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A broken campaign structure hidden beneath good-enough results. Three wasted weeks before the real problem surfaced. A restructure so risky it felt like demolishing a skyscraper mid-construction. And then — growth that changed the brand’s trajectory entirely.
The client sells dietary supplements on Amazon and Walmart — one of the most overcrowded, commoditized categories in all of e-commerce. With over 85,000 competing products on Amazon alone, the fight for visibility is relentless, and most brands win it through price compression or review manipulation. This brand chose a different path: clean formulations, no artificial additives, and uncompromising ingredient quality.
That choice paid off in customer trust — the brand maintained a consistent 4.6-star rating across tens of thousands of reviews. Flagship SKUs such as their bromelain supplement and L-lysine immune-support line had built genuine organic followings. The fundamentals were strong. What wasn’t strong was the advertising engine underneath.
The relationship between our team and this client didn’t begin in 2024. The founder had worked with our lead strategist at a previous role and was so satisfied that when the opportunity arose, they sought him out specifically to manage the account under the new agency. That history of trust mattered — because what came next required both sides to take a calculated risk.
Inc. 5000 Recognized. During our management period, the brand earned placement on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies — a reflection of the revenue trajectory we built together.
When we took over the account in January 2024, the numbers looked decent from the outside. Monthly total sales were sitting at $370,665 across 15,593 units. TACoS was around 15% — high for a brand at this scale, but not alarming to the untrained eye. Campaigns were live. Sales were happening. To most people managing the account, this would look like “good enough.”
We knew it wasn’t. But it took three weeks to find out exactly why.
For the first three weeks, we did what any competent PPC manager would do: adjusted bids, refined budgets, added negatives in obvious places, optimized match types. The kind of work that reliably moves numbers. Except — nothing moved. Not meaningfully. The account seemed immune to our changes, absorbing every adjustment without flinching.
“We kept pulling levers and nothing was responding. That’s when we stopped optimizing and started diagnosing. And what we found underneath was a structural problem so deep that no amount of bid management was ever going to fix it.”
What we found was this: the same keywords were running in multiple campaigns simultaneously. Auto campaigns were duplicated across the same ASINs. Manual campaigns contained identical keywords targeting identical products with no isolation, no signal separation, and no performance logic. The structure wasn’t just inefficient — it was self-competing. Every dollar spent in one campaign was partially cancelling out another.
There was a second problem layered on top: the campaigns were running out of budget before peak hours. The brand’s highest-converting windows — the hours when shoppers were most likely to buy — were windows where the brand had already exhausted its daily budget. It was invisible during the moments that mattered most, every single day, and no one had caught it.
Diagnosing this changed everything. The question was no longer “how do we optimize” — it was “how do we rebuild, at scale, without destroying the $370K monthly revenue base we’re standing on?”
Here’s the honest version of what we faced: the brand was doing over $300,000 in monthly sales through Amazon at the point of restructure. Rebuilding the campaign architecture meant pausing, reorganizing, and relaunching campaigns that were currently driving real revenue. One wrong move and we could torch months of ranking signals, lose keyword momentum, or trigger an ACoS spike that would alarm the client.
We described it internally like this: it’s the equivalent of being asked to demolish the bottom 50 floors of a skyscraper that’s still standing — and then build something bigger on the same foundation, without the building collapsing. We started the rebuild in week three and spent the next three to four weeks — up through weeks six and seven of the engagement — rebuilding the entire account structure from scratch.
“The comfortable path was to keep making incremental adjustments and claim slow progress. The right path was to stop, tear it down, and rebuild it correctly — even if that meant short-term exposure. We chose the right path.”
The rebuild was completed across three sequential phases, each building on the last. By week seven, the new structure was live. The results came almost immediately.
Standard optimization yielded no meaningful results. Deeper audit revealed the root cause: duplicate campaigns across the same ASINs, identical keywords running in multiple ad groups simultaneously, auto campaigns without proper negative keyword lists, and daily budget exhaustion during off-peak hours. No amount of bid adjustment could fix a structure this broken.
Each supplement SKU was analyzed individually — not as part of a catalog, but as its own competitive entity with its own keyword intent, margin profile, and conversion pattern. Top-performing keywords were identified per product, added to negatives in existing auto and manual campaigns, and relaunched in dedicated single-keyword campaigns with exact match and broad match separation.
