Key takeaways

  • A good Amazon advertising agency sets targets from your margin and reports total sales, not ACoS alone.
  • Flat plans remove the incentive to raise your ad spend for its own sake.
  • You should own your ad account and campaign history, whichever agency you pick.
% of ad spendFlat plan
Fee when spend rises
Price known up front
Reward for wasted spend

What an Amazon advertising agency should do for you

Amazon rewards momentum. Ad sales lift your organic rank, a better rank lowers what the next sale costs, and that margin pays for the next round of ads. A good agency manages that loop, not a list of keywords. That means setting a target from your real margin, deciding where each dollar goes, and reporting total sales against ad spend rather than ACoS on its own.

It also means knowing when ads are the wrong answer. If a listing converts badly or a product is about to run out of stock, more spend makes the loss bigger. That is why we check the listing and the inventory position before we raise a budget, and why a product heading out of stock with no inbound shipment gets cut back instead of pushed.

The Amazon ad types we run

Most brands start with search ads, then add upper funnel formats once the core is profitable. We run each format to its own goal and keep them from bidding against each other.

  • Sponsored Products: the base of the account, built around exact match harvesting, product targeting and negative keyword control. See Amazon PPC management.
  • Sponsored Brands: headline and video placements that defend your brand terms and win category searches.
  • Sponsored Display: retargeting and product page defense for shoppers who viewed but did not buy.
  • Amazon DSP and Streaming TV: programmatic display, Prime Video and Fire TV reach for brands ready to grow demand. See Amazon DSP management.
  • Amazon Marketing Cloud: audience and path analysis for accounts with enough volume to use it.

What Amazon advertising management costs

Many agencies charge a percentage of ad spend, which means their fee rises when you spend more, whether or not that spend was profitable. We use flat plans, so the advice to spend more or less costs us nothing either way. Prices are published on the Amazon agency pricing page.

  • Launch: $995 a month, for up to $10k in monthly ad spend.
  • Growth: $1,250 a month, for up to $40k in monthly ad spend.
  • Scale: $2,200 a month, for up to $120k in monthly ad spend.
  • Enterprise: a custom quote above $120k in monthly ad spend or across multiple accounts.
  • Amazon DSP and Streaming TV: management from $1,100 a month.

How we run an account

Work starts with an audit of your campaign structure, search terms, wasted spend and margin by product. We then agree a target for each product based on what it actually earns, rebuild the structure where it needs it and launch. After that, SpiderOS monitors the account 24x7 and changes bids when needed, while your ads manager handles the decisions that need judgment: budget moves, new tests, seasonal plans and creative.

Ads rarely fix a whole account alone. If you also want listings, creative and operations covered, our full-service Amazon agency plans put one team across all of it.

How an account runs

  1. 1Audit

    Structure, waste, margin

  2. 2Target

    Profit goal per product

  3. 3Rebuild

    Clean campaign structure

  4. 4Run

    24x7 monitoring, human calls

Who this is a good fit for

We work best with brands that already sell on Amazon and want advertising to pay its way. If you spend a few thousand dollars a month and suspect a good share of it is wasted, the Launch plan and a clean rebuild usually make the most difference. If you spend far more and your growth has flattened, the work moves to incrementality: separating the sales ads truly created from the sales you would have had anyway, then shifting budget toward new customers.

New products need a different plan. A launch has no sales history to learn from, so the first weeks go to finding the search terms that convert, and early ACoS will sit above your long term target by design. Our Amazon product launch service covers that stage.

If you only want a second opinion, start with the free Amazon audit. You get a clear view of what is working and what is wasting money, and you can use it with your current team or anyone else.

How to choose an Amazon advertising agency

Use these questions with every agency you talk to. A good one will answer without slides, and a weak one will change the subject to screenshots.

  • Ask how the fee works, and whether it rises with your ad spend.
  • Ask who owns the ad account and the campaign history if you leave. The answer should be you.
  • Ask how they set ACoS targets. They should start from your margin, not an industry average.
  • Ask what they report. Total sales, TACoS and profit matter more than ad clicks.
  • Ask who does the work day to day, and how often you will speak to that person.
  • Ask what they do when stock runs low, and when they would tell you to spend less.

Sources

Ad format descriptions come from Amazon's own product pages.

Get the next change before your competitors do

We send the marketplace changes that matter each week, with what to do next.

By subscribing you agree to our privacy policy. Unsubscribe any time.
Want this done for your account?

We run these playbooks on client accounts every day. Start with a free audit.

Get a free audit