Anonymised and sector-framed. Figures are the client’s own, reported the same way each month, and shown here with their permission.
A supplement brand had reached best-seller status on Amazon, but that success had quietly become a dependency: almost every sale ran through a marketplace it did not control, on terms it could not change. When the brand tried to build demand on its own channels, the numbers refused to work, with a high cost of sale and a low return making sustained campaigns impossible to justify. Compounding the problem, competitors were bidding on its own branded search terms, intercepting people who were already looking for the product and diverting them elsewhere. The brand was paying, in effect, to send hard-won demand to rivals and to a marketplace that owned the customer relationship.
Stop renting your customers from a marketplace and start owning the channel they buy through.
Reclaim the branded terms
The first leak to close was the brand's own name. With rivals bidding on branded search and skimming ready-to-buy customers, we stood up a defensive paid presence on the brand's own terms so that people searching for the product landed on a destination the brand owned, not a competitor's ad. This is unglamorous work, but it is the cheapest, highest-intent traffic a brand can buy, and letting others win it was the single clearest waste in the account.
Build a channel the brand owns
Amazon dependence is a structural risk, not just a margin one. We built out the brand's own direct storefront and conversion path as a genuine alternative to the marketplace, so that demand generated by advertising had somewhere to convert that the brand controlled end to end. That meant treating the owned site as the primary destination: clear product pages, a checkout journey engineered for confidence, and messaging that carried the credibility the Amazon listing had earned.
Rebuild the paid economics
The campaigns had failed before because the maths did not work, so we rebuilt them around cost of sale and return rather than raw volume. We restructured the account by intent, cut spend that was buying traffic the brand could not convert, tightened targeting and creative to the audiences most likely to purchase, and measured everything against a single question: does this ad pay for itself. Nothing scaled until the unit economics held.
Fix the conversion path
Cheaper clicks only matter if they turn into orders. We treated the on-site journey as its own discipline, removing friction between the ad and the purchase, aligning the landing experience with the promise of the ad, and making the case for buying direct rather than defaulting to the marketplace. Every improvement to conversion rate multiplied the value of the traffic we were already paying for.
Measure, then scale
With four senior practitioners and no juniors, the work was hands-on throughout: read the data, cut what lost money, double down on what paid, repeat. Once the account was returning above break-even and the owned channel was converting, we could scale spend with confidence, knowing each additional pound was buying profitable growth rather than subsidising the marketplace.
The results followed directly from closing the leaks and fixing the economics. Reclaiming branded terms and rebuilding the account around unit economics cut the cost of sale by 70% and lifted return on ad spend to 1.91x, which is the difference between campaigns that drain the business and campaigns that fund their own growth. Once each pound of spend was paying for itself, scaling stopped being a gamble.
The owned channel is what turned efficiency into volume. With a 99% improvement in conversion rate on a destination the brand controlled, the same traffic did far more work, and the compounding effect of cheaper, higher-returning, better-converting traffic produced 10x more conversions off Amazon. The brand no longer depends on a marketplace it cannot control, and no longer pays to send its own customers to rivals.