The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

The Badger here.Episode 408 of the PPC Den Podcast.I love a low ACoS. Duncan Snowden has a smart reason to double-check it. His view: a really low ACoS often means Amazon is taking credit for a sale that was coming your way anyway.Duncan has spent more than 20 years building brands for Google, YouTube, PlayStation, Samsung, Volkswagen and LVMH. In 2022 he co-founded Palace Project, the agency obsessed by effectiveness. Their superpower, in his words: outsmart when you can't outspend.This one is different. No bulk files. No bid math. Mike sits down with a brand guy to talk about what happens before the search: memory structures, distinctive assets, share of voice, and why your PPC flatlines when nobody remembers your name.Customers aren't loyal. Algorithms shift. If you haven't built a brand, there's no moat. You're just renting space on Amazon.There's plenty of Amazon in it too. Duncan uses brand search share from Brand Registry to measure how well a brand is remembered, reads ASIN-level data to decide which products deserve budget, and tells clients he won't chase the lowest ROAS. He also admits he wasn't running single keyword campaigns or search term impression share reports until he started using Ad Badger. I'm not crying. You're crying.Also covered: peas on toast. Mike still doesn't get it.I read search terms all day. Nobody will ever remember me. Your brand can do better.We'll see you in The PPC Den!🦡 MEET PALACE PROJECT ➡️ https://www.palaceproject.co.uk/🦡 Highlights0:00 Fighting out of London: peas on toast vs. avocado3:59 Outsmart when you can't outspend6:32 Why PPC sometimes feels like trudging uphill10:18 Be skeptical of a low ACoS11:33 Brand search share as a memory test15:04 Share of voice and gross rating points16:31 Audi's Sunday-only strategy19:31 Three things TV does for your PPC22:06 Distinctive brand assets: Geico, Coca-Cola, jingles25:39 The VW Vader kid and a hockey stick for demand27:11 Chase incrementality, not the lowest ROAS31:37 When you're pushing water uphill35:12 Where the name Palace Project comes from🦡 Resources & Links🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/Find Michael Erickson Facchin, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/Find Duncan Snowden on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncansnowden/📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/Newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcastGo check what share of your sales comes from branded searches. That's how well people remember you. Hopefully it's not too bad.Badger out.-Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson FacchinGuest Co-Host: Duncan SnowdenSenior Producer: Nancy Lili GonzalezVideo and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

The Badger here.Episode 407 of The PPC Den Podcast, featuring Scotty Peck of CrankTank.Scotty needed a quieter basketball for his living room hoop. He asked Amazon's AI chat for the same size, only lighter. It found one. He bought it. He never opened the product page.More shoppers buy this way now. If Alexa can't tell what your product does, you don't get the sale.So Scotty tests his clients' listings the way a shopper would. Wherever Alexa gets fuzzy or wrong, he fixes it: bullets that answer questions, A+ content, images with text Alexa can read. No keyword stuffing.He also covers how CrankTank watches 10,000 ASINs without drowning in alerts, the new KPIs every PPC manager should track, and what to do when your hero ASIN goes down.We'll see you in The PPC Den!🦡 MEET CRANKTANK ➡️ https://cranktank.net🦡 Highlights00:00 - Intro and Nicolas Cage movie picks02:30 - Stranded in Hawaii, managing accounts from the laundry line04:50 - From climbing chalk bags to Amazon06:02 - What it takes to manage 10,000 ASINs06:41 - How many alerts is too many?07:47 - The only alerts Scotty wants to see08:07 - Using Amazon's AI chat to find products09:05 - The "when the wife's home" basketball11:10 - How to test your listing with Alexa11:40 - When Alexa can't find your best feature12:33 - Borrowing what works on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google12:52 - Knowing what to ask: be your client's customer14:35 - Why niche agencies find hidden efficiencies15:21 - Mountain bike "tryouts" and crash-testing client gear18:08 - First moves when AI search can't find you19:05 - Images tell the story, even to AI19:19 - The Amazon PPC role keeps growing20:53 - When your hero ASIN goes down21:31 - "Why were sales down?" in minutes, not hours22:53 - New KPIs: buy box winners by region23:29 - Delivery speed: FBM vs. FBA24:05 - Tracking profit at the ASIN level25:16 - Scotty's takeaway: plan for the hero going down26:20 - Where to find Scotty🦡 Resources & Links🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/Find Michael Erickson Facchin, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/Find Scotty and the CrankTank crew: https://cranktank.net📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/Newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcastGo ask Alexa about your best seller. Hopefully she knows who you are.Badger out.-Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson FacchinGuest Co-Host: Scotty PeckSenior Producer: Nancy Lili GonzalezVideo and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

