people who already know to type your brand name in, this is the phase you are missing.
Consideration is where the comparison-shoppers are. Long-tail keyword targeting captures the specific buying intent. A Max Coverage Strategy, running multiple ad types simultaneously on the must-win head terms, dominates the top-of-page real estate so your competitors don't.
Purchase is the moment a customer is on your listing. Defensive ads on your own product detail pages stop competitors poaching attention at the final step. The bigger lever here is listing quality and competitive pricing, but defensive coverage is the part most agencies forget.
Loyalty is where the lowest ACoS in the entire account lives. Subscribe & Save for consumables. Sponsored Display Views Remarketing and Purchases Remarketing for retargeting people who already engaged with your brand. Most accounts ignore this phase entirely. The accounts that work it have a structural advantage that compounds, because every cohort of customers becomes the seed for the next one.
Working all four phases is the difference between an account that is actually growing and an account that is just being maintained.
Sales growth or margin protection. We build the campaigns around what you actually want.
Most agencies optimise to a single metric, usually ACoS, regardless of what the brand owner actually wants from the account. That works if you are trying to maximise short-term ad profitability. It is the wrong default if you are trying to grow.
Here's why. Higher ad spend, deployed properly, lifts organic rank. Higher organic rank produces sales that aren't attributed to ads at all. So the metric that matters for a growing brand is TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales, what your ad spend is as a share of total sales, including the organic uplift), not ACoS.
A worked example. Two campaigns running on the same product:
- Campaign A: 50% ACoS, higher spend, lifts the listing's organic rank.
- Campaign B: 10% ACoS, lower spend, no organic uplift.
Looking at ACoS alone, Campaign B is the obvious winner. Looking at TACOS (total revenue produced for total ad spend), Campaign A wins by a wide margin, because the organic uplift it triggered is generating sales the ads aren't getting credit for.
An agency optimising to ACoS will quietly cut Campaign A's budget. An agency optimising to TACOS will scale it. Most agencies do the former. Your growth ceiling is set by which one you hire.
Once you've picked the goal, optimisation becomes mechanical. The bid rules are codified: written as constraints, evaluated against every keyword, every cycle. A small example, in the language we use day-to-day:
Clicks ≥ 8 AND Orders ≥ 2 AND CVR ≥ 20% AND SKU TACOS ≤ 15% → increase bids by 10%, increase Campaign Budget by 10% (keyword level)
Dozens of rules like this run on every keyword, every campaign, every 72 hours. The same logic applies across every account on the books, regardless of category or marketplace. The bid changes follow the goal you set, not the goal the metric defaults to.
Your money keywords surface, get more budget, and compound. The rest don't drag your account.
Out of every hundred keywords in a typical Amazon account, perhaps fifteen actually generate orders consistently. Most accounts spread their budget across all hundred. The result is that the fifteen money-makers are starved while the eighty-five non-performers slowly bleed the spend.
Our job is to find the fifteen and protect them. The mechanic runs in two layers.
The first layer is research. Research campaigns running auto-targeting, broad match, and phrase match combine with Amazon Brand Analytics' Search Query Performance data to surface the highest-intent keywords for each of your products. Budget here is treated as research spend, since we expect a higher ACoS at this stage because we are paying to learn which keywords convert.
The second layer is promotion. As soon as a keyword starts producing orders at acceptable conversion rates, it is promoted out of research and into its own dedicated single-keyword campaign. Tier escalation continues from there:
- One order at the right ACoS and conversion threshold promotes the keyword into the first tier.
- Two orders promote it into the second tier, where bids and budgets are higher.
- Three or more orders promote it into the top tier: the highest-conviction keywords in your account, where the largest budgets live.
What this means for your account: every cycle, the keywords that are actually converting get more spend, more budget, and better placement. Non-performers stay in research where their cost is capped. The whole structure self-reinforces: the more your account compounds, the cleaner the data and the faster the next cycle of winners surfaces.
For new accounts and for existing products that lack proper coverage, we lay this foundation through what we call the ABC Campaign Structure, an internal launch SOP that ensures every product starts with the same proven set of campaigns. Applied to under-covered existing products, ABC alone usually produces a step-change in performance before the promotion mechanic above has even started running.
Your best keywords need their own budget. Otherwise Amazon picks where your money goes.
The most expensive structural mistake in Amazon advertising is pooling many keywords into a single ad group with one shared budget. When you do this, you have no control over which keyword gets the spend. Amazon's allocator decides, on logic that is opaque to you, optimised for Amazon's metrics, not yours.
The keyword you think is your top performer might be getting starved. A mediocre keyword that happens to score well on Amazon's internal signals might be eating most of the budget. You only find out months later, when you realise the campaign is plateauing despite the spend going up.
The fix is structural. Where it matters, every winning keyword gets its own campaign. Budget is set at the keyword. Bid is set at the keyword. Search-term reports are clean because there is one keyword per campaign. The diagram below shows the difference.
Six keywords share one campaign budget. Amazon decides which one gets the spend. The keyword that should be your largest line item ends up with whatever the algorithm leaves over.
Each winning keyword sits in its own campaign with its own budget. The keyword that earns the spend gets the spend. Search-term reports stay clean. Underperformers don't drag the group.
Your account gets the same disciplined attention every 72 hours. Forever.
Every agency promises rigour at the pitch. Most stop delivering it by month four. The first ninety days are tight, the search-term reports get read, the bid changes get applied. Then a quarter passes, you stop hearing about the small wins, and the metrics start drifting. By month nine the account is on autopilot: your retainer is being paid, but the discipline that justified it is gone.
This is not because the agency is dishonest. It is because rigour is hard. The temptation to skip a cycle, to defer a rule, to leave the search-term report unread, is constant. Over time, those small lapses compound, and not in the direction you want.
Our solution is not to rely on memory or willpower. We built proprietary software, Macro Runner, that runs the full optimisation cycle every 72 hours, on every account, against the same codified rules. Every keyword evaluated. Every bid change logged. Every search-term report processed. The cadence does not flex because the system does not let it.
This is what makes the methodology actually work for you. The disciplines above are how the methodology should run. Macro Runner is what makes sure it actually does.
Book a 15-minute call to see if we're a fit.
No deck, no pitch. We'll ask the right questions about your situation, and you'll know by the end of the call whether your account is a good match for what we do.
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