What was the starting point?
The month before we took over, the account did $5,150 in sales on 377 units, from under 3,000 sessions. The products were good and the brand had a loyal base, but traffic was thin and nothing in the account was set up to grow it.
Medicated and topical skin care is one of the harder places to sell on Amazon. Listings in this space go through category review, some claims are off limits entirely, and ad copy and targeting face restrictions that general product categories never see. A listing that breaks a rule can be suppressed overnight, which takes its sales and its rank with it. That is why the usual growth playbook (aggressive copy, broad ads, push volume) does not work here.
What did we change?
We took over in May 2025 and rebuilt the foundation before scaling anything:
- Compliance-safe listing rewrites. Titles, bullets and descriptions rewritten from real search data, but written to survive category review, so the listings stayed live while they gained rank.
- Keyword strategy inside the rules. We built the keyword set around the terms the category actually allows, then indexed the rest through backend search terms. See our backend keyword tool for how we check this.
- Restricted-category ad structure. Campaigns organised around the terms that convert and that ads are allowed to target, with weekly bid and negative-keyword audits to keep spend off junk searches.
- Search Query Performance tracking. Organic rank and share of the money keywords checked every week, so slippage was caught before it showed up in sales.
- Weekly account health checks. In a category where one flag can suppress a listing, we watched account and listing health every week.
What were the results, month by month?
| Month | Sales (USD) |
|---|---|
| April 2025 (month before takeover) | $5.1K |
| May 2025 (month 1) | $8.2K |
| July 2025 | $11.6K |
| November 2025 | $12.2K |
| December 2025 | $14.2K |
| January 2026 | $17.2K |
| April 2026 | $18.7K |
| July 2026 (best month) | $23.6K |
Growth was not a spike. It compounded: revenue grew in 12 of the 15 months compared with the quarter before, and July 2026 was the best month the account has had. Over the same period units per month rose 3.5x and sessions 4.5x, so the growth came from more shoppers finding the listings, not from price changes. Total revenue since takeover passed $232K.
What can other skin care and beauty sellers take from this?
- Compliance comes before growth. In a gated category, a listing that gets suppressed loses everything you spent to rank it. Write to survive review first.
- Small, weekly ad fixes add up. There was no single big change here. Weekly bid and negative audits kept the spend efficient month after month.
- Track rank, not only sales. Search Query Performance shows a ranking problem weeks before it shows up as a sales drop.
If you sell beauty or skin care, our page on managing beauty and skin care brands on Amazon covers the category in more depth, and the listing optimization guide explains how we rewrite listings.