The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

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
08:17 – Dan's news digest: inboxes, YouTube transcripts, Obsidian clips
11:32 – The SOP problem in a remote team
13:03 – Inside the Command Center and the daily triage report
14:52 – What triage caught today: a stock-out and a 4x spend spike
15:47 – The simple version: three CSV exports and one SOP
17:29 – Saving time, not cutting staff
19:32 – Getting a team to actually adopt it
21:37 – Obsidian, and a new listing built in 60 minutes
25:18 – Giving your AI the keys to do the task
27:21 – Keeping SOPs fresh: the 75/125 title change
32:53 – Dan's best prompt: drop the bias
35:00 – Make your second brain log its own mistakes
37:59 – The trap: don't let AI invent work

🦡 RESOURCES & LINKS

🦡 GET AD BADGER
Your host: 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: Dan Head of AMZ Elite
Dan's first appearance: Three Important Weekly Tasks for Amazon PPC
Actually Useful Use Cases of AI in Amazon Marketing
How to Combine Organic, PPC & Ranking Data with AI to Optimize Every Amazon Keyword
How to Use AI & Spreadsheets to Prevent Amazon Stock-Outs
How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Account Using Bulk Files and Business Reports
How to Avoid Micromanaging Your Amazon PPC Team
📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook & Advertising checklist
Subscribe to our newsletter
Review all our show notes

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Dan Head
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

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 forecasting model.
The idea: auditing an account that's already running is the easy version. The data is sitting right there. Forecasting is the hard version, because you're projecting spend and revenue off keywords that have zero performance history attached to them. As Michael puts it, the digital marketer in all of us wants to launch big and find out fast but sitting down to plot it out first is what real businesses do.
Priscilla walks through the entire build. Tiering roughly 90 competitors by relevancy using Helium 10 and Claude. Bucketing keywords into core, expansion, branded, and broad discovery. Pulling current impression share straight out of the Search Query Performance report, then picking a lift target that's "big enough to read, small enough to test." She also shares the variable Michael had never seen anyone put in a forecast before: click-through rate and conversion rate decay, because your CTR cannot possibly hold steady as your impression bucket multiplies.
And there's a real case study in here. One client's forecast surfaced a buy box problem before a single ad went live so the recommendation wasn't a campaign structure, it was "stop selling to resellers first."
We'll see you in The PPC Den!
🦡 HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 – Welcome back, Priscilla Wagner
02:54 – Why forecasting is harder than auditing
06:19 – "Are ads just stealing our organic sales?"
08:45 – Step one: 90 competitors in Helium 10
11:06 – Tiering competitors 1 through 4
16:30 – Picking a realistic target: 1.5% to 8%
18:40 – The four keyword buckets
19:50 – Reading impression share in Search Query Performance
22:00 – Where CTR and CVR come from with no history
25:10 – CTR and CVR decay as impressions grow
30:30 – Turning keywords into a starting budget
31:20 – Case study: fix the buy box before you spend
35:00 – What 3% looks like when 8% is too aggressive
39:00 – Everyone has a plan until they get punched
42:00 – How often to rerun the forecast
🦡 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
Find Priscilla Wagner at Relentless B2C — MBA, Marine Corps veteran, and full-service Amazon PPC + SEO strategist (LinkedIn)
Advanced Amazon PPC Bid Optimization
📚 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
🦡 CREDITS
Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Priscilla Wagner
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

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 challenges and ongoing learning in Amazon advertising.
This episode is a rerelease of one of our most popular episodes. Please note the resources and link section for any relevant updates.
We'll see you in The PPC Den!
🦡 Highlights
0:00 - Guest Introduction: Who is Mansour Norouzi?
0:37 - Forecasting Focus: What is forecasting in Amazon PPC?
2:30 - How complex is Amazon advertising?
3:27 - Why never stop learning?
5:44 - What does forecasting really involve?
8:55 - How to plan financially for advertising?
11:47 - How to determine market share?
17:46 - Which tools help understand the market?
29:25 - How to empower your Amazon strategy?
🦡 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
Where to find Mansour: Mansour Norouzi
Incrementum Digital
How Does Tracking Keywords Help PPC?
How To Develop A Successful Client Relationship?
How To Launch Amazon Products That Customers Actually Want?
What Amazon PPC Updates Do You Need For 2024?
How Can I Build Tasks To Help My Amazon PPC Campaign?
How Can I Best Use The Product Opportunity Explorer For My Amazon PPC Campaign?
📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook
Subscribe to our newsletter
Review all our show notes
Credits
Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Mansour Norouzi
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

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 organic rank, impression share, or search query behavior sitting right next to it. Everything on Amazon is "one big ball mashed together," so it's genuinely hard to know where to lean into momentum and where to pull back.
Michael walks through the exact four reports to pull, how to feed them to your favorite AI chatbot (Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude), and the prompt that turns all of it into a keyword-by-keyword action list  bid up here, cut back there  even if you've never opened a spreadsheet in your life.
Get the exact prompt. The full AI prompt Michael references in this episode, the one that cross-references organic rank, search query data, impression share, and ACoS into one action list  is already sitting inside the free Badger Guide to Amazon PPC Checklist. Look for the section called "PPC with Organic Data and AI" on Row 209. 
We’ll see you in The PPC Den!
🦡 Resources & Links

00:00 – Intro from summer vacation in Switzerland

00:45 – The presentation Michael built for Elizabeth Greene's seminar on AI-based PPC optimization

01:30 – Why AI is so good at combining data sources into one PPC "assistant"

03:10 – The real problem: Amazon mashes organic, PPC, and ranking into one big ball

04:40 – Why goal-setting is still the hardest part of Amazon PPC in 2026

06:00 – The mastermind presentation (shoutout to Gansa) that started this whole framework

07:45 – From manual spreadsheets to AI: what's changed in how Badger builds these reports

08:30 – Badger Sheets: what's coming next

09:15 – The 4 reports to download: search query performance, brand analytics top-clicked terms, sponsored products search term impression share, and organic ranking data

12:00 – Running the prompt and reading your output: strong organic + low ACoS = cut bids
13:15 – Your 4 action items to go do this week

🦡 Highlights ​​

🦡 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

Actually Useful Use Cases of AI in Amazon Marketing

Free N-Gram Analysis Tool (Google Sheet)

How Can I Be The Most Efficient With My N-Gram Analysis?

The Exact "Revenue Impact Formula" to Prioritize Your Optimizations

📚 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 and Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

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 work with an agency.
This episode is a rerelease of one of our most popular episodes. Please note the resources and link section for any relevant updates.
We’ll see you in The PPC Den!
🦡 Highlights
0:00 - Introduction

2:19 - Marketing myopia

7:38 - Now harder for solo Amazon sellers?

11:40 - Focus on financial literacy

17:01 - Michael's view: Amazon ad forecast for brands

20:00 - Steps for better Amazon performance

23:44 - Should advance Amazon entrepreneurs improve skills?

28:17 - Back to basics

32:35 - SOP issues

37:48 - Destaney's book recommendation

🦡 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  Destaney Wishon of BTR Media

How Can I Use ChatGPT To Advance My Amazon PPC Campaign?

How Should I Analyze My Data for my Amazon PPC Campaign?

How Can I Use Amazon’s New Dashboard To Boost My Amazon PPC Sales?

Amazon PPC Horrors: 10 Terrifying Mistakes You Might Be Making

How Can I Reach My Full Potential In The Amazon PPC Space?

What Amazon PPC Updates Do You Need for 2024?

Are We Still In The Golden Age of Amazon PPC?

📚 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: Destaney Wishon
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator and Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno