Laurence vs Perpetua

If you’ve shopped for Amazon ads software in the last few years, you’ve almost certainly come across Perpetua. It’s one of the best-known names in the category, and for good reason: it made goal-based advertising easy to set up, and a lot of brands and agencies run their accounts on it.

Laurence and Perpetua solve the same problem from two different directions. Perpetua is software your team or agency operates: you set a goal and a target ACOS, and its engine manages the bids. Laurence isn’t software you operate. We run your Amazon ads for you, our models price every click from your own economics every hour, and our team reviews the work and answers to you.

Perpetua, in a few paragraphs

Perpetua began in Toronto and grew into one of the most widely used Amazon ads platforms. It became part of Ascential in 2021, merged with Sellics, and is now part of Flywheel, Omnicom’s commerce business, where Flywheel describes its goal-based bidding as powered by Perpetua. Perpetua says it runs in 11 Amazon marketplaces, makes more than a million optimizations a day, and advertises more than 440,000 products.

Its central idea is the goal. You set up a goal for a product with a budget and a target ACOS, and Perpetua builds the campaigns for you: an auto campaign to find search terms, plus keyword and product targeting campaigns. Terms that work get moved from auto into the manual campaigns, either on their own or with your approval. The engine then manages bids toward your target. It’s a clean, approachable way to run a lot of advertising without building campaigns by hand.

Around that sit tools for teams who want more control: hourly bid schedules built on Amazon Marketing Stream, hourly share of voice tracking, Amazon Marketing Cloud, reporting across your whole Amazon business, and white-label dashboards for agencies. Perpetua also runs Walmart and Instacart ads, and offers Amazon DSP as software or as a managed service.

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.

Software you run, or work that gets done for you

Perpetua takes a lot of busywork off your plate. You no longer build campaigns by hand or adjust every bid yourself. But someone on your side still runs the account: choosing the goals and their targets, setting budgets, deciding which harvested terms to approve, and checking whether it’s all working. Perpetua’s own guide asks you to let a new goal run for at least two weeks before changing it, which tells you the kind of rhythm it’s built for.

With us, that job is ours. You tell us the goal, whether that’s profit, growth, or a CAC, TACOS or ROAS number, and the limits you want. The models then 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

Perpetua bids toward a target ACOS, set per goal, and it can also recommend target changes to hold a total ACOS across a group of goals, up to your whole account. That’s how most of the industry works. ACOS is familiar, 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.

To be fair, Perpetua lets you set a different target for every goal, and careful teams do. The hard part is picking 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.

Hourly bidding, and what moves each hour

Perpetua has used hourly data for a while. Its bid schedules, launched in 2022, raise or lower bids by hour of day and day of week, and it can suggest a schedule from your last five weeks of data. Its help center says that under its standard optimization, bids are calculated daily or when you change a setting. A newer mode that optimizes hourly from Amazon Marketing Stream data was in open beta for Sponsored Products keywords as of June 2026.

Every hour we re-price the bid on every search term and check every budget, and every night we reset placement modifiers. A schedule says the evenings tend to convert better; we re-price every search term’s bid every hour from the newest settled data, so a term’s bid moves within a day or two of its results. And a campaign close to its daily budget that is still clearing your ROAS bar gets more for the rest of the day.

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.

Perpetua handles new terms by testing them in auto campaigns and moving the ones that convert into manual campaigns, if you like after a set number of orders. That works well for terms that get enough traffic to prove themselves. 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 organic rank

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 and set the base bid for the placement that converts worst, then raise the others with modifiers, reset every night. Perpetua raises placement multipliers on its own when a placement is beating your target ACOS, and you can set them yourself in each goal instead.

Ad sales help a product climb the organic results, and organic sales cost nothing per click. 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. Perpetua goes further here today: it tracks organic rank and share of voice hourly, can ease bids off where you already rank well, offers organic rank optimization on custom goals, and lets you boost the terms you want to win. If ranking on specific terms is your main goal, that’s a real strength.

Channels, agencies and price

Perpetua covers more ground. It runs Amazon in 11 marketplaces, Walmart and Instacart, and offers Amazon DSP as software or as a managed service. It’s also built for agencies, with white-label dashboards and approvals across many clients.

It’s also one of the few in the category with a published price: $695 a month for up to $10,000 of monthly ad spend, and above that the same fee plus a share of ad spend, with custom pricing over $500,000 a month. For a smaller brand that wants software and has someone to run it, that’s a clear, predictable place to start.

We run Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP on our own seat. Meta and Google are in early beta, and we’re holding them to the same standard as Amazon before we call them ready. We don’t publish a price: 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

Switching from Perpetua to Laurence

You don’t have to switch everything at once. We can run one marketplace or product family while Perpetua keeps the rest, so you can compare results on your own account before deciding anything.

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. Check the term and renewal date on your Perpetua order form so the handover lines up, and pause the Perpetua goals on the products we take over so two systems aren’t bidding on the same terms.
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 Perpetua?

For Amazon ads, yes, but a different kind. Perpetua is goal-based software your team or agency runs toward a target ACOS. Laurence runs your Amazon ads for you, with models re-pricing every bid hourly and a team reviewing the work.

Does Perpetua bid hourly?

Partly. Perpetua’s help center says bids under its standard optimization are calculated daily, with hourly bid schedules on top, and an hourly optimization mode was in open beta for Sponsored Products keywords as of June 2026. Laurence re-prices the bid on every search term every hour, resets placement modifiers every night and checks budgets every hour.

Does Laurence run Walmart or Instacart ads?

Not today. Laurence runs Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP, with Meta and Google ads in early beta. Perpetua runs Walmart and Instacart ads today.

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 Perpetua’s products, pricing and features from perpetua.io and its help center 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 click value chart uses made-up numbers to show the idea. If we’ve got anything about Perpetua wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.