When you look for an Amazon ad agency, a polished report tells you little about how the team will manage your account. Ask the team to show a decision: what it noticed, why it acted, and how it checked the result.
Alfredo’s agency-review videos focus on that gap between activity and useful work. A long change log is not a business outcome. Equally, automated changes or a quiet launch calendar do not prove poor management. Use them as starting points for questions, then assess the evidence and the explanation together.
Define the assignment before comparing agencies
Write a short brief with the products that matter, your margin constraints, available budget and inventory situation. Say whether the immediate priority is profitable growth, a launch, cash preservation or clearing stock. These goals can call for different choices.
List what you expect the agency to own. Campaign management, listing work, pricing and inventory planning are different responsibilities. A PPC team can identify a listing problem without being contracted to fix the listing. Establish who acts when a problem crosses that boundary.
Ask each candidate to respond to the same brief. That makes proposals easier to compare than a collection of unrelated service lists.
Ask how targets are set for each product
A useful discussion starts with costs and product roles. Ask what data the team needs to set an advertising allowance, and what it does when cost information is missing or outdated.
One catalog-wide ACOS target can hide important differences. A mature product with thin contribution and a funded launch should not automatically receive the same target. The team should explain exceptions, spending limits and review dates. Our ACOS guide provides a basis for that conversation.
Try a practical question: “If our selling fees rise and the target stays the same, how would you catch the change?” Look for a defined review and a named owner, rather than a promise that software handles everything.
Request a decision walkthrough
Ask for an anonymized example or a walkthrough of your account using access you have authorized. Customer confidentiality matters; a provider should not need to expose another brand’s private data to explain its process.
- Which product or campaign needed attention?
- What evidence distinguished the problem from normal variation?
- Which options did the team consider?
- What changed, and who approved it?
- When did the team review the result, and what did it learn?
If bids change at the same time each day, that may simply reflect a scheduled rule. If a bid later returns to its earlier value, new data or a test may explain it. The concern is whether the team can reconstruct the decision and identify when the rule should stop applying.
Look for a testing plan with limits
Ask which questions the team wants to answer during the first review cycle. A good test has a hypothesis, budget, scope and decision date. “Launch more campaigns” is an activity; “test whether this product can acquire relevant non-brand traffic within its allowance” is a question.
A mature account may need better use of existing campaigns. A launch may need more exploration. Do not judge an agency by a fixed quota of new campaigns or a universal thirty-day rule. Ask why its proposed tests deserve budget and what would make it stop.
The campaign structure guide explains how clear campaign purposes make those reviews easier.
Agree on reporting that leads to action
Require a concise summary of business performance, the main explanation, the next actions and the information needed from your team. Keep supporting detail available for investigation.
| Ask for | What it helps you assess |
|---|---|
| Spend and attributed sales | Advertising efficiency within the report’s attribution rules. |
| Total sales, units and contribution | Whether the wider business is improving. |
| Product and inventory context | Whether a proposed increase in spend is feasible. |
| Actions, owners and review dates | Whether findings become accountable work. |
Agree on date ranges and metric definitions. ROAS is a revenue ratio, not profit. Attributed sales are not necessarily sales caused by advertising. Ask the team how it handles those limits and whether returns, management fees and other costs appear in the profit view.
Make communication and handover explicit
Find out who manages the account, who reviews their decisions and who responds when a product runs low on stock. Set a routine update schedule and an escalation path for urgent problems. A shared chat channel helps only when someone owns the response.
Before signing, clarify account access, ownership of campaign data, exports, software charges, notice periods and what the team supplies on exit. Keep media spend separate from fees in the proposal. Ask how charges change if the advertising budget grows or shrinks.
Choose on fit and evidence
Score candidates against the same criteria: product economics, explainable decisions, useful tests, reporting, communication and handover. Record unanswered questions alongside the strengths. A confident sales call should not erase missing evidence.
Enflet’s PPC management service is one option to evaluate with this checklist. Bring recent performance data and a clear business objective. The first useful conversation should establish what needs attention, what remains uncertain and how the team would investigate it.
From Enflet’s video library
These guides adapt the ideas from the original videos into a practical reading format.
