A tool I use every month to better manage my Amazon PPC campaigns

A tool I use every month to better manage my Amazon PPC campaigns Speaker 1: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den podcast, the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today on the show, we start with a story, the story of someone I know, someone I respect, who went to a forum that I host. You might have heard of it. It's called Core Community. We do an Amazon PPC mastermind every week. But The big thing I wanted to chew on is where do you turn to when you are struggling with macroeconomic changes inside your PPC account? How do you know what is You or the market? It's difficult to tell. So when performance shifts, I've talked about it before on the show, when my performance shifts in a PPC account, one of the first things that I try to think of is, did I do something in my PPC account or did something change on a macroeconomic level? So the situation was, was that the cost of acquisition to acquire a customer Doubled over the last year, and the CPC has increased. Our brand has increased sales, but everything's more expensive. Now, there's a lot of things to unpack. And just to recap this, sales are up. Cost to require a customer doubled. CPCs increased. There's more volume, but it's more expensive to get those sales. Now, when I first heard this, my mind was buzzing in the sense of, oh, it's probably that those extra sales were incrementally more expensive. But then it's like, you can't just simply say that. I mean, that is generally true. Like, it's usually your cost per acquisition, you get cheaper sales in when the account is potentially relatively smaller, and then you scale and maybe those incremental sales are More expensive, especially if we're thinking of like the, you know, really pushing market share, right? Like muscling out that competition, it can get a little bit more expensive. And somewhere in the middle, you usually gain a lot of efficiency in a sense of your account is scaling and you're finding cheaper opportunity. After that, it eventually gets a little bit more expensive. So 35% does seem significant. And here was my response. I analyzed about 1300 marketplaces on AdBadger. I see that the average CPC for the month of August was a whopping average of $1.16. That's wild because, you know, years ago, since I've been tracking this, there were many months where it was in the 80s, like 80-ish cents, 90 cents. And then in May 2025, it was $1.08. So what we're dealing with is a rise in CPCs, right? That is a given. CPCs will increase over time. CPC inflation, call it whatever you will. CPCs have gone up for every year that I've been doing PPC. Now. A 35% jump is significant, right? For a single company to have your CPCs go up 35%, that is significant. What does that mean? And how do you tell this narrative? How do you wrap your head around this, that PPC is as good as it could be, and that it's actually a market trend to pay attention to? And it was a really great mastermind, but really the thing that came up was using the product opportunity Explorer to help tell this narrative. Now, I think you can also tell this narrative using the search query performance report. I think that's a conversation for a different episode. But for this episode, I wanted to focus on a use case of a product opportunity explorer that you may not be familiar with that I personally love. The way that I interact with a lot of Amazon accounts these days is I'll get brought into something to help diagnose it, to help figure out what's going on, to figure out why performance isn't as good as it could be, to try to answer that hard question of, hey, how come we cannot double our sales? In the next 12 months, you know, those kinds of things, I'm working on these really big lofty questions, provide recommendations on the micro scale, like, hey, do this to these campaigns, launch these kinds of campaigns. So I need to be able to like zoom in and zoom out and get quick pulse check on the market. One of the tools that I use almost all the time is the Product Opportunity Explorer. Why? Because it gives me this big macro view of things. So you'll make a search. In this case, I searched podcast microphones. And what it is that you'll see are what they call different niches. And they define it as a cluster of similar search terms or keywords. So, they call, you know, microphone the niche, and then I can click on this niche and get data on all the search terms for this niche. So, I can see that if I click on the microphone niche in the USA, all of the search terms For this particular niche, and you can see that they cap it at 20 usually, so they're saying for these 20 search terms, you know, the top 20 most significant search terms for the niche microphone, which includes the search term microphone, have a particular trend over 90 days, 180 days, and 360 days. So what this tells me, you know, first and foremost, really quick, 18 million searches for the top, for these 20 terms, Minus 10% search volume growth over the last six months compared to previous six months. Now, it's a little frustrating. I can't do it. I don't have a date selector here because, you know, it might include quarter four, right? So quarter four, you're moving out of that window range. It's going to be notable that you left quarter four and now we're comparing a non-quarter four to a quarter four, right? So it still gives me a pulse check to just let me know like, clued in, it gives me average price, clued in, gives me amount of units sold, clued in, which is perfect if you wanted to know your true market share, right? So like you can look at if you're selling microphones for the microphone niche, you'll know that How many sales occurred for the last 360 days? You can see the average return rate for this niche and you can compare yourself against that. They recently added some summarization of this and it says the microphone niche generated 12 to 14 million in sales over the last 360 days, so on and so forth. It's got a 129% year-over-year search volume growth with prices ranging from everywhere from $9 to $160. So it sort of clues me in there. Now, again, Amazon's trying to make a lot of things as appealing as possible, but the thing that's going to be most significant for me is the insights and trends. When I go into insights and trends, I can see how the conversion rate has changed over time. I can see how the search volume versus search conversion rate has changed over time. So if I were to do some reflection of an account and maybe sales are up or sales are down, I can come here and really quickly, I mean, this is three clicks, search your niche, Click on insights, and then I can get a mapping out of search conversion rate over time for the last year, two years actually. So it's really great. So I can see when conversion rate shifts, so on and so forth. There's some good seasonality here. I can see that the conversion rate is going up over time. I can