Seven months of decline –and a fixable cause.

This audit will not tell you PPC alone explains a seven-month sales decline, and it will not hand you a breakeven ACOS you can't verify, per-SKU margin data isn't available to us for this account yet, so nothing here assumes one. What it will tell you is exactly where a real, countable share of current ad spend is going with nothing to show for it, and what we'd fix first regardless of what the margin numbers eventually say.

What actually happened – in seven sentences.

One peak, one long slide.

Before any campaign gets touched, here is what the business actually did over the last 17 months, pulled from the Business Report, not the ads console. Ad efficiency lives inside this bigger curve, and the two move together for a reason we unpack below.

Month by month, from launch to today

The business leaned harder on ads exactly when ads got worse.

Pulled from the Amazon Ads console, whole-account view, Sep 2025 – Sep 2026. Whole-period totals: $12,774.36 spent, 1,181 purchases, blended ROAS 3.43. The monthly trend underneath that average is where the real story is.

Monthly ACOS / TACoS / ROAS

External evidence: category search volume follows the same shape

Independent of the account's own data, historic search volume for "honey ginger tea" (Jungle Scout, all-time view) shows a clean seasonal pattern across both years on record: a winter peak, a summer trough, repeating.

One campaign carries the account. One cancels it out.

15 campaigns exist in this account. Eight are paused or dormant. Of the seven live campaigns, one is excellent, one is where most of the waste lives, and two are "Enabled" but effectively not delivering at all. All campaigns run Dynamic Bids – Down Only, which is the correct default and not a finding on its own.

Every campaign, 19 Jul – 19 Sep 2026

No portfolios are in use across any campaign, worth setting up once structure is cleaned up, but not a priority fix.

Where each placement's spend actually goes

Placement-level breakdown for the two campaigns that matter most. Both run identical "Dynamic Bids – Down Only," neither has a placement bid adjustment set – which is exactly why the spend lands where it does.

84 keywords, one ad group, almost nothing to show for it.

The Targeting Report breaks SCALE's single ad group – CORE_KW_EX – down to the keyword. $396.49 spent, $544.85 in sales, 15 orders, 72.8% ACOS across 84 exact-match keywords. Here's what's actually in that list.

Worst offenders – all zero orders, all exact match

What's actually converting – keep and build around these

Dominant on your own name. Nearly invisible on the category.

Cross-checked across two separate report exports (Search Term Impression Share and Search Term Report) to avoid relying on a single pull. Both land in the same place independently, which is the whole point of pulling two.

You're not competing on price. You're not targeting their names either.

Independent competitor research, cross-checked against the same Search Term and Targeting reports from Sections 04–05. Two separate findings here: where Ginger Bee Tea actually sits on the shelf, and a real gap in how the account's ads are built around that shelf.

The five closest direct competitors

Balance Grow and Damtuh show meaningfully higher estimated sales in this research than Ginger Bee Tea – the two strongest commercial threats in the group. Secondary, less comparable competitors: VONBEE and KPANTRY (same occasion, but citron/yuja-forward rather than ginger-honey-forward). Not direct competitors – treat as category/search substitutes only, not the primary comparison set: Pocas, Prince of Peace, and Honsei (instant powders/sachets), Bigelow (conventional tea bags).

Two children, two different products on paper.

The variant family sits under parent ASIN B0F2GKQVZP (parent SKU GBT1, itself inactive). Two children are active and sellable. They are not running the same listing story, and the higher-priced one is the weaker copy.

30-day snapshot, both active children

GBT1 (parent SKU) is inactive, FBM, zero inventory – it's the variation parent record, not a sellable listing, and carries no backend search terms.

The conversion rate isn't the problem – the traffic mix is.

GBT1-FBA converts at 13.1% on 928 page views, that's a healthy rate for the category, not a listing failure. The listing gaps here are real but secondary to the traffic and spend issues in Sections 03–05.

What the Category Listings Report shows

A repeat-purchase product with no repeat-purchase mechanism turned on.

Confirmed directly by Rohail: the account is not running a Subscribe & Save discount, and there's no quantity discount configured anywhere in the catalogue. For a consumable that people either love enough to keep buying or don't, both of these are standard tools sitting unused, not exotic ones.

Yes on the mechanics. Not on a number we can't back.

Every item below is something we can point to in the data you've already given us. None of it depends on the margin data that isn't available to us yet – when that arrives, these get sharper, not different.

What moves, and on what basis

Stop the bleeding first. Then chase impression share.

We don't yet know the single cause of the 7-month decline, and we won't pretend to. What we do control is impression share on the keywords already proven to convert – "ginger bee tea," "ginger tea," "honey ginger tea" – and that's the lever this plan leans on to rebuild sale velocity while the bigger question in Section 02 gets answered. Ordered by how fast each item can show up in the numbers, not by how interesting it is. The dollar figures below are directly derived from the 62-day waste already confirmed in Sections 03–05, monthlyized, not projected.

We advise and coach. Your team keeps its hands on the account.

This is a consultation relationship, not a hand-off. Long-term working sessions with your in-house operator, where every recommendation comes with the reasoning behind it, not just the instruction.