RTunesBackground
The owner of RTunes knows PPC. He built the business on it. A 2,683-SKU auto parts catalog, grown listing by listing on campaigns he ran himself.
Auto parts is an unforgiving category to advertise in. Every product has fitment, a dozen ways shoppers search for it, and competitors bidding on all of them.
The challenge
A catalog that size throws off more search terms, more competitor overlap, and more bid decisions than one operator's hours can cover, and performance had settled at a level he couldn't push past.
Past a certain catalog size, every hour goes to keeping ACOS from creeping instead of pushing it down. That's the plateau. And what a seller wants at that point isn't a prettier dashboard. It's margin back and hours back, without betting a working account on someone else's promises.
Instead of handing over the keys, he proposed a test: his campaigns and Astra's, running side by side in the same account.
What Astra changed
Our strategist grouped the catalog and assigned plays. Scale strategies on the proven movers, defense on the branded terms. And Astra executed the structure daily: harvesting converting search terms, cutting the wasted ones, pacing budgets against his targets.
Daily is the part that matters. Not weekly check-ins or a monthly bid sweep: every 24 hours, across all 2,683 SKUs, a volume of decisions no operator can make by hand. And it never skips a week because someone got busy.
Results
The two sides ran in parallel for over a year. His campaigns averaged 51.7% ACOS. Astra's ran 19.4%, on about 8 minutes a week of hands-on time.
That gap means every ad dollar on the Astra side bought more than two and a half times the sales. And the 8 minutes a week is what running the account looks like now: reading the numbers instead of producing them.
Then he moved everything.
Operator's note
This is the fairest test that exists in this business: same products, same seasons, same market, different management. A year of parallel running is long enough that luck has nothing to do with it.