Supplement brand: sales up 28% on 43% less ad spend

Year two out-sold year one while spending 43% less on ads.

The situation

This brand sells hair-care and wellness supplements on Amazon US, about ten products. It had two years of advertising history behind it and a catalog written in the language supplement sellers get into trouble for. The question was simple: where was the money going, and what was it buying?

What the two-year review found

We pulled 25 months of sales, traffic and advertising data and split it into eras. The account had a period of organic-only sales, a heavy-spend stretch that ran at well over 200% ACoS, and a later, more disciplined stretch that ran near 70%.

• Year two beat year one on every efficiency measure. Sales grew about 28% while ad spend fell 43%. ACoS dropped from 235% to 85% and return on ad spend rose from 0.43 to 1.18.
• One month changed the picture. In September 2025 spend dropped by roughly 87% and impressions by roughly 90%. ACoS went from 291% to 69%. Cutting about 83% of the ad budget cost only 5.6% of revenue, which tells you how much of that spend was never earning its keep.
• Three listings absorbed 29% of all ad spend. One of them ran above 1,000% ACoS across its history. They were the first place to look for waste.

Where the growth actually came from

This part matters, because it is easy to oversell. Orders were flat across the two years (728 to 714) and sessions fell 37%. The sales growth came from a higher average order value, which rose about 30%. The brand sold the same number of orders at a better price per order and stopped paying heavily for traffic that did not convert.

The constraint the review could not remove was click-through rate. Over two years it sat around 0.075%, against a category range closer to 0.30 to 0.50%. Until the listings and main images earn more clicks, advertising has a ceiling on this account. That is the next item to work on.

The listing problem

The catalog had a second, quieter problem. Titles, bullets and descriptions made drug and disease claims: efficacy percentages, "clinically tested", language about preventing conditions. Claims like these put listings at risk of suppression. The direction we took was to strip every listing back to compliant structure and function language, not to keep the claims and hope.

We also found:

• A shampoo filed under an over-the-counter hair-regrowth category, which pulls a hair-care product into drug-category rules. We moved it to the correct category.
• A deprecated variation theme on the hair-care variation family.
• Backend search terms stuffed well past 1,000 bytes across several fields when Amazon reads roughly 250.

What we did

• Rewrote titles, bullets and backend terms to compliant language, listing by listing, and flagged descriptions and A+ content that still carried claims.
• Built a monthly performance report from the advertising platform's own history, which reaches back much further than Amazon's 60-day API window.

The takeaway

Efficiency gains can hide an unfixed ceiling. The account got much cheaper to run, but click-through is still the limit, and the honest next step is fixing the listings that earn the click rather than buying more impressions.