The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery – Details, episodes & analysis

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The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

The PPC Den

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/7d. Total Eps: 435

The world's first Amazon advertising podcast-- hosted by Ad Badger. Here we discuss the ins and outs of Amazon PPC, including tips and tricks to help optimize your ad campaigns. Whether you're a die-hard PPC fanatic or an Amazon seller looking for an edge, this podcast is for you!

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https://www.adbadger.com/podcast
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https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/
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https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/
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The Billion-Dollar Brands Leaving Amazon Search Wide Open

Episode 403

Friday, October 2, 2026 • Duration 44:27

Sean Stone of Spillover Commerce is back on The PPC Den, and this time he refused to tell Mike the topic in advance. No pre-show. No planning. Just one question: which billion-dollar e-commerce market has nine of its eleven biggest players missing from Amazon?

Mike guessed mattresses. It's telehealth.

🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing/

🦡 Sean's agency, Spillover Commerce ➡️ https://www.spillovercommerce.com/

🦡 Show notes ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/the-billion-dollar-brands-leaving-amazon-search-wide-open-the-ppc-den-podcast/

From there Mike and Sean get into what this means for everyone else: why the best Amazon brands cut their bottom 5% of products every quarter, why 15% of Google searches have never been searched before, why "demand generation" is a scary phrase if all you do is demand capture, and how to turn Amazon into an acquisition channel with a product insert, a QR code and a Meta pixel.

Also in here: what telehealth brands could be selling on Amazon tomorrow, why continuous monitoring might be the next GLP-1, and Sean's new tagline, "Amazon demand starts elsewhere."

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 - Intro

01:28 - The billion-dollar market that isn't on Amazon

02:49 - It's telehealth: D2C brands with a prescriber

04:18 - The haves: Hims and Ro

05:39 - The have-nots: GLP-1 brands with nothing on Amazon

06:23 - Who ranks when you search "Weight Watchers"

07:17 - "They paid for a billboard and left it empty"

07:45 - A market growing 24.6% a year through 2034

09:05 - Bigger than GLP-1: peptides, wearables, longevity

10:40 - "GLP-1 supplement support": 30,000 searches from nothing

11:53 - Protein snacks: 4x the search volume in three years

12:40 - Fiber gummies and the hockey stick

13:38 - Brand name plus modifier searches

14:00 - The spillover effect, featuring Gronk

16:03 - Trend spotting as a business model

17:56 - Nature Made's GLP-1 Companion: 10K units a month

19:23 - Why clinging to your catalog hurts your PPC

21:13 - 15% of Google searches are brand new

22:20 - Cut your bottom 5% every quarter

24:22 - "Amazon demand starts elsewhere"

25:32 - Demand generation vs demand capture

28:34 - What telehealth brands could sell on Amazon tomorrow

29:57 - Continuous monitoring is the next GLP-1

30:24 - Amazon as an acquisition channel

31:13 - The product insert, QR code and Meta pixel play

31:40 - The one DSP use case Sean likes

34:36 - You can't be full funnel if you're only on Amazon

35:59 - Go talk to your customers

37:09 - A "generational bag fumble"

38:44 - Will Spillover become a health-focused agency?

39:42 - Niche till it hurts

41:59 - Where to find Sean

🦡 Resources & Links

- Find Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/

- How to Launch Meta Ads as an Amazon Seller [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/how-to-launch-meta-ads-as-an-amazon-seller-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- 3 Unfair Advantages of the Top 1% of E-commerce Brands [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/3-unfair-advantages-of-the-top-1-of-e-commerce-brands-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- Why Amazon Brands Are Starting to Use Meta Ads and Shopify [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/why-amazon-brands-are-starting-to-use-meta-ads-and-shopify-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/

- Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/

- Review all our show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcast

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin

Guest Co-Host: Sean Stone

Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

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How to Hand Off Your Amazon PPC Without Blowing Up Your Brand

Episode 402

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Duration 41:24

Gonza Martinez is back on the PPC Den, and a lot has changed since his last visit seven months ago.

