It depends on your bandwidth and how much visibility you want into your campaigns. Agencies handle the day-to-day, but you’re typically paying 10–20% of your ad spend (or a flat monthly retainer) for someone who doesn’t know your products, margins, or seasonal patterns the way you do. Many brands find they get better results managing campaigns themselves once they have the right training and automation in place, because they can react faster and make decisions grounded in their own business data. Helium 10’s Ads Learning Hub includes structured courses, live expert sessions, and ready-to-use automation templates designed to give you the skills and systems to manage your own campaigns profitably, without needing to spend 30 hours a week inside the ad console.

Amazon prodMost sellers can understand the fundamentals of Sponsored Products, keyword targeting, and bid management within a few hours of focused training. Getting comfortable with more advanced strategies like rules-based bidding, dayparting, and cross-campaign keyword harvesting typically takes a few weeks of practice with real campaigns. Helium 10’s Ads Academy is structured so you can move from campaign setup through advanced automation at your own pace, with real examples at every step. Sellers who follow the full course and apply the included templates to their accounts often see measurable improvements in ACoS within the first month.

Start by auditing your existing campaigns for waste. Filter for search terms with 20 or more clicks and zero sales over the past 60 to 90 days, then negative match them immediately. Next, look for targets where your ACoS is above 100% and reduce those bids. This 10-minute audit alone can surface $5,000 to $7,000 in wasted spend, and most sellers find savings on day one. From there, the most effective long-term approach is a gradual bid reduction strategy: instead of slashing bids all at once (which kills visibility), set tiered rules that step bids down in small increments as your ACoS improves. One Helium 10 user reduced their ACoS by 27% in two months using this approach. Helium 10 Ads includes templates for both the initial audit and the ongoing bid optimization, so you can apply these strategies to your campaigns without building the rules from scratch.

Rules-based advertising lets you set custom conditions for how your campaigns behave, and the system executes those rules automatically across all your campaigns. For example, you can create a rule that says: if a keyword gets 20 clicks with zero sales, pause it. Or: if a search term converts twice at under 60% ACoS in an auto campaign, suggest it for promotion to an exact match campaign. Instead of logging into the ad console every day to make manual adjustments, you define the logic once and the rules run continuously. The key difference from fully automated AI tools is that you stay in control. You set the thresholds, the ACoS targets, and the bid formulas based on what works for your account. Helium 10’s rules-based advertising is available on the Diamond plan and includes expert-built templates you can apply immediately or customize to fit your strategy.

Yes. Helium 10 includes a full suite of Amazon advertising tools alongside its keyword research, listing management, and profit tracking features. The ads tools include AI-powered campaign management, rules-based bidding and automation, dayparting (time-of-day bid scheduling), keyword harvesting across campaigns, negative targeting, and budget rules. Because your ad data lives in the same platform as your keyword research and profit tracking, you can make campaign decisions with the full picture in front of you rather than switching between separate tools.

The Diamond plan ($359/month, or $279/month annually) gives you access to rules-based advertising, dayparting, expert-built automation templates, and advanced campaign management at scale. Most sellers who are serious about managing their own ads choose Diamond because of the advertising capabilities where the biggest time savings come in. One seller manages over 300 campaigns across four accounts in under 30 minutes a week using the Diamond plan rules and templates. See the pricing page for full plan details.

If you already understand the basics of Sponsored Products and campaign structure, Helium 10’s Ads Academy picks up where most beginner courses leave off. It covers advanced topics like rules-based bid optimization, cross-campaign keyword harvesting, dayparting strategy, and new product launch campaign structures, all with real account examples rather than theory. For sellers who are specifically looking to transition from an agency to in-house management, the Outsourced to Optimized series follows a real brand through that entire process, with downloadable templates and live Q&A at every stage.