Choosing an Amazon PPC agency? Here are 10 questions established brands should ask before delegating Amazon advertising management and PPC optimization.
By Enzo Levasseur, Founder of BridgeLink Commerce
Firsthand Amazon and commercial operating experience across the United States and Europe.
Once Amazon becomes a meaningful sales channel, PPC needs regular attention.
Budgets move. Search terms change. Competitors become more aggressive. New products need support. Mature products need different treatment. Some campaigns deserve more investment while others need to be cut back.
At that point, bringing in an Amazon PPC agency, consultant or external management partner can make sense.
The decision should not come down to who promises the lowest ACoS or presents the most impressive dashboard.
What matters is whether the person managing the advertising understands what the business is trying to accomplish and can take responsibility for the work without disconnecting PPC from the rest of the Amazon account.
Here is what to look at before handing over your Amazon advertising.
Before talking about campaign structure, bids or keywords, an Amazon PPC partner should understand the products.
Which products matter most?
Which have the strongest margins?
Which are growing?
Which have inventory constraints?
Which are being launched?
Which are already strong organically?
Those questions matter because two products in the same Amazon account can need completely different advertising strategies.
Imagine a brand with four SKUs.
One converts extremely well and has healthy margins.
One is selling well but inventory is getting tight.
One is new and needs visibility.
One has weak conversion and poor economics.
It would make very little sense to manage all four the same way.
The first product may justify more aggressive investment. The second may need spend controlled until inventory improves. The third may need a deliberate launch strategy. The fourth may need work on the listing or offer before more traffic is bought.
Good Amazon PPC management starts at the product level, not with a generic campaign template.
ACoS is one of the first numbers people look at in Amazon advertising, and for good reason.
It tells you how much advertising spend was required to generate attributed advertising sales.
But viewed on its own, it can give an incomplete picture.
A provider can sometimes improve ACoS simply by reducing spend, concentrating heavily on branded searches or pulling back from more competitive opportunities.
The number improves, but the business may not.
There are also situations where a higher ACoS is perfectly reasonable. A new product, a strategic launch or an attempt to build visibility in an important search area may require more investment for a period of time.
So the question is not simply:
What ACoS can you achieve?
A better question is:
How do you decide whether the advertising is actually helping the business?
Depending on the account, that may involve looking at:
There is no universal dashboard every brand needs.
What matters is whether the person managing the advertising understands what the numbers mean commercially.
"Amazon PPC management" can mean very different things depending on the provider.
One company may take responsibility for the advertising strategy and make recurring decisions across the account.
Another may check campaigns periodically, adjust bids and send a report at the end of the month.
Before signing anything, understand what is actually included.
That may cover:
Just as important, understand what happens when the problem is not PPC.
If an important keyword is bringing relevant traffic to the listing but very few customers are buying, another bid adjustment may not solve anything.
The listing could be unclear. The images may be weak. The price may be uncompetitive. Reviews may be holding the product back. Inventory could be creating problems.
The PPC manager does not necessarily need to fix every one of those issues.
They should be able to recognize them.
This is a simple question that brands do not always ask early enough:
Who is actually going to manage our advertising?
The person running the sales call may not be the person making decisions inside the account after you sign.
That is not automatically a problem. Larger Amazon agencies can bring useful specialization.
But you should know what the relationship will look like.
Find out who will:
It is also worth understanding how direct the communication will be.
If every question moves through an account manager, then to a PPC specialist, then back through the account manager, that is a very different working relationship from speaking directly with the person making the decisions.
Neither structure is inherently wrong.
You should simply know which one you are paying for.
Advertising decisions become much easier to understand once they are connected to product economics.
A product with a 70 percent gross margin gives you a very different advertising range from one with a 20 percent gross margin.
The same applies to pricing, FBA fees, promotions, returns and other costs.
An ACoS target that works comfortably for one SKU could lose money on another.
That is why a single account-wide efficiency target can be misleading.
Even if your company manages detailed profitability analysis internally, the Amazon PPC agency or consultant should understand enough about the economics to know where advertising can be pushed and where it needs more discipline.
Paid advertising and organic sales should not be treated as two completely separate businesses.
PPC can help a product appear in front of customers searching for relevant terms.
What happens after the click depends heavily on the listing.
If the traffic is relevant but conversion is poor, increasing the advertising budget can simply make the underlying weakness more expensive.
This is where the distinction between a traffic problem and a conversion problem matters.
Suppose a campaign is generating a large number of clicks for a highly relevant search term, but customers are not buying.
The targeting may be too broad.
Or the targeting may be exactly right and the listing is losing the sale.
Those situations require very different decisions.
Someone responsible for Amazon advertising management should be able to tell the difference.
Delegating PPC does not require giving away ownership of your Amazon infrastructure.
Your company should remain in control of the Amazon account and its underlying business assets.
External partners should receive the permissions they need to perform the agreed work.
Before onboarding, clarify:
It is basic account hygiene, but worth getting right from the beginning.
Amazon already gives you a lot of numbers.
A management partner should add interpretation.
A useful PPC report should help you understand three things:
What happened?
Why does it matter?
What are we doing next?
If spend moved from one product to another, there should be a reason.
If a campaign was reduced, there should be a reason.
If a product is receiving more investment despite a temporarily higher ACoS, there should be a reason.
A shorter report that explains the important decisions clearly is often more useful than twenty pages of exported metrics.
Amazon PPC management can be priced in several ways.
Common models include:
There is no pricing model that is automatically better than the others.
The important thing is understanding both the incentives and the scope.
If the provider earns more when ad spend increases, ask how budget decisions are made.
If the fee is fixed, understand what level of account complexity and workload is included.
And compare the fee against how much responsibility is actually being taken off your team.
A cheaper provider can become expensive in time if someone internally still has to supervise every decision.
Nobody managing Amazon PPC controls every variable that affects performance.
Competition changes.
Prices change.
Inventory changes.
Reviews change.
Conversion changes.
Demand changes.
Amazon itself changes.
So be cautious with anyone guaranteeing a specific ACoS, sales figure, ranking position or growth rate before they have even understood the account.
A credible Amazon PPC agency should be able to explain the work it will manage, how it approaches the account, what it needs from your team and how performance will be evaluated.
That gives you far more useful information than a guaranteed number.
If you are comparing providers, these questions will usually get past the sales presentation quickly:
The quality of the answers matters more than whether the provider uses the same terminology you do.
Sometimes the answer is straightforward.
Your team is comfortable handling listings, inventory, catalogue work and the wider Amazon account. Advertising is simply the part that needs dedicated ownership.
In that case, standalone Amazon PPC Management can make sense.
In other businesses, PPC is only one piece of the workload.
The internal team is also spending time on operational issues, catalogue work, recurring account tasks and coordinating Amazon as a whole.
If that is the situation, handing off PPC alone may not remove enough of the burden.
That is where Full Account Management becomes a different proposition.
The right scope depends on what your company actually wants someone else to own.
Choosing an Amazon PPC agency should not come down to the lowest promised ACoS.
Look at whether the provider understands the products, can explain its decisions, considers the economics behind the advertising and takes clear responsibility for the work.
Before signing, you should know:
That is what makes delegation useful.
BridgeLink Commerce works directly with established product brands that want the recurring Amazon advertising workload handled while retaining visibility into the channel.
If Amazon requires broader recurring ownership across advertising and operations, explore Full Account Management.