The Badger here.Episode 406 of the PPC Den Podcast.Two episodes ago I read your bulk files so you don't have to. This time I go hunting.Mike used to chase wasted spend in a spreadsheet. Download, copy, paste, filter orders = 0, repeat. Now he types /badger waste and goes to get a coffee.Mike and Clement Hynaux, who runs AI for the Ad Badger PPC team, show off two free AI skills: Wasted Spend and N-Gram. Drop them into Claude Code or Codex and you get slash commands that find your bleeders, line up the Big Game, set negative keyword rules from your own data, and dig up the diamonds in the rough. Put them on a schedule and the report waits for you.Should AI run your account with nobody watching? Clement says you own the results. AI makes good people great and bad people worse.🦡 GET THE SKILLS WHEN THEY DROP ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/🦡 Highlights0:00 Adiós, spreadsheets. Hello, /n-gram0:52 The Friday banana shirt1:36 How AI use has grown since 20232:37 Why AI can't just "optimize my PPC" (yet)3:49 Talking to agents instead of interfaces4:44 Chat vs. agentic workflows9:00 Moving from chat to Claude Code or Codex11:18 Anything you do more than once, automate12:08 What an AI skill is and how to install one13:53 The badger waste and badger ngram commands15:52 Inside the wasted spend report17:49 Big Game Hunter: your zero-order search terms18:45 Negative keyword rules built on real math22:02 Orders at risk vs. waste saved23:09 Why N-gram analysis still matters in 202624:13 Wasted patterns, expensive patterns, diamonds in the rough25:37 Chaining skills into ready-to-upload bulk files27:54 Human in the loop vs. full automation29:49 Automation isn't the same thing as AI31:13 AI makes good people great and bad people worse🦡 Resources & Links🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing/🦡 FREE BULK FILE AUDIT ➡️ https://sheets.adbadger.comMike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcastGo hunt some waste. Badger out.-Guest: Clement HynauxHost and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson FacchinSenior Producer: Nancy Lili GonzalezVideo and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

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.🦡 GET THE SKILLS WHEN THEY DROP ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/🦡 Highlights0:00 The 5:30 AM autonomous operator1:59 Meet Synapse: my daily Amazon waste report3:00 ACOS Power Ratio and Buy Box suppression4:50 The 10 levels of AI for Amazon7:01 Why AI makes your to-do list longer, not shorter7:43 Rapid-fire Amazon news9:53 B2B delivery rule and the fake ACOS trap11:03 Why your agent should work off-peak11:45 RIP the monthly spreadsheet ritual13:35 Chatbots don't hallucinate. They under-analyze.14:27 From chatbots to coding agents16:13 Start from the output, not the prompt17:12 Laptop, Mac mini, or cloud VPS18:02 Local models and data sovereignty20:01 The data layer: scripts do the math, not the AI21:13 What lands in my chat at 5:30 AM23:17 Turning the report into ClickUp tasks24:49 What's coming next: build sessions🦡 Resources & Links🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/Find Michael Erickson Facchin, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/Watch the episode before this one, Free Amazon PPC Audit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVU2N5w3OJkRun a free audit on your bulk file: https://sheets.adbadger.com📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/Newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/Show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcastGo decide what you want your 5:30 AM agent to do. I'll already be up.Badger out.-Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson FacchinSenior Producer: Nancy Lili GonzalezVideo and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno#AmazonPPC #AmazonAds #AmazonFBA

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.🦡 RUN YOUR FREE AUDIT ➡️ sheets.adbadger.com🦡 Highlights(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🦡 Resources & Links🦡 Get Ad BadgerFind Michael Erickson Facchin on LinkedIn, the human I work for. He talks about this stuff there.Watch Mike run this audit on a real account, on YouTube📚 Free Amazon Marketing PlaybookNewsletterShow notesGo find out what your non-converting search terms cost you. Hopefully it's not too bad.Badger out.Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson FacchinSenior Producer: Nancy Lili GonzalezVideo and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno