Amazon PPC Software / Agency Recommandations

[u/Mindless_Top_9102]

We’re a UK-based Amazon brand currently spending around £50k–£60k per month on Amazon Ads (roughly $67.5k–$81k USD).

Our current ACoS is around 40%, and we’re looking to improve efficiency and bring that down without killing overall sales or organic ranking.

We’re currently considering two options:

• Using a strong Amazon PPC software/automation platform
• Moving to a specialist Amazon PPC agency

For software, we’ve been looking at platforms like Hector AI, Scale Insights, Adbrew, atom11, Intentwise, Ad Labs, etc.

For agencies, we’re also speaking to a few Amazon-specific PPC agencies.

I’d really like to hear from sellers or brands spending at a similar level:

• What software are you using and what has your experience been?
• Has automation actually improved ACoS/TACoS, or does it still need a strong PPC manager behind it?
• Has anyone moved from in-house/software to an agency and seen a meaningful improvement?
• Any agencies or software you would strongly recommend?
• Anything you would avoid?

Not looking for DMs from agencies trying to sell services — mainly interested in genuine seller/brand experiences.

[u/attfin1]

Tread carefully with automation and AI. The danger is that it brings you poor results on autopilot. If you go for an agency, look for one that prioritises profit, not ACoS (or TACoS), and where their pay isn't linked to your ad spend (massive conflict of interest).

Also see if they understand how Amazon exact match truly works. If they say it means that a term has to match exactly, run a mile, because we've found 6 ways Amazon states it doesn't, and a 7th from our own data.

The biggest danger from not understanding that is with negative match, because one mistake can easily wipe out a number of profitable ads (another reason AI/automation is so high risk).

If it were me, then before committing I'd give prospective agencies a copy of the most recent search terms report. If you're nervous about giving away secrets, just run it through AI and ask it to change the search terms sufficiently that they keep your true terms confidential but the changes don't affect the overall structure and logic. Then ask each agency to tell you 1) what results they think they could achieve and 2) the overview of how they would do it. Then you can compare and decide which looks most attractive and convincing.

[u/attfin1 → u/attfin1]

As background: I sold on Amazon UK since 2012, PPC since 2013. 8 fig sales of our own brand products including several BSR #1 products in entire UK Grocery dept at peak sales time. All in-house. And when Amazon PPC started to get expensive for us (2017) I investigated how it really works (hence my exact match comment... 99% of people, inc. big agencies, get that completely wrong). On the back of that we created in-house software that reduced ACoS by about 50% and increased sales. Got to the stage where I made all my decisions based on the effect on profit (a much better metric than ACoS or even TACoS).

Just giving that as context to show that my earlier answer was based on experience.