Ask every candidate which of the 5 traffic channels they actually run. There are five ways to capture traffic on Amazon: organic, paid, promotions, influencer and creator, and off-channel. Most agencies run two. If they only run organic and Sponsored Products, you are paying a full retainer for half a strategy.
The short version
- Ask which of the 5 traffic channels they run. Two out of five is the industry norm and it is the ceiling most brands hit.
- Ask how many brands each account manager carries. At Flapen it is about 1.4. Above 8 you are buying a spreadsheet, not a team.
- Ask what ACoS they would target at launch versus at maturity. One number for both means they are not adjusting to product stage.
- Ask what would make them tell you to stop. An agency without kill criteria bills you forever.
- Make them size your market before they quote you. A quote that arrives before the analysis is a quote for hours, not outcomes.
Why the traffic channel question works
I run Flapen from Abu Dhabi with 50 operators managing about 70 Amazon brands by hand. Before that I ran data and technology at BRANDED and Moonshot Brands, two large Amazon aggregators, where part of my job was hiring and firing agencies at scale.
The single most reliable predictor I found was not price, headcount, or case studies. It was how many of the 5 traffic channels the agency could actually operate.
Here is what actually works. The five channels are:
| Channel | What it is | Why most agencies skip it |
|---|---|---|
| Organic | Ranking through velocity and relevance | Nobody skips this one |
| Paid | Text, image, and video advertisements | Text ads only, because image and video need creative capacity |
| Promotions | Discounts and deals to drive velocity | Requires margin modeling most agencies will not do |
| Influencer and creator | Revenue share, lower upfront cost, slower start | Slow to show results, hard to bill monthly |
| Off-channel | Blogs, social, external traffic | Sits outside Seller Central, so it falls outside the retainer |
Most sellers use two of five. Most agencies sell two of five. That is not a coincidence, and it is the reason so many brands plateau and assume the market is saturated. When a post-launch brand hits a ceiling, the ceiling is usually not the market. The ceiling is the traffic strategy.
So when you interview a partner, do not ask whether they do advertising. Everyone says yes. Ask them to walk you through the economics of each of the five channels for your specific product. An agency that runs all five will answer in about ten minutes. An agency that runs two will change the subject to their case studies.
What questions to ask before hiring an amazon agency
Five questions, in this order. The order matters, because each one narrows the field before you spend time on the next.
- Which of the 5 traffic channels do you run, and what does each cost me? Looking for specifics on all five, including the three most agencies avoid.
- How many brands does one account manager carry? Looking for a real number. We run about 1.4 brands per operator. Anything above 8 means your brand is a line item.
- What ACoS would you target for my product at launch, and what would you target twelve months in? Looking for two different numbers with a reason attached to each.
- What would have to happen for you to tell me to stop spending on a product? Looking for actual kill criteria: rating trend, return rate, conversion rate, and cost of customer acquisition trajectory.
- Can you size my market before you send me a proposal? Looking for market size, growth trajectory, and return rate. We use a $2M per year minimum as the floor, because below that there is not enough revenue to capture profitably once you account for cost of customer acquisition.
If a candidate cannot answer questions 1 through 4 in a single call, they are not an operator. They are a reseller of someone else's labor.
How to evaluate amazon ppc agencies inside a full-service search
A lot of sellers start looking for a marketing partner and end up hiring a PPC agency, because PPC agencies are easier to find and easier to compare. That is a real decision with a real trade-off, not a mistake.
Hire PPC-only when your listing converts, your images work, your margin is known, and your single bottleneck is ad efficiency. Hire full-service when you do not know which of those is broken. Paying a PPC specialist to fix a conversion problem is the most common way sellers waste a retainer. If your conversion rate is low, no amount of ad spend fixes it.
What most agencies will not tell you
The uncomfortable one: most agencies set a single ACoS target and leave it there.
A new product needs aggressive ACoS to build velocity and ranking. A mature product needs efficient ACoS to protect margin. Those are different jobs requiring different numbers, and the transition between them is where most of the money is won or lost. An agency reporting the same ACoS target in month one and month fourteen is not managing your ads. They are maintaining them.
The second thing they will not tell you: a monthly retainer creates a quiet incentive to keep a failing product alive. We use kill criteria for exactly this reason. If rating trend, return rate, conversion rate, and cost of customer acquisition do not improve within a defined window, we kill the product. I learned that after pouring money into a failing launch for three months hoping the ads would turn around. They did not.
Ask your candidate what they have killed recently. An honest answer to that question tells you more than any case study.
Related answers
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- Amazon agency red flags to watch out for
- How to vet Amazon PPC agencies
- Compare Amazon PPC vs full-service agencies
- Hiring an Amazon agency: the complete guide
If you want a team that runs all five traffic channels on your brand, that is what we do at Flapen.
