An integrated Google Ads and Amazon PPC engagement, full account rebuild, listing optimization, and marketplace acceleration.

The 30-Second Snapshot

When this premium Electronics brand came to us, they were spending $45K a month on ads and watching their ROAS slowly bleed out, from 3.2x to 1.6x over nine months. Six months after we restructured their entire paid acquisition stack, monthly revenue moved from $87K to $358K, blended ROAS hit 4.9x, and Amazon ACoS dropped from 41% to 19%.

A note on confidentiality. The client is referenced as “the brand” under an active NDA. All figures are validated against Google Ads, Amazon Advertising Console, and Shopify back-end data.

01 · CLIENT BACKGROUND

The Brand Behind the Numbers

Industry & Positioning

The brand operates in the premium wireless over-ear headphones, true-wireless earbuds, and lifestyle Bluetooth speakers in the $89–$229 range. They sit in the “affordable premium” tier: above mass-market players like JBL and Anker, below aspirational brands like Bose and Sony. Differentiation comes from design-led product engineering and a tightly-edited 11-SKU catalogue.

Distribution Mix at the Start

Channel

% of Revenue (Pre-Engagement)

Shopify (D2C site)

13%

Amazon US

31%

Amazon CA + UK

78%

Wholesale & retail

4%

Where They Were

Founded 2021, bootstrapped 18 months, raised a Series A in 2023. Team of 24, with a 2-person in-house marketing function. Monthly ad spend at engagement start was \~$45K across Google + Meta + Amazon, on trailing-12-month revenue of \~$1.1M. Their previous agency was a generalist performance shop that managed Google + Meta but had no Amazon expertise.

What They'd Already Tried

The internal team and previous agency weren't lazy, they were under-equipped. They had tried:

• Aggressive bid increases on top-converting Shopping campaigns (which only inflated CPCs)
• Three “creative tests” on Meta with no holdout audiences
• Amazon PPC entirely on auto-targeting with a flat $1.20 default bid
• Manually pausing campaigns based on the previous day's ROAS

The result was the kind of slow, expensive decline that's hard to spot until it's already structural.

02 · THE DIAGNOSIS

The Real Problems Inside the Account

When founders watch ROAS decline, the instinct is almost always the same: something must be wrong with the creatives, or we need to spend more. Both instincts are usually wrong. Here's what was actually happening.

Problem 1 - Account Structure Was Working Against the Algorithm

One Performance Max campaign carried 73% of total Google spend, no asset group segmentation, no audience signals, no exclusion lists, brand and non-brand bundled into the same conversion pool. The algorithm defaulted to the cheapest available clicks: brand-search the brand would have gotten organically anyway. They weren't acquiring new customers, they were paying Google to deliver their existing ones.

Problem 2 - Amazon Was a Black Box

Every product ran auto-targeting with a single flat bid. No harvesting workflow, no negative keyword sculpting, no day-parting, no separation between brand defense, category targeting, and competitor conquesting. ACoS sat at 41%, and on bestselling SKUs the brand was effectively breaking even on ad-attributed sales.

Problem 3 - Cannibalization Between Google and Amazon

Brand search wasn't being managed as a distinct strategy. Customers searching the brand on Google were being delivered to Shopify and clicking the brand's own Amazon Sponsored Brand ads, both channels “earning” credit. In reality, \~30% of attributed Amazon ad revenue would have happened organically.

Problem 4 - A Funnel With No Middle

No retargeting infrastructure. No Display, no YouTube TrueView, no Sponsored Display on Amazon. A brand spending $45K/month had no way to re-engage warm traffic on either platform.

Problem 5 - Listings Were Built for 2022

A+ Content was generic. Premium A+ wasn't deployed despite brand registry eligibility. The Brand Store had two pages and no shoppable modules. Title structure didn't reflect the search terms actually driving conversions, directly capping how efficient PPC could ever be.

The summary. The issue wasn't ad spend, creative quality, or product-market fit. Every layer of the paid acquisition stack - structure, signal, segmentation, and assets - had been built for an earlier version of the business and never rebuilt.

03 · STRATEGY & EXECUTION · GOOGLE ADS

The Google Ads Rebuild

Real performance at this stage comes from rebuilding the system, not optimizing inside a broken one. The engagement was structured across four phases run partially in parallel.

Phase 1 - Diagnostic & Restructure (Weeks 1–4)

Before any bid changes, we ran a full audit: search-term forensics across 18 months of historical Meta and youtube data, attribution modeling comparing last-click vs data-driven vs post-purchase survey attribution, a listing audit on all 31 SKUs against top-rank competitors, and funnel mapping from impression through 90-day repeat purchase. It produced a 47-page strategy and account-restructure document. We're not going to pretend everything in it worked, some early hypotheses about audience segmentation were wrong and got revised in Month 3. The point of Phase 1 wasn't to predict the future. It was to rebuild on a foundation we actually understood.

Phase 2 - The Account Rebuild

We restructured the account around one principle: separation of intent. Each campaign tier has one job, with enough signal to do it well.

Campaign Tier

Role

Budget %

Brand Search

Defend brand terms, capture warm intent, clear competitor squatting

8%

Non-Brand Search

Acquire new customers on category terms (themed ad groups)

22%

Shopping - Top Sellers

Priority-bid Shopping for proven SKUs

18%

Shopping - Long Tail

Discovery-mode Shopping for the rest of the catalog

9%

Performance Max

New customer acquisition with audience signals + value rules

24%

YouTube + Display Retargeting

Mid-funnel, visitors who didn't convert in 30 days

11%

Competitor Conquest

Targeted search on three named competitors

8%

04 · STRATEGY & EXECUTION · GOOGLE ADS (CONT.)