He used to be the guy in the ad console every single day. He even built his own bid calculator by binge-watching Ad Badger videos and reverse-engineering the math. (Yes, we're still a little emotional about this.)

Today? He doesn't touch it. The only reason he logs in is to pay invoices.

Gonza walks Mike through the whole ladder: hiring two guys with zero PPC experience, training them for a year, handing over campaigns one crumb at a time, then a year of watching without touching, until he admitted he was the slow part.

Plus: why he stopped launching for a full year, why 12 launches flopped and he's fine with it, why his best products were never going to work on Amazon (hint: the price tag), and how he learns a new channel by offering the best person alive money for an hour.

Also: why "hire an agency and go to the beach" is a lie, the question every brand should ask their agency, and what Yeti teaches us about knowing when to stop.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:53 — The bid calculator he built from old episodes
06:41 — "Why weren't results 10% better?"
09:05 — Elon, Twitter, and going past the mark
12:05 — The delegation formula says don't give up PPC
16:05 — Training Diego and Franco from total zero
17:21 — The slow handoff ladder (junk SKUs first)
18:47 — A full year of looking but not touching
19:46 — The day he stopped logging in
20:18 — Why agency-jumpers never learn anything
23:44 — The one question to ask your agency
26:01 — Big brands launch a lot and kill a lot
27:17 — The 80/20 flop rate is an Amazon thing
30:17 — The real reason the products failed: price34:16 — "You're not Yeti in the car"35:29 — Plan your launches around your MOQ36:40 — Building your email list backwards from 1,500 units38:39 — Learning Meta, Google, and email from scratch39:13 — Pick a "true North"40:30 — Offer the best person alive $2,500 for one hour43:48 — "The more you read about parenting, the more you realize business was easy"

4 Lessons from 400 Episodes of Amazon PPC

Episode 400

Friday, September 18, 2026 • Duration 12:49

Today Mike is flying solo, and for once the case file is his own: 400 episodes of The PPC Den, and what a decade of these conversations actually taught him about who wins on Amazon and who just stays busy.

There's a shirt involved. There's a DSLR. There's also the small matter of being #1 on both of FeedSpot's Amazon podcast lists - the 9 Best Amazon PPC Podcasts and the 14 Best Amazon Advertising Podcasts - which raises the question of how those are two different lists. Mike rewinds eight years to the first two videos ever published, back when the bidding advice was revenue-per-click and the first episode of this show asked whether we were living in the golden age of Amazon PPC.

Then the part worth writing down. Across 400 episodes and ten years of running Ad Badger, four things keep showing up in the people who succeed: they're never distracted by nonsense, they know how to prioritize, they never stop chasing product-market fit, and they treat the job as one that keeps evolving. On the way through you'll hear why there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets, why the most successful accounts Mike has worked on were the ones he barely had to touch, and the line most sellers have backwards - great PPC cannot save bad product-market fit, and PPC is the thing that tells you whether you have it.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 - Intro: 400 episodes of The PPC Den
00:32 - The DSLR, the shirt, and the milestone
01:32 - Two FeedSpot lists, two #1 rankings
01:54 - The first two YouTube videos, eight years ago
02:31 - The very first episode: the golden age of Amazon PPC
03:44 - Lesson 1: never distracted by nonsense
04:15 - No silver bullets, only lead bullets
05:48 - Lesson 2: the skill of prioritization
05:58 - Why the job got more complicated, not less
07:04 - Lesson 3: the product-market fit nobody finishes
07:20 - The easiest campaigns, and why they were easy
08:16 - What PPC tells you about product-market fit

Why Your Amazon PPC Team Needs Access to Your Stock Data

Episode 401

Friday, September 18, 2026 • Duration 13:24

Five years ago you could hire a PPC manager for bids, budgets, keywords, campaign types and structure, and that was the whole job. Today Mike argues that a good Amazon PPC marketer is just a good Amazon marketer, and the job now reaches into what used to be somebody else's problem entirely: fees, refunds, logistics, and the one he thinks is most underrated, stock.

