Laurence vs Tinuiti

If you’re choosing who should run your Amazon ads, Tinuiti and Laurence may both be on your list. It’s a fair comparison to make: both of us will run a brand’s Amazon ads for it, and both of us have people you can talk to. Underneath, though, we’re built very differently.

The short version: Tinuiti is a marketing agency. Its media and retail teams run your Amazon ads as one part of a plan that can also take in other retailers, TV, social and search, with its own software connecting the data. 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 every hour. Our models do the work, and our team reviews it.

Tinuiti, in a few paragraphs

Tinuiti has been in digital marketing for more than twenty years. It started in New York in 2004 as Elite SEM, a search marketing firm, added the Amazon agency CPC Strategy in 2019, renamed itself Tinuiti the same year, and in 2021 added the streaming media buyer Bliss Point Media and the Amazon operations agency Ortega Group. Today it calls itself “the largest independent full-funnel marketing agency across the media that matters most”, with $4 billion of digital media under management and more than 1,000 employee owners. On Amazon, it is an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner and an accredited Amazon Marketing Cloud provider. That’s a serious track record, and we respect it.

The way it works on Amazon: Tinuiti plans around what it calls the four conditions for sustainable growth, which are traffic, conversion, profitability and inventory. Its media and retail teams “work as one”: they run Sponsored Ads, DVA+ display, video and audio, and streaming TV, work on detail pages and product data, and “continuously refine bids, budgets, keywords, audiences, products and formats based on the business outcome, not a single media metric.” Its software, Bliss Point, is what Tinuiti calls its “marketing operating system”: it connects Amazon media and commerce data so the teams can see what drives sales. Tinuiti sums up how it uses software in one line: “machines accelerate, but humans decide.”

What stands out most is how much ground they cover. Beyond Amazon, Tinuiti runs retail media on Walmart Connect, Target, Instacart, Kroger, Costco, Chewy, DoorDash, Home Depot and retailers powered by Criteo, across more than 50 retailer and platform relationships. It also runs streaming and linear TV, audio, Meta, TikTok, paid search and AI SEO, and offers retail operations such as catalog, forecasting and pricing. If you want one partner for all of your media, 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 on the point that matters most, we agree.

Tinuiti says its teams refine Amazon bids and budgets “based on the business outcome, not a single media metric”, and shift investment “toward the products and campaigns that create profitable growth, not just top-line sales.” We couldn’t agree more: a ROAS or ACOS number on its own says little about whether an ad made you money. We both care about margin and about organic rank. And we both think people should stay involved: to set the strategy, to catch what software misses, and to be someone you can call.

Where we differ is in how that judgment gets made: by experienced teams with good software, or by models that price every click and a team that reviews them. 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.

Tinuiti’s teams set bids toward the business outcome, weighing product-level performance and profitability goals, and say they “manage media efficiency, fulfillment costs, catalog architecture and pricing together.” That’s experienced people weighing many inputs at once, and the people who know your business make the call.

We start from the same place, what the click is worth to you, and turn it into a number. 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, a good team weighs all of this too, and Tinuiti’s weighs media, fulfillment and pricing together. The hard part is doing it for every search term 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.

Tinuiti’s Amazon page describes its approach: it uses “actual customer search behavior to identify valuable terms, then tests broad, phrase and exact match”, and search-term harvesting and negative targeting help the program adapt over time. 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.

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. Tinuiti comes at organic growth from the retail side: detail pages, product data and creative that make the product page earn the click, inventory planning so that media and retail decisions adjust “before stockouts erode sales and organic rank”, and product information that Rufus, Alexa and other assistants can understand.

Who does the work, and what you get to see

With Tinuiti, its media and retail teams make the calls on bids, budgets, keywords and formats, with Bliss Point connecting Amazon media and commerce data so they can see what drives sales. In Tinuiti’s words, “machines accelerate, but humans decide.” That’s a good fit if you want experienced people making each decision.

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. We group each product’s search terms into campaigns by cluster and still give every term its own bid, so the Amazon Ads 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

Tinuiti simply covers more today, by a wide margin. On Amazon it runs Sponsored Ads, DVA+ display, video and audio, streaming TV and Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis. Beyond Amazon it runs retail media on Walmart, Target, Instacart, Kroger and Criteo-powered retailers, plus streaming and linear TV, audio, display, Meta, TikTok, paid search, AI SEO, affiliate, creative, email and influencer work, and retail operations such as catalog, forecasting, pricing and Buy Box monitoring.

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, Target or TV is a big part of your plan today, that’s a real reason to look at Tinuiti.

Pricing and getting started

Neither of us publishes a price list. Tinuiti scopes each program; its Amazon page says “the right investment level depends on the services, formats, audiences and measurement required.” 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 Tinuiti 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 Tinuiti 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, Tinuiti’s team is the people they work with every week, so switching changes who you talk to, not just who 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 Tinuiti agreement so the handover lines up, and agree up front what Tinuiti keeps running, such as DVA+, streaming TV or other retailers, 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 Tinuiti?

For Amazon ads, yes. Both run your Amazon advertising for you, with people you can talk to. Laurence bids from what each click is worth to your business, recalculated every hour, and focuses on Amazon. Tinuiti covers far more retailers and media, from Walmart to streaming TV.

Is Laurence an agency like Tinuiti?

No. At Tinuiti, teams of people make the calls, with software in support. At Laurence, 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.

Does Laurence run Walmart or Target ads?

Not today. Laurence runs Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP, with Meta and Google ads in early beta. Tinuiti runs Walmart, Target, 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 Tinuiti 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 Tinuiti’s services, channels, size and methods from tinuiti.com as of November 11, 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 Tinuiti wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.