Northside

From 84% ACoS and 2.58x ROAS Into 241% Revenue Growth with SellerApp

Discover how NorthSide went from high spend and low returns to a system that actually worked, cutting ACoS from 84% to 4.71% and scaling revenue by 241% by focusing on the right traffic, not just more of it. With SellerApp’s full-funnel approach, inefficient spend was turned into consistent, profitable growth.

CTR CPC optimization

Executive Summary

NorthSide, a footwear brand selling on Amazon through FBA, had built strong visibility and a steady flow of traffic over time. But that momentum had started to slip. Revenue was no longer keeping pace, ad spend was rising, and returns were becoming harder to sustain.

The problem was who it was reaching. Traffic was coming in, but a large share of it wasn’t converting at the level needed to support profitable growth.

SellerApp partnered with Northside in November 2025 to identify where the disconnect was happening and realign the account around higher-intent demand. This involved a full-funnel approach, combining AI-powered bidding, Amazon DSP, Amazon Marketing Cloud, and inventory-aware automation to improve both targeting and efficiency.

About the Brand

NorthSide is a private label footwear brand selling on Amazon through FBA. Operating in a highly competitive category, the brand had built steady visibility and a consistent flow of traffic over time.

By November 2025, NorthSide partnered with SellerApp to take over account management. The goal wasn’t just to maintain that momentum, but to turn it into more efficient, scalable growth.

Rethinking the Growth Strategy

NorthSide came in looking to regain control over performance. Efficiency had slipped, returns were under pressure, and there was a clear need to bring ACoS down to sustainable levels.

But the ask went beyond just improving efficiency.

SellerApp approached this as a broader performance reset. The focus was not only on reducing ACoS, but on rebuilding a healthier growth model, one where organic contribution could scale alongside paid efforts, and traffic translated more consistently into actual buyers.

This meant shifting spend toward higher-intent audiences, tightening targeting, and improving how demand was captured across the funnel.

At the same time, DSP and AMC were introduced to recover lost audiences, expand new-to-brand acquisition, and build a clearer view of how users moved from discovery to purchase.

~66%

Increase in Ad Revenue

15.9%

ACoS dropped by

66%

CTR improved by

"As a seller, you need to secure what you already have before expanding to vendors. Otherwise, you end up competing against your own products.

We focused on strengthening what was already working before scaling further."

- Nithin Mentreddy, Director of Customer Success

Challenges Northside Faced Before SellerApp

Performance had already started to slip, but the account didn’t look obviously broken. Traffic was still flowing in, impressions were strong, and activity levels remained high. Underneath that, though, the numbers told a very different story.

Challenge 1: The Numbers Stopped Making Sense

During the baseline period (Nov 2024–Oct 2025), performance declined sharply, with ROAS falling from 4.40x to 1.19x, a 73% drop.

At its worst, ACoS peaked at 84.27% in April 2025, pushing the account into an unprofitable state where a significant portion of revenue was being spent just to acquire sales.

This wasn’t a short-term fluctuation. It pointed to a deeper inefficiency in how spend was being deployed across the account.

Challenge 2: Getting Clicks, Not Conversions

While impressions scaled up to 2.9M in May 2025, engagement and conversion did not follow. CTR remained flat at 0.34%, CPCs rose to $0.62, and conversion rates dropped as low as 0.89%.

The issue came down to the type of traffic being captured. Campaigns were pulling in a high volume of generic, category-level search terms in a highly competitive space, which drove visibility but not meaningful intent.

Loose match types and complementary targeting further expanded reach without sufficient control, bringing in users who were browsing or comparing rather than ready to purchase.

At the same time, underperforming and irrelevant queries were not consistently marked as negative, allowing spend to continue flowing toward traffic that wasn’t converting.

The result was a system optimized for impressions, but not for outcomes.

Challenge 3: More Than Just a Targeting Problem

Beyond targeting, structural issues within the account were compounding inefficiencies. These gaps made it harder to control spend and optimize effectively at scale.

External factors also played a role. Buy Box inconsistency and seasonal demand fluctuations affected conversion reliability, while vendor-side distribution introduced additional competition for the same products. In several cases, identical SKUs were being sold at lower price points through vendors, which disrupted pricing control, reduced Buy Box ownership, and added further pressure on conversion performance.

At the same time, increasing reliance on paid traffic began to erode organic performance. Instead of supporting organic growth, PPC spend was compensating for it, making the account more dependent on inefficient paid acquisition.

ACoS reduction case study

SellerApp’s Audit

When SellerApp dug into the account, the initial focus was on bidding. Aggressive bids or inefficient budget allocation are common reasons for declining performance. But the data pointed elsewhere.

The issue was not how the campaigns were being funded, but who they were reaching.

This misalignment showed up clearly in the metrics. CTR remained flat despite strong impressions, while conversion rates declined to 1.67% and dropped as low as 0.89%. Increasing spend under these conditions only amplified inefficiencies, driving ACoS higher and pushing ROAS further down.

The account did not need more volume. It needed better alignment between targeting and intent. It also needed clearer visibility into how users interacted with the brand across touchpoints, so that spend could be directed toward demand more likely to convert.

