Sports & Outdoors · Amazon case study
Built all year. Cashed in December.
A giftable outdoors brand with brutal Q4 seasonality. You cannot buy your way into a good December; whatever rank, reviews, and conversion you hold in November is what the season multiplies. Ten months of compounding later: a $94K December, more than half of it organic.
Bird Darts · growth trajectory
$6K → $94K
monthly Amazon sales · Feb to Dec 2025
55%
of the peak month was organic · $52K organic December
15%
TACoS in the biggest month ever
13% → 22%
conversion rate into Q4 · still 17 to 21% today
13x
ad spend flexed from August trough to December peak
+69%
July year over year · 2026 vs 2025
The brand
Bird Darts
Bird Darts is a DTC-born sports and outdoors brand whose product lives on gift lists: demand stacks hard against the holidays, with a second bump around Father’s Day. On Amazon that kind of seasonality is a trap for the unprepared, because rank compounds too slowly to buy in December, exactly when every competitor’s bids spike at once. When Elev8 came on, the account was doing roughly $6K a month with a listing converting at 13%.
Where things stood
December is won in March.
01
Extreme gifting seasonality: the year lives or dies on a six-week window where CPCs surge for everyone at once.
02
Rank compounds too slowly to buy in Q4. Whatever shelf position the listing holds in November is the one the season multiplies.
03
A 13% conversion rate put a hard ceiling on how efficiently any traffic, paid or organic, could turn into sales.
04
A modest base meant every dollar of spend had to earn its keep. There was no burn-to-learn budget.
What we did
Compound all year, harvest in Q4.
01
Campaign architecture built for rank velocity in the off-season: win the terms cheaply in spring that would cost multiples more in November.
02
The listing rebuilt for conversion, images and A+ Content together, so rising traffic landed on a page that closes. Conversion moved from 13% to 22% by the peak.
03
Spend flexed with the season instead of averaging through it: pulled back through the August trough, then scaled 13x into December while TACoS fell to 15%.
04
The gifting windows planned in advance: budgets, deals, and inventory mapped to Father’s Day and the holiday weeks, then executed rather than improvised.
Start to finish
Engagement start (Feb 2025)
$6K/mo
→
Ten months later
$94K December
55% organic · 15% TACoS · converting at 22%
How it played out
The result.
December 2025 closed at $94,445, with $52,184 of it organic. TACoS for the month was 15%, which means the biggest month in the account’s history was also one of its most efficient: the rank was already owned, so the season did the multiplying. Conversion held above 22% while traffic surged.
The reset survived the season. Through 2026 the listing has converted between 17% and 21%, against 11 to 13% a year earlier, and five of the first six months of 2026 ran ahead of the same month in 2025, with July up 69% year over year.
The creative
What shoppers actually saw.
The boards below shipped on the live listing. Design and strategy from the same team that ran the numbers above. Click any board for full size.
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