Beyond PPC: Full-Service Amazon Strategies with Clear Ads

George: Welcome to the Clear Ads Podcast, Highway to Sales. You’re with George Roberts and Maxim Gen. Today we’re talking about channel support and full-service support for Amazon brands—how Clear Ads does it and tips you can use for your own brand. Max, welcome—it’s been a while!

Max: Thanks, George—great to be here. I’m one of the senior advertising specialists at Clear Ads, and I lead our full-service channel support, which we introduced toward the end of 2023. Historically we were a PPC/DSP agency and very established there, but we broadened our offering. A lot of us are (or have been) sellers—so we brought that experience together to manage the entire Amazon presence: inventory management, listing optimization and maintenance, customer feedback and account health, and of course all the ad management.

George: Exactly—we’re far more than PPC/DSP now. I want to focus on helping sellers with systems we’ve implemented on the full-service side. Your day-to-day varies by brand, but what time-consuming tasks have you systemized?

Max: Our priority is giving sellers their time back. We work day-in and day-out inside Amazon, especially for larger brands with 10–several thousand SKUs. Top priorities:

• Account health: from a removed bullet point to a suppressed listing—or worst-case, account suspension—we jump on it fast and try to preempt issues.

• Inventory management: we built an internal forecasting/tracking system. In North America, coverage across fulfillment centers is crucial. If you’re not eligible for fast Prime delivery in enough regions, you’ll underperform in search. Onboarding includes optimizing inventory flow so distribution improves organic visibility and revenue.

George: Inventory’s huge. Before we controlled more of the service, we’d scale spend and then—surprise—stock would run out. Now, aligning forecasting with growth makes a difference. On alignment: how do you sync PPC with front- and backend listing work to improve rank and overall sales velocity?

Max: Onboarding starts with listing optimization—images, titles, bullets, descriptions, A+ Content, Store, all customer-facing elements. We work in batches (top sellers first) and:

• Add semantically relevant and exact-match high-value keywords (shockingly absent on many strong listings).

• Respect character limits (title/bullets); Amazon’s algorithm only reads the first ~1,000 bullet characters. Title carries the most weight, then bullets, then description.

• Optimize image stacks: the algorithm “reads” them—brand labels with key terms can help; add relevant alt text.

• Update backend (generic) keywords: Amazon increased the field from 250 to 500 characters—we use it fully.

This is ongoing: rotate images, refresh A+ modules, and update the Store. Staying active correlates with better search results.

George: Some sellers fear changing listings. But competitors are iterating. Also, Amazon’s evolving search (Rufus, baskets, personalization, etc.). The keyword-stuffing era is gone. It’s more nuanced now.

Max: Exactly—balance readability with relevance. Tell the product/brand story in the description/About the Brand, but put your must-rank terms in title/bullets. Amazon rewards activity: launches, updates, and continuous testing. We actually encourage clients to launch new products regularly—monthly if possible—to boost brand momentum.

George: Someone told me “ads will be dead in a year.” I strongly disagree—if anything, advertising becomes more important amid search changes.

Max: Agreed. Amazon’s not ditching ads—they’re core revenue. But we do aim to reduce over-reliance on ads. Ideally your mix is ~40–65% organic / 35–60% ads, with ~50/50 a healthy target. If 85–95% of your sales are ad-driven, Amazon sees you as “ad-dependent,” which hurts organic ranking. Our channel management focuses on growing organic while improving ad efficiency.

George: We flag >60% ad reliance as “danger zone.” How do we reduce that from the ads side?

Max: We now pair our manual strategy with Scale Insights and PathView. We use:

• Day-parting and staged bid pulls instead of pausing (e.g., reduce bids by 50%, then another 40% later). Maintain learning and grab occasional low-bid sales overnight.

• Rule stacks per brand (not boilerplate): build toward jointly agreed TACOS margins while scaling.

Sometimes clients have great TACOS (e.g., 10–12%) but are starved for scale. With data we can justify carefully lifting to grow, then dial back to a sustainable balance.

George: Good example: we onboarded a brand and told them to send 60% more inventory based on our forecast and growth plan—they were shocked, but it worked. When the data changed, we pulled back spend and stock flow accordingly.

Max: Right—especially for higher-COGS items with low weekly sell-through, sending more stock feels risky. But if you only have inventory in a few states, you’ll never get broad Prime coverage, which caps sales. We look at the distribution map per SKU then recommend inbound volumes to ensure coverage.

George: Let’s wrap with top tips and best practices you’ve uncovered—things many sellers miss.

Max: Two big ones:

1. Use Category Listing Reports & Flat Files

   • Request access in Seller Central (Reports → open a case to enable Category Listing Reports).

   • Download your full catalog—hundreds of columns vs. the limited front end.

   • Populate as many fields as possible: improves compliance, reduces policy flags.

   • Flat files take precedence over front-end edits. Use them for partial updates, image stack URLs (hosted), creating variations, and pushing through stuck changes.

   • Use the Browse Tree Guide to confirm/better your categorization (caution: Amazon is stricter about recategorization and may revert you).

2. Fill Backend (Generic) Keywords—Properly

   • Use the full 500 characters with semantically relevant terms (no repeats, no commas needed).

   • Amazon shows five fields on the front end, but only the first 500 characters are indexed—so put your best set in that first field.

And keep iterating: titles, bullets, images, A+, Store modules—rotate and test continuously.

George: Perfect. We’ll cover our tool stack in a part two. Thanks, Max—super helpful. If you want more info, head to clearadsagency.com, join the waitlist or book a call with me. We can dig into how we can support you—or provide a free account audit. Until next time!

Max: Pleasure, George. Cheers.