Amazon Sponsored Products management
Your ACoS is not your profit.
I run Sponsored Products for a small number of brands, against each product's own breakeven. Flat monthly fee, never a percentage of your ad spend, month to month with no minimum.
Weekly contribution profit on my own brand, after cost of goods, Amazon fees, fulfilment and returns. The shaded stretch is the four weeks it ran below the pre go-live average. Eighteen weeks, May to August 2026.
What happened on my own brand
I sell physical therapy products on Amazon under my own label. That account is where this system was built and it is the account I can show you eighteen weeks of weekly numbers for.
It got worse before it got better, and you should know that first
The first four weeks after I turned the system on, my weekly contribution profit dropped from an average of $210 to $69 and my advertising cost of sales climbed to 40%. The turn came after I added two guards: a spend circuit breaker and a profit floor that refuses to bid above what a product can actually earn. The seven weeks after that ran $83, $285, $300, $256, $308, $379, $432.
One account is one account. I have no control group, so the honest word is correlated, not caused. If somebody shows you a clean curve with no bad stretch in it, ask them what they left out.
The problem with managing to ACoS
Every product in your catalog breaks even at a different return on ad spend. Managing the whole account to one target hides which products are actually losing you money.
One target that fits none of them
These are three real products from one client account. They break even at 1.95x, 2.33x and 3.17x. The account was being steered to a single 3.00x target, which is above what two of the three products need and below what the third needs.
That one number is why 17 of their 20 campaigns were being told to cut or pause, including ten whose return had improved.
Six profitable, six losing. Or so the account said.
A client came to me with an account level view showing 6 profitable campaigns and 6 losing ones. I took their cost of goods per product and worked out the real breakeven return for each one: 1.95x, 2.33x and 3.17x. Then I scored all 20 campaigns against their own product's bar instead of the account average.
It was 6 profitable and 13 losing, at a net loss of $540 a month. The account level number was not wrong so much as it was averaging three different businesses together.
One target for products that are not the same
A $28 card deck with a $3.90 unit cost and a $13 accessory with a $2.71 unit cost do not break even in the same place. Tools that ask you for one target return on ad spend will happily cut the bid on your best product and scale the one that cannot pay for the click.
I ask for your cost of goods per SKU at intake, compute the breakeven for each one, and every recommendation you get is scored against the right bar.
What I actually do
The list is short on purpose. Everything here runs on my own account today and has a write ledger behind it.
Find and stop the waste
Search terms that take clicks and return nothing get negated, with a shield that refuses to negate a term converting at or above that product's breakeven. Amazon gives you the search term report and no suggestions. This is the part almost nobody automates safely.
Bid to the breakeven, not the average
Bids move against each product's own breakeven return with a profit floor underneath them, a cap on how far any single bid can move, and a cooldown before a bid can be changed again or reversed.
Move the budget toward what pays
Budget shifts toward campaigns clearing their bar, with a spend circuit breaker that halts the whole cycle if the account's spend moves outside its expected range.
Grow keywords through a funnel
New search terms are promoted through discovery, then validation, then scaling, so a term has to earn its own evidence before it gets real money. Terms that stop earning get demoted rather than left running.
Report in dollars, not ratios
Contribution profit per product per week, after cost of goods, Amazon fees, fulfilment and returns. Realised margin next to the margin you think you have. Most reports stop at ACoS and ROAS.
Show the receipts
Every change lands in a ledger with a before value, an after value, a reason and a timestamp. On my own account that is 4,181 successful changes since April 2026. You can have your log any time you ask.
What else you could buy
Worth knowing before you talk to me, because I am not the cheapest option and I am not trying to be. Prices below were checked on 2026-09-11 from each vendor's own published pages.
| Option | How it is priced | At $10k spend | At $30k spend | Who runs it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon's own bid rules | Free | $0 | $0 | Amazon's algorithm |
| Self serve software | Flat fee, often plus 2% to 3% of spend | $150 to $800 | $250 to $900 | You do |
| Kovalchick Analytics, managed | Flat fee, no percentage of spend | $600 | $1,200 | I do |
| Ad Badger managed service | $975 plus 8% of spend, $2,500 monthly minimum | $1,775 | $3,375 | They do |
| Typical agency floor | Flat retainer, published from $2,000 | $2,000+ | $2,000+ | They do |
| Full service agency | Published benchmark bands | $1,000 to $2,500 | $3,500 to $6,000 | They do |
The shape of that table is the reason I exist. Below roughly $800 a month everything is software you operate yourself. Above roughly $1,700 a month everything is an agency. In between there is one managed service, it takes 8% of your ad spend on top of its fee, and it will not take you at all under about $19,000 of monthly spend.
If you are spending $5,000 to $20,000 a month, your only real alternative to doing this yourself is an agency with a minimum. That is the gap I work in.
Three things I will not do
Take a percentage of your spend
Getting paid more when you spend more is a conflict I do not want to have to explain. Flat fee, every tier, and the fee does not change when your spend goes up.
Lock you into a contract
Month to month, no minimum spend, no onboarding fee, cancel with notice in writing. Your Amazon account, campaigns and history stay yours on the way out.
Promise you a number
Amazon's auction, your competitors and your own listings are not mine to control. Nobody honest guarantees a result on this platform. What I can promise is that you will be able to see exactly what I did and why.
Start with the audit
Send me a 60 day bulk file and your Sponsored Products search term report, or give me viewer access and I will pull them myself. You get back a written read on where your spend is going, the biggest leaks by name and dollar amount, and the three changes I would make first. No charge, no obligation, and you can take the list and do it yourself.