They hired a PPC shop and thought they had hired an Amazon partner. Those are no
By Pasha Knish · October 6, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
They hired a PPC shop and thought they had hired an Amazon partner.
Those are not the same purchase.
A supplement brand signed a $2,500 a month PPC retainer after a deck full of 18% ACOS screenshots. Seven months later ACOS was still 18%. Revenue was down 11%. Two ASINs had been suppressed for 19 days in the middle of that retainer and nobody on the ad team owned the ticket. Inventory lived in a Google Sheet the founder still updated at 11pm.
The ads were not a disaster. That is what made the relationship hard to fire. Reports arrived. Bids moved. ACOS was the number they had bought, and they received it.
What they had not bought was anyone looking at the catalog, the page, or the warehouse.
Scorecard when they finally came in:
→ Campaign structure: fine. Not elegant. Fine.
→ Listing on the hero: title from 2023, image 2 still talking about a formula they had changed in January.
→ Suppressed children: two, both fixable, both aged.
→ Backend attributes: 14 of 44 filled.
→ Forecast: the founder, a spreadsheet, and a supplier who quoted 60 days and delivered 80.
They did not need a better PPC person. They needed the brief to match the bottleneck. For 7 months they paid $17,500 in fees to optimize the only part of the account that was already acceptable, while the parts that were not acceptable had no owner.
This is the agency-selection mistake I see more than "we hired a bad agency." They hired a specialist for a general problem, then graded the specialist on the specialist's metric.
If your constraint is conversion, inventory, catalog, or account health, a PPC-only retainer will give you a cleaner ACOS on a smaller business. It can look like professionalism. It is a category error.
Questions that would have saved them the 7 months:
→ Who watches suppressions at 7pm on a Friday?
→ Who changes the listing when the formula changes?
→ Who owns days of cover, and do they sit in the same meeting as the person who can raise spend?
→ Can you show a listing you rewrote and the conversion change, not only an ACOS chart?
→ What did you decline to do for a client in the last quarter, and why?
We took the account. Ads stayed in a similar spend band for the first 45 days on purpose. Listing, catalog, and forecast moved first. Revenue recovered past the old baseline in month 3, with ACOS at 21%, worse on paper, better in dollars.
If you are shopping for help this fall, do not shop for the screenshot you already understand.
Shop for the owner of the problem you actually have.