Where they were
Volara was spending about $18,400 a month on Amazon ads and had been for two years. Revenue was growing roughly 8% a year. Ad spend was growing 40%. Nobody inside the business could say which of those campaigns was responsible for either number.
The account had 112 campaigns running. Some had been built by a previous freelancer, some by the founder in 2023, some by a tool nobody could remember buying. Six ASINs produced 80% of the revenue and were getting 22% of the budget. The rest of the money went to a long tail of products that had never been profitable at any spend level.
The reporting was the other half of the problem. The previous agency sent a monthly deck with ROAS on it. That ROAS counted branded search, where Volara was buying its own customers back at a 9x return and calling it performance.
What we did
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01
Two weeks of counting before touching anything
We pulled 24 months of business reports, search term reports, and the fee statements, then rebuilt the P&L per ASIN with advertising and Amazon fees allocated properly. Nine of the 24 products were losing money on every unit sold once storage and returns were counted. Two of them were in the top five by ad spend.
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02
Cut the catalogue, then the campaigns
We stopped advertising the nine unprofitable ASINs and moved four of them to a clearance plan to free up storage. Campaign count went from 112 to 22, organised into three tiers: hero products with their own budgets, supporting products in shared campaigns, and a defensive tier for branded terms with a spend ceiling on it.
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03
Fix the pages before buying more traffic
Three of the six hero ASINs converted below 11%, well under their category. Our creative team rewrote the listings, shot new image stacks with the supplement facts panel readable on mobile, and rebuilt the A+ modules. Conversion on those three went from 10.4% to 16.1% over the following quarter. That single change did more for ACoS than any bid adjustment we made.
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04
Move retargeting off search and into DSP
Branded search spend dropped by two thirds. We moved that budget into DSP audiences built from Amazon Marketing Cloud data, targeting people who had viewed a hero ASIN but bought a competitor. That audience returned 3.4x in its first full quarter and kept improving as the lookback windows filled out.
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05
A weekly call that ends in decisions
Every Tuesday we go through the same five numbers with Volara’s growth lead: contribution margin, ACoS by tier, organic rank on the twelve terms that matter, inventory cover, and the one thing we want to change that week. It takes 25 minutes.
Where they are now
Nine months in, revenue is up 68% year over year and ACoS has come down 31%, from 34% to just under 24%. The number Volara actually cares about is contribution margin per unit, which is up $2.60 on the hero range.
The wasted spend we removed in the first month, about $4,900, funded the creative work and the DSP test without asking for a bigger budget. Volara has since launched two new SKUs into the same campaign structure, and both hit profitability inside seven weeks.
The first thing Sentinel did was tell us which of our products we should stop selling. No agency had ever done that. It cost them ad spend to say it, which is how we knew they meant it.
Figures come from the client’s Seller Central and advertising accounts over the period described. Past results are specific to that brand, that catalogue, and that category.