Specific Moves That Mattered

• PMax got proper asset groups - separated by product collection, with first-party audience signals (purchasers, high-AOV visitors, abandoners) feeding each one.
• Value rules prioritized first-time customers at 1.4x conversion value, since LTV data showed first purchases were under-weighted.
• Brand search excluded from PMax via account-level negative keyword lists, ending the cannibalization problem.
• Shopping tiered with bid modifiers based on 20-day SKU profitability, not last-7-day ROAS.
• YouTube retargeting used 69-second product-in-context ads (not founder-pitch creative), targeting visitors who'd viewed product pages but not added to cart.

Google Ads account view at Month 6 - ROAS by campaign type with daily CPC trend.

Sound familiar?

If declining ROAS, ACoS stuck above 30%, or retargeting that doesn't really exist are showing up in your account, we'd rather show you than tell you.

Request a free 30-minute account audit  →

05 · STRATEGY & EXECUTION · AMAZON ADS

The Amazon Ads & Listing Rebuild

On Amazon, listings and PPC are one stack, bad listings cap the ceiling of even a perfect campaign structure. We ran both rebuilds in parallel.

Listing Optimization (Weeks 2–6)

• Title structure rebuilt around top 20 converting search terms per SKU, not simply the highest-volume terms.
• A+ Content replaced with comparison modules, lifestyle imagery, and benefits-first copy.
• Premium A+ & Brand Store deployed on the four brand-registry-eligible SKUs (with a hover-state in-ear fit module); Brand Store rebuilt to seven shoppable pages and backend search terms rewritten for long-tail intent.

PPC Architecture - A Three-Tier System (Weeks 3–10)

1. Discovery Layer - auto-targeting + broad-match manual at low bids, designed to surface new search terms.
2. Performance Layer - exact-match manual campaigns built from harvested terms, bids set against 90-day per-SKU target ACoS.
3. Defense Layer - brand defense (own ASINs and brand terms), competitor conquesting on named ASINs, category defense via Sponsored Display.

Specific Moves That Mattered

• Negative keyword sculpting became weekly, not quarterly - \~1,400 wasteful search terms removed in the first 60 days alone
• Search-term harvesting on a 14-day cycle: terms hitting our conversion threshold in Discovery campaigns on a continuous harvesting cycle.
• Bid optimization rule-based against per-ASIN target ACoS - bids tightened on terms drifting above target, loosened on under-performers.
• Sponsored Display ran retargeting on viewers and conquesting on 14 named competitor ASINs - finally giving the middle-funnel capability they had been missing on both platforms.

Amazon Advertising Console - ACoS trend, top-SKU performance, and campaign-type spend allocation at Month 6.

06 · RESULTS

Results & Business Impact

Six-month engagement results, measured against the trailing 90-day pre-engagement baseline.

Metric

Before

After

Change

Monthly Revenue (blended)

$87,400

$358,200

+310%

Blended ROAS

1.6x

4.9x

+206%

Amazon ACoS

41%

19%

-22 pts

Amazon TACoS

28%

11%

-17 pts

Average CTR (Google Search)

0.8%

2.3%

+188%

Customer Acquisition Cost

$52

$24

-54%

Repeat Purchase Rate (90-day)

9%

18%

+100%

Monthly revenue, three months before vs six months after engagement start.

What's Behind the Numbers

• 311% revenue growth is not all paid-attributed. \~38% of the lift came from organic Amazon ranking improvements driven by listing optimization and PPC velocity. Real effect, but it's important to credit it correctly.
• CAC dropped 54%, but blended CAC across the full customer base improved more modestly (\~31%) once we reconciling the attribution methodology. We pushed the brand to track both numbers.

Business Impact Beyond the Metrics

• The brand hit the scale milestone needed for their Series B raise, closed in Month 9.
• Expanded from three to seven international Amazon marketplaces, we managed the launch sequencing.
• Amazon Best Seller rank in their primary category went from #847 to #41, materially improving their wholesale conversion with two national retailers.

07 · METHODOLOGY

What This Means for Your Brand

We chose to write this case study in detail, including the parts where our early hypotheses were wrong and the parts where the headline numbers come with caveats, because the agency space has a credibility problem. Real account work isn't infallible. It's diagnostic, structural, iterative, and slow in the right places. If you take one thing from this case study: growth at $1K+ revenue is almost never about finding a new tactic. It's about rebuilding the system so the tactics you already have can actually work.

Who We Work Best With

D2C brands or marketplace sellers doing $5K–$20K monthly revenue, spending $35K+ on paid media, with product-market fit. We're a poor fit for brands looking for a 30-day turnaround or hoping creative alone will solve a structural problem.

Want to see what this looks like inside your account?

We won't promise identical numbers. On a free 30-minute call we will: audit your Google Ads account structure, walk through your top three Amazon SKUs, quantify the 90-day opportunity using your actual data, and tell you honestly if we're the right partner.

Book your free 30-minute growth diagnostic   →

Menko Services - Google Ads management, Amazon PPC management, Amazon listing optimization, and end-to-end marketplace growth services for D2C brands scaling from $1M to $20M.   |   Results specific to this engagement; not a guarantee of comparable outcomes for other brands.