A public challenge on Upwork. Month one: $388K in total sales. Month three: $480K.
A brand owner posted a brief on Upwork: grow my Amazon business to $400,000 in sales within the next six months. Most agencies would either pass on it or overpromise. We took it on — and set out to prove what systematic PPC management actually looks like.
When we audited the account, here's what we were starting with:
The account had potential — real products with genuine demand. The problem was structural. Campaigns had been set up without a clear architecture, bids were too uniform across high and low-intent keywords, and there was significant budget leakage to irrelevant search terms that had never been negated.
The opportunity was large. The account wasn't underperforming because of bad products — it was underperforming because of bad structure.
We archived every existing campaign and built the new structure in the first week. Tight exact match campaigns for every proven converting search term. Structured phrase match for discovery. Product targeting to capture buyers actively comparing competitors. And for the first time — a proper negative keyword strategy eliminating the largest sources of wasted spend.
Daily bid reviews. Three full bid adjustments per week. Search term analysis every 48 hours — mining what was converting and immediately adding negatives for what wasn't. Budget was shifted from underperforming campaigns to proven winners every week.
By end of month one: $388,000 in total sales. The $400,000 target the client had set for six months had been nearly matched in the first month.
Once the structure was proven, we focused on scale. New keyword clusters were introduced systematically. Sponsored Brands campaigns were layered in to capture brand searches and top-of-funnel traffic. Ad spend was actually reduced slightly in month three — from $46K to $41K — while total sales continued to grow to $480,000. ROAS reached 7.88×.
This is what proper optimisation looks like: less spend, more output.
The $400K-in-six-months target was hit in month one. By month three, the brand was at $480K monthly — 100% more than the original target, achieved in 90 days instead of 180.
The account wasn't broken — it was just built wrong. Every dollar of ad spend was working less hard than it should have been. A proper rebuild didn't require more budget — it required smarter architecture, daily discipline, and the willingness to make decisions based on data rather than hope.
Most Amazon brands are in exactly this position. The opportunity is already there — it just needs to be unlocked.