Strategic Consulting & Audits

Category and brand maturity drive the split more than any universal rule. For a mature brand in a branded-search-dominated category (established supplements, legacy CPG), a reasonable starting split is 65% Sponsored Products / 15% Sponsored Brands / 10% Sponsored Display / 10% DSP. Brands in commodity categories without a dominant search term benefit from pushing Sponsored Brands higher (25%) and DSP harder (20%) to earn share of voice rather than defend it. The common mistake: brands running $50K/month on Sponsored Products with zero DSP because Sponsored Products feels more measurable, leaving 30–40% of addressable demand unreached.

Holdout-market testing is the only clean answer. Pause Amazon ad spend in a geographically controlled holdout market for 3–4 weeks while running normally elsewhere, and measure DTC lift in the control versus holdout. AMC's cross-channel overlap reports help but require DSP plus a non-trivial identity stitch between Amazon shoppers and DTC CRM. Anything short of holdout testing is correlation, not causation, and correlation gets you a 70% overattributed halo number that justifies any budget decision you want. Most brands we work with discover actual halo is 15–25% of what their previous agency was claiming.

Start by modeling contribution margin over the repurchase window, not the first order. If your LTV looks like $180 revenue against $45 ad spend over 18 months for a supplement brand, your LTV-adjusted break-even TACOS is 25%, not the 15% that first-order accounting would suggest. The catch is that Amazon's closed-garden attribution doesn't show repurchase cleanly. You need Subscribe & Save data plus brand-level order history to model it, and most agencies don't build the view. This is where AMC plus a warehouse pipe (iDerive for us, something similar elsewhere) earns back its cost inside of a year.

When three conditions align: (1) chargebacks and AVN (Annual Vendor Negotiations) allowances are eating more margin than the Vendor-exclusive advertising benefits create; (2) your brand has enough organic pull that you don't need Amazon's 1P merchandising to move units; (3) you have the operational capacity to run your own ads, catalog, and inventory planning. For most mid-size brands, the flip pays back inside 6–9 months once chargeback erosion crosses ~4% of 1P revenue and co-op asks cross 8%. The transition itself is painful. Expect 30–60 days of revenue disruption as ASINs migrate.

When you’ve outgrown pre-built reports, meaning your questions no longer match any canned dashboard. Helium 10 and similar tools are rules-based: they tell you what’s happening against known benchmarks. AMC is query-based: it answers questions no one’s pre-built for you ("what’s my path-to-purchase overlap between Sponsored Products and DSP for new-to-brand customers who came from competitor-conquest keywords?"). The trigger for graduating is usually (a) DSP spend above $50K/month, (b) cross-ad-type path analysis Sponsored Ads reports can’t produce, or (c) stitching Amazon behavior into a larger data model across DTC, retail-media networks, and CRM. Under those conditions, AMC typically cuts 15–25% of ad waste inside two quarters. Outside them — a $2M brand running Sponsored Products only — AMC is overkill and a dashboard tool tells you what you need.

In the first 30 days with a new Amazon agency, expect discovery, audit, and access handoff, not live campaign changes. Days 31–60 bring foundation changes (campaign restructures, listing optimization, creative briefs). Days 61–90 produce the first real performance signal and a rolling 90-day plan. A good agency spends days 1–30 auditing your account, documenting baseline performance, and identifying quick-win opportunities. You should expect very little execution in the first two weeks, reporting and diagnostic calls instead. Days 61–90 produce initial performance signal from the foundation changes, first strategic recommendations based on actual data, and alignment on a rolling 90-day plan for the next quarter. If an agency is “running campaigns” in week 1, they’re either skipping the audit or rebadging work they did on another account.

A 12-month retainer is industry-standard for full-service Amazon agencies. Neither inherently normal nor a red flag on its own. The real signal is in the terms. 12-month contracts are standard because account integration, catalog work, and creative production have real switching costs. Agencies write the math assuming they’ll amortize those over a year. Red flags in a 12-month contract: no mid-term off-ramp clause, termination penalty exceeding one month of retainer, or required pre-payment for more than one quarter. Good 12-month terms include a 90-day trial period with no-fault termination, 30-day notice for cause (underperformance against agreed KPIs), and no penalty for standard termination at natural quarter boundaries.