Laurence vs Stackline

Brands that talk to us have often looked at Stackline too, or already use it. That makes sense: if you sell a consumer brand through several big retailers, Stackline is hard to miss. But the two of us aren’t really the same kind of thing, and that’s the most useful place to start.

Stackline is a retail data platform first. It shows your team how your category is moving across Amazon, Walmart, Target and other retailers, and its ads software, Ad Manager, lets your team, or Stackline’s own experts, run retail media across them. Laurence isn’t a tool you operate. We run your Amazon ads for you: our models make the decisions every hour, and our team reviews the work and answers to you.

Stackline, in a few paragraphs

Michael Lagoni started Stackline in Seattle in 2014, with $300 in a one-room apartment, and still runs it as CEO. It raised $50 million from Goldman Sachs’ growth equity team in November 2020 and $130 million from TA Associates in June 2021. Today it has about 250 people across six offices and says it works with more than 7,000 consumer brands, including 83 of the top 100.

Its foundation is data. Atlas measures 1.2 billion products every day across Amazon, Walmart, Target and other retailers in 26 countries: sales and market share, traffic, paid and organic share of voice, pricing, reviews, and how much competitors spend on ads. Around it sit Beacon for 52-week forecasts for every SKU, Shopper Analytics for who buys and how, and Advisor, an AI agent that answers performance questions, researches categories and builds presentations. In January 2026 Stackline added AI Visibility, which tracks how products are recommended in ChatGPT, Amazon Rufus and other AI shopping tools.

Ads came next. Stackline launched Ad Manager in March 2020, and today Ad Manager runs retail media on Amazon worldwide, Walmart Connect, Target, Instacart, Criteo and more from one place. Machine-learning models make “thousands of adjustments across bids, budgets, and targeting every day”, alongside rules you configure, budget pacing, dayparting and ready-made Amazon Marketing Cloud analyses. Stackline says it optimized $2.4 billion in client ad spend last year. For brands that would rather not run it themselves, its managed services team runs the campaigns across those networks, “from planning and audience targeting to creative development, bidding, and real-time adjustments.”

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.

Who runs the ads day to day

This is the real choice, more than any single feature.

Stackline gives you two ways to run your ads. With Ad Manager, someone on your side, or at your agency, sets the objectives, writes the rules, chooses the dayparting and budgets, and reads the dashboards, while Stackline’s models make the many small adjustments within them. With Stackline’s managed services, its experts run the campaigns for you, with its software and data underneath and detailed reporting for you to read. If you choose the services, the work is done for you too, and the bigger difference is how each bid is set, which is the next section.

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 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 the work and is there when you want to talk it through. Your people get their time back for product, creative and the channels we don’t run.

What each bid is aiming at

Stackline describes Ad Manager’s bid changes as tuned to raise conversion and ROAS, keeping each campaign in line with the performance objectives your team sets. When it launched the tool in 2020, it said the bidding would draw on profitability, conversion and competitive data alongside its market data. Aiming at a target is 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 only lands on the right bid when it happens to match what that product can afford, and one target rarely fits a whole catalog:

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.

In Ad Manager you can set different objectives for different campaigns, and good teams do. The hard part is choosing each target 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.

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.

Simple rules have a hard time here, whichever tool runs them, because a rule needs a threshold, like “pause after 20 clicks with no order”, and most terms never get close to one. 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 clicks come in.

Market data, and where it goes

Both companies believe a brand should see its whole category, not only its own account. This is where Stackline is strongest. Atlas shows your market share week by week, the traffic and searches moving your category, your paid and organic share of voice, and what competitors spend on ads, across Amazon and other retailers. Stackline uses that data in its own ad targeting, and it’s genuinely useful for planning, for retail buyers, and for anyone who has to explain the business to a board.

We use market data as an input to every bid. 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.

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, Stackline describes Ad Manager’s optimization as real-time, with budgets ramped up or down by performance, pacing and the time left, and dayparting to choose when ads run through the day. 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.

Channels and scale

Here Stackline covers far more ground. Ad Manager runs retail media on Amazon worldwide, Walmart Connect, Target, Instacart, Criteo and more, its budget pacing also reaches The Trade Desk, and its data spans 26 countries. Large consumer brands selling through many retailers, and the teams that serve them, are its home turf.

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. If a large share of your sales comes from Walmart, Target or Instacart today, that matters, and Stackline covers them.

Pricing and getting started

Neither of us publishes a price list. Stackline sells its software by subscription, and both the software and its managed services start with a demo. 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

Using both, or switching

Because Stackline is largely data and we run ads, they can sit side by side. You can keep Stackline for market data, forecasting and your other retailers while we run Amazon. Or you can hand us one marketplace or product family first, to 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. Switch off Ad Manager’s bidding and rules on those products, or ask Stackline’s team to, so two systems aren’t changing the same campaigns.
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 results stay easy to tell apart. Your history stays in your account, and Stackline’s market data keeps working.
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 Stackline?

For running Amazon ads, yes, but a different kind. Stackline is a retail data platform with ads software your team uses across many retailers, and a services team that can run those ads for you. Laurence runs your Amazon ads for you, with models setting every bid hourly and a team reviewing the work. For market data and forecasting, Laurence isn’t a replacement, and the two work well together.

Can I use Laurence and Stackline together?

Yes. You can keep Stackline for market data, forecasting and your other retailers while Laurence runs Amazon. Just make sure Ad Manager’s bidding and rules aren’t also changing the campaigns Laurence runs.

Does Laurence run Walmart, Target 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. Stackline supports Walmart, Target, Instacart and many other retail media networks.

What is Stackline Atlas?

Atlas is Stackline’s market data product. It measures sales, market share, traffic, pricing, reviews and competitors’ ad spend for more than a billion products across Amazon, Walmart, Target and other retailers.

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 its reason on the Laurence platform, and our team is there when you have questions.

How we wrote this. We described Stackline’s products, channels and scale from stackline.com, its press releases and its Ad Manager launch announcement as of November 11, 2026, and things may have changed since. Stackline’s scale figures are its own, from its website. 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 Stackline wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.