Laurence vs Quartile

“How are you different from Quartile?” is one of the questions we hear most on first calls. It’s a fair question. From the outside, we look a lot alike: both of us run a brand’s Amazon ads with software that bids every hour, and both of us have people watching over the work.

The short version: Quartile takes the target you give it, like a ROAS or TACOS goal, and steers your campaigns toward it, across Amazon and a long list of other channels. Laurence starts by asking what each click is worth to you, from your margin and how likely that click is to convert at each placement, and bids that. Your target is still there, but as a guardrail rather than the starting point.

Quartile, in a few paragraphs

Quartile has been doing this a long time by Amazon ads standards. It started in New York in 2018, after two years spent building bidding algorithms, and today says it works with more than 5,300 brands in 32 countries and manages over $2 billion a year in ad spend. Amazon gave it a Scaled Technology Award in 2022. That’s a serious track record, and we respect it.

The way it works: Quartile’s software bids every hour, and uses Amazon Marketing Stream and your history to update bids, budgets and placements in real time toward your target. You also get a dedicated strategist, backed by channel specialists, who sets the plan and meets with you regularly. If your team likes to keep a hand on the wheel, Versa lets you keep your own campaign structure and write rules that run alongside theirs.

What stands out most is how much ground they cover. Beyond Amazon, Quartile runs Walmart, Instacart, Criteo, Google, Meta, Microsoft and even ChatGPT ads, and offers Amazon SEO and listing work too. If you want one partner for every retail media network you sell on, that’s hard to match.

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 do the work on every account, and our deployments team sets your strategy with you, reviews what the models did, and is the people you talk to.

The belief underneath everything we do is that advertising is a math problem. A click has an expected profit you can actually calculate: how likely it is to convert, what the order is worth, what you keep after costs, and what you paid for it. Once you can price a single click, the right bid, placement modifier and budget follow. Our methodology goes into more detail.

Where we agree

Before the differences, it’s worth saying how much we have in common, because it sets both of us apart from most of the industry.

We both think a weekly bid review is too slow, so we both bid every hour. We both give a search term its own bid instead of letting it share an average with dozens of others. We both bid from Amazon Marketing Stream’s hourly data. And we both think people should stay involved: to set the strategy, to catch what software misses, and to be someone you can call.

If you’re coming from a team that adjusts bids by hand once a week, either of us will feel like a big step up. The rest of this page is about how to choose between the two.

What each bid is aiming at

This is the biggest difference, so it gets the most space.

Quartile’s bidding aims at your “intended target”, which it describes as ROAS, TACOS and similar goals. That’s how most of the industry works, and there’s a good reason for it. A target is simple to agree on and simple to check: pick a number, and the system holds the account to it.

We start one step earlier, with what the click is worth to you. The math fits on one line:

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. Bid below that value and the click makes you money; bid above it and it doesn’t. A target ACOS is a shortcut to the same answer, and it only lands in the right place when the target happens to match what the product can afford. Here’s what that looks like with three products and one target:

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, you can set a different target for every product, and good teams do. The hard part is picking each one well and keeping it right as prices, margins and CVR change. That’s the part we take off your plate. We recalculate the value from your numbers for every search term every hour and every placement every night, and your ROAS, CAC or TACOS goal stays on top as a limit the bids have to respect.

Search terms with only a few clicks

Something that surprised us when we started: 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. With that little to go on, a term’s average CVR is mostly noise. Four clicks and no orders reads as 0%, but it really just means you don’t know yet.

Both companies have thought hard about this. Quartile’s patents describe launching single-keyword campaigns, gathering data on each one, then running a machine-learning step to set the bids. Our approach is to treat each term’s CVR as a range instead of one number. A term with little history gets bid with that uncertainty priced in, and it borrows evidence from similar searches, so it starts from a sensible guess rather than from zero. As clicks come in, the range tightens and the bid settles toward what the term has actually shown.

