Crack Q4 2025 with AMC Audiences & Deals

Crack Q4 2025 with AMC Audiences & Deals Speaker 2: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den podcast. My name is Michael Erickson Facchin, and right now you are joined by Badger Nation, where we learn about Amazon advertising, all to make your Amazon PPC life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. If you are interested in the show and you want to learn more, we have a checklist of over 300 episodes organized and categorized. You can get that checklist In the description, learn a little bit more about what we're all about today. We have a special treat. My dear friend and incredibly talented marketer, Sean Stone, is on the show and we're going to be touching on two things that you can do to really maximize Q4. Let's jump into the show. Sean Stone, welcome back to the pod. How are you? How's life in California? Speaker 1: Life is pretty good. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2: And how's your Amazon life? Speaker 1: Pretty great, actually. I feel like there's a lot to be excited about right now. So I feel like it's never been a more interesting time to be selling on Amazon. There's so many new opportunities, so many great things you can be doing. I'm sure it's confusing for a lot of people, but I think it's never been a better opportunity than it is today. Speaker 2: Before we get into it, do you ever think about merging these two things, meaning merging your Amazon life and your personal life? I can see a surfboard in the background, potentially selling surf wax, surfboards, so on and so forth. Have you ever thought about merging these two interests of yours? Speaker 1: So I am usually I usually have two or three brands I've got percolating in the back of my mind. And right now, my wife has made me a promise not to start any brands. I need to focus on my agency for now. But trust me, I have many ideas for great brands, mostly in the snack space, but I do like the idea of surf wax. I like a lot of different surf items. So there are a lot of things that I'm interested in selling. Speaker 2: You know, one of my first forays into the world of digital marketing was with a website, Surf Science. It was really cool because it was like a content site about different kinds of surfboards, how to surf, what kind of surfboard you should get based off your skill level and like what kind of waves you'll be surfing, all this stuff. Coolest part, I got a lot of surf stuff sent to me, which is really cool. Speaker 1: All right. Well, feel free to forward that stuff over to me. I will absolutely put it to use. Today's like the last day of a hurricane swell. And so I might try to get out after this conversation, just in case. Speaker 2: I love it. Well, let's get to it because I find it really interesting. And it's also really interesting. We mentioned becoming a seller. You have an agency. I love sharing Like broad views on things, meaning you're able to see inside a lot of different accounts and you're able to observe inside of a lot of different accounts. You know, this is the way that I interact with campaigns as well. I get to see a ton of different stuff and I get to see what's working. So I have a question for you. What's working today? Q4 2025. What comes up for you when I ask that question? Speaker 1: A lot of the principles that have been working for years Are still working, you know, all that kind of stuff. But there are two like really like brand new things. There are two things that didn't exist last Q4 that are absolutely mind blowing. And I think that they're going to have a huge impact on sellers, whether you ignore them or whether you pay attention to them this year, because they're gigantic opportunities. So those two things. Our Amazon Marketing Cloud, specifically the audiences. And then I actually everyone's talking about Amazon Marketing Cloud. I think the bigger thing that nobody's talking about is the new deal rules. That is going to have a freaking huge impact on Q4 this year. It's going to be massive. So, yeah, those are the two things where I'm like, I can't believe like 2025 is the year I'm the most excited about Q4 of every year that I've done this. Speaker 2: And I think it's true too, like there's always more and added complexity to digital marketing, which makes it really exciting. I would say that the pace of everything has increased in many, many ways. Like AMC was released and that was like a little keyhole, but then you step inside, it's gigantic, the amount of things that you can do. And we've talked about it before on this show, the fact that you can combine audiences plus Amazon Typical Amazon targeting methods is really interesting. Generally, in the e-commerce world, any kind of audience-based targeting is usually going to do better than a non-specific ad. So the fact that You have Amazon, which has some of the highest conversion rates out of any e-commerce ad combined with audience targeting native inside the advertising platform is still such a great opportunity. We've mentioned this on the show before. So I'm curious how you are using it. Like if you were to