How SellerApp Turned Demand Into Results

Partnering with SellerApp transformed Northside's Amazon presence, delivering improved ad efficiency, higher revenue, and a stronger brand position on the platform.

Full-Funnel PPC and AI-Driven Bidding

Campaign structures were rebuilt from the ground up to reflect purchase intent instead of broad reach. Low-quality search terms were systematically identified and removed, while new structures were built around queries with a proven track record of conversion.

At the same time, Keywords ranking on Page 2 were identified and pushed toward Page 1 visibility, using paid traffic to accelerate organic ranking. The objective was not just to drive sales, but to improve long-term discoverability and demand capture.

Amazon Marketing Cloud: Path-to-Purchase Clarity

Amazon Marketing Cloud was deployed to map the full path-to-purchase and uncover high-intent audience segments that standard reporting could not capture.

This provided visibility into how users interacted with the brand across touchpoints, allowing budget to be aligned with the stages of the funnel that were actually contributing to conversion, rather than those simply driving clicks.

Amazon DSP : Structured Full-Funnel Targeting

DSP was used to build a more controlled and layered approach to audience targeting.

At the top of the funnel, campaigns focused on category-level shoppers who had shown interest in similar products but had not yet converted, expanding reach in a more qualified way.

At the bottom of the funnel, retargeting was used to re-engage users who had previously interacted with the brand but did not convert, effectively recovering lost demand.

Audience targeting also shifted from broad segments to more refined in-market and lifestyle-based groups, ensuring that ads were reaching users closer to a purchase decision.

Inventory-Aware Automation

To prevent performance drops driven by operational factors, SellerApp integrated inventory and Buy Box signals directly into campaign optimization.

When stock levels declined or Buy Box control weakened, spend was automatically redirected toward better-performing SKUs. This ensured that conversion rates remained stable and that budget was not wasted on products that were unlikely to convert at that point.

Budget Reallocation Based on Performance

Budget allocation was continuously aligned with performance data. Campaigns and segments delivering stronger CTR and conversion rates were scaled, while those underperforming were reduced or paused.

This allowed the account to improve efficiency without cutting overall spend. Growth was driven by reallocating budget toward what was working, rather than increasing investment across the board.

Execution Framework

Once the strategy was defined, execution focused on maintaining control, consistency, and speed of optimization across the account.

Search term reports were reviewed on a weekly cadence. Irrelevant and underperforming queries were negated on an ongoing basis to prevent wasted spend from compounding, while converting terms were isolated into dedicated campaigns for tighter control.

Keyword bids were adjusted continuously based on organic positioning and conversion data, with Page 2 keywords prioritized for aggressive scaling toward Page 1.

Budget allocation was reviewed dynamically rather than fixed, shifting spend toward campaigns delivering stronger CTR and conversion rates and pulling back on segments that weren't performing.

Inventory levels and Buy Box status were monitored alongside campaign performance. Spend was redirected away from SKUs with low availability or weak Buy Box ownership to keep conversion rates stable and prevent budget waste at the product level.

AI bidding strategy

Results & Business Impact

When NorthSide onboarded in October 2025, ACoS stood at 13.40%, already down from its April peak of 84.27%, but still far from efficient. The account was leaking spend across loosely matched queries, underperforming terms that hadn't been negated, and SKUs disrupted by vendor-side competition and Buy Box instability.

The fix wasn't more spend. It was better control.

Within the first month, keyword tightening and negative term cleanup began redirecting budget toward traffic that was actually converting. The results compounded quickly from there.
Total sales grew from $24,377 to $83,029, a 241% increase driven entirely by efficiency gains, not increased investment. ACoS dropped from 13.40% to 4.71%, a 65% improvement.

Conversion rate climbed from 1.67% to 3.02%, and CTR rose 53%, both pointing to stronger alignment between who was seeing the ads and who was ready to buy.

Organic contribution moved from 65% to 75.3%, reflecting a healthier account where paid performance was lifting organic visibility rather than masking its decline. ROAS went from 2.58x to over 20x, growth at a scale that only holds when the underlying targeting is right.

Key Takeaway

NorthSide's problem was never visibility. The impressions were there. The traffic was there. What wasn't there was intent, and no amount of spend was going to close that gap.

The turnaround came from doing less, better. Fewer keywords, but the right ones. Tighter structures, cleaner negatives, spend that followed performance instead of chasing volume.

The account didn't need to reach more people. It needed to stop paying to reach the wrong ones.

There's a subtler lesson here too. By the time SellerApp stepped in, the account had already slipped into a pattern that's easy to miss from the inside, where paid spend was quietly compensating for organic erosion rather than supporting it.

The metrics looked like a targeting problem. Underneath, it was structural. Fixing one without addressing the other would have only delayed the same outcome.

Vendor expansion without securing core channels first added another layer of pressure that didn't show up in campaign data but showed up everywhere else, in pricing, in Buy Box stability, in conversion reliability.

Growth strategy and ad strategy were pulling in different directions, and the ad account was absorbing the cost of that misalignment.

Precision beat scale here. It usually does.

If you see your account in this story traffic that isn't converting, spend that keeps rising, returns that don't add up, the problem is worth a closer look.

Don't just take our word for it.

full funnel Amazon advertising strategy