The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

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!

The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery is a business podcast hosted by The PPC Den, with 431 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

The PPC Den hosts The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery, a business show with 431 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #402

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

  Sep 25, 202641 min

  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: price 34:16 — "You're not Yeti in the car" 35:29 — Plan your launches around your MOQ 36:40 — Building your email list backwards from 1,500 units 38:39 — Learning Meta, Google, and email from scratch 39:13 — Pick a "true North" 40:30 — Offer the best person alive $2,500 for one hour 43:48 — "The more you read about parenting, the more you realize business was easy" Resources & Links GET AD BADGER Find Michael Erickson Facchin , Ad Badger's CEO Our guest: Gonza Martinez of Ziresquare Training PPC Managers Who Can Train Others How Can I Reach My Full Potential In The Amazon PPC Space? What's the Best Way to Manage an Amazon Brand? FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook Subscribe to our newsletter Review all our show notes - Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Guest Co-Host: Gonza Martinez Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #400

  4 Lessons from 400 Episodes of Amazon PPC

  Sep 18, 202613 min

  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 08:40 - Lesson 4: the evolving role of the PPC manager 09:06 - The stock level and PPC performance mashup 09:51 - The commitments for the next 100 episodes 10:58 - The weekly digest plan 11:19 - Every company is a software company 12:52 - What 400 episodes changed 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 How to Find Your Amazon Cross-Sales and True Organic Sales Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook Subscribe to our newsletter Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist Review all our show notes Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #401

  Why Your Amazon PPC Team Needs Access to Your Stock Data

  Sep 18, 202613 min

  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 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 09:03 - The case study: a $400K per month account 10:50 - Reading the dashboard: days of stock left 11:47 - The restocks nobody notifies you about 12:42 - A free zip code level Buy Box tool Resources & Links GET AD BADGER ➡️ Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO You're Not Out of Stock, So Why Are Your Sales Down? Buy Box Checker - free zip code level Buy Box and stock tracking Unlock our FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook Subscribe to our newsletter Review all our show notes Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

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

  Sep 14, 202629 min

  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. Resources & Links Get Ad Badger The N-Gram Analysis Tool Amazon Ads Bulk Operations Use AI & Spreadsheets to Prevent Stock-Outs FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook All show notes -· Host: Michael Erickson Facchin · Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez · Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash · Editor: Pedro Moreno

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #399

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

  Sep 14, 202631 min

  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 13:04 – Report 1: cross-sale share by advertised ASIN 14:42 – The reasons behind click A, buy B 15:48 – The cross-sale engineered on purpose 17:38 – The meaning of a 0% same-ASIN product 19:52 – The wrong way to read total ACoS per product 22:19 – Report 2: the true organic sales formula 23:16 – The share of product B's sales that PPC earned 27:04 – A rank drop misdiagnosed after a stock-out 28:26 – 100% organic vs 10% organic: the levers 30:09 – Three dashboards from the new reporting tool 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 Our guest today is Steve Patenaude PPC Detectives: Solving Amazon's Most Mysterious Performance Crimes When Higher Total ACOS Means More Profit How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Account Using Bulk Files and Business Reports Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook Subscribe to our newsletter Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist Review all our show notes - 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

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.