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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5:30 AM. PPC Waste Found. Building an AI Agent for Amazon PPC [The PPC Den Podcast 405]
Episode 405
Friday, October 16, 2026 • Duration 27:49
The Badger here. Episode 405 of the PPC Den Podcast.
It's 5:30 AM. Mike is asleep. I'm not.
Before he reaches his desk, an AI agent has already run the math and dropped a waste report in his chat: search terms with zero orders, ACOS Power Ratio, bleeding ASINs, Buy Box suppression. One brand in this episode spent $6,700 in 30 days on search terms that never sold. Nobody had to ask.
Mike shows the report, explains why he's moving from chatbots to coding agents, and previews the build sessions coming next. Plus something new: a rapid-fire Amazon news segment.
0:00 The 5:30 AM autonomous operator 1:59 Meet Synapse: my daily Amazon waste report 3:00 ACOS Power Ratio and Buy Box suppression 4:50 The 10 levels of AI for Amazon 7:01 Why AI makes your to-do list longer, not shorter 7:43 Rapid-fire Amazon news 9:53 B2B delivery rule and the fake ACOS trap 11:03 Why your agent should work off-peak 11:45 RIP the monthly spreadsheet ritual 13:35 Chatbots don't hallucinate. They under-analyze. 14:27 From chatbots to coding agents 16:13 Start from the output, not the prompt 17:12 Laptop, Mac mini, or cloud VPS 18:02 Local models and data sovereignty 20:01 The data layer: scripts do the math, not the AI 21:13 What lands in my chat at 5:30 AM 23:17 Turning the report into ClickUp tasks 24:49 What's coming next: build sessions
Go decide what you want your 5:30 AM agent to do. I'll already be up.
Badger out.
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Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno
#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA
Free Amazon PPC Audit: Hand Me Your Bulk File, I'll Find the Leaks [The PPC Den Podcast 404]
Episode 404
Friday, October 9, 2026 • Duration 12:45
The Badger here. Episode 404 of the PPC Den Podcast.
Since 2018 Mike has been handing you spreadsheets. The bid calculator. The placement calculator. The n-gram sheet that took him eons to build. All of them needed you to copy, paste, and squint.
I retired the copy-and-paste. Go to sheets.adbadger.com, drop in your bulk file, and I dig through it right there in your browser. Add your business report and I'll line your ad numbers up against your organic ones too. It costs nothing. It stays free.
Every account starts at 100. Then I take points away. Most of them go to one thing: spend on search terms that never produced an order. Not at the keyword level. At the search term level, where the dirt actually is.
In this episode Mike walks through the whole audit, screen by screen, in the order he'd audit an account himself.
Reading bulk files is the most tedious job in Amazon advertising. I don't care. That's the job.
(0:00) Eight years of Ad Badger spreadsheets (1:30) Why we retired the copy-and-paste (2:12) How I score your account (3:00) Search term level vs. keyword level (3:51) Converting terms you haven't promoted yet (4:47) Structure, budgets and placements (5:40) Competitor ASINs worth targeting (6:24) Share of spend vs. share of revenue (7:22) Ghost impressions and bleeders (8:19) Why any ACOS beats no sales (9:22) N-gram analysis and negative keyword coverage (10:12) AMC audiences and total ACOS by product
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/
🦡 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
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
Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno
01:44 - Lost revenue, rank decay, PPC tax and capital lockup
02:29 - The client who didn't believe it
03:07 - Unit session percentage vs warehouse balance
04:22 - Inventory distortion, and the 10 to 30%
05:36 - Problem 1: lost revenue, zip code by zip code
05:57 - What half a million Buy Box checks revealed
06:51 - Problems 2 and 3: rank decay and the PPC tax
07:28 - The SOP: three reports across two timeframes
Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno
Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Guest Co-Host: Steve Patenaude Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno
2. Any listing image with a photorealistic AI-generated person needs the keyword "contains-synthetic-performer" in the dc:subject (XMP) field before you upload it. Real people, non-photorealistic art, and images with no people are exempt.
3. If your rating is under 4.5, fix that before you touch your bids.
🦡 Resources & Links
🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/
- Amazon Is Now Deducting Ad Spend From Your Account Balance
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