A beauty brand on Noon and Amazon UAE. Twelve months. 1,500 AED to 25,000 AED a month – a 16× lift. TACoS held inside a 20-25% band the whole way.
The reason it worked is not flattering to any single function. It worked because, for the first time on this brand in this market, one person owned listings, ads and stock at the same time. The structural change came before any tactical move.
What follows is the rebuild story – and more importantly, the structural lesson underneath it, because the structural lesson is the part that travels to other brands, other categories, and other markets.
Where the brand stood at 1,500 AED a month
This was a major Indian beauty brand. By the time I picked them up in the UAE, the parent business had been running for years, the catalogue was deep, and the brand had genuine consumer awareness across the Gulf because of expat shopping habits and cross-border ecommerce. None of that was reflected in the UAE marketplace presence. 1,500 AED a month on Noon plus Amazon UAE combined was rounding-error revenue against the brand’s potential.
The brand sat inside a wider portfolio account I was managing at the time, which is the only reason it was getting any attention at all. On a pure ROI calculation, the team would have deprioritised it months earlier. The reason it was still on the dashboard was that the parent company expected the UAE to be a meaningful market, and somebody had to either prove that thesis or formally retire it.
The internal setup was the usual one on a stuck marketplace account. The brand lead sat with the parent company in India and owned the creatives. The operations team in the UAE owned stock and inventory decisions. The ads team owned spend. Three teams, three sets of priorities, no shared definition of what success looked like. The ads team was being graded on ROAS, which was poor, so they were throttling spend. The ops team was being graded on stock efficiency, which meant they were rounding orders down based on historical sales, which were low because nothing was visible. The brand lead was being graded on creative output, which is to say they were shipping new images to India market spec because that is what they had templates for.
Nobody was wrong on their own metric. Together they had built a system that could not grow.
What was actually broken
I spent the first ten days listening rather than rebuilding. The diagnostic came down to three interlocking problems, and the order matters because each one was holding the next one in place.
- Creatives were optimised for the India market. Hero images, lifestyle shots and copy were all designed for Indian buyer expectations and Indian shelf cues. UAE buyers searched differently, looked at packaging differently, and responded to a different visual register. The keywords inside the listings did not match the actual search demand on Noon UAE or Amazon UAE. Search query reports made this obvious within a single afternoon of analysis.
- Stock decisions were based on poisoned data. The ops team was forecasting forward based on the previous three months of unit sales. The previous three months of unit sales were artificially low because the listings could not be found. They were ordering small quantities to match small sales, which meant the brand never had enough stock on hand to support any visibility push even if visibility had been there. A self-reinforcing cycle, and the cycle had been running for at least six months.
- Ad spend was throttled because nobody trusted the ROAS. ROAS was bad because the listings were not converting. The listings were not converting because the search visibility was wrong. The search visibility was wrong because the keywords were wrong. The keywords were wrong because the creatives and copy had been built for a different market. Spend was therefore held low to protect the P&L, which kept impressions low, which kept the listing data sparse, which kept everybody guessing.
The three problems were braided together. You could not fix any one of them in isolation, because the other two would pull it back. The reason this brand had been stuck for so long was that every previous attempt had tried to push exactly one lever, and the other two had absorbed the push within a few weeks.
Twelve months of coordinated listings, ads and stock
I took ownership of all three pieces for this single brand within the portfolio. That was the structural change before any of the tactical changes. The brand lead stayed involved on creative direction and brand voice, but listing copy, keyword strategy, paid spend, and stock signalling all came under one head for the duration of the growth period.
The first month was almost entirely listing work. Keyword research grounded in UAE Noon search terms and Amazon UAE search query reports. Search volumes were pulled across both platforms and triangulated, then prioritised by category relevance and conversion intent. New hero images were briefed and shot specifically for the UAE shelf, with packaging cues that matched local buyer expectations. Arabic translations were added where they were missing, including for the back-end search terms field, which was empty for most SKUs when I came in.
