From Delisted to Thriving: How We Revived a Breastfeeding Balm Brand on Amazon

When a trusted brand in the baby care market saw their Baby Breastfeeding Weaning Balm Stick suddenly removed from Amazon due to a product policy compliance issue, their business faced a critical setback. 

For a brand highly reliant on Amazon’s reach, the delisting not only paused sales but also risked losing valuable market positioning and customer trust. Sipransh Ecommgrowth stepped in to provide a comprehensive restoration strategy, from listing reinstatement to optimizing ad spend and enhancing sales performance. 

By systematically rebuilding their Amazon presence, we not only reestablished their market foothold but also achieved a substantial decrease in ACOS and a steady increase in sales, turning this setback into an opportunity for growth.

This case study dives into the steps we took to get their business back on track and surpass their previous performance, achieving results beyond expectation.

Challenges:

1. Loss of Social Proof: Starting with zero reviews after having 2,000 positive reviews can significantly impact credibility and conversion rates, especially in the sensitive baby care category where reviews play a pivotal role in customer trust.
2. High ACOS on New PPC Campaigns: Without reviews, PPC campaigns typically require higher bids to achieve visibility and engagement, which can initially inflate the ACOS. For niche products like weaning balm, reaching a stable, profitable ACOS can be a slower process.
3. Product Policy and Compliance Monitoring: The baby care category often has stringent compliance requirements. Ensuring that product descriptions, keywords, and images fully align with Amazon’s policies is crucial to avoid future listing removals.
4. Sensitive and Specific Audience: Weaning balm appeals to a niche market of breastfeeding mothers, making audience targeting critical. However, PPC targeting can be challenging without reviews or brand recognition, and the product must reach the right audience to avoid wasted ad spend.
5. Compliance with Health and Safety Regulations: Being part of the baby care category, the product is subject to strict regulations, which can cause frequent scrutiny and potential compliance-related suspensions.
6. Restoring Organic Ranking: Once a listing is reactivated, organic ranking and visibility need to be rebuilt from scratch, which can be time-consuming and requires consistent PPC and SEO efforts to regain lost ground.

Actions:

1. Launching Targeted PPC Campaigns: We started with a comprehensive PPC strategy on the new listing to regain visibility. Despite the initial challenge of zero reviews, we strategically targeted high-converting keywords from the previous listing to capture relevant traffic. Although the ACOS was above 30% initially, continuous optimization allowed us to refine targeting and ad placement, significantly lowering ACOS over time.
2. Keyword Optimization for High Organic Ranking: To accelerate organic ranking recovery, we incorporated all previously high-performing keywords directly into the listing’s title, bullet points, and backend search terms. This on-page optimization helped regain first-page ranking on these keywords, which improved organic visibility without heavily relying on ads.
3. Bid and Budget Adjustments: We monitored each campaign’s performance daily, adjusting bids to target profitable placements and reduce ad costs. By refining our bids, we gradually brought the ACOS down from 30% to below 20%, aligning with the client’s goal while maintaining consistent visibility on high-impact search terms.
4. Enhanced Content and Review Strategy: We leveraged Enhanced Brand Content (A+ content) to increase conversions despite the absence of reviews, using lifestyle images and benefit-focused descriptions to establish trust. This helped maintain CTR and conversions even in the early stages when customer reviews were minimal.
5. Review-Building Campaigns: To quickly gain new reviews, we enrolled the product in Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program and strategically reached out to previous customers within Amazon’s guidelines. This approach helped restore the product’s credibility, reinforcing our PPC efforts and reducing ACOS as conversions increased.
6. Competitor and Negative Keyword Targeting: To further enhance efficiency, we targeted competitor listings directly and used negative keywords to exclude irrelevant search terms, minimizing wasted spend and focusing only on high-intent keywords. This targeting helped stabilize ACOS and improved ROI.
7. Weekly Performance Analysis and Adjustments: We conducted weekly reviews of PPC metrics and organic ranking positions, adjusting our strategy as needed. This proactive approach ensured that campaigns stayed optimized, maintaining the balance between ad spend and organic growth, and ultimately achieving ACOS below 20%.

Through these focused actions, we successfully restored the product’s standing on Amazon and achieved the client’s goal of reducing ACOS to below 20%.

Benefits:

Targeted PPC campaigns boosted the product’s visibility on relevant keywords right from the start, ensuring it reached the right audience even with zero initial reviews. This visibility drove early traffic and set the stage for organic growth.

By optimizing the listing with high-impact keywords, the product quickly reclaimed its first-page positions, reducing dependency on ads and allowing for more organic sales, which are cost-free compared to PPC.

Systematic bid adjustments reduced ad spend without compromising visibility, resulting in a lower ACOS that aligned with the client’s profitability goals. Efficient spending meant more budget flexibility to explore additional growth strategies.

Using Enhanced Brand Content created a professional, trustworthy brand image, which appealed to shoppers and encouraged conversions even before significant reviews had accumulated. This optimized content helped establish the product as a go-to choice for the target audience.

The Early Reviewer Program helped reestablish social proof, crucial for increasing customer trust. By quickly gaining verified reviews, the product gained traction faster, which further supported conversion rates and ad performance.

Competitor targeting and negative keywords optimized ad relevance, reducing costs associated with irrelevant clicks and ensuring the product appeared in front of the most likely buyers, which enhanced ROAS.

Weekly analysis enabled agile adjustments, keeping the PPC strategy aligned with real-time performance and market changes. This approach helped maintain low ACOS and high conversion rates, supporting both profitability and sustainable growth.

These actions collectively increased both paid and organic visibility, built customer trust, and enhanced profitability, positioning the product strongly on Amazon while achieving the client’s target ACOS.

Results:
Over the course of 10 months, we have reduced the ACos from 31.5% to 18% using our specialised optimization techniques. The lowest being 12% in one of the months. Regained the lost sales and reviews and optimized the listing strictly following Amazon’s compliance guidelines.

January 1st, 2024  to  October 25th, 2024 (10 months):

• Total Units Ordered: 8923 units
• Total Ordered Product Sales: $221,355
• Organic Sales: $101,880
• PPC Sales: $119,475
• PPC Spend:$21,583
• ACoS: 18%
• PPC Impressions: 1,218,515