A giant pays to appear above your product. Your agency’s job is to pull that click back to your listing and hold the ground. Eight ways to tell whether that is happening — and four that look like failure but are not.
Written by an agency. Read it with that in mind — which is exactly why the second half exists.
Tick the ones that sound like your account. Each has a check that does not depend on anyone’s word.
The report shows spend, sales and ACoS. It does not show actions. A month of work should be describable: these four listings rewritten, these keywords added, this campaign restructured, this stock problem caught before it bit.
The check: ask what they changed in the last thirty days. Not what the numbers did. The answer arrives in specifics or it does not arrive.
Amazon moves. Competitors rewrite their pages, search terms shift, new formats arrive. A listing untouched for half a year is a decision not to compete, taken quietly on your behalf.
The check: your own screenshots, or the listing edit history. If nobody kept screenshots, that is its own answer.
Sales up, advertising up more. That is not growth, it is rent. The test is whether your organic position improved while the ads ran — because the organic position is the part you keep when the spending stops.
The check: Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance. Take your five most important queries, compare your organic share now against six months ago, then put TACoS over the same window.
ACoS falls when you switch campaigns off. It is the easiest number on Amazon to improve, and the easiest to improve for the wrong reason. If nobody mentions profit per unit after fees, the metric is being managed instead of the business.
The check: ask what your profit per unit was last month after FBA fees, referral fees, advertising and returns. Whoever runs your account should know, or find out the same day.
Running out is the fastest way to lose rank and the slowest to recover from. An agency that talks about advertising every week and replenishment never is not watching the thing most likely to undo its own work.
The check: think back over three months of calls. Did anyone raise a restock date before you did?
Every idea you had was a good idea. Every product you wanted to launch was worth launching. An agency that agrees with everything is not advising you. It is keeping you comfortable, which is cheaper for them.
The check: nothing to look up. You knew the answer to this one before you finished reading it.
You speak to an account manager. Someone else writes the copy, someone else runs the bids, someone else builds the images — and you have never been told who they are or what they are good at.
The check: ask who will be on your account next month, by name and by job. The question is ordinary. The hesitation is the signal.
The listings, the images, the A+ content, the keyword work, the Brand Registry. Some agencies hold these so that leaving is expensive. You should not have to guess which kind you hired.
The check: ask outright — if we parted next month, what stays with us? The answer should be all of it, said without a pause.
We would rather you kept a decent agency than left one over a bad month. These come up constantly and almost none of them are the agency’s doing.
Amazon is lumpy. A single month down, with no other signal, is noise. Look at a rolling quarter before you conclude anything.
Check the category, not only your account. Product Opportunity Explorer, same period last year. If the category fell and you fell less, you gained share while losing revenue.
CPCs have climbed across most categories. No agency holds a bid down against a whole market. What they can do is tell you before you notice it yourself.
The opposite of a bad sign. The agencies worth keeping are the ones that will spend their own credibility telling you something will not work.
Most of the accounts we take over could have been saved without changing agency. The brand never asked three direct questions, and the agency was never made to answer them.
If the answers are good, stay. Switching costs you a quarter of momentum, and the new agency begins by learning what the old one already knew.
Free, one listing, an answer within 24 hours. Sometimes the honest finding is that the work is good and the market got harder. We will say so, and you will have been saved a bad decision.
Five a week. That is the pace we can hold and still do them properly.
Amazon Experts has sold on Amazon since 2018 and still does, under its own brands and its own money. Taking clicks back from the giants is the whole job — we call it The Takeback Method, and it is the same work whether the account is ours or yours.
Nine causes in the order worth checking, and the one question to answer before you touch a bid.
Read it →Two different arrangements, two different risks. One listing, one seller, one price — and who carries the stock.
See how it works →Account management from €800 a month, listings built every month, no lock-in after the first three.
See the pricing →