This is the case for letting your marketing team into your inventory data, and it starts with a client who flatly did not believe it mattered. Conversion rate is a product page problem and a PPC problem, they said. So Olena on the Ad Badger team built the chart that settled it - unit session percentage plotted against warehouse balance - and the split was uncomfortable. Above one threshold the numbers held. Below it they didn't. Sales, conversion rate, Buy Box. Not out of stock. Just low.

That sent Mike into inventory distortion - the combined financial drain of overstocking and stocking out, estimated to cost global retail 10 to 30% of total sales volume, and almost never mentioned alongside ACoS. He breaks the damage into four buckets: lost revenue that doesn't happen evenly (half a million Buy Box checks found roughly one in three products has at least one location with a suppressed Buy Box), rank decay, the PPC tax you pay while competitors take cheaper clicks, and capital locked up in overstock.

Then the SOP. Three reports - advertised products, FBA inventory health, and detailed page sales and traffic by ASIN - dropped into Claude with a prompt, and you have a dashboard. Mike walks an anonymized $400K a month account where roughly 30% of the catalog was fully out of stock and a couple of SKUs sat on over 1,000 days of supply. Plus the one nobody automates: nothing tells you when a product comes back in stock, which is exactly when you want the ads switched back on.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 - Intro
00:22 - What PPC management looked like five years ago
01:13 - Fees, refunds, logistics and stock: the new scope

The 10 Levels of AI for Amazon [Claws Out Ep. 2]

Monday, September 14, 2026 • Duration 29:22

There is no shortage of AI hype for Amazon sellers. "AI bidding." "AI agents." Videos about tools that shipped this morning.

This is the opposite of that. Michael walks the full 10-level progression from clicking around in Seller Central to running autonomous, self-improving agents on your account and is honest about what each level actually costs you in time. Claws out.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

0:00 What's on Claws Out today
1:51 The problem with "AI bidding" content
2:11 AI is amazing and still a boatload of work
3:43 Bloom's Taxonomy: the framework to climb
5:06 ACT 1 Level 1: just the Amazon interface
6:04 What the interface is good and bad at
7:52 Don't automate anything until you have a mental model
8:45 Level 2: spreadsheets still a prerequisite?
9:38 Bulk files are the one file worth mastering
11:08 N-gram analysis on bulk files
11:50 ACT 2 Level 3: asking a raw LLM (the worst option)
12:16 The canoe problem: AI knows a lot, but it isn't wise
13:59 "My ACoS is high, what do I do?" where the nuance dies
14:58 Level 4: project-based LLMs and your knowledge base
16:14 Level 5: drop a spreadsheet into an LLM
17:56 Level 6: two data sources at once the magic starts
18:21 Maryna's stock-level dashboard
20:25 Level 7: coding agents (and why the line is blurring)
22:54 What a skill actually is
23:49 Level 8: read-only APIs and MCPs
24:52 Buy Box Checker MCP tools in action
26:59 No spreadsheets, no interface have AI build your own
28:19 Level 9: agentic workflows and the ad waste firewall
29:34 The catch: AI is not deterministic
30:32 Level 10: memory and the self-improvement cycle
31:38 Ad Badger now has its own MCP
32:20 Open-source skills and the Badger audit process
33:30 Your homework + see you in the Badger Den

🦡 Your Homework

1. Find your level on the ladder honestly. If you can't explain your budgeting protocol, keyword structure, and auto campaign strategy without opening a tool, you're at Level 1 stay there this week.2. Get good at one bulk file. The legacy sponsored ads reports are being retired; bulk files are here to stay.3. Connect the Ad Badger MCP wherever you already use AI and run a wasted spend audit.4. Get on the Ad Badger email list weekly skill drops and walkthroughs are coming.

How to Find Your Amazon Cross-Sales and True Organic Sales

Episode 399

Monday, September 14, 2026 • Duration 30:35

Today Mike is joined again by Steve Patenaude the closest thing this show has to a PPC detective to open a case that starts with a boring question and ends somewhere much more interesting: which of your products is actually earning the sale?

