You’d think that Amazon ads would be easy enough to implement. Set up a ton of campaigns, designate some keywords, bid, and let the sales roll in. But somewhere along the line, a lot of sellers get lost in the weeds; finance spirals out of control into disastrous territory for the rest of their business; or performance underwhelms no matter how much is thrown at it.

Recognizing when it’s time to collaborate with professionals for management can save you thousands upon thousands in lost and missed profits and help you expand in ways you would never be able to without them. Here are some signs it’s time to stop managing Amazon advertising yourself.

Your ACoS Is Skyrocketing

The Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) is one of the easiest markers to determine that something is wrong. When your ad spend increases faster than the sales it brings in, there’s something fundamentally wrong with a campaign’s structure, targeting, or even bidding.

For example, most sellers try to reduce this by overly decreasing bids to the point where campaigns are eliminated. This is unnecessary as drastic measures reduce visibility and attempts to gain sales which sellers either stress to maintain ACoS or continue spending ad dollars on with no hope for profitability, bringing all efforts to naught.

Neither solution answers the question of why the ACoS is so high in the first place. Professional Amazon marketers understand when ACoS is truly too high (new products or heavily saturated categories) and when it’s something structural that can be resolved through systematic changes, not surface-level alterations.

You’re Spending Hours Managing Ads

Time is money; if you’re spending time running your own ads, you’re not spending time creating quality products and assessing your re-order needs, and paying attention to customer service inquiries.

If managing ads requires 10 hours in your week, 15 hours per week, it becomes apparent that sellers must come to terms with this lack of potential for growth not worth it anymore.

How much is your time worth? If you’re spending 15 hours a week managing your ads yourself – and your time is worth something (which it should be) – then you’re spending more on your ads than a professional who can manage who can offer you more in time efficiencies.

This is why companies like RocketAMS exist, PPC management and listing optimization and design professionals that give founders back valuable hours that they would otherwise be doing something only they can do best.

Your Listings Aren’t Converting Visitors

If you’re still generating visits through PPC ad spend but not converting visitors into buyers, there’s a problem with your actual listings and how they appeal to the interested. Most sellers fail to acknowledge this and focus exclusively on getting traffic, without realizing they’re not converting purchased traffic because their listings themselves won’t get it done.

Management professionals take a holistic approach – PPC attracts traffic; optimized listings create the value necessary to convert traffic into purchases via compelling listings themselves plus graphic design capabilities. If this cannot happen in tandem, any traffic created was an avoidable mis-spend on PPC clicks that ultimately won’t convert.

You’re Losing Sight of What’s Working

As campaigns accumulate in complexity and number, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s working, what’s not, and why it’s working or not. There are many campaign types, thousands of keywords and match types that create differentiation elements that make it difficult to assess needs.

Professional Amazon advertising management knows how to track things through the account structure – they know what’s doing what and how each element supports or detracts from each level – and which important metrics matter versus those that are just red herrings.

Competitors Are Always Above You

If competitors selling similar products continually appear above your listings – sponsored and organic – in top positions within search results for your industry category, it’s either a higher budget or better campaign structure that’s aligned within the algorithm for a better position.

Competing with such supremacy requires knowing how to position bids but also structure campaigns for relevant scores. This means knowing how to leverage keywords that they’re ignoring but you can win, or how a budget spread carefully among different types of campaigns empowers better distribution than reckless overlapping campaigns that operate unnecessarily competitively against each other.

You’re Only Running Automatic Campaigns

There is nothing wrong with automatic campaigns; they are a great starting point; however, if you’re going to rely on these types of campaigns long term with no other solutions going forward, you’re missing out on plenty of accessible profits. Manual campaigns generally bring exponentially better results – the only caveat is that it requires a trained professional with practical experience to know useful keyword research stages (plus match type nuances) along with recourse-type strategies like negative keywords or trials – to make this worthwhile.

Your Budget Is Gone

It’s one thing if your daily budget runs out by noon due to clicks accrued overnight – it’s another if you give yourself a much larger budget just to accommodate yet fails to accommodate due to known inefficiencies or efforts merely burned as your campaign died down yesterday since you logged off.

When you have a professional working with your budget, they can calibrate bidding by different times on different days of the week so your daily budget intended for times most likely converting will last throughout the week as it should minus clicks during low-converting business hours where little is being manufactured anyway.

You’re Not Using All Ads Available

Amazon has different sponsorship opportunities – sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display and more – which serve different purposes for different purchasing scenarios. Most sellers who successfully manage their own campaigns use one or two types at max – none who mesh or blend budgets that could otherwise maximize potential profitability across the board should they know better and had more intention than siloed thinking.

Knowing how each ad works by itself and when they should be working together and how the budget should be applied overall takes experienced knowledge that most sellers lack when operating alone.

Your Performance Has Plateaued

The plateau is perhaps the most disheartening – sales flatline from advertising plus profit and despite budget increases assigned daily plus new keyword additions or different combined campaigns or retouched ads – and nothing is changing anything anymore.

At this point it’s clear enough sellers have hit the wall themselves as far as what they can do based upon effort vs what’s needed in a campaign requiring expertise and strategies unlocked that they otherwise couldn’t access since they’ve been trying to run their business simultaneously.

Time To Make The Call

It’s not a question of admissions defeat when it’s time to seek out professional Amazon advertising management; it’s acknowledging specialized efforts can do a better job than a jack-of-all-trades seller whose only game is entrepreneurship without anyone necessarily focused on marketing.

It’s not a question of whether it will cost money – but instead whether it will cost more than what’s available without such an investment from professionals capable of leveraging expert efforts across the board.

More often than not successful Amazon sellers come to this tipping point and it’s clear how long sellers have waited far too long – and recognizing sooner rather than later saves months if not years down the line by poorly managed failed ad spend – and the signs are not failures but good common success points that show it’s time to get specialized help over this little bump in the road to success instead.