Cutting a supplement brand's TACoS from 27% to 12% without losing volume
TACoS 27% → 12%, volume held
A supplements brand was buying its own growth: spend rose every quarter and profit didn't. We rebuilt the campaign structure around intent, cut branded defense to what it actually needed and let organic rank carry the terms it had already earned.
At a glance
- Category
- Vitamins & Dietary Supplements
- Marketplaces
- US
- Revenue at start
- $228k / month
- Ad spend at start
- $62k / month
- Engagement
- Amazon PPC management
- Timeframe
- 7 months
Results
The challenge
The account had 74 campaigns, most of them created to solve a problem that no longer existed. Branded terms alone consumed 41% of spend — on a brand shoppers were typing in by name, which is traffic the listing would have won anyway. Auto campaigns that were meant to be a discovery tool had quietly become a third of the budget, harvesting nothing because nobody had reviewed their search terms in over a year.
The brand's read on this was that supplements are simply an expensive category. The data said something narrower: the account had no structure separating traffic it had to buy from traffic it already owned, so every efficiency conversation ended in “cut spend and lose sales”.
Our approach
The goal was not to spend less. It was to stop paying for sales the brand already had.
- Structure by intent — branded, category, competitor and discovery separated into their own campaigns so each could have its own target and its own ceiling.
- Branded defense capped, not killed — held at the level that keeps competitors off the brand's own page, and no higher.
- Discovery with an exit — auto and broad campaigns kept small, with a weekly harvest that promotes winners into exact and negates the rest.
- Cuts staged and measured — spend reduced in steps with organic rank watched at each one, so a drop would show up before it cost a quarter.
How we worked
- 1
Search-term audit
Twelve months of search-term data scored by intent and by whether the listing ranked organically for the same term. That single view is what made the branded overspend undeniable.
- 2
Rebuild into four intent tiers
Seventy-four campaigns became nineteen: branded, category, competitor and discovery, each with its own budget and ACoS target.
- 3
Staged branded reduction
Branded spend was cut in four steps over nine weeks, with organic rank and total unit volume checked before each next step.
- 4
Weekly harvest routine
Discovery campaigns now feed exact-match campaigns weekly and are negated aggressively, so they stay a research tool instead of becoming a budget line.
- 5
Reporting on TACoS, not ACoS
The brand's weekly report leads with total advertising cost of sales, which is the number that moved — campaign-level ACoS had always looked fine.
Inside the ad account
Anonymized account view, rebuilt from the figures reported above: ad sales holding around $108k a month while ACoS falls from 58% to 27% across the 7-month engagement.
The results
Ad spend fell from $62k to $29k a month while revenue went up slightly, from $228k to $241k — TACoS 27% to 12%.
The mechanism was organic: as branded defense came down, the share of sales arriving without a paid click rose from 44% to 68%, because those sales had been organic all along and the account had simply been paying a toll on them. Roughly $33k a month moved from advertising to profit, with no loss in unit volume and no change to price.$
“Cutting spend by half sounded like a threat until we saw the first two steps land with volume flat. Now it's the report I open first.”
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