Skyrocketing Naturealm's BSR in a saturated category

Once we plugged into the account, the problem was immediately obvious: the previous setup was concentrating spend on only 5-10 obvious high volume keywords making extremely negative margin.

Targeting mostly the obvious keywords works for market leaders and category winners, but since Sacred 7 had fallen down the pecking order in sales velocity, BSR had to grow before targeting the highest volume keywords could be profitable.

Spend sat concentrated on a handful of obvious high volume keywords, with almost no exploration beyond them. Without exploration, the brand could not find the winner keywords where it could acquire customers profitably on the first purchase. And without those winners, there was no velocity to concentrate, and no way to grow organic rank.

The core idea is simple: concentrate budget on the keywords and product targets that are making us positive margin so we can scale market share without burning cash.

Then, as sales velocity and BSR grow, we can begin to scale back up on the higher volume keywords as we gain relevance ranking and are able to earn more competitive CPCs.

We started with exact, phrase, and broad campaigns on these profitable targets for Sacred 7. The vast majority of budget goes to the exact campaign where we build volume on those proven winners and train our model on how conversion rate varies with CPC for each target, allowing us to calculate and use the profit optimal bid for dozens if not hundreds of targets at a time.

In the mushroom supplement category, the biggest inefficiencies turned out to be competitor keyword auctions. The clearest example is the keyword "ryze mushroom coffee": Ryze leaves its branded auctions lightly defended, so clicks there are cheap, and our model has learned that shoppers convert well once they land on the Sacred 7 listing.

That one keyword has driven 46 NTB customers since takeover at a 1.3x ROAS, roughly breakeven on the first purchase and clearly profitable once those customers reorder.

Most accounts crowd the same few high volume generic keywords and bid each other up. Since our model prices every single relevant auction, it finds the pockets of opportunity that add up to overall brand growth.

Exploration is how we drive growth. Done intelligently, it keeps finding inefficiencies in the market: auctions where a click costs less than it is worth because nobody else is pricing them properly. Exploiting those inefficiencies, one after another, is how a brand grows profitably toward its fair market share.

Once we had built volume on the niche keywords, we were able to begin to re-enter the higher volume auctions with lower CPCs than we initially started with, allowing us to scale volume while staying net profitable.

This is the whole strategy paying off: we systematically grew our market share by winning our niche, which allowed us to start gaining market share across the broader category.

At the same time, we systematically discover potentially new keywords and product targets where we can grow market share. This is what the phrase and broad campaigns are for: they discover and surface similar search terms we do not have data on yet while a low budget, low bid auto campaign hunts for cheap long-tail auctions. Whenever any of these campaigns surfaces a new search term that gets a sale, we harvest that term into the exact campaign and concentrate budget on it.

Discovery matters most in the first few weeks while we map the profitable keyword niches of the category. The end state is an exact campaign where every keyword is bid from its own conversion rate estimate. On the branded side, branded exact and phrase plus defensive product targeting keep high intent shoppers from drifting to competitor listings after the top of funnel work brought them in.

We executed this positive feedback loop for the weeks before Prime Day: exploring to find profitable keywords, then concentrating budget on them to grow their organic rank.

Prime Day is when the rank pays. Volume and purchase intent surge across the category, and the listings that already own the organic placements capture that surge for free.

Sacred 7's daily revenue ran at 4x its usual average on day one of Prime Day, and 92% of that growth came through organic sales, not ads: our strategy won us organic placements across the category.

Best Seller Rank jumped to #12 during the event, up from #45 at takeover eight weeks earlier.