ACOS from 41% to 22% while sales grew 63%
Ads were 40% of revenue and the brand was losing money on every sponsored sale. Ninety days of restructuring around profit, not spend, brought ACOS to 22% and grew total sales at the same time.
Published May 2, 2026
ACOS
22%
from 41%
Total sales
+63%
vs week 1
Ad sales
+38%
TACOS
14%
from 27%
The challenge
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.
What we did
- 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.
The results
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.
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