The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

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...

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 rep...

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 Commerc...

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...

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...

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...

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&#39...

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...

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 thin...

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, compan...

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...

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 cha...

Today Michael is coming to you solo  recording from summer vacation in Switzerland to share a presentation he built for his friend Elizabeth Greene's seminar on AI-based optimization for Amazon PPC. The idea: AI is great at combining data. And the hardest part of Amazon PPC has always been that your ad console shows you revenue per click, cost per click, and target ACoS  but it never shows you org...

Wondering why some Amazon sellers do really well and others don't? In this video, Michael and Destaney Wishon from BetterAMS share their own ups and downs with Amazon ads. They talk about how tricky Amazon advertising can get, why focusing too much on one thing can be a problem, and what basics you need to know. They also discuss whether it's better to handle your ads on your own, use software, or...

Today, we are joined by the amazing Maryna from the Ad Badger team. If you have ever wondered why your Amazon PPC performance suddenly dropped, even when your bids, keywords, and competitor pricing look perfect this episode is for you. Maryna shares her brilliant workflow for managing massive Amazon accounts that juggle thousands of SKUs. We discuss how to combine three essential Amazon reports in...

Sean Stone of Spillover Commerce joins Mike to explain why most Amazon sellers fail when they try Meta ads and the fix: anchor your first campaign to a real event, not a generic sale.  They break down a live case study: a Father's Day push that turned $8K in ad spend into $38K in sales for a brand whose Shopify site normally got 10 visitors a day.  Topics include the offer ingredients you need, re...

In this episode, host Mike chats with Shane White from NoBul Partners about practical and highly effective ways to use AI in Amazon marketing.  Shane explains his transition from ChatGPT to Claude, highlighting its powerful capabilities in visualizing large datasets and generating client-ready presentations.  He also shares a clever hack for training the AI to scrape a client's website to auto...

Welcome back to The PPC Den! This episode we're pulling back the curtain on how a real Amazon agency runs behind the scenes from AI to accountability. Michael sits down with Joshua Rawe of AmpliSell to talk about how they personally use AI (spoiler: Claude Opus is the daily driver), why "average" AI output is a trap if you don't already have great ideas, and how they built an ongoing, AI-powered a...

Welcome back to another episode where we’re diving deep into the next big shift in Amazon advertising: Sponsored Prompts.  You've probably seen those little blue AI questions popping up right under your product images, and guess what? Amazon is officially letting us track them with the new Prompt Report inside Campaign Manager. Today, I'm hanging out with Tyler from Pilot House to break down exact...

Amazon just made its premium first-party (1P) data including Flexible Shopping Insights (FSI) and Audience Segment Membership completely FREE to query in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) through the end of the year! But before you get blinded by the shiny new data, we need to talk about reality. In this episode, I break down what FSI actually uncovers (like the massive 14+ day attribution gap and orga...

In this episode, Mike takes you behind the scenes of a real Amazon account. He breaks down how to audit your brand using a bulk file and a business report. First, he looks at a premium, high-ticket product with great PPC sales but terrible organic rankings. Mike explains why a low organic share is dangerous and how a cheaper product variation can fix it. Next, Mike dives into the data to find hidd...

Today we are joined by Steve Walters, a leading Amazon FBA expert and the founder of Waltsco agency. Let’s be honest: Amazon margins are getting tighter, and it is so easy to fall into the micromanagement trap. We’ve all been there constantly checking if the team is updating bids, trimming the fat on accounts, or setting up too many broad match campaigns. But Steve found a better way.  In this epi...

Welcome to the second episode of Inside the Badger Den! This series is your backstage pass to Ad Badger, where we bridge the gap between powerful Amazon PPC software and high-level advertising strategy. In this episode, we don't just show you the tools; we show you the "why" behind them. We dive deep into our brand-new Custom Algorithm Feature to help you mix your own "algorithm...

Is Amazon DSP actually worth it or is it just a massive budget burner? In this episode Michael sits down with Sam Lee from Trivium to talk about how Amazon DSP is changing fast. If you think you need fifty thousand dollars just to get started you are completely wrong. Sam shares his exact blueprint on how to launch successful DSP campaigns with a starting budget of just five thousand dollars. They...

Ever noticed your Amazon sales dropping and immediately blamed your ads? We all do it! In this episode, Michael and Campaign Manager Olena reveal a massive secret about what is really killing your sales. It turns out you do not have to be completely out of stock to lose money. Just having a lower inventory drops your conversion rate and your sales velocity. Olena actually brought the receipts for...