Cutting ACoS from 44% to 21% while growing an outdoor brand 68%

The brand made durable outdoor gear with strong reviews and a genuine seasonal peak between April and August. It was doing $187k a month — but at a 44% ACoS, and advertising was consuming almost a fifth of total revenue. Every growth plan the owner modelled ended the same way: more sales, less profit.

The account had been run almost entirely on automatic and broad-match campaigns. That had been a reasonable way to discover demand in year one, but nothing had ever been promoted into controlled, exact-match structures, so the brand kept paying discovery prices for keywords it had already proven. More than a quarter of spend was going to search terms that had never produced a sale. Seasonality made it worse: budgets were set once and left alone, so the account overspent in the shoulder months and ran out of budget exactly when demand peaked.

The goal was not to spend less — it was to stop paying discovery prices for demand the brand had already proven.

• PPC restructure — moved proven search terms out of automatic and broad campaigns into controlled exact-match structures with their own budgets and bids, so known winners stopped competing with open-ended discovery.
• Search-term control — established a weekly harvest-and-negate routine that cut off the long tail of terms spending without converting, while keeping a small, capped discovery budget running.
• Seasonal budget planning — built a month-by-month plan tied to the category's demand curve, front-loading budget into the peak and pulling it back in the shoulder season.
• Creative content — rebuilt main images and A+ for the top-revenue ASINs, lifting conversion so the same bids returned more, which is what made the lower ACoS sustainable rather than a symptom of cutting spend.

ACoS fell from 44% to 21% and TACoS from 19% to 9%, while monthly revenue still grew from $187k to $314k — a 68% increase. Spend on search terms that never converted dropped from 27% of the budget to 8%.

The important detail is that efficiency did not come from spending less. Ad spend rose in absolute terms across the peak season; it simply went to demand the brand had already proven it could convert, at prices that reflected that. With advertising taking half the share of revenue it used to, the owner could reinvest into inventory ahead of the next season instead of funding the previous season's discovery.