Note: All business and company names in our case studies are anonymized for client privacy. All metrics, timelines, and operational details are real and independently verifiable on request.
The starting point
A heritage confectionery brand with massive name recognition was leaving demand on the table. The brand was already on Amazon, but advertising was small, defensive, and reactive — a couple of branded-keyword campaigns, no real category coverage, no Sponsored Brand Video, no DSP.
The team knew the brand was beloved. What they didn’t have was a system for turning that brand love into category dominance on Amazon. The existing setup was doing the bare minimum: defending the name and little else, while the rest of the category was wide open.
That’s a common place for a famous brand to get stuck. The name recognition is so strong that the channel produces decent numbers on autopilot, which masks how much is being left behind. Decent is the enemy here.
The diagnosis
The brand was undermonetized on its own search terms and invisible on the category terms where casual shoppers were starting their journey. ROAS was lopsided — strong on branded but bleeding on the few non-brand experiments that had been tried. The branded number looked great precisely because it was the only thing being measured, and a great branded ROAS is mostly a sign you’re harvesting demand you already had.
We saw a brand whose halo could carry a much larger media footprint if we built the targeting carefully and kept ACoS disciplined. The non-brand experiments hadn’t failed because non-brand doesn’t work for this brand — they’d failed because they were run without structure or a target to hit.
The playbook
Branded protection at full coverage. No competitor was going to win the brand’s own search term. We locked branded with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Brand Video. Owning your own name is table stakes — a competitor’s ad on your branded search costs them dearly and costs you the customer you already earned.
Sponsored Display category expansion. Audience-based targeting against shoppers searching for adjacent confectionery, with creative tuned to the brand’s heritage story. This is where the halo earns its keep: the same impression that’s expensive for an unknown brand converts for a famous one.
Tiered keyword strategy. Brand · category · competitor · long-tail. Each tier had a target ACoS and a fixed monthly cap so nothing ran away. The caps are the part most teams skip — without them, the broad tiers quietly eat the budget and the efficiency erodes before anyone notices.
Subscribe & Save lift. We pushed subscription discounts on the multipacks to convert one-time buyers into recurring revenue, which compounded the LTV math against the ad spend. A subscriber doesn’t need to be re-acquired next month, so every subscription quietly improves the return on every ad dollar that came before it.
Catalog hygiene. Listings rebuilt with A+ Content telling the brand story, 7 images each, mobile-first copy, and infographics for the multipack value math. You can drive all the traffic you want, but if the listing doesn’t close, you’re paying to send shoppers to a leaky page.
The result
The portfolio runs at 10.06x ROAS on roughly $24K of monthly ad spend, generating $242K in attributed revenue per month. The brand is now visible in branded and non-branded search, and the Subscribe & Save base provides a floor under the topline.
What worked
Treating brand love as a multiplier rather than a substitute. The brand recognition meant a competitor’s intercept attempt cost them; for us, the same media drove conversion. Once we proved the unit economics on Sponsored Display category expansion, we had the budget to lean in further.
The reason it compounded is that each layer made the next one cheaper. A famous name lowers the cost of category expansion, category expansion feeds the Subscribe & Save base, and the subscription base underwrites more aggressive acquisition. Build the layers in the right order and they reinforce each other instead of competing for budget.
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“ClearSight took our Amazon ads from a side project to the strongest channel in the portfolio. They moved fast and the math worked the whole time.”