There's a number that gets thrown around in Amazon advertising discussions — the industry average TACoS — and it usually lands somewhere between 8% and 15% depending on the category. Most brands operating in that range think they're fine. Maybe they are. But "fine" and "exceptional" are very different things, and the distance between them is measurable in margin dollars.
Athlean-X, the fitness supplement and equipment brand built around Jeff Cavaliere's massive YouTube following, came to us with a common problem: strong brand awareness, a loyal customer base, and an Amazon account that had become expensive to operate. Ad spend had crept up. Efficiency had crept down. The account was generating revenue, but the economics were getting worse quarter over quarter.
Over the course of an 18-month Amazon management engagement, we rebuilt the account from the structural level up. By Q4, they were operating at 1.87% TACoS — with 87% organic share, 33.6% margins, and a Subscribe & Save base that was compounding month over month.
Here's what that journey actually looked like.
Where We Started: The Audit
The first thing we do with any account is understand the gap between what the reporting says and what's actually happening. Most Amazon accounts look a lot better in the dashboard than they look in reality. Common issues we find:
- Brand keyword spend inflating the efficiency numbers — ad spend on "Athlean-X protein" taking credit for sales that would have happened organically
- Broad match campaigns matching irrelevant queries, burning budget on traffic with no purchase intent
- No structure around defensive vs. offensive campaigns — everything in the same budget pool, making it impossible to optimize intelligently
- Subscribe & Save not being actively managed — eligible ASINs not enrolled, enrollment rates not tracked, no win-back strategy for churned subscribers
- Listing content not functioning as a conversion asset — bullet points that described features, not benefits; images that showed the product, not the customer using it
These are some of the same common Amazon PPC mistakes we find in almost every new account audit. The Athlean-X account had most of these issues in some form. The baseline TACoS when we started was 8.3% — not catastrophically bad, but well above where we knew it could go given the brand's organic authority and loyal customer base.
Phase 1: Structural Rebuild (Months 1–3)
Before touching bid strategy, we rebuilt the campaign architecture. The goal: give every dollar of ad spend a clear job, so we can tell whether it's doing that job or not.
This separation sounds basic, but most accounts don't have it. Without it, you don't know whether your TACoS improvement came from better non-brand efficiency or just from your brand defense campaigns performing well. You can't optimize what you can't see clearly.
Phase 2: Organic Rank Push (Months 3–6)
With the architecture clean, we shifted focus to organic rank on 12 high-priority non-brand keywords. This was the high-spend phase. TACoS actually went up slightly to 9.1% during this period — which was expected and correct. We were buying ranking momentum.
A TACoS increase during an organic rank push is a sign the strategy is working, not failing. You are spending to build something that will cost nothing to maintain once you own it. The question is whether the organic traffic you're building justifies the temporary efficiency cost.
The keyword selection was deliberate. We targeted terms where Athlean-X had conversion rate data (from existing campaigns) that suggested the listing would rank and convert well, and where the organic ranking upside was significant. Not the most competitive terms in the category — the ones where the investment-to-organic-payoff ratio was best.
By the end of month 6, organic share had grown from 62% to 74%. Non-brand TACoS was falling even as total spend had temporarily increased. The flywheel was turning.
Phase 3: Subscribe & Save Compounding (Months 4–9)
Athlean-X's supplement line was underutilizing Subscribe & Save. The products were enrolled, but enrollment rate optimization was minimal and there was no systematic approach to preventing churn.
We rebuilt the SnS strategy around three levers:
The result was SnS subscribers growing to 190% of the starting baseline by month 9. Each subscriber represents recurring revenue that requires no ad spend to maintain. As the subscriber base grows, it lifts total revenue — which, with flat ad spend, directly compresses TACoS.
Phase 4: Q2–Q3 Growth and Margin Expansion (Months 6–12)
By Q2, the account had reached a new baseline: organic share consistently above 75%, SnS revenue compounding, and non-brand TACoS at 4.8%. The Q2→Q3 comparison told the story clearly: +176% revenue growth with margins expanding to 33.6%.
The margin expansion came from two places. First, the ad spend as a percentage of revenue was falling as organic carried more of the load. Second, with ranking stability on key terms, we were able to gradually pull back on the aggressive rank-building spend and redirect budget toward defending and harvesting rather than buying new positions.
Organic rank doesn't expire the moment you stop spending — it decays gradually. A well-ranked ASIN can be maintained with far less ad spend than it took to get there. This is the efficiency curve everyone talks about but few brands actually reach.
Where It Ended Up: The Q4 Numbers
By Q4 of year one, here's where the account stood:
A 1.87% TACoS means less than 2 cents of every revenue dollar is going to ads. At 87% organic share, the brand is essentially operating like a well-ranked organic listing that happens to have a small paid support layer. The ads are now primarily defensive and harvesting — not driving growth, which organic is doing on its own.
The full-year TACoS of 3.54% reflects the blended rate including the investment phases earlier in the year. That number will likely compress further in year two as the organic base continues to mature.
What Made This Possible
It would be easy to attribute these results to a collection of optimization tactics — and tactics were certainly part of it. But the real driver was something structural: patience and a clear phase plan.
Most brands optimize for this week's TACoS. They see spend go up and they cut it. They see a low-performing campaign and they pause it before it's had time to build data. They optimize for the metric in front of them rather than the trajectory they're trying to build.
The Athlean-X engagement worked because we had alignment on the plan from the start. When TACoS ticked up during the rank push, the response wasn't panic — it was confirmation that the strategy was executing as designed. That alignment only happens when the brand partner understands the strategy deeply enough to sit with temporary numbers that look worse on the way to getting much better.
3.54% TACoS isn't a number you stumble into. It's a destination you plan for, execute toward, and protect once you get there. And once you're there, the margin expansion and compounding SnS revenue create a business that is dramatically more valuable than it was at 8.3% — not just in efficiency, but in stability, defensibility, and the freedom to make growth decisions rather than efficiency decisions.
That's what elite Amazon performance actually looks like from the inside. See more results like these across our client portfolio.