Once the listings were doing their share, I opened up ad spend by roughly 4x on the tested SKUs. The discipline here was not aggression for its own sake. The discipline was a strict TACoS band of 20 to 25%, held weekly, with bid moves tied to where TACoS was sitting inside or outside the band rather than to gut feel.
The campaign structure on the SKUs that scaled looked roughly like this:
- One Auto campaign per SKU, set to a defensive bid floor, running continuously to keep capturing new search terms as the category matured.
- One Broad campaign carrying the tested keywords from the listing work, with bids tied to placement performance.
- One Exact campaign carrying proven converters, ring-fenced with tight negatives.
- A retargeting layer for page visitors who did not convert on the first visit, which mattered in the UAE because traffic patterns showed a longer consideration window than the India equivalent.
The third change was operational. Stock conversations with ops moved from monthly to weekly. The forecasting model shifted from historical pull to forward-looking, with the ads team feeding planned spend lifts into the inventory model two weeks ahead so ops had time to react. This was the single hardest change to land politically, because it asked the ops team to trust the ads team’s forecasts, and trust had to be earned across the first three months. By month four it was routine.
How the twelve months unfolded
Months one and two. Pure listing rebuild. Revenue moved slightly, from roughly 1,500 AED to roughly 3,500 AED a month, mostly on organic visibility starting to return as the keywords aligned with actual search demand. Ad spend was still conservative in this window.
Months three and four. Ad spend opened up by 4x on the SKUs where the listings were doing their job. TACoS moved into the 20-25% target band and held. Revenue hit roughly 6,000 AED a month by the end of month four. Stock pipeline was reset to weekly cadence.
Months five through eight. Compounding phase. The Exact campaigns started carrying real volume. The retargeting layer began contributing meaningfully. Cross-category browse traffic from the wider portfolio started cycling into the brand. Revenue climbed from roughly 7,000 AED to roughly 11,500 AED a month across these four months, almost linear growth.
Months nine through twelve. Plateau, then second lift. Months nine and ten were flat as the catalogue absorbed the new run rate. Months eleven and twelve added a further 30% as additional SKUs from the catalogue cleared the listing rebuild and got switched on. Final monthly revenue at the end of month twelve was approximately 25,000 AED.
TACoS held inside the 20-25% band every single month. Inventory stayed tight through the growth period – two close calls in month seven and month ten, both caught a week ahead because the weekly stock cadence surfaced them in time.
Numbers that moved
- Monthly revenue: 1,500 AED to 25,000 AED, 16x lift in twelve months.
- TACoS: held in the 20-25% band for the entire growth period.
- Inventory: kept tight via weekly stock cadence; no growth-killing stockouts.
- SKUs in the rebuild: started with three, ended with seven by month twelve.
- Stock review cadence: monthly to weekly.
- Cross-functional ownership: from three separate teams to one accountable head.
What I would do differently
One thing I would change if I were running this again on a similar brand.
I would force the cross-functional ownership conversation in week one rather than letting it happen organically. On this account it took until roughly week three before all three functions were genuinely aligned under one plan, and those first weeks were slower than they needed to be.
The broader lesson is the one I lead with whenever a brand asks me about new-market expansion. Marketplace growth in a new market is almost never about one lever. The reason most expansion plans stall is that listings, ads and stock are owned by three different functions, none of which can move the others. The fix is usually structural before it is tactical. Get the ownership right and the tactical work compounds. Get it wrong and even good tactical work gets absorbed.
Bottom line – the structural fix that travels across markets
If you are stuck at a low monthly run rate in a market where the brand has every reason to be doing more, the question is almost never whether your ads are good. It is who owns listings, ads and stock – and whether that is one head or three. Until the answer is one, the levers keep pulling against each other.
Related: the Amazon Account Audit for a written diagnostic on similar marketplace expansion work.