say, like if I were to push you and say, right now, if you had just one Amazon Marketing Cloud audience to start today for a brand new client, what would that audience be, do you think? Speaker 1: I think it's important to say that if you have a brand new account that has very limited data, the answer is going to be very different. So like, if you've only been selling on Amazon for three months, and then you get an Amazon Marketing Cloud instance, the answer is clicks but did not purchase. If you have an account that's selling lots of product, you know, 50 grand, 100 grand, 200 grand, a million a month. Then the main audience that I would start, again, I could only do one, is high likelihood or high intent. It used to be called high likelihood to purchase. Now I think it's called high interest. And that audience has been incredibly effective. Amazon doesn't really tell you what high interest means. It just says, like, based on their search information, like, great, thanks, Amazon. That's very specific. But that audience is done really well if you are just getting started for the very first time. On Amazon Marketing Cloud, that's one you can do without code, without writing SQL, without even talking to AI. You can just take that one and run. Yeah. Speaker 2: I think the umbrella of behavior-based targeting, meaning these people have done some behavior to indicate that they're more commercially inclined, is like the way to think about it. It's like, okay, I can have anyone searching for my kind of product, or I can have people that maybe add it to cart or maybe have already viewed My product, or maybe Amazon dubs them high interest, meaning they've had a lot of activity, but they haven't purchased yet. Like the ability to have this umbrella of people who are more likely to convert is huge. And it's like such an easy thing to wrap your head around. And Let's talk about that. So you mentioned like there's varying levels in which you would launch. For an aged brand, like someone who's already humming along, you know, 100,000 plus sales a month. Would you, out of the umbrella of sort of like retargeting or more commercially inclined, are you thinking about running all of them or are you thinking about one at a time? Like how do you structure the hierarchy of audiences? Like what to do first, second, third, all of them at the same time. Talk us through how you have been navigating that. Speaker 1: Really what I'm thinking about is I'm thinking about like the way that somebody might buy this product, right? If I have a best-selling product, like one of the top five products in my category or just like the best product in my catalog, that one I'm definitely starting with high intent to purchase or high interest to purchase, whatever we're going to call that. We still call it high likelihood because that's the old name, high likelihood to purchase. So that is the way I think about it. If I have a product I'm trying to grow and maybe it doesn't have the best conversion rate, we know it's a good product, it may not be The most rankable, it's not going to end up at the very top of the page. Then the one that we're going to mess with is usually added to cart but did not purchase because there's a good chance that that person may just need to come back to purchase. And then for lower conversion products, and especially if they're a higher price product, the one that I really like and that I've seen work quite well is Multiple detail page views but did not purchase, especially if you go for like three plus views. Because if you think about it, if I'm looking to buy something that's expensive, I'm going to go read the page over and over and over again because I'm like, Do I need this? This is more expensive than I want to pay, but maybe it's worth it. And if you have somebody in that category, you want to retarget them over and over again because there's a much higher chance they're going to buy than just cold traffic or unsegmented traffic. Speaker 2: Very well said. Someone selling a $10 cell phone case is likely not going to benefit a lot, meaning they might be able to create a campaign that has a higher conversion rate, but then when you add the initial campaign and the AMC-based campaign, they're going to add an unsustainable total ACoS, perhaps. But if you're selling a $75, if your OtterBox, though, And you sell an $80 cell phone case, you can probably get away with that first touch, as well as invest in retargeting. And when you combine that, you know, you'll be bringing customers back who were not able to initially convert for some reason. So I mean, yes, so it's sort of unlocking a classic e-commerce approach of sort of Spending more on people who are worth it. And then, of course, you can verify this. If you were to think of a sample account that you looked at this week, what would you say is an average ACoS difference for AMC-based campaigns versus non-AMC-based campaigns? Speaker 1: Yeah. So I think a lot of it also comes down to how you run these campaigns. I'm not saying that to be fancy. I'm just like, I'm a big believer in isolation. I think isolation on Amazon is really