Laurence vs Skai

Skai has been in performance marketing longer than almost anyone. It started as Kenshoo in 2006, back when search ads were the whole game, and today it runs paid search, paid social and retail media for some of the biggest brands and agencies in the world. If your marketing team already lives in Skai, there are good reasons for that.

Skai and Laurence answer different questions, though. Skai asks how a large team can run every channel from one place. We ask how to make every dollar of Amazon advertising earn as much as it can, and then we do the work ourselves. Skai is software your team or agency operates; 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.

Skai, in a few paragraphs

Skai was founded in Israel in 2006 as Kenshoo by Yoav Izhar-Prato, who still leads it, with Nir Cohen and Alon Sheafer, and took the Skai name in 2021. It says it works with more than 8,200 brands, including PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Adidas and Liquid Death, and with agencies such as Tinuiti, Publicis and dentsu.

On retail media, Skai covers Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Criteo, DoorDash and more than a hundred other networks, alongside Google, Meta, TikTok and Reddit. On Amazon that includes sponsored ads, Amazon DSP in North America and Europe, and Amazon Marketing Cloud. Its central bidding idea is portfolio optimization: you group campaigns, set a shared ROAS or budget goal, and Skai moves bids and budgets toward wherever the next dollar is expected to return the most. Around that sit rules, keyword harvesting, negative search term analysis, budget pacing and AI dayparting built on hourly Amazon Marketing Stream data.

Two things stand out. First, measurement: Impact Navigator runs geo-split incrementality tests on live campaigns, which is a serious way to find out what your ads actually add. Second, AI: Celeste answers questions about your marketing in plain language, and Skai Studio, announced in May 2026 and rolling out to beta partners, lets teams build agents that carry out workflows within guardrails. Skai also publishes its pricing, which is rare at the enterprise end of the industry.

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.

One platform for every channel, or Amazon run for you

Skai is built for teams. A brand or agency running search, social and a dozen retail networks gets one place to plan, buy, measure and report, with bulk editing, rules and portfolios that make a large program manageable. Someone on your side still sets up the portfolios and their goals, writes the rules, reviews the dayparting recommendations and reads the results. Skai’s expert services can help with onboarding or cover a team for a while.

We go the other way: one marketplace, run for you. 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

Skai’s portfolios have a smart idea at their core: move money to wherever the next dollar does the most good. We agree with that completely. The question is how “the most good” is measured. In a Skai portfolio it’s usually ROAS or spending a budget. Skai can also bid to custom metrics your team builds, such as one that includes margin, so a portfolio can aim at profit. The margin data and that setup are yours to own and keep current.

We build profit into the value of every click from the start:

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 single ROAS or ACOS target lands on the right bid only when it matches what a product can afford, and that’s 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.

Measuring what ads really add

This is an area where Skai deserves real credit. Geo incrementality testing is one of the most honest ways to learn what advertising adds beyond what would have happened anyway, and having it built in makes it far easier for a large brand to run. It comes with Skai’s top plan.

We come at the same question from the account’s own numbers. Ad sales help a product climb the organic results, and organic sales cost nothing per click, so we judge each product on TACOS rather than ad sales alone, and track rank on the terms we bid on every day. We also report branded and non-branded search separately, because spend on searches for your own brand often buys sales you would have had anyway, and a blended ROAS hides that. Experiments and per-click pricing aren’t rivals; a brand can use both.

Search terms, placements and timing

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.

We treat each term’s CVR as a range instead of one number, so a term with little history is bid with that uncertainty priced in, and it borrows evidence from similar searches. We also work out the CVR for each placement: on the median account we run, top of search converts at about twice the rate of lower placements, so we set the base bid for the weakest placement and raise the others with modifiers.

On timing, Skai describes its core bid and budget optimization as daily, and uses hourly Amazon Marketing Stream data for dayparting recommendations. We re-price every search term’s bid every hour, 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.

Channels, scale and price

Skai covers far more ground: search, social and more than a hundred retail networks, with cross-channel reporting, incrementality testing and an agent platform on top. For a global brand or a large agency, that breadth is the point.

Its pricing is published as annual fees by ad spend band: $114,000 a year for up to $4 million of annual ad spend, rising to $756,000 a year for up to $35 million, with custom pricing above that. Smaller programs are pointed to Skai’s reseller partners. That makes Skai a natural fit for large, multi-channel programs.

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

Using both, or switching

Because Skai spans many channels and we run Amazon, they can sit side by side: your team keeps Skai for search, social and other retailers while we run Amazon. Or you can hand us one Amazon product family first and 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. Take those Amazon campaigns out of Skai’s portfolios and rules, so two systems aren’t changing the same campaigns.
3. 03
   We build our own campaigns.Our campaigns carry a Laurence prefix, so results stay easy to tell apart, and Skai can still report on them alongside your other channels. 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 Skai?

For Amazon ads, yes, but a different kind. Skai is enterprise software your team or agency uses across search, social and retail media. Laurence runs your Amazon ads for you, with models re-pricing every bid hourly and a team reviewing the work.

Can I use Skai and Laurence together?

Yes. Keep Skai for search, social and other retail networks while Laurence runs Amazon. Just take the Amazon campaigns Laurence runs out of Skai’s portfolios and rules, so two systems aren’t changing the same campaigns.

Does Laurence run Google, Meta or Walmart ads?

Laurence runs Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP today. Meta and Google ads are in early beta, and Walmart isn’t supported. Skai covers all of these 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 Skai’s products, pricing and features from skai.io 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 Skai wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.