ACOS from 41% to 22% while sales grew 63%

Twelve campaigns, most of them auto, all sharing the same budget, bidding on everything from brand names to unrelated categories. The break-even ACOS for the hero product was 28%; the account was running at 41%. Organic rank had also slipped because paid sales carried the ranking and the ads were being switched off whenever cash ran short.

• Rebuilt the account by intent: exact-match campaigns for the terms that already converted, a phrase tier for discovery, auto campaigns only for harvesting.
• Bid caps derived from each product's break-even ACOS, set per keyword rather than per campaign.
• A 480-term negative list built from six months of search-term reports, refreshed weekly.
• Weekly TACOS report to the owner so decisions were made on total profit, not ad-console ACOS.

By day 90: ACOS 22% (from 41%), ad sales up 38%, total sales up 63% as organic rank recovered on the four main keywords. Ad spend fell slightly in absolute terms. The account has run at 20–24% ACOS since.

Why it worked

The account was managed on spend, not on profit. Once every bid was tied to the break-even point of the product behind it, the campaigns that could never pay for themselves became obvious and were cut. The freed budget went to terms that already converted, so sales grew while cost fell.

What to check on your own ads

• Work out the break-even ACOS for each product before looking at any campaign.
• Separate discovery from performance. Automatic campaigns find terms; exact-match campaigns scale them.
• Read the search term report weekly and add negatives. It is the cheapest saving in the whole system.
• Report TACOS, not only ACOS, so organic sales are part of the picture.

Our free ACOS calculator gives the break-even figure in a minute.