useful because if you're able to isolate, you're not going to overspend, double spend. Well, you'll probably still cross over and stuff like that. But you'll get a lot of segmented opportunity that no one else is really going after. So, I was showing you before this call an account where the account average is 42% ACoS from month to September. Again, it's October 2nd, so we're just talking about last month. And I think the spend was $40,000 and the sales were like $115,000. And then we segmented just the Amazon Marketing Cloud campaigns. And the A cost was 23% and the sales were like 33 grand. So I think we spent seven or eight grand on those campaigns. And really like the reason we were able to get away with that was a couple of things. We hyper segmented the audience in all those campaigns. So if you look at like the audience tab, all the spend is going like basically the campaign total and the audience section are basically the same or within 90 to 85% usually, except for impressions. Okay, so you take an auto campaign, give it really low bids, and then a high modifier on the audience, and then you modify the rest of the search and top of search placements after that. But you kind of have to do like multiplies, multiplies, because they don't add together like a 100% Top of Search modifier on a 900% modifier doesn't equal 1,000, it equals 1,800. And that was tough to wrap our heads around at first because you're kind of doing like double placement optimization. Once we figured that out, we started playing with it. And we realized that there is so much opportunity on Amazon in these audiences, especially like People always talk about like, oh, the long tail keywords. There's so much opportunity in the long tail keywords. But then I was like, show me the proof. Like there's no, there's nothing. Amazon Marketing Cloud. With automatic targeting is where we find long tail keywords that convert at scale. Speaker 2: It makes sense. You're taking broad, generalized targeting, but then you're specifying to a certain group of people, which allows you to pick up really good impressions because you're saying, auto campaigns are so interesting. I've shared this before, but At one point in time, someone made a typo in their bidding. So their general campaign structure was like unlimited budget. So the budget was like $1,000 a day, but they were only spending maybe $100 or so. And then they made a typo in their bidding. So like instead of like $1, they made it $10, like really extreme bids. And you would think that, okay, at a dollar bid, like at a reasonable bid, like I should be near some level of impressions, but they had like 10x the amount of stuff that they were showing up for. So their auto campaigns are so fascinating that there is so much visibility out there that could be captured with sort of the right kind of bid. So being able to take that sort of core concept that auto campaigns can have immense reach, which is really exciting, and then merging it with an audience. Speaker 1: Well, okay, so the thing that really surprised us that has been, like, we've been able to do this a bunch of times in a row on different accounts with different types of products, is if you can get an auto campaign with an AMC audience really dialed, it's like finding a new exact match keyword in your account. Like, we have auto campaigns with a like 60% conversion rate at top of search, and It's crazy the kind of stuff that you can find in there because it's just like a completely unexploded audience because. It's 2025. A lot of people have not really had time to play with this. So a lot of people who are maybe like overseas competitors, like they haven't necessarily, like they're too focused on having a low cost and that kind of thing to really dive deep into the more advanced tactics. Like these kinds of things are huge opportunities for the average seller, the average like mid to large size brand in 2025. Because a lot of people haven't figured this out yet. Like there's a big arbitrage opportunity. Speaker 2: Well said. So if anyone's listening, need some homework, go inside, create an auto campaign, give it low bids, and then stack on, depending on the size that you have, if you're able to do add to cart, no purchases, high interest audiences, multiple detailed page views, maybe three or more, merge that in And let us know how it works out. The second thing that I wanted to touch on is you mentioned deals at the start of the show. Deals in general, I would put under the category, I heard a quote, which is price optimization is the highest leverage activity anyone has to sell anything online. Meaning if you apply coupon or you change your price, It doesn't take that long to do. Creating an auto campaign, thinking of audiences, your first time doing it, it might take you a couple hours. But creating a deal, walk us through that process and why do you think it works so well. Speaker 1: I want to do that, but I just want to make one disclaimer about auto campaigns. You need to look at them every single day and please, for the love of God, start with a low budget because those campaigns can run away