Laurence vs Jungle Scout

Jungle Scout is where a lot of Amazon businesses began. Its product and keyword research helped a generation of sellers find what to sell, and over the years it has built one of the largest bodies of Amazon market data anywhere. If you’ve ever estimated a competitor’s sales, there’s a good chance a Jungle Scout number was involved.

Today Jungle Scout is really two products. Catalyst is a research toolkit for small and growing sellers. Cobalt is a platform for larger brands that combines market intelligence, Seller and Vendor Central reporting and an ads tool called Ad Accelerator. When brands ask us how we compare, they usually mean Cobalt’s ads, so that’s the focus here.

The short version: Jungle Scout gives your team excellent data and capable software to run ads toward an ACOS or ROAS target. Laurence runs your Amazon ads for you, with models that price every click from your own economics every hour and a team that reviews the work.

Jungle Scout, in a few paragraphs

Greg Mercer founded Jungle Scout in 2015, and it grew into one of the best-known names among Amazon sellers. In 2021 it raised $110 million, led by Summit Partners alongside Greg Mercer, and bought Downstream Impact, a Seattle ad-tech company founded by former Amazon staff that was managing more than $250 million a year in Amazon ad spend. Jay Lovelace has led the company as CEO since 2024.

Its foundation is data. Jungle Scout says it tracks more than 600 million products and 24 million keywords, with over 11 years of history, which lets a brand benchmark itself against its whole category rather than only its own account. Catalyst puts that data to work for smaller sellers through tools like Product Database, Keyword Scout, Listing Builder, Rank Tracker and an AI assistant, at published prices with no contract.

Cobalt is the brand-side product. Since Cobalt 2.0 in 2023 it has combined Retail Insights reporting, Market Intelligence, Digital Shelf Analytics and Ad Accelerator in one platform. Ad Accelerator covers Sponsored Products, Brands and Display and DSP, with machine-learning bidding toward a maximum ACOS or minimum ROAS, a mode that paces spend to use a budget, hourly dayparting, keyword harvesting, budget controls and rules you can write.

Laurence, in a few paragraphs

We’re building autonomous advertising across the entire internet, starting with Amazon Ads for e-commerce brands. We’re a full-stack AI company: we aren’t a tool your team has to operate, and we aren’t an agency selling hours. Our models run every account, and our deployments team sets your strategy with you, reviews what the models did, and is who you talk to.

The idea underneath is that advertising is a math problem. Every click has an expected profit you can work out: how likely it is to convert, what the order is worth, what you keep after costs, and what the click cost. Once you can price a single click, the right bid, placement modifier and budget follow. Our methodology explains it in more detail.

Data to act on, or the work done for you

Jungle Scout’s strength is helping your team see clearly and act well: where your category is growing, how your share compares, which keywords matter, and a capable ads tool to act on it. Someone on your side still decides each campaign’s target, chooses between the bidding modes, sets up dayparting and budget rules while Ad Accelerator adjusts bids toward them, and watches the results, with a customer success manager to help.

With us, the running of the account is the product. You tell us the goal, whether that’s profit, growth, or a CAC, TACOS or ROAS number, and the limits you want. The models make the calls a person would otherwise make: which searches to go after, what to bid on each one every hour, how to price each placement, and how to set budgets. Our team checks the work and is there when you want to talk it through.

What each bid is aiming at

Ad Accelerator bids toward the target you set: a maximum ACOS or a minimum ROAS, or a budget you want spent within a window. That’s how most of the industry works, and it’s easy to agree on and easy to check.

We start one step earlier, with what the click is worth to you:

Order value is what the shopper spends on that order. A customer who comes back is worth more than one order, and we already measure how often that happens for each product; bringing it into the bid is what we’re building next. Margin is what you keep after the cost of the product, Amazon’s fees and returns. A target ACOS lands on the right bid only when it happens to match what that product can afford, and the right number is different for almost every product:

One more thing we care about: we treat your target as a limit, not the goal, and try to win every click that clears it, so your volume grows as far as your economics allow.

You can set a different target for every campaign, and careful teams do. The hard part is choosing each one well and keeping it right as prices, margins and CVR move. That’s the part we do for you, for every search term every hour and every placement every night, with your ROAS, CAC or TACOS goal on top as a limit.

Market data, and where it goes

Both companies believe a brand should see its whole category, not only its own account. Jungle Scout has more history here than almost anyone, and Cobalt’s market intelligence and share-of-category reporting are genuinely useful for planning, for buyers, and for anyone who has to explain the business to a board.

