I want to be upfront about something: I did not walk into Ramp Nutrition as an Amazon expert. I started this brand with a product I believed in — liposomal liquid vitamins — and a lot of confidence from my marketing background. What I didn't have was any real experience running Amazon PPC from scratch. The 421% ACOS wasn't something I inherited. That was me, learning in real time with real money on the line.
This post is not a flexing post. It's a documentation of what I tried, what broke, and the workflow that's actually working for me now. I'm still figuring it out — I'll tell you that upfront too.
The Early Mistakes
When I launched, I did what most first-time Amazon sellers do: I set up automatic campaigns, set a budget, and watched the money disappear. Automatic campaigns are great for discovery but terrible as your only strategy. I had no manual campaigns, no negative keyword lists, no separation between product types. Everything was in one bucket getting spent at whatever Amazon decided to spend it on.
On top of that, my listings weren't optimized. I hired a designer through Upwork to update my main images and A+ content, and brought in a videographer for product video content. That alone made a measurable difference in conversion rate — which, by the way, is just as important as ACOS. A great ACOS on a listing that doesn't convert is still a losing business.
Building the Workflow That Works For Me
Here's the cadence I run now, roughly:
Weekly reports: Every Monday I pull my search term report, campaign performance report, and inventory report. I built a simple automated report through Make.com that compiles these and sends them to my inbox so I'm not logging into Seller Central every day trying to piece things together.
Campaign structure: I now run campaigns per product, not per brand. Each product has its own automatic campaign (low budget, discovery only) and its own manual campaign broken into exact, phrase, and broad match ad groups. Keeping them separate means I can actually see what's working per SKU instead of everything blurring together.
Negative keywords: This was the single biggest unlock. Every week I go through the search term report and add irrelevant queries to my negative list. Irrelevant clicks were eating a massive chunk of my budget. Building the negative list is unglamorous work but it compounds — the longer you do it, the cleaner your traffic gets.
PPC and SEO Working Together
One thing I didn't fully appreciate early on is that Amazon PPC and organic rank aren't separate systems — they influence each other. Running PPC on your target keywords, even at a loss initially, helps boost organic rank for those terms over time as sales velocity increases. I now think about PPC spend partially as an SEO investment, not just an advertising cost.
Getting Reviews: Vine and Automated Follow-Ups
Reviews are oxygen for an Amazon listing and getting them is harder than it looks. I enrolled in Amazon Vine early to seed initial reviews on new products. It's not cheap but it's legitimate and it worked. I also installed an automated review request app that sends follow-up sequences after confirmed delivery — fully within Amazon's Terms of Service. The combination of Vine for initial velocity and automation for ongoing review collection has been the right one-two for me.
The Inventory and Cash Flow Problem (Still Unsolved)
I want to be honest here because most Amazon content glosses over this: inventory management and cash flow is genuinely hard and I'm still working through it. Supplements have lead times. Amazon's storage fees punish overstocking. Running out of inventory tanks your rank. The timing of when to reorder, how much to order, and how to fund it against the cycle of payouts from Amazon is a real operational challenge.
I don't have a clean answer here yet. What I do know is that cash flow needs to be part of your PPC decision-making — if you're cash-constrained, running aggressive PPC to juice rank isn't always the right move, even if the ACOS math looks fine in isolation.
What I'm Building Next
One of the things on my list is building a simple app to track competitor pricing on a weekly basis. Pricing is such a significant factor in whether someone actually buys your product — but manually checking 10 competitor listings every week doesn't scale. I want a lightweight dashboard that pulls this automatically so I can make pricing decisions with actual data rather than gut feel.
I'm also still exploring how to use Amazon's advertising tools to better support SEO outcomes, particularly around new keyword discovery and long-tail terms that have real purchase intent but lower competition.
The honest summary: I started with zero Amazon experience, lost money learning, built a workflow that's working better, and I'm still learning. If you're building an Amazon brand and you're in the messy middle of it — welcome to the club. Keep pulling the search term reports.