$1.31M in seven months at a 10.6% TACOS for a fly fishing brand

Wild Water Fly Fishing sells fly fishing starter kits, rods, flies and lines. We rebuilt its Amazon advertising around separate awareness, conversion, Amazon's Choice and defense campaigns, extended ads across the range and into five European marketplaces, and from June to December 2022 drove $1.31M in Amazon US sales at a 10.6% TACOS, then raised profit per kit by 22% in 2023.

$1.31M

Amazon US sales, Jun–Dec 2022

10.6%

TACOS, Jun–Dec 2022

9.2%

TACOS in December 2022, a $224K month

+22%

Profit per kit, 2023 vs 2022

The Starting Point

The Challenges Holding the Brand Back

Campaigns that could not bid precisely

Keywords and product targets sat in the same campaigns, so bids could not be pushed for top of search on keywords and for product pages on product targets separately.

Defense ads billed per view

Brand defense campaigns ran on cost per view, so shoppers who found the listing organically were counted as ad traffic, which made ad spend and TACOS hard to manage.

Listings missing search terms

Shoppers searched for "combos", "5wt" and "9ft", terms the listings did not cover, and bullet points did not open with the keywords Amazon uses for ranking.

What We Built

Rebuilding the Foundation for Scalable Growth

A new campaign structure

Awareness campaigns on high-volume terms such as "fly fishing" and "fly rod"
Amazon's Choice campaigns on exact-match keywords for each product category
Cost-per-click defense campaigns replacing cost-per-view ones, plus remarketing at 7, 30, 60 and 90-day lookbacks
Kits by rod weight split into keyword and product targeting campaigns, with Sponsored Display by weight

Ads across the whole range

Campaigns for squirmy worm, woolly bugger and dry flies, poppers, tippets and leaders, rod cases and crankbaits
A Tenkara product targeting campaign and a Euro nymphing keyword campaign
Paused campaigns, ad groups and keywords with a sales history reactivated
Black Friday and Christmas coupons

Listings, store and Europe

New main images and parent-child variations for poppers, tippets, fly lines and cases
Brand store reordered to put best sellers at the top
Listings translated into French and German and updated for the UK
Ads launched in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain in October and November 2022

The Results

Measurable Growth Across Every Key Metric

Metric	Before	After
Profit per kit	$23.72 (2022)	$29.04 (2023)
Average order value	$107 (2022)	$116.30 (2023)
Brand defense campaigns	Billed per view (vCPM)	Billed per click (CPC)
Campaign structure	Keywords and product targets mixed	Separate awareness, conversion, Amazon's Choice and defense campaigns
European marketplaces	Not advertised	Ads live in UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain (Oct–Nov 2022)