Amazon has retired the old sponsored product reports. The drag-and-drop builder that replaced them looks like extra homework, and it is but it also hands you two columns the old reports kept apart: the ASIN that was advertised, and the ASIN that was purchased. Put those side by side and the account stops looking like a list of products and starts looking like a set of relationships.

Steve found it while doing something ordinary. He was tightening up CM1, CM2 and CM3 to set targets product by product, and the numbers refused to sit still - cross-sales were everywhere, in an account with no parent-child variations at all. In the episode he and Mike build two reports out of that: one that shows what share of each ASIN's ad revenue was really a cross-sale (one product in the sample: 94%), and one that lands on a number almost nobody calculates correctly - true organic sales, business report revenue minus same-ASIN ad sales minus the sales that product picked up as somebody else's halo.

You'll also hear why total ACoS per product is usually wrong in both directions, what a 0% same-ASIN product is telling you, the loss-leader SKU trick that pulls shoppers onto a listing, and the stock-out that tanked a hero product's sales - except the hero product was never the one doing the work.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 – Intro with Steve Patenaude
02:50 – The end of the old sponsored product reports
03:43 – The new drag-and-drop report builder
04:29 – A client mystery: per-product profit targets
06:52 – One report for sponsored products, brands and display
07:22 – Advertised product ID vs converted product ID
07:59 – The most common total ACoS miscalculation
09:01 – The size of the halo without parent-child variations
09:31 – The non-hero ASIN driving the traffic
12:39 – A lookback window longer than 60 days

Amazon Is Taking Ad Spend From Your Seller Balance [Claws Out Ep. 1]

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 • Duration 08:17

Amazon started pulling your ad spend straight out of your seller balance on August 1, 2026 no credit card float, no points, no 25-60 day settlement window. In this Claws Out mini-episode Michael breaks down what changed, the new AI image labeling rules you need to follow before your next upload, and why a 3.4 star rating is a bigger threat to your business than any bid you could adjust.

Three things, eight minutes, claws out.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

0:00 - What's on Claws Out today

0:15 - Amazon now pulls ad spend from your seller balance

0:50 - What you actually lose: credit card points and float

1:35 - "Based on feedback" - how this change got here

2:00 - New AI transparency rules in advertising

2:24 - Amazon's rule: photorealistic AI-generated people

3:02 - Demo: tagging an AI image in 30 seconds

3:41 - Why you should double-check the tag didn't get stripped

4:15 - A real listing that got suspended over this

4:39 - A 3.4 star rating is not a PPC problem

5:25 - The ACoS math: conversion rate does the heavy lifting

6:20 - 4 fixes: images, rating, bullets, price

7:08 - Your homework + never stop searching

🦡 Your Homework

1. Open your payment profile and check how your ad spend is being funded.

How to Build an AI "Second Brain" for Your Amazon Business

Episode 398

Friday, September 4, 2026 • Duration 38:28

Today Mike is joined by Dan Head of AMZ Elite, a full-service Amazon consultancy with 20 years of experience, to talk about the thing every AI-curious seller keeps circling: how to stop asking generic AI generic questions.

The premise is simple. AI knows a lot about things you don't, but the best operators in any field will laugh at its default advice. The fix is a "second brain" a private, company-specific store of your SOPs, your data, and your hard-won corrections that AI can actually read and act on.

Dan walks through what he's built: a news digest that reads his inboxes and YouTube transcripts and boils the week down to two or three pages, an Obsidian vault of markdown SOPs, and a Command Center wired to Amazon that produces a daily triage report the one that caught a campaign spending 4x overnight and flagged the portfolios to drop to a $1 budget after a stock-out. Mike covers how Ad Badger vectorizes its own Google Docs so any team member can query an SOP in plain English from Claude, Google Chat, or ClickUp.