see that search volume does fluctuate, but I can get a pulse check on how the search volume is progressing for this. It's fantastic. And I actually added some new features here too. Which gives me, you know, top five versus amount of products or top five click share versus conversion rate. So I can see, you know, right off the bat, oh, the top five click share. If the top five click share is increasing, that means the top five products are gobbling up the market. If that's decreasing, that means there's movers who are taking some of their click share. So it also clues me in on how, you know, potentially soft the top five products are. So I love this, that you can get a demand overview. A competition overview, a differentiation potential, and a momentum tracker all in one place. It truly is a powerful tool to help you understand what the niche is doing and how it's progressing. What does that mean? That basically means if your performance goes up in a month or if it goes down in a month and you want to know how you just generally compared versus the overall market, It takes a few minutes of analysis to come over into the Product Opportunity Explorer and then instantly get a pulse check on something like search volume. Oh, are my sales up? Let me check the search volume. Oh, the search volume is up 15%. My sales only went up 5%. So that means other people gained more than I did. If search volume is down, but your sales are up, you know that you gained some market share. So there's lots of different ways to interpret this data. But the quick pulse check, if you just come into Product Opportunity Explorer, type in your niche, scroll down to the insights. And just get a quick pulse check, search volume. Okay, that's awesome. And then there's tons of secondary metrics that you can add. So if I want to know search volume by product count, that's really helpful to know. I could see, you know, the product count just recently dipped. So if I notice an uptick in my sales, I know that some products were retired from this listing, right? So I can just sort of get a quick pulse check. I can track average selling price if I wanted to know what the average selling price was as things progress. Search conversion rate. I can use this to compare to what I'm experiencing. Selling partner count, brand count, prime product count, how many ads there are. This is incredible, right? So you really get a quick pulse check on so many metrics all at once and you can piece together a story of what is going on, when, how, so on and so forth. Tracking the top five Brand, click share, really useful to know. You can really approximate your sales. Again, this is first party right from Amazon really nicely. You can click on products and I can see the click share of each product. So I know who is in the first spot. I can see exactly, you know, ratings, reviews, seller ranks, so on and so forth. Super duper helpful to get that pulse check. You may walk away with some keyword ideas. Usually you probably already know all these if you're in the niche itself, but just to get this pulse check, which is what I wanted to focus on today. If your performance goes up, if your performance goes down, to me, this is something that anyone managing Amazon PPC should probably look at at least once a month in retrospect. The month is over. You're analyzing the month. You come here and you just get a quick pulse check. Did you gain market share or did you lose market share? Is it more expensive to be a top five person or is it more advantageous to everyone else other than the top five gain? So there's so much information that you can gain here. And I would say that in 2025, and I think 2026 and into the future, this has always been true. So much of digital marketing, especially marketing on Amazon, is simply knowing what tools are available, And then scheduling time to use them and improve what it is that you do on Amazon. Just think about this information that you're getting here. Oh, my sales are up. Let me check the search volume super quickly inside Product Opportunity Explorer. You know if you gained or you lost market share instantly. So you know how to interpret those results. In a much better manner than otherwise. So, it was amazing. The person came back to this post and had such an amazing understanding there that sponsored ads, you know, there's so many more sponsored ads competitors, right? So, you know, sponsored product count, sponsored product count. In this case, it actually looks like it peaks, it peaked And then it's actually sort of declining a little bit. So I would imagine the sponsored product gets a little bit softer, right? We were up to almost 100 advertisers and now we're only at 70. So I would expect my advertising to get a little bit easier during these times, right? Again, so much insight you can get here. So that is amazing. Top five brand click share is really interesting to know too. You know, are the dominant brands being as dominant? Meaning is this niche gobbled up by the top five products or not? That could be really useful if you're a challenger product and you're trying to break into the top five. Super, super helpful. How many people are selling in this niche? Also super helpful. I think they call that selling partner count. So selling partner count, again, I can see podcast microphones or microphones is getting softer, right? There's fewer advertisers, there's fewer seller partners. Is the, you know, conversion rate Changing to conversion rate is up. So it's like, I'm seeing all these factors. And if my PPC performance is worse, I know that I'm actually trailing behind what the market dynamics are doing. I can see this, if search conversion rate is going up, there's fewer advertisers. This is like a dream, right? So I should be leaning into this. That being said, I believe the search volume was a little bit lower. I don't know, search volume Just trending up. So again, you learn so much from this. So if my PPC performance isn't getting better over the last few months, I know that it's a PPC issue because the market is actually a bit softer here. So Product Opportunity Explorer, so much of digital marketing, so much of Amazon growth is really just knowing what tools are available. This is a tool I look at almost every time someone asks me for insight in their account. It gives me a five-minute pulse check. And again, five minutes, I can easily spend 30 minutes here pulling out insight, informing my next steps. So much of good PPC management is getting insight and taking action. I hope you found this useful. Go and use the Product Opportunity Explorer. They added some nice new insights and trends. Have a good one, and I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: And picked keywords. I've got my bids. Some placements too. No bad mistakes. I've made a few. I've had my share of problems. But meet me soon in my dreams And we'll give up the meeting You too are the PPC. Time for medicals cause we fixed the game.