eCommerce & Digital Solutions
eCommerce & Digital Solutions
Should you hire an Amazon PPC agency or run ads yourself? What DIY involves, when an agency makes sense, what to expect and how to judge results.
Every Amazon seller reaches the point where advertising stops being something you set up once and becomes a job. At that point you have two choices: keep doing it yourself, or hand it to an Amazon PPC agency. Neither is automatically right. This guide sets out what each involves so you can decide based on your situation rather than a sales pitch.
Amazon's campaign manager is free and you do not need special software to use it. What you need is time, on a regular schedule, and a working understanding of how the system behaves. A realistic weekly routine looks like this:
Then, less often: build campaigns for new products, review campaign structure as your catalogue grows, test Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, and reconcile ad spend against actual profit.
None of this is difficult on its own. The difficulty is doing it every week, consistently, while also running the rest of the business.
For a small catalogue, a few products with modest spend, the weekly routine can be done in an hour or two once you know what you are looking at. Learning what you are looking at takes longer. Most sellers who manage their own ads well have spent months reading, testing and making mistakes with their own money.
As the catalogue grows, the time grows faster than you expect. Twenty products in two marketplaces is not twice the work of ten in one; it is closer to four times, because every campaign type multiplies across products and countries.
The honest test is this: look at your search term report right now. If you cannot remember the last time you added negative keywords, the routine is already slipping, and the ads are costing more than they should.
An agency is worth considering when one or more of these is true:
Your ad spend is meaningful. If advertising is a significant monthly cost, a small improvement in efficiency covers a management fee. If you spend very little, it may not.
You have run out of time. The ads are being neglected, not because you cannot do it but because something else always comes first.
You are launching or expanding. New products and new marketplaces need campaign structures built properly from the start. Fixing a bad structure later is slower than building it right.
You have plateaued. You have done the basics, sales are flat, and you are not sure what to try next. A second pair of eyes with experience across many accounts often sees the obvious thing.
You want the number to be someone's job. Accountability is worth something. If ACoS is your responsibility, it competes with everything else. If it is the agency's, they answer for it every month.
A good Amazon PPC agency UK or US sellers can rely on should do the weekly routine above, and do it better than you would, because they do it across many accounts and see patterns you cannot. Beyond that, expect:
What you should not expect is guaranteed results. Anyone who promises a specific ACoS before seeing your account is guessing.
Whether you run ads yourself or hire an agency, judge them the same way.
Know your break-even ACoS first. It depends on your margin, and it is the only sensible target. We have a full guide to what a good ACoS looks like if you have not worked yours out.
Watch TACoS, not just ACoS. Total ad spend as a share of total sales tells you whether ads are lifting organic sales or just replacing them.
Give it time. Amazon attribution takes days, and restructured campaigns need a few weeks of data before bids settle. Judging an agency after two weeks is unfair; judging them after three months is reasonable.
Look at profit, not revenue. Higher sales at a worse margin is not a win. Ask for reporting that shows both.
Check the work is happening. Change history in the campaign manager shows every edit. If nothing has changed in a fortnight, nobody is managing the account.
If your spend is small and you have the time, manage the ads yourself and learn the system. If spend is meaningful and the weekly routine keeps slipping, an agency will usually pay for itself in reduced waste alone.
Our Amazon PPC management service covers the full weekly routine, campaign builds, and plain-English reporting for UK and US sellers on a fixed monthly fee. It starts with a free audit of your current campaigns, so you can see what we would change before deciding either way.