You'll also hear the single most useful prompt Dan has ever learned, why summaries alone will cost you the details that matter, and the trap to avoid: don't use AI to invent new work, use it to put work someone is already doing into warp speed.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 HIGHLIGHTS

00:00 – Intro with Dan Head of AMZ Elite
04:21 – What a "second brain" is, and why default AI advice falls flat
08:17 – Dan's news digest: inboxes, YouTube transcripts, Obsidian clips
11:32 – The SOP problem in a remote team
13:03 – Inside the Command Center and the daily triage report
14:52 – What triage caught today: a stock-out and a 4x spend spike
15:47 – The simple version: three CSV exports and one SOP
17:29 – Saving time, not cutting staff
19:32 – Getting a team to actually adopt it
21:37 – Obsidian, and a new listing built in 60 minutes
25:18 – Giving your AI the keys to do the task

How to Forecast Amazon PPC Spend & Revenue Before You Spend a Dollar

Episode 397

Friday, August 28, 2026 • Duration 33:24

Today Michael welcomes back Priscilla Wagner of Relentless B2C, Marine Corps veteran, and quite possibly the most spreadsheet-brained guest in Badger Nation. She's been on the show for the visibility death spiral, for classifying keywords by how they actually behave instead of by raw console numbers, and for the custom Excel bidding system Michael still talks about. This time she's opening up her forecasting model.

The idea: auditing an account that's already running is the easy version. The data is sitting right there. Forecasting is the hard version, because you're projecting spend and revenue off keywords that have zero performance history attached to them. As Michael puts it, the digital marketer in all of us wants to launch big and find out fast but sitting down to plot it out first is what real businesses do.

Priscilla walks through the entire build. Tiering roughly 90 competitors by relevancy using Helium 10 and Claude. Bucketing keywords into core, expansion, branded, and broad discovery. Pulling current impression share straight out of the Search Query Performance report, then picking a lift target that's "big enough to read, small enough to test." She also shares the variable Michael had never seen anyone put in a forecast before: click-through rate and conversion rate decay, because your CTR cannot possibly hold steady as your impression bucket multiplies.

And there's a real case study in here. One client's forecast surfaced a buy box problem before a single ad went live so the recommendation wasn't a campaign structure, it was "stop selling to resellers first."

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 HIGHLIGHTS

00:00 – Welcome back, Priscilla Wagner
02:54 – Why forecasting is harder than auditing
06:19 – "Are ads just stealing our organic sales?"
08:45 – Step one: 90 competitors in Helium 10
11:06 – Tiering competitors 1 through 4
16:30 – Picking a realistic target: 1.5% to 8%
18:40 – The four keyword buckets
19:50 – Reading impression share in Search Query Performance
22:00 – Where CTR and CVR come from with no history25:10 – CTR and CVR decay as impressions grow30:30 – Turning keywords into a starting budget31:20 – Case study: fix the buy box before you spend35:00 – What 3% looks like when 8% is too aggressive39:00 – Everyone has a plan until they get punched42:00 – How often to rerun the forecast

Can Amazon PPC Success Be Predicted? (Classic)

Episode 396

Friday, August 21, 2026 • Duration 30:45

In this episode of our podcast, featuring Mansour Norouzi from Incrementum Digital, we focus on forecasting for Amazon PPC. We discuss moving from a flexible spending strategy to a planned one, and how past trends can guide future spending. Mansour will explain how to use tools like Amazon's Product Opportunity Explorer and Category Insights to predict future trends. Join us to learn about the challenges and ongoing learning in Amazon advertising.

This episode is a rerelease of one of our most popular episodes. Please note the resources and link section for any relevant updates.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

0:00 - Guest Introduction: Who is Mansour Norouzi?
0:37 - Forecasting Focus: What is forecasting in Amazon PPC?
2:30 - How complex is Amazon advertising?
3:27 - Why never stop learning?
5:44 - What does forecasting really involve?
8:55 - How to plan financially for advertising?
11:47 - How to determine market share?
17:46 - Which tools help understand the market?
29:25 - How to empower your Amazon strategy?

🦡 Resources & Links

🦡 GET AD BADGER
Find Michael Erickson Facchin — Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
Where to find Mansour: Mansour Norouzi
Incrementum Digital
How Does Tracking Keywords Help PPC?
How To Develop A Successful Client Relationship?
How To Launch Amazon Products That Customers Actually Want?

The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery – Details, episodes & analysis

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The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery – Details, episodes & analysis

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