The Situation
When Rust-Oleum approached Digital Gearbox, their Amazon Ads account was in need of strategic refinement. An initial audit revealed:
Campaigns were not structured to differentiate between brand and non-brand effectively.
This meant that generic keywords and brand terms competed for budget, limiting scale and clarity, and ROAS was being inflated as a large portion of revenue was coming from the brand terms.
Bids weren’t being adjusted enough based on performance. Many poorly performing keywords were still at bidding at average bid levels, leading to wasted spend.
Although some irrelevant terms were blocked through negative keyword additions, there were still gaps.
Finally some stronger performing campaigns were frequently running out of budget by mid-day, causing missed coverage and sales opportunities.
Rust-Oleum’s overall ROAS was declining month on month, and it was clear that they needed help to get their account performing at their targeted ROAS through a more hands on approach.
Our Solution
When we took over the account our first steps included:
Brand term exclusion: We negatived the Rust-Oleum brand name from all campaigns to focus on new customer acquisition.
Campaign rebuilds: We rolled out new Sponsored Product campaigns with refined ad group and keyword structures.
Bid optimisation: We ensured regular bid adjustments were happening, increasing bids on high-performing keywords and reducing wasteful spend.
Content expansion: We added missing best-sellers and product variations (e.g. colour options) into campaigns to capture more traffic.
The Results
Amazon Ads state that a ROAS of 2 is industry average for users of their ad platform, but a good ROAS to aim for is between 3-4.
Prior to our takeover the account was running with a ROAS of 4.39. This however was being inflated with Branded queries, which was making up a large proportion of their ad revenue and were sales that we were in agreement that they would have collected organically anyway.
The impact of the changes we made was immediately clear, and by the 2nd month, we had not only reversed the trend of their ROAS falling, we had broken the ROAS target of 4.5 and were able to achieve a ROAS over 5 by the 2nd month’s management, with the brand terms completely excluded.
We have since been able to continue to run activity above their target, and well above industry averages
What The Client Had To Say
"We brought Digital Gearbox to provide essential support for our Amazon Advertising during a critical period for our business. They proved to be a dependable and professional partner and we were incredibly grateful for their collaboration and support in reaching our goals."
Steve Pattison, Head of E-commerce EMEA