Placements and organic rank

Amazon lets you bid once per search term and then raise that bid for certain placements. That matters more than it sounds: on the median account we run, clicks at the top of search convert at about twice the rate of clicks further down. So we work out the CVR for each placement and bid each one at what its clicks are worth. In practice that means setting the base bid for the placement that converts worst, then raising the others with modifiers, so product page clicks aren’t bought at a top-of-search price. Quartile adjusts placements in real time too, as part of its bidding.

Organic rank matters to both of us. Ad sales help a product climb the organic results, and organic sales don’t cost anything 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. Quartile treats organic growth as its own line of work, with an SEO and listing service that uses what the ads learn.

Who does the work, and what you get to see

With Quartile, the software handles bids, budgets and placements, and your strategist is the person you work with. Versa gives you the option to run your own rules. That’s a good fit if your team wants to stay close to the controls.

With us there are no rules to write. You tell us the goal, whether that’s profit, growth, or a CAC, TACOS or ROAS number, and the limits you want, and the models make the calls a person would otherwise make by hand: 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 what the models did and is there whenever you want to talk it through.

Campaign structure is a smaller point, but it shapes what you see every day. Quartile’s default is one campaign per keyword, which gives every keyword its own controls and means more campaigns in the Amazon Ads console. We group each product’s search terms into campaigns by cluster and still give every term its own bid, so the console stays readable and the detail lives on our platform.

We also care a lot about you being able to see why. In the Laurence platform every search term shows its spend, sales, ROAS and clicks, and every bid has a history with a plain-English reason for each change. Ask Laurence answers questions about your business from the same data the models use. If something looks off, you shouldn’t have to wait for a call to find out why.

Channels and services

Quartile simply covers more today. It runs Amazon and Amazon DSP, Walmart, Instacart, Criteo (which reaches retailers like Target and Best Buy), Google, Meta, Microsoft and ChatGPT ads, plus Amazon SEO and listing work.

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’d rather go deep before we go wide. But if Walmart or Instacart is a big part of your business today, that’s a real reason to look at Quartile.

Pricing and getting started

Neither of us publishes a price list. Quartile starts with a demo and charges a flat fee based on your ad spend. We start by asking you to connect your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central accounts with read access, and then build you a pilot proposal from your own data: 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 Quartile to Laurence

You don’t have to switch everything at once, and honestly, we’d suggest you don’t. We can run one marketplace or one product family while Quartile keeps the rest. That way you get a clean comparison on your own account instead of taking our word for it.

It also helps to be honest about what you’re replacing. For many brands, Quartile’s strategist is the person they work with every week, so switching changes who you talk to, not just which software sets the bids. Starting with one product line makes that change smaller.

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 notice period in your Quartile agreement so the handover lines up, and agree up front what Quartile keeps running, such as DSP, so both sides’ results stay clean.
3. 03
   We build our own campaigns.Our campaigns carry a Laurence prefix, and we pause the existing ones on the products we take over, so the 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, so you can turn them back on.

Common questions

Is Laurence an alternative to Quartile?

For Amazon ads, yes. Both run your Amazon advertising with hourly bidding and people overseeing the work. Laurence bids from what each click is worth to your business rather than from one target, and focuses on Amazon. Quartile covers more retail and search channels.

Do Quartile and Laurence both bid every hour?

Yes. Quartile adjusts bids hourly, and updates bids, budgets and placements in real time, using Amazon Marketing Stream. Laurence re-prices the bid on every search term every hour, which comes to about 10,000 bid changes a week on the median account we run, 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. Quartile runs Walmart, Instacart and Criteo ads today.

Does Laurence need my cost of goods?

It helps, but you can start without it. Laurence works from your Amazon Ads history and sales data. A margin or cost of goods for each product makes each click’s value more accurate.

Can I run Laurence and Quartile at the same time?

Yes, on separate products or marketplaces. Laurence bids only on the campaigns it creates, and pauses your existing ones only on the products it takes over, so each side’s results stay easy to read.

How we wrote this. We described Quartile’s products, channels, size and methods from quartile.com and its published patents 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 Quartile wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.