really quickly if you're not paying attention to them. Speaker 2: So, just disclaimer. I would like to believe all the listeners out there of Badger Nation do look at their campaigns every day, but it's a good reminder. Speaker 1: Yeah, so when it comes to deals, I mean, we've seen deals like we've seen the exact same PPC playbook. Get completely transformed or completely transform an account once you start layering deals on top of it. And we've actually seen deals plus a reduction PPC spend grow overall sales and overall profits. Using deals strategically has always or like has been something in our arsenal that we've been using for maybe I don't know, call it a year and a half. And I wish I'd been doing it for longer. I just, you know, I'd always been a bit of a deal skeptic. And then once I started really learning about how deals can have a big positive impact on an account, I definitely switched to being more of a deal bull. The big thing with deals is they have a huge impact on your conversion rate. You run them. And like you said, as soon as the deal starts, you notice. Assuming, of course, you run it on a product that deserves to have a deal. So, you know, you're not going to take your worst selling product, put it on a deal and then suddenly have it work. Speaker 2: You know, but that is a wish of many people. And I always it's much harder to go from zero to one than it is like one to two. So like making your best products even better. Is typically easier than trying to revive something from the dead? Speaker 1: Well, here's the thing. If you put your product on deal and still nobody buys it, it's your product's problem. Like it's a product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like it just, people love deals, you know, like everyone loves getting a good price on something. If you give someone what you think is a good price and they still don't buy it, That's a product problem. Yeah. Basically, deals have changed in 2025. They changed in June. And the changes have been, I feel like they've been decently well publicized, but I don't think anyone's really thought through the implications of it this year, and especially not for Q4. You know, it's interesting. Speaker 2: I feel like a lot of marketers that talk about Amazon marketing PPC gets a lot of attention. SEO gets a lot of attention. I feel like sometimes deals almost get forgotten about. A lot of professional marketers seem to think it may be that's the seller's responsibility to worry about that. I don't really want to pay attention to pricing necessarily or deals or sort of like I would call it like overall market strategy, but I think there's immense value if you are a marketer to think about these things, to sort of think full funnel, to think full market for a particular product. I think it unlocks a lot of opportunity and I'm sure it makes your life easier once you're inside campaigns and you're optimizing PPC campaigns. It gives you a lot of tailwind pushing you forward. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I'm of the opinion that if you're someone who's helping someone grow on Amazon, ignoring deals is like forgetting that there's a whole other, it's like ignoring Amazon Marketing Cloud, you know, like there's a whole other thing you could be using to grow your business. Maybe I'm in the minority there, but I just think it's such a big opportunity. And it's something that has a big impact on rankings. It's a big impact on Your PPC spend and it actually has a very positive impact on all your AMC campaigns. So that's another thing that you might want to think about. Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, the agencies that I see grow the fastest and do some of the best work are the ones who do think full funnel. They sort of like want to take responsibility of all these pieces because they know that You know, a company doesn't hire me for the change bids or create a campaign. It's the outcome of all those things. So it's like, how can you improve the outcome top to bottom? So anyway, it's cool that you're mentioning it. And I'm happy that we're talking about it. And there were some changes in the way that deals were structured. Talk us through that. Speaker 1: Yeah, if I misspeak on anything here, my apologies. I'm just, you know, I don't have my notes up in front of me. So normally when I'm making deals, I have notes up or like a little thing where I'm like, all right, just checking. Speaker 2: Something I believe about Amazon marketing is that it is impossible to know every single bullet point on every single page that Amazon has. We did a study in our Wednesday Mastermind, I don't know if you remember it, but I went through every single page that you could look at inside Seller Central. It's like 125 pages. And it changes all the time. New pages are coming. Some pages are being phased out. The pages themselves are changing. And it's like, there's no way that you can possibly remember every single thing, every single time. So positively, the best marketers know that I'm going to need to double check if this is the same as it was three months ago. And a lot