About
I run the ad accounts I write about.
I’m Adam Finan — an Amazon PPC specialist based in Bournemouth, United Kingdom, 8 years into working inside live ad accounts rather than writing about them from the outside.
Day to day I’m Brand Director at an Amazon PPC agency, which means full ownership of a portfolio of brands: strategy, structure, bids, budgets, launches and the awkward monthly conversations when a category gets more expensive. On top of that I take a deliberately small number of independent clients, which is where this site comes in.
The work spans seven Amazon marketplaces — UK, Ireland, Germany, France and Italy in Europe, plus the US and Canada — mostly supplements, food and personal care. Categories where the search language is specific, competition is dense, and the difference between a good account and an average one is almost never the bid. It is usually structure, coverage, and whether anyone actually read the search term report.
I’ve also sold on Amazon myself. That matters more than it sounds: when you have had your own cash tied up in inventory, you stop treating ACOS as a score to optimise and start treating it as one input into whether the business makes money this quarter.
Audit before anything else
Search query performance and search term data first. I want to know where spend is being wasted and, more importantly, where it is missing entirely, before I touch a bid.
Find the coverage gaps
The biggest single lever on most accounts is proven-converting search volume with no targeting at all. Not underbid — absent. That is usually worth more than every bid adjustment combined.
Structure to match maturity
A launching SKU and an eighteen-month hero product need different structures and different bid strategies. One template across a catalogue is how the smaller lines end up subsidising the bestseller.
Budget across the whole range
Spend gets allocated across the full catalogue, not just the hero SKU. Smaller lines get the coverage they need to grow instead of sitting on autopilot.
Real, verified figures from accounts I have personally run. Brands are described at category level only — I don’t publish client names.
Hydration Supplement Brand
UKMonthly sales by month 5£100K+First 4 months£0 → £50KTaken from effectively zero to £50K/month in four months, past £100K/month by month five, then held above £95K/month for the rest of the year. Growth was the easy half — sustaining it through Q4 inventory and bid pressure was the real work.
- Structure built from scratch, not inherited
- Phased budget release tied to sell-through
- Held above £95K/month for the remainder of the year
Novelty Bath Toy Brand
USSales in 6 months from launch$111.7KOrders~11,900A new product line taken from $0 to $111.7K in sales and roughly 11,900 orders in six months. Keyword strategy was built from a full competitor niche export rather than a seed list, so the launch campaigns opened on terms competitors were already converting on.
- Full competitor niche export as the keyword source
- Launch campaigns isolated from the core account
- ~11,900 orders in the first six months
Clean & Natural Cosmetics Brand
USACOS across 3 products~3%ROAS~30xThe most efficient account in the portfolio. Three products, each on a campaign structure matched to its own maturity stage rather than one template applied across the catalogue — which is what keeps a mature hero SKU from subsidising the newer lines.
- Maturity-matched structure per product
- ~30x ROAS sustained, not a single good month
- No template-across-catalogue shortcuts
Nut-Free Seed Butter Brand
UK & USUS total sales+210.9%US orders+229.3%The same brand run across two marketplaces in parallel. UK grew +9.1% in total sales through a phased launch on a more mature account; the US grew +210.9% in sales and +229.3% in orders once dedicated campaigns were built for keywords the account had never covered.
- Two marketplaces run in parallel, not cloned
- UK: +9.1% total sales via a phased launch
- US: dedicated campaigns for previously uncovered keywords
Hangover Recovery Supplement Brand
UKTotal sales£55.0KBuilt the full campaign structure from a low base: Auto discovery feeding the rest of the account, competitor conquesting on both keyword and product targeting, ingredient-level targeting for people searching the active rather than the category, and Sponsored Brands over the top.
- Auto discovery feeding harvest into exact
- Competitor conquesting — keyword and product targeting
- Ingredient-level targeting alongside category terms
- Sponsored Brands layered over the SP base
If your account looks like one of these, let’s talk.
Audits, full campaign builds, launches and ongoing management. I keep the independent client list short because I do the work myself — there is no account manager between you and the person in the bulk sheet.