Most Amazon PPC agencies will show you an ACoS drop and a logo wall. Neither tells you how they will treat your account on a Tuesday in month four. These are the questions we would ask if we were on the buying side.
About the people
1. Who exactly will run my account, and how many accounts do they run? Senior specialists with fewer than ten accounts can know your margins by heart. A junior with forty cannot. Ask for the name, not the org chart.
2. Will I talk to that person, or to an account manager? Hand-offs between the person who does the work and the person you talk to are where decisions get lost.
3. Have you managed accounts in my category and marketplace? Amazon.de behaves differently from Amazon.com in search behaviour, pricing pressure and review velocity. German copy written by a native matters.
About the method
4. What is my break-even ACoS, and how do you set targets per product? If the answer is one account-wide ACoS target, they are not managing to profit.
5. Do you report TACoS and organic vs. paid split? An agency that only reports ACoS can look great while your organic sales decline.
6. How much of the work is automated, and who reviews the rules? Software is fine. Unsupervised software is not. Ask to see a rule set.
7. What happens to campaign structure when we start? "We rebuild everything on day one" risks a sales dip. "We touch nothing" means no improvement. The right answer is a staged restructure with the original campaigns kept as fallback.
About the terms
8. Is there a minimum contract term? Month-to-month means they expect to earn your business every month. Twelve-month lock-ins mean the opposite.
9. How is the fee calculated? A percentage of ad spend rewards spending. A flat fee or a fee tied to profit does not. Know which incentive you are buying.
10. Who owns the campaigns, data and reports if we part ways? Everything should live in your advertising account, built under your login, exportable at any time.
About proof
11. Can I speak to a current client in a similar situation? Not a testimonial. A phone call.
12. What would make you tell me advertising is not the right lever for my product? The honest answer involves conversion rate, price position and reviews. An agency that never says "fix the listing first" will spend your money on a page that does not convert.
Our answers
Senior specialist, fewer than ten accounts each, same person audits and runs. Break-even and TACoS in every report. Staged restructure. Month to month, flat fee. Everything in your account. And yes, we regularly tell sellers to fix the listing before they spend another euro on ads.
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