Highway to Sell: Amazon PPC Insights

Your bid doesn't decide what you pay per click on Amazon. Your click-through rate does. And in most accounts, the CPC gap between brands bidding the same amount on the same keyword runs at 25 to 40%. That's the relevance signal nobody talks about, and it's been quietly inflating CPCs for the brands ignoring it. In this episode, I break down how the Amazon ad auction actually clears and...

TikTok Shop is growing fast, but so is the money sellers are losing without ever knowing it. In this episode, George sits back down with Agassi Korkis, co-founder of CapTrack, to break down exactly how TikTok sellers are losing thousands in unrecovered revenue and how to get it back before the 60-day window closes forever. We cover what CapTrack does and how it works, why TikTok sellers lose 2-3x...

Agassi Korkis co-founded Carbon Six, scaled it to over $50M in annual revenue, and helped sell it for more than $200 million in just 3.5 years. Now he's back with CapTrack, a tool that recovers lost revenue for TikTok Shop sellers. In this episode, George sits down with Agassi for a deep dive into one of the most impressive SaaS exits in the Amazon space and what he's building next. We cov...

Between February 12 and May 31, 2026, Amazon is splitting reviews across every variation family with functional differences. Flavours, formulations, specs, generations, formulas. Reviews aren't being deleted. They're being redistributed. And the visible review count on your listings is dropping in ways most sellers aren't catching until it hits their ACoS. In this episode, I cover what...

Amazon knows who bought your rival's product last month. It knows when they bought it. It knows when they're about to run out. If you're running Amazon DSP, you can show your ad to every one of them at exactly the right moment. In this episode, I walk through five specific ways to reach people who are currently buying from your competitors. Each one targets a different buyer at a diffe...

Most Amazon brands treat Sponsored Display and DSP as interchangeable, or assume DSP is just a more expensive version of the same thing. They're not. They operate on different mechanics, serve different strategic purposes, and target completely different budget levels. Getting this wrong means either funding the wrong tool for what you're trying to achieve or leaving the most powerful targ...

We pulled a report for a brand recently. Established product, two years on Amazon, healthy ACoS across every campaign. What we found underneath it was that their organic rank had dropped four positions on their main keyword over six months. The revenue they were attributing to their ads? A significant chunk of it was sales they used to get for free. They weren't scaling. They were paying for g...

We audited an account last month that had spent $6,600 over 65 days without a single order. Bids looked fine. Keywords made sense. Match types were clean. Nothing in Campaign Manager pointed to a problem, because the problem wasn't in Campaign Manager. In this episode, I walk through a free report buried in Brand Analytics called Search Query Performance that most sellers have never touched. I...

Amazon's standard ACoS calculation has a blind spot. When a customer clicks your ad for Product A but buys Product B, your campaign gets zero credit for that sale. You see high ACoS. You consider pausing. But the revenue was real. It just got credited somewhere else. In this episode, I walk through a real client account where $78,400 in sales over 58 days was completely invisible in Campaign M...

There's a number buried in Amazon's ad documentation that changes how you should think about your entire campaign structure. It's 30. That's how many conversions per month a campaign needs before Amazon's algorithm can optimize your bids. In highly segmented accounts, most campaigns never get there. The structure you built for control is quietly working against you. In this epi...

In April 2024, Amazon introduced a fee for carrying too little inventory. They already charged you for carrying too much. The window in between, 28 to 90 days of supply per FNSKU, is the only place you don't get penalized. And as of January 2026, that fee is now assessed per individual variation, not per parent ASIN. That rule change exposed a huge number of SKUs that were previously safe. In...

Amazon's ad platform has fundamentally changed. The old playbook of raising bids, increasing budgets, and winning more impressions is now actively working against you. CPCs are up 48% cumulatively since 2019. The algorithm no longer simply rewards the highest bidder. And more budget doesn't scale what's working. It gives Amazon permission to find traffic that doesn't convert. In th...

