Amazon is not your brand website with a buy button. It is a marketplace that taxes attention, ranks listings like search engines, and will spend your money the moment you give it a credit card. Girard Media runs Amazon as a paid channel inside a buying desk, with the same adult reporting we use everywhere else.
Tactical campaign structure lives in our Amazon PPC campaign strategy. This page is the managed-service version: catalog, search terms, creative, and who is accountable.
Amazon is a closed marketplace, not a brand site
On your site, you own the URL, the analytics, and the offer. On Amazon, you rent a shelf. Amazon decides the shelf, the query, and a large part of the click. Treating Sponsored Products like "just another Google campaign" is how brands wake up to a catalog of bleeding terms and a Buy Box they do not hold.
Before we spend, we check four ugly facts:
- Can you actually win the Buy Box on the SKUs you want to advertise?
- Is the catalog clean (titles, backends, variations) or is the algorithm reading garbage?
- Which terms already convert without ads, so we do not bid against ourselves blindly?
- Who owns inventory so we do not advertise a stockout?
If those are wrong, we fix them or we refuse the spend. Girard Media will not run a pretty PPC structure on a broken listing. That is how agencies look busy.
We also will not pretend Amazon replaces your owned site. Marketplace demand is real. Brand equity that only lives on Amazon is a lease. We keep a path off-Amazon for customers you can still talk to. For the paid search mindset on open web, see Microsoft Ads as a contrast: you at least own the landing page.
Search term control and catalog hygiene
The work that makes Amazon ads profitable is not a bid tweak. It is term hygiene and catalog hygiene, every week.
Girard Media's desk:
- Harvests search terms into exact where they earn, and negatives where they steal.
- Splits brand defense from conquest so you can see what you pay to keep your own name.
- Stops advertising child SKUs that cannibalize a parent you actually want to rank.
- Watches placement (top of search vs product pages) as a creative and margin question, not a default.
We do this on a schedule you can see. "The algorithm will sort it" is not a schedule.
Brand terms deserve their own P&L. Paying Amazon to rank for your own name can be rational when competitors bid on it. It can also be a quiet tax. We separate that spend so you can see the tax. We do not bury brand defense inside an auto campaign and call the blended number a win.
Catalog work is part of the engagement when it blocks spend. Titles, bullets, and backend terms are sales copy in a search index. We write them like sales copy. We do not keyword-stuff them into porridge. If your team must approve every character because of legal or retailer rules, we build that into the SLA. We do not go rogue on a regulated SKU.
Creative and A+ as a sales floor
On Amazon, the listing is the landing page. A+ modules, images, and video are not brand decoration. They are the closer after a paid click you already bought.
Girard Media produces those assets when they are in scope, and we treat them as paid-for assets you keep. The ongoing testing (which module, which image, which short video) is the service. If we stop, testing stops. The files remain yours.
We will not promise a universal conversion rate. Category, price, reviews, and Prime eligibility move the number more than a headline. We will show you, privately, what changed after a module shipped.
Review velocity and rating are commercial facts. If the public proof is damaged, that is a reputation problem as much as an ads problem. Pouring spend onto a 3.2-star listing is a choice we will argue against.
Managed Amazon, reported like any other paid channel
You get a weekly English note: spend, sales Amazon attributes, terms we added or killed, listings we touched, and one decision we need from you (price, stock, or a creative yes/no).
You do not get a 40-tab spreadsheet as a substitute for a point of view. You do not get a login and a wave. If Girard Media is on the account, we are on the account.
This is a managed service. Campaigns we operate live in the seat we run. Your Brand Registry, your seller account, and your catalog data remain yours. If that split is unclear in a proposal, ask. We would rather pause than blur it.
Inventory is a media problem. Advertising a SKU that will stock out in nine days trains Amazon to show you, then trains the shopper to bounce. We would rather pause the campaign than buy that bounce. Your ops team stays in the loop. We will not "just keep it on" because the campaign looks healthy in the console.
If Amazon is already a meaningful slice of revenue and the account feels like a slot machine, get in touch. Bring last month's search-term report and your top ten SKUs. We will tell you, in that meeting, whether the problem is bids, listings, or the mix of brand defense versus conquest.