Northstar NutritionHealth & Wellness
Rebuilding a supplement catalogue around contribution margin
A 40-SKU supplement brand growing revenue while losing money on half its catalogue. We rebuilt the campaign architecture around margin tiers and shifted spend toward the SKUs that could carry it.
Engagement: Full-service management · 14 months
Headline results
+126%
Revenue
Months 1–14 vs prior 14
-31%
TACoS
Total ad cost of sale
+24%
Conversion rate
Unit session percentage
Illustrative figures. This case study is demonstration content. Replace the brand, quote and every number here with verified, client-approved data before publishing — see src/content/case-studies.ts.
The challenge
What was actually wrong.
Northstar had grown to eight figures on Amazon with a single blended ACoS target applied across a catalogue whose margins ranged from 14% to 58%.
Revenue was still rising, but contribution margin had been falling for three consecutive quarters. Nobody could say which products were responsible because the reporting stopped at ad-attributed revenue.
Background
The account had accumulated over 600 campaigns across four years and three previous agencies. Naming conventions had changed twice, so portfolio-level reporting was meaningless.
Sixty-one percent of ad spend was going to branded search terms, which produced an excellent ACoS and almost no incremental revenue.
Strategy
What we decided to do — and in what order.
Load real costs before touching a bid
We loaded landed cost, fee and return data per SKU and produced a contribution margin view. Eleven SKUs were losing money at their current ad spend.
Segment by margin, not by product type
Campaigns were rebuilt into three margin tiers, each with its own efficiency target, rather than one blanket ACoS goal.
Separate defence from acquisition
Branded campaigns were isolated and capped so brand defence could not disguise acquisition performance in the reporting.
Use paid placement to earn organic position
On 40 mid-tail terms where the brand ranked between positions 12 and 25, we ran a deliberate velocity push and tracked organic movement weekly.
Execution
The work, week by week.
- Migrated the campaign structure in four staged waves over nine weeks, holding legacy campaigns live until replacements built placement history.
- Reduced branded spend from 61% to 22% of total advertising budget over two quarters.
- Rewrote 28 detail pages against the top objections found in review and returns mining.
- Introduced a weekly search term harvest and a negation protocol with a defined data threshold.
- Moved reporting to contribution margin by ASIN, reviewed in a fixed monthly session with the founder and CFO.
Before vs after
The movement.
| Metric | Before | After | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad spend on branded terms | 61% | 22% | Share of total advertising budget |
| Campaigns in account | 614 | 88 | After consolidation |
| SKUs below breakeven after ad spend | 11 | 2 | Two retained deliberately as entry products |
| Organic share of sales | 38% | 57% | Trailing 90-day average |
View the underlying data as a table
| Period | Indexed value |
|---|---|
| Q1 | 100 |
| Q2 | 118 |
| Q3 | 149 |
| Q4 | 176 |
| Q5 | 226 |
Timeline
How it unfolded.
Weeks 1–4
Diagnose
Cost data loaded, margin model built, 600+ campaigns audited and mapped.
Weeks 5–13
Restructure
Staged campaign migration in four waves, branded spend capped.
Months 4–8
Content and rank
28 detail pages rebuilt; velocity push on 40 mid-tail terms.
Months 9–14
Scale
Budget redeployed to high-margin tiers; two new product lines launched into the structure.
Key learnings
What we'd tell the next brand.
Blended ACoS targets are the single most common cause of profitable-looking, unprofitable accounts.
Cutting branded spend reduced total ad sales in month one and raised contribution margin from month two. Expect the dip and plan for it.
Campaign consolidation was worth more than any bid change. You cannot optimise what you cannot read.
The first thing they did was tell us which of our products were losing money. Nobody had ever shown us that.
Placeholder attribution. Client names and quotes are published only with written permission.
Services used in this engagement
Amazon PPC
Sponsored Products, Brands and Display managed to contribution margin, not to a vanity ACoS target.
ExploreAmazon SEO
Relevance, indexation and organic rank work that reduces how much of your revenue has to be bought.
ExploreFull-service Amazon management
Strategy, advertising, search, content and operations run by one accountable team against one plan.
Explore
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