Home and outdoor hardware brand: one set of goals across three marketplaces

Eight US goals adopted at 32.1% ACoS, UK campaigns back from dark, and DE from zero managed goals to two.

The situation

This brand sells ratchet straps, screen doors, door curtains and related products, around 86 SKUs. Advertising ran in the US, UK and Germany, each marketplace set up on its own. There were inconsistent goals, no shared view of performance, and, as we found, a good deal of live state nobody had checked.

What we found

• Campaigns in the UK had gone dark. A UK goal sat in a Paused state. In the bid-management platform, pausing a goal also pauses the Amazon campaigns beneath it, so three campaigns had not served since about September. Nobody had noticed because the historical numbers still looked large when we viewed a long date range.
• Germany had no managed goals at all. Its campaigns ran without a goal driving bids.
• A subtle platform trap. Some goals, called multi-ad-group goals, live on a different route and show "--" in the target column, because they use an ACoS ceiling plus a priority metric. A scrape of the goal list would silently miss them, so we open each goal and read its real configuration.
• The estate was larger than it looked. US had 28 goals, 8 active and 20 paused. We verified each one individually instead of inferring from spend.

What we did

• Adopted every active US goal onto the new platform, deleted the old ones, re-enabled the campaigns, and verified them live. Over the lookback window those eight goals covered roughly $220,000 in spend and ran at 32.1% ACoS.
• Re-enabled the UK campaigns under an existing goal at a 26% target and brought two German campaigns under goals at 30% targets.
• Set targets per product line. The screen-door products and the strap products have different margins, so each has its own break-even and scale band. We stopped using one account-wide number. A target calibrated to the wrong line reads as over-boosted on the line with the thinner margin, and we found exactly that in earlier work.
• Limited placement changes to campaigns the platform manages. Edits to the other campaigns are overwritten or fought by the bid engine. Everything is entered natively in the platform instead of through bulk files.

The title review

The brand is the one client with real keyword evidence on disk: thirteen Amazon Ads keyword exports with impressions, clicks, conversions and attributed sales per target. Instead of guessing keywords from the listings, we ran an evidence-scored title review across 40 over-length titles in 22 product families. Each candidate was scored against the actual data and checked against Amazon's rules.

What we check every time

• Read goal status, not spend. A big historical figure can sit on top of a paused goal.
• Verify live state in the platform, not from cached data.
• Treat "all enabled and serving" as something to prove, campaign by campaign.

The takeaway

Consolidating accounts is mostly a matter of finding the things nobody knew were off. The gain here was less a new tactic than making the whole estate consistent, then confirming it was live.