What to Look for in an Amazon Growth Agency (2026)

Most Amazon agencies are glorified PPC button-pushers charging you a percentage of ad spend they have every incentive to increase. I run an Amazon agency, and I'm telling you — the industry has a trust problem. After talking to hundreds of brand owners who've been through 3, 4, sometimes 5 agencies with nothing to show for it, the pattern is clear: sellers don't know what to look for, and agencies exploit that.

This guide is what I wish every brand owner read before hiring anyone — including us.

What Separates a Real Growth Agency from a PPC Shop?

The first distinction that matters: growth agency vs. PPC agency. These are not the same thing.

A PPC agency manages your ads. They adjust bids, add keywords, maybe send you a weekly report. That's it. Your listing could be terrible, your inventory planning could be a disaster, your brand could be getting hijacked — and they'll keep optimizing campaigns on a listing that converts at 5% when it should convert at 12%.

A real growth agency owns the outcome, not just the ad account. That means:

• Listing optimization — copy, images, A+ Content, all tested and iterated

• PPC management — but as part of a system, not in isolation

• Catalog strategy — which products to push, which to sunset, launch sequencing

• Brand protection — hijacker monitoring, MAP enforcement, counterfeit takedowns

• Data infrastructure — dashboards, attribution, incrementality analysis

• Inventory alignment — coordinating ad spend with stock levels so you don't scale into a stockout

If the agency you're evaluating only talks about ACoS and ROAS, they're a PPC shop. Nothing wrong with that if that's what you need. But don't confuse it with growth.

What Questions Should You Ask an Amazon Agency?

These are the questions that separate real operators from slide-deck agencies:

• "What does your first 30 days look like?" — If they say "launch campaigns," run. The first 30 days should be an audit: understanding your catalog, margins, competitive positioning, and historical data before touching anything.

• "How do you handle listing optimization?" — If ads and listings are separate teams that don't talk to each other, that's a red flag. PPC performance is downstream of listing quality. They're inseparable.

• "What's your approach when a strategy isn't working?" — Look for specificity. "We'll optimize" means nothing. "We'll analyze search term data, check conversion rate trends against organic rank changes, and decide whether it's a relevance issue or a pricing issue" tells you they actually have a diagnostic process.

• "Can I talk to a current client in my category?" — If they can't produce a reference, ask why. If they have 50 clients but nobody willing to vouch for them, that tells you everything.

• "What do your worst outcomes look like?" — Any agency that claims they've never had a bad result is lying. The honest answer reveals how they handle adversity and what they learned from it.

• "How are you compensated?" — Understand the incentive structure. Percentage of ad spend? They're incentivized to spend more. Flat fee? They might be incentivized to do less. Percentage of revenue growth? Better alignment, but watch for attribution games.

What Are the Red Flags When Hiring an Amazon Agency?

I've heard every horror story. Here are the patterns:

• They won't give you access to your own ad account. This is non-negotiable. It's your account. If they build campaigns you can't see or export, they're creating lock-in, not value.

• They guarantee specific results. Nobody can guarantee rankings or sales numbers on Amazon. The algorithm changes, competitors shift, categories evolve. Guarantees are marketing, not operations.

• Their case studies are all "300% ROAS" with no context. What was the starting point? What category? What time frame? A 300% ROAS on a $10 product with 15% margins is terrible. Context is everything.

• They have 200+ clients and 5 account managers. Do the math. That's 40 accounts per manager. Nobody is getting real attention at that ratio. At GigaBrands, we deliberately limit our portfolio so every brand gets actual strategic work, not just automated rules.

• They push long-term contracts with no performance clauses. If they need a 12-month lock-in to keep you, ask yourself why they don't think their results will keep you voluntarily.

• They can't explain their strategy in plain English. Complexity isn't sophistication. If they hide behind jargon and "proprietary algorithms" but can't tell you why they'd take a specific action on your account, they probably don't know either.

How Should You Evaluate Amazon Agency Case Studies?

Case studies are the currency of agency marketing. Here's how to read them critically:

Look for specifics, not percentages. "We grew revenue 150%" could mean they took a brand from $2K to $5K/month. That's a very different competency than taking a brand from $200K to $500K/month. Ask for absolute numbers, or at least ranges. Check the time frame. Growth over 18 months during Q4 peak season is different from growth over 6 months starting in January. Seasonality inflates a lot of case studies. Ask about what didn't work. The best case studies include the pivots — what they tried first that failed, what they learned, and how they adjusted. A case study that's all upward trajectory with no bumps is probably edited. Verify if the brand is still with them. A case study from 2023 where the brand left in 2024 tells a different story than one where the brand is still a client 2 years later.

At GigaBrands, we track every brand's trajectory from onboarding. Some of our best results took 3-4 months of foundational work before the growth curve hit. That's normal. Anyone promising results in week one is either lying or about to blow your ad budget to manufacture short-term numbers.

What Are Realistic Growth Timelines on Amazon?

This is where most agencies over-promise and brand owners get burned.

Here's what realistic looks like based on our portfolio of 50+ brands:

• Month 1: Audit, setup, foundation. Don't expect revenue growth. Expect better data and a clear plan.

• Months 2-3: Listing improvements take effect, PPC restructuring begins showing cleaner metrics, conversion rates start climbing.

• Months 3-6: Compounding phase. Better listings + cleaner PPC + improved organic rank start feeding each other. This is where real growth shows up.

• Months 6-12: Scale phase. The foundation is solid, and now you can push spend aggressively because efficiency is dialed in.

If someone promises to double your revenue in 30 days, they're either going to jack up your ad spend (tanking profitability) or they're lying. Sustainable growth on Amazon is built on efficiency first, then scale. Reverse that order and you burn cash.

What Does an AI-Assisted Agency Actually Do Differently?

This is worth addressing because "AI" is slapped on everything now.

At GigaBrands, AI isn't a marketing buzzword — it's operational infrastructure. We use AI systems to:

• Monitor search term reports across 50+ accounts continuously, flagging waste that humans would catch weekly at best

• Run A/B test analysis at scale — processing thousands of test results to identify patterns across categories

• Track competitive movements — pricing changes, listing updates, new entrants — in real time

• Generate optimization hypotheses based on cross-portfolio data that no single account manager could hold in their head

The key difference: AI handles the data processing and pattern recognition so our team focuses on strategy and creative decisions. It's not AI replacing humans — it's AI making every human on the team dramatically more effective.

If an agency says "AI-powered" but can't explain specifically how AI changes their workflow, it's just a website redesign.

What To Do Next

If you're doing $50K+/month on Amazon and you're evaluating agencies — or you've been burned before and want to know if a different approach exists — let's talk.

Book a free strategy call — No pitch. We'll look at your account, tell you what we see, and you can decide if it makes sense to work together. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you that too.

Hunter Harris is the founder of GigaBrands, an AI-assisted Amazon growth agency managing 50+ brands with over $205M in total Amazon sales.