Pull four numbers yourself from Seller Central: cost of customer acquisition trend, organic share of revenue, conversion rate by product, and return rate. Then read your last three monthly plans side by side. That takes an afternoon and tells you more than any conversation with the agency will.
The short version
- Do it yourself first. Four numbers, no cooperation required.
- Organic share of revenue rising toward paid is the clearest failure signal.
- Put three monthly plans side by side and count repeated items.
- Compare ACoS to the product's stage, not to an industry average.
- Then ask them to explain the gaps. The response is the real audit.
The four numbers
I run Flapen with 50 operators managing about 70 brands, and the majority are profitable within their first year. These four are all available in your own Seller Central and advertising reports.
| # | Number | Where | What bad looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cost of customer acquisition, trended | Ad reports plus total revenue | Rising while units are flat |
| 2 | Organic share of revenue | Total revenue minus ad-attributed | Falling every quarter |
| 3 | Conversion rate by product | Business Reports, unit session percentage | Flat or declining over 6 months |
| 4 | Return rate by product | Returns reports | Rising, unaddressed |
1. Cost of customer acquisition
Total marketing spend divided by new customers acquired, trended over twelve months. If your agency reports only ACoS and spend, calculate this yourself.
Rising cost of customer acquisition at flat unit volume means you are buying the same revenue for more money. It is the clearest quantitative sign that management is not working, and it usually predates any revenue decline by two quarters.
2. Organic share of revenue
Take total revenue and subtract ad-attributed sales. Track the ratio monthly.
Falling organic share means the account is becoming dependent on paid. Every other metric can look fine while this deteriorates, and it is the number that tells you what happens if you ever pause spend. An agency building an asset moves this up over time. An agency renting you sales moves it down.
3 and 4. Conversion and return rate
Conversion rate caps everything advertising can achieve. If it has been flat for six months while spend has grown, ads are being asked to compensate for a listing problem, and no amount of ad spend fixes a conversion problem.
Return rate is the quiet one. Rising return rate on a product is a sourcing or listing accuracy issue that will eventually damage rating and ranking, and it should have been raised long before you found it yourself.
The plan test
Print your last three monthly plans or reports and lay them side by side.
Count initiatives that appear in all three. Those are things that have not shipped. One repeated item is normal. Three or more means the constraint is capacity rather than strategy, and the question to ask is how many brands your named account manager carries. We run about 1.4 brands per operator, and above eight nothing moves quickly.
Also check whether ACoS targets have changed. A new product needs aggressive ACoS to build velocity and ranking, a mature product needs efficient ACoS to protect margin, and if the target has not moved in a year while your catalog has matured, nobody is managing to stage.
The conversation that follows
Once you have the numbers, ask three questions and listen to how they are answered.
- Why has cost of customer acquisition moved this way? A specific, causal answer or a general one about market conditions.
- What is our organic share of revenue and where is it heading? They should already know.
- What have you recommended we stop doing? Nothing, across a whole catalog, is an answer.
The quality of the explanation matters more than the numbers. Numbers move for reasons partly outside anyone's control. What is inside their control is whether they saw it, told you, and proposed something specific.
What most agencies will not tell you
Agency reporting is built from spend and sales because both usually rise, and both respond directly to budget. A report on those two can present a deteriorating business as a success story for a year.
The two numbers that would expose it are the two most commonly missing. That is not usually deception, it is selection: nobody volunteers the metric that can look bad while everything else looks good.
The other thing: a second opinion is cheap. Most agencies will audit an account for free, ours returns a written report within 48 hours, and you are not obliged to do anything with it. Getting an outside read on your own account once a year is normal practice in every other professional service and strangely rare in this one.
Related answers
- Red flags your Amazon agency is underperforming
- Signs your Amazon partner is underperforming
- KPIs an Amazon agency should report weekly
- When to switch Amazon agency
- Hiring an Amazon agency: the complete guide
If you want a second read on your current agency's work, that audit is free at Flapen.