Amazon Marketing Cloud has always held the data that explains why your ads are actually working or not. Attribution across DSP and Sponsored Ads. New-to-brand rates. Frequency curves. Full path to purchase. The problem was always access. You needed SQL expertise and hours of query development to get any of it. That barrier is gone. In this episode, I cover what AMC via Amazon's MCP server actu...

Over three weeks, 11 different AI systems crawled our website 10,932 times. Google Analytics reported essentially none of it. This isn't a GA4 bug. It's architecture. AI bots don't execute JavaScript. They never trigger the tracking script. Every crawl from ChatGPT, ClaudeBot, Meta AI, Amazon Q is completely invisible to standard analytics. In this episode, I walk through our actual Bo...

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol is live. But there's one product-level attribute that decides whether your products get a Buy button in AI Mode, and most brands have never heard of it. In this episode, I break down exactly what the native_commerce attribute is, how the AI mode checkout flow works, and what happens when the attribute is missing from your product data. I walk through th...

OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in September 2025. By early March 2026, it was gone. Five months and roughly a dozen live merchants. But the real story isn't that native checkout failed. It's what the 83% number tells you about who actually controls the AI commerce layer and what that means for where your products show up. In this episode, I break down what Instant Checkout actually was,...

Microsoft launched AI Performance inside Bing Webmaster Tools on February 9th. It's the first tool from any major search engine that shows you exactly how often AI is citing your content. Google hasn't built this. Nobody else has. In this episode, I walk through a real case study. A beauty brand published one long-form article on a skincare ingredient. Less than three weeks later, we pulle...

You woke up to a 28% drop in conversions. Nothing changed on your listing. Except Amazon put three words on it: "Frequently Returned Item." That badge tanks conversions 25-50%. You can't appeal it. You can't call support. It's automatic. In this episode, I walk through the 7-step plan we use to remove it, week by week. I start with root cause analysis using the FBA Returns Re...

On February 17th, TikTok sent every US seller the same email. The shipping mandate is dead. If you relaxed after reading it, you're about to make an expensive mistake. Three policies are still enforced right now that most sellers haven't touched. The USPS restriction that went live in January 2026 is active regardless of the mandate. The 95% tracking rate and 4% dispatch limit are still being enfo...

A study of 680 million AI citations just proved what nobody else is telling you. Only 11% of the sources ChatGPT trusts also get cited by Perplexity. 89% of what works on one platform is completely ignored by the other. There's no single "AI search optimization" strategy. There's ChatGPT optimization, Perplexity optimization, Google AI optimization, and Claude optimization. Four...

Amazon is scraping over 200,000 brand websites and rewriting product titles, images, and bullet points across millions of listings without permission. They call it Project Starfish, and it's already affected over 900,000 sellers. In this episode, I break down exactly what's happening and how to protect your brand. How Amazon's AI rewrites your listings in 4 steps, the $7.5 billion inte...

Everyone knows Amazon Rufus. Almost nobody understands COSMO, the algorithm underneath it that actually decides which products get recommended. In this episode, I do a deep dive into Amazon's AI search system. COSMO (Common Sense Knowledge Generation and Serving System) processes 275 million queries daily, building massive knowledge graphs that understand shopping intent. Rufus queries those g...

Shopping behaviour is changing faster than ever and Amazon sellers are feeling the pressure from every direction. In this episode, George and Max break down what's really happening on Amazon right now. Rising consumer stress, shrinking margins, increasing fees, tougher competition, TikTok's growing influence, and how Amazon's AI is reshaping product discovery. These shifts are already...

Amazon is moving toward full automation. AI is increasingly controlling targeting, bidding, and placements, and the old keyword-first strategies are fading fast. In this episode, I break down what the next phase of Amazon advertising actually looks like. How Amazon now understands shoppers at a deeper level through context and intent rather than just keywords. Why off-Amazon signals, brand demand,...

90% of the sources ChatGPT cites don't rank in Google's top 20. The SEO strategy you've spent years building? AI is looking somewhere else entirely. In this episode, I break down exactly what AI platforms actually cite, backed by the Princeton GEO research (9 techniques tested against 10,000 queries), a 90-day study of 1,200 pages, and the largest AI citation analysis ever conducted. K...