Somebody is already taking the clicks your brand created. Choosing an agency is choosing who takes them back. Every deck looks the same: a wall of logos, a chart going up and to the right, a promise about advertising. None of it is checkable. What does predict whether an agency will work for a European brand is duller, and it sits in reports you already have.
Written by an agency. We are one of the options on your list, so read it as a buyer — including the part about when not to hire anybody.
Most agency advice is written for one large American marketplace. Europe is a different shape, and three of its features decide what an agency can honestly promise.
A European brand sells the same ASIN in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The catalogue record is shared; the way people search for it is not. The term carrying half your German sales often has little volume in France.
The check: open Search Query Performance and change the marketplace. If each country’s top terms are translations of one another, nobody did the research.
What takes a listing down here is rarely the copy. It is a missing EPR registration, a VAT number for a country you now hold stock in, or no responsible person inside the EU. Until those are done, nothing else can be seen.
The check: Account Health and the compliance section of Seller Central. Ask them to read both in the first meeting and name what is missing — before a suppression does it for them.
Brand Registry, the image library, the A+ modules and the ad account can all end up registered to an agency rather than to you. It is offered as convenience and it is the most expensive thing here to undo.
The check: ask in writing who owns Brand Registry and the ad account, and what happens to the source files the day the contract ends. A good answer is short.
Ask these with your account open. One frame for the answers: a good agency can say how it will detect where your demand leaks, take back the click and defend it. Tick each question you get a straight answer to.
A real answer contains a refusal. Anyone intending to change everything has not read the account, and nor has anyone who cannot name one thing already working.
The check: ask before you send them anything, then again after they have looked. The second answer should be the better one.
They should be able to find it, and to separate it from paid placement. If nobody checked before the meeting, you are buying a plan rather than a reading.
Where to look: Search Query Performance, in Brand Analytics, read apart from ad-attributed sales. You can verify every number they quote.
A discount and a better listing both move the line on a chart; only one survives the end of the promotion. Ask to see Business Reports, not a slide.
Where to look: units, average selling price and sessions for the same period. Growth bought with a discount shows up as flat sessions and a lower price.
Covered above, and worth asking twice — once in the pitch and once in the contract, because the two sometimes disagree.
The check: if we parted next month, what stays with us? The answer should be all of it, without a pause — and in the contract, not the call.
The most useful sentence any agency says. Nobody does advertising, content, compliance, logistics and creative equally well; claiming otherwise describes a brochure, not a team.
The check: propose something slightly wrong — a second marketplace before the first is profitable. Listen for a no with a reason.
An agency that cannot name the part of the job it is bad at has either not run enough accounts, or is not telling you about the ones it ran.
References are chosen. That is not dishonest, it is what a reference is. Two requests get past it, and both are reasonable enough that a refusal is itself an answer: speak to a brand that left, and start on a short first term. Any agency with a few years behind it has former clients, and three months costs a confident one nothing — it moves the risk onto the party making the claims.
After that, watch the first disagreement. Somewhere in the opening quarter you will want something they think is a mistake. Whether they say so plainly is the most reliable signal you will get.
The check: make both requests in one email. A yes to the second and a long explanation about the first tells you how the references were picked.
This section costs us work, and it is the honest half of the answer. Three cases where a retainer makes your position worse.
Add the retainer to referral fees, FBA fees, advertising and returns, then look at what is left. If the fee is a large slice of that, the agency has to produce growth just to pay for itself. That is a bet, and should be called one.
No amount of account management fixes a product the market has moved past, or a price that only works at a volume you cannot reach. Product Opportunity Explorer will tell you so in an afternoon, free.
If someone has a few focused hours a week, the basics are learnable — a researched title, honest images, the paperwork, a small well-negated ad account. An agency earns its fee once the work outgrows the attention available.
Free, one listing, an answer within 24 hours. Take it into the meetings you have already booked and ask harder questions with it — including of us. Sometimes the finding is that your setup is fine and the market got harder. We will say so.
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 — 50+ brands in our own seller accounts, in Vendor and Seller Central. Every question above is one we have had to answer ourselves. Taking clicks back from the giants is the whole job — we call it The Takeback Method, the same work whether the account is ours or yours.
Eight things to look for if you already have one, and the three questions to ask before you switch.
Go through them →Nine causes in the order worth checking, and the one question to answer before you touch a bid.
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