Medium and lower-competition keyword clusters were grouped into structured manual campaigns by intent type — not dumped into catch-all broad campaigns — each with a defined budget proportional to its revenue potential. For the first time, every dollar had a clear purpose and a measurable signal.
Once the foundation was stable and TACoS was responding, we identified the next lever: Sponsored Brand Video. At the time, the account had zero video presence on Amazon — a significant gap in a supplement category where video commands above-the-fold placement and communicates ingredient quality in ways static creative cannot.
We produced video creatives for multiple SKUs and launched Sponsored Brand Video campaigns aggressively across the highest-value keyword sets. The impact compounded: higher CTR drove stronger impression share, stronger impression share improved organic ranking signals, and better organic ranking drove sales that didn’t require ad spend. This is the flywheel — and it’s why TACoS (not just ACoS) is the metric that matters.
By the end of the sixth month, both headline numbers had fundamentally shifted. Total monthly revenue crossed $598,943. Unit volume reached 26,180. TACoS — the metric we benchmarked every decision against — had dropped from ~15% to under 10%. Both ad-driven and organic revenue grew simultaneously, which is the signal that the flywheel is turning correctly.
Most Amazon advertisers — and many agencies — run keywords in clusters. It’s faster to set up, easier to manage, and produces acceptable results for most brands. But “acceptable” and “optimized” are different things. When you mix multiple keywords in a single campaign, you lose the ability to make clean, data-driven decisions about any individual keyword’s true value.
Our approach for this catalog was different. Here’s the exact logic, applied to two top-selling products:
Bromelain was one of the brand’s top-selling SKUs. Analysis showed that across 200+ keywords generating monthly sales, two terms were doing a disproportionate amount of the heavy lifting: “bromelain” and “bromelain 500mg”. These two keywords had high search volume, strong conversion rate, and significant revenue attribution — but they were buried inside broader campaigns alongside lower-value terms, competing for the same budget and diluting the performance signal.
The fix: add both terms to negative lists in every existing auto and manual campaign to stop them from running in diluted contexts. Then launch two dedicated single-keyword campaigns — one exact match, one broad match modified — with their own budgets, their own bid logic, and their own optimization track.
The L-lysine immune-support SKU presented a different challenge: multiple high-value keywords with different search intents — brand-adjacent terms, ingredient terms, and benefit-specific terms — were all running together. A shopper searching for the full product name is in a very different mindset than someone searching “l-lysine,” and those two campaigns should have different bids, different budgets, and different creative strategies.
We isolated three primary keyword groups for this product — “lysine immune plus” (brand/product-specific), “lysine immune” (benefit intent), and “l-lysine” (ingredient/clinical searcher) — into separate single-keyword campaigns.
This same methodology — identify the top 2–5 keywords per SKU by revenue attribution, isolate them into dedicated single-keyword campaigns, then group the remaining medium and lower-competition terms into structured intentional campaigns — was applied across the entire supplement catalog.
Twelve months. One structural rebuild. Three compounding phases. Here’s what the numbers looked like from start to finish.
The engagement didn’t begin with a cold pitch or a website inquiry. The founder had worked with our lead strategist at a previous agency and had been so impressed with the thinking — not just the results, but the how behind the results — that when they heard about Clickstera, they reached out directly.
“Every time I meet you,” they told us, “it feels like you’ve updated your software. There’s always something new, something sharper.” That became the standard we worked to maintain throughout the engagement: showing up to every call and review with a perspective the client hadn’t seen before, not just a report of what had happened.
That relationship deepened to the point where the founder would actively seek strategic input — not just on PPC, but on budget philosophy, expansion sequencing, and how to think about scaling profitably rather than just scaling fast. That trust took years to build and shaped how we approached every decision on the account.
[Client quote to be added — founder has verbally expressed strong satisfaction and regularly credited this partnership with shaping the brand’s growth strategy. Written quote in progress for publication.]
The clearest indicator of a truly successful agency engagement isn’t the contract renewal — it’s expansion. When a client trusts your work enough to bring you their second brand, that’s the signal that matters most.
Following the results on the first brand, the founder extended the engagement to cover a sister brand in the herbal wellness category. A different product range, different competitive dynamics, same structural approach.
After the turnaround on the core supplement account, Clickstera was brought in to manage the sister brand under the same ownership — applying the same single-keyword architecture and TACoS-first philosophy to a new product catalog across Amazon and Walmart.
If your campaigns are running but TACoS is stubbornly high, or your account feels immune to optimization — we’ve seen this before. Let’s find the structural issue together.
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