A short read on where the US account sits today, the structural opportunities specific to this market, and what we'd prioritise. Designed to sit alongside the audit dashboard, not replace it.
Note: These findings are presented without full knowledge of the account, and the strategy behind it.
The US account is a substantial operation in its own right, with its own range of category-appropriate winners, PVC tape multipacks, heavier-gauge cable ties, duct tape and P-clips all carry meaningful volume. The opportunity here is not to rebuild the catalogue, but to lift the efficiency of a market that currently runs less tightly than the UK on a like-for-like basis.
US blended ACoS sits at 27.4%, against UK's 23.9%. Two factors explain most of that gap.
First, the US marketplace is simply more expensive to compete in. Average CPC is $1.47, materially higher than UK in like-for-like terms, because competition on cable-tie and tape keywords is denser. This is a market characteristic rather than a management issue, but it raises the cost of every inefficiency elsewhere.
Second, the campaign structure has not yet been calibrated to that more expensive market. The clearest single indicator: Exact-match ACoS (35.5%) currently sits above Broad-match ACoS (33.3%). In a fully developed account, Exact should sit clearly below Broad, you're paying for the most specific, highest-intent queries. The reverse pattern points to a structure that has grown organically rather than being built around a deliberate discovery-and-harvest model.
Conversion itself is not the problem, US CVR of 29.4% remains well above category norms. The constraint is the efficiency of how spend is deployed, not the account's ability to convert.
The audit flags a large figure of spend on search terms that produced no orders in the period. As in any account, that headline overstates the opportunity. The large majority sits on terms that received only a handful of clicks each, too little data to judge, and the normal cost of discovery that Broad and Auto campaigns incur to find converting terms in the first place. The genuinely actionable portion is a small fraction of the headline. The real efficiency lever isn't cutting this spend, it's the structured architecture and negation discipline described below.
The highest-leverage work in the US is tightening how spend is deployed. Rebuilding to a structured discovery-and-harvest architecture, Broad and Phrase for new-term discovery, Exact for harvested converters, disciplined negation between them, would correct the Exact-above-Broad inefficiency. We estimate this lifts account efficiency by 3-5 percentage points of ACoS at current spend levels. A disciplined weekly negation cadence supports this by retiring the small number of search terms that have had enough traffic to prove they won't convert, though the larger gain comes from the structural rebuild itself, not from trimming spend. On a ~$74,500/month spend base, the combined effect is meaningful and compounds month on month.
US conversion is strong but sits below the UK benchmark. Much of the gap reflects listing maturity, a number of US-active ASINs are newer, with thinner review depth than their UK equivalents. Targeted content work on the highest-traffic US listings, imagery, A+ content, and review generation, would close part of that gap. It compounds with the efficiency work above, because higher conversion lowers effective ACoS without touching bids.
The UK and US ranges differ, appropriately, since buying patterns differ between the markets (US demand skews toward heavier-gauge ties and tape multipacks, and the two markets' bestsellers are genuinely different products). A focused review of which proven UK lines have no US equivalent, weighed against US demand signals, would identify any genuine replication candidates. We'd treat this as a question to work through with the team rather than a sized opportunity at this stage, the data shows the US is already winning with the right products for its market, so any replication should be evidence-led rather than assumed.
It depends on neither new listings nor catalogue decisions. Conversion work and any catalogue review follow naturally once spend is being deployed efficiently, and both become easier to justify once the account is running tighter.