A year of flat sales, and an ad budget nobody could account for.

Where they started

A hundred-year-old brand and a channel going nowhere

SILCA was founded outside Milan in 1917 by Felice Sacchi and has spent a century as one of the known names in bike parts. None of that was the problem. The problem was that a brand with that much standing was doing $55,000 a month on Amazon and could not move it.

Through 2021 they tried tactics and watched sales drop anyway. Advertising ran without a consistent budget and without a return anyone could point to, which is the worst version of this — not overspending exactly, just spending without a way to tell whether it worked. Two constraints came with the engagement: the ad budget was limited, and margin was not to be traded for revenue. There was also no money for new design or A+ content, so whatever we did had to come out of the listings and the ad account as they already were.

What we did

Audit, then search, then advertising — in that order

• Audited ad efficiency against the brand, and fixed the KPIs the account would actually be judged on: ad spend, revenue, and TACoS.
• Keyword research in Helium 10, read against the past ad data for conversion rate and click-through by campaign, so the rebuild followed demand rather than guesswork.
• SEO rebuilt next — back-end attributes and new front-end copy, giving organic rank something to climb on before a dollar of new ad money moved.
• Full-funnel PPC launched in March, two months after the engagement started, with several ad types and bids raised only once the pages could convert the traffic.

The sequence is the whole method, and it is the same one that ran on the OnPoint account. Raising bids in January, against listings that had not been touched, would have bought a larger ad bill and roughly the revenue they already had. The pages had to be able to convert before the traffic was worth paying for.

What changed

Monthly revenue went from $55,000 to $125,000

Against their 2021 monthly average, revenue across April through July 2022 ran at $125,000 a month — up 127%. Annualized, that moves the channel from roughly $660K to roughly $1.5M. The first full month of the measured window landed one month after PPC went live, and three months after the engagement began.

Margin held. That was the constraint going in and it is the number worth as much as the revenue, because doubling sales by buying them is not a result. The old report also states that organic sales more than doubled over the same period; we have no figures behind that sentence, so treat it as the client’s characterization rather than a measurement.

What we’d flag: four months against a full prior year is a short read, and it is the window the original engagement was measured on rather than one we chose. Nothing here says anything about pricing enforcement or unauthorized sellers — that work was not in scope, so this page makes no claim about it.

Why it matters if you're reading this

A stalled channel is usually a sequencing problem

The instinct on a flat Amazon channel is to spend more on ads, and it is almost always the wrong first move. Ad money spent against listings that cannot convert buys traffic that leaves, and the account learns the wrong lesson from it.

SILCA did not need a bigger budget or a new brand. It needed the search work done first and the advertising pointed at pages that could hold the visit — which is why the revenue moved without the margin moving with it. If your sales have been flat for a year while your ad spend has not, the order you do things in is the first place to look.