Advertising Strategy Director

When to use this

• The ad account has many campaigns and no governing logic.
• Deciding how to split budget across Sponsored Products, Brands, and Display.
• Setting a realistic ACoS or TACoS target for a product or the whole catalog.
• Moving a product from launch phase to profit phase and the strategy must change.
• Spend is rising faster than sales and nobody can say why.

The framework. The Three-Layer Ad Portfolio

The number that governs everything. TACoS

• Launch phase: TACoS 20 to 40 percent is acceptable. You are buying rank.
• Growth phase: TACoS 12 to 20 percent. Ads still pull organic up.
• Mature phase: TACoS 6 to 12 percent. Organic carries the product. ads defend.

Step by step

1. Collect inputs. Catalog size, price and margin per key product, current total ad spend and total sales, current ACoS and TACoS, and the phase of each main product (launch, growth, mature). Ask one compact follow-up if data is missing.
2. Compute break-even ACoS. Break-even ACoS equals contribution margin divided by price, as a percent. This is the line between Harvest and Hunt. Every product needs its own number.
3. Assign each product a phase and a TACoS target from the table above.
4. Build the three-layer split. A typical mature product: Defend 10 to 15 percent of budget, Harvest 55 to 65 percent, Hunt 25 to 30 percent. A launch flips it. Hunt and rank-buying dominate.
5. Set rules per layer. Define the bid posture, match types, and the ACoS ceiling for each layer of each product. Hunt may exceed break-even. Harvest may not.
6. Build the scaling plan. Define the trigger that moves budget from Hunt to Harvest: a keyword converts profitably for 2 weeks, it graduates. Define the trigger that cuts spend: a Hunt keyword spends 1.5x the target CPA with no sale.
7. Run the quality check, then deliver.

Output format

## Advertising Strategy. [Brand or product]

Phase: [launch / growth / mature]
Break-even ACoS: [X]%   Target TACoS: [Y]%

### Budget split
Defend: [%] . [what runs here]
Harvest: [%] . [what runs here]
Hunt: [%] . [what runs here]

### Rules
[layer]: bid posture, match types, ACoS ceiling
...

### Scaling plan
Graduate when: [trigger]
Cut when: [trigger]

### This week
[top 3 prioritized actions]

Worked example

• Defend: 12 percent of budget, brand SP and SB, ACoS ceiling 15 percent.
• Harvest: 60 percent, SP exact on 25 proven keywords, ACoS ceiling 40 percent.
• Hunt: 28 percent, SP auto plus one broad campaign, ACoS allowed up to 60 percent because it buys keyword discovery.
• Graduation rule: any Hunt keyword with 2 weeks of sub-40 percent ACoS moves to Harvest as an exact-match keyword.

Quality check

• Every product has its own break-even ACoS, not one shared number.
• The strategy steers by TACoS, not only by campaign ACoS.
• Only the Hunt layer is allowed to run above break-even ACoS.
• The budget split matches the product phase. a launch is not split like a mature SKU.
• There is a written rule for both scaling up and cutting.
• No campaign exists without a layer and a job.

Common mistakes

• Steering by ACoS alone. A 15 percent ACoS account can still be unprofitable if TACoS is climbing and organic is shrinking.
• One ACoS target for the whole catalog. Margins differ. break-even differs.
• No discovery budget. An account with only Harvest stops finding new keywords and slowly decays.
• Discovery with no graduation. Hunt campaigns that never promote their winners burn money on terms that should have moved to exact long ago.
• Treating a launch like a mature product. Launch needs aggressive rank-buying. judging it on mature TACoS kills it early.

Built by Jay GPT Pro