We use market data differently: as an input to every bid rather than a report to read. We value every search in your category, with its monthly searches and purchases, group searches into niches by shopper intent, and bid on the ones that pay back. On the median account we run, about 6,300 different searches got a click last month. Organic rank matters here too: ad sales help a product climb the organic results. We track your organic rank on the terms we bid on every day and judge each product on TACOS, so the organic sales your ads help earn are counted. Pricing what each rank is worth into the bid itself is what we’re building next.

Search terms with only a few clicks

Most of what an Amazon account pays for barely has any data. On the median account we run, 95% of the search terms that get a click get fewer than ten clicks a month. A term with four clicks and no orders reads as a 0% CVR, but all it really tells you is that you don’t know yet.

Harvesting and rules work best on terms that have earned enough clicks to judge. We treat each term’s CVR as a range instead of one number. A term with little history is bid with that uncertainty priced in, and it borrows evidence from similar searches, so it starts from a sensible guess and adjusts as each click comes in.

Placements and timing

On the median account we run, clicks at the top of search convert at about twice the rate of clicks lower on the page. So we work out the CVR for each placement, set the base bid for the placement that converts worst, and raise the others with modifiers. So product page clicks aren’t bought at a top-of-search price.

On timing, Jungle Scout describes its bidding as adjusting continuously, and Ad Accelerator spreads spend by hour through dayparting. We re-price every search term’s bid every hour from Amazon Marketing Stream data, reset placement modifiers every night, and a campaign close to its daily budget that is still clearing your ROAS bar gets more for the rest of the day.

Price, and who each is built for

Catalyst has published prices, from $29 a month billed yearly, with its advertising analytics and negative keyword tools on the Growth Accelerator and Brand Owner plans, and no contract. Cobalt is priced per user after a demo, for brands doing more than $1 million a year. For a seller who wants research tools, or a brand that wants market data and an ads tool its team can run, both are sensible choices.

We don’t publish a price; we agree it with you once we’ve seen your account. We start by asking you to connect your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central accounts with read access, then build a pilot proposal from your own data, showing where your ad money goes today, the targets we’d set for each product line, and the bids our models would place. Pricing is agreed with the pilot.

Which one is right for you

Using both, or switching

Because Jungle Scout is largely data and we run ads, they can sit side by side. You can keep Jungle Scout for research, market intelligence and reporting while we run your Amazon ads, or hand us one product family first to compare results on your own account.

1. 01
   Connect with read access.We read your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central data to build your pilot proposal. Nothing in your account changes at this point.
2. 02
   Agree on the pilot.You pick the products and the goals. Switch off Ad Accelerator’s bidding and rules on those products, so two systems aren’t changing the same campaigns. Jungle Scout’s reporting keeps working.
3. 03
   We build our own campaigns.Our campaigns carry a Laurence prefix, so results stay easy to tell apart. Your history stays in your account.
4. 04
   If you stop.If you stop, we pause and archive our campaigns and leave yours as they were.

Common questions

Is Laurence an alternative to Jungle Scout?

For Amazon ads, yes. Jungle Scout’s Cobalt gives your team an ads tool that bids toward an ACOS or ROAS target. Laurence runs your Amazon ads for you, with models re-pricing every bid hourly and a team reviewing the work. For product research and market intelligence, Laurence isn’t a replacement, and the two work well together.

Can I use Jungle Scout and Laurence together?

Yes. Keep Jungle Scout for research, market intelligence and reporting while Laurence runs your Amazon ads. Just switch off Ad Accelerator’s bidding on the products Laurence runs, so two systems aren’t changing the same campaigns.

What is Jungle Scout Cobalt?

Cobalt is Jungle Scout’s platform for brands doing more than $1 million a year. It combines market intelligence, Seller and Vendor Central reporting, Digital Shelf Analytics and Ad Accelerator, an ads tool built from Jungle Scout’s 2021 purchase of Downstream Impact.

Do I need someone on my team to run Laurence?

No. You set the goal and the limits, and Laurence does the day-to-day work. You can see every decision and the reason for it on the Laurence platform, and our team is there when you have questions.

How we wrote this. We described Jungle Scout’s products, pricing and features from junglescout.com, its press releases and its changelog as of November 10, 2026, and things may have changed since. Laurence figures are medians across the 15 store profiles we run, covering all of their Sponsored Products spend, October 6 to November 4, 2026. The charts use made-up numbers to show the idea. If we’ve got anything about Jungle Scout wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.