of times it's not. So what do you recall? Speaker 1: Basically, the way that they charge for deals has changed and the total number of days that a product can be on sale has changed. So the way it used to work is that you used to be able to run one best deal and then three lightning deals over the course of a I think it was 28 day period or 30 day period. I can't remember which. And then what they recently did was they switched to you can run up to 14 days worth of deals over that same timeframe, whether it's 28 or 30 days. And that can be broken down as one 14-day deal, or it can be broken down as like 14 one-day deals spread out over a 28 day. So you could have a deal every other day if you want to, which would be kind of weird. I don't think it would be good, but who knows. And so the main thing that really What does that mean? Well, that means that for the final 14 days leading up to Christmas, your best product could be on sale for all 14 days. The final 14 days of the shopping year before the shipping cutoff for Christmas or holiday shopping cutoff to be more inclusive, I looked at it. I think it's going to be the 9th to the 22nd this year. So theoretically, you could have a product on sale for all 14 of those days this year. Now, Amazon's going to charge you more money than they would in previous years for it. But you can have a deal for every single day that someone is insanely highly likely to buy your product. And this works really, really well, especially when you have already been layering on new Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences and things like that. And we know this because we've been running deals all year and we've been noticing that our AMC campaigns absolutely pop off because every time you run a deal, it's like your own little mini Q4 or your microdosing Q4. And so watching your AMC campaigns pop off when you run a deal has been great to see because it gives us more insight into what we can expect. But more importantly, you can now run this longer deal on your best products during the best time of year. It's incredible. It's such a powerful opportunity. It's crazy. Speaker 2: Deals are not free to run, right? Of course, it cuts into people's overall profitability. What do you generally notice What lift are you expecting for a product? Like, let's say a product is doing $10,000 a month in profit, so profit, bottom line profit, and you begin to run a deal. What would you expect that product to do in that month with a 14-day deal in the middle of it? Speaker 1: Well, if you do it wrong, you'll have way less profit. Unknown Speaker: But... One of the main things... Speaker 1: Don't adjust your PPC at all. Try to always keep your campaigns in budget. All that kind of stuff I've seen have a very negative impact on your overall... Speaker 2: So you do some cost control and PPC to be sure that you're not spending at the same level that you did when you now have technically lower margin per sale because of the deal. Got it. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and the other thing too is you want to make sure that you're really spending adequately on your ranking campaigns, but only spending up to a threshold you're comfortable with. Because when you have a deal, your rankings improve. And the reason they improve is because you're getting more organic sales than normal because you're one of the few ones with a big badge that says limited time deal in the search results. But then on top of that, your PPC converts at a higher rate. And so you're getting more sales on the keywords that matter at a higher velocity And so if you have a ranking campaign that has a $100 budget a day, and usually you only spend $40, you can expect to spend all $100 if you let it on Amazon during the deal days. So what you might want to do is you might want to go in and cut your budgets on all your ranking campaigns to maybe like 20% more than what they actually spend in a day. And then after you do that, Go and make sure that your highly profitable campaigns are really optimized for that huge spike in traffic that you're about to see. And so that can have A profit boosting impact. I've seen 15, 20, 25% increases in profitability thanks to a deal like month over month. That's something that has been like we've observed time and time and time again. As long as you make sure that you're controlling costs in other areas, the deal fees actually end up netting out to just being like a different form of PPC spend. Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Would you say there's if someone is going to run a deal? Throughout the year, you know, whenever they can, they're running a deal throughout the year. Should that be, like, if they bake that into their normal price and they increase their pricing somewhat to account for running consistent deals, does it end up being as if they just had a lower price all year? What do you think about in terms of pricing and then running deals consistently? Speaker 1: I don't think it's a good idea. I think the better play is to Sell at the same price all year but then have a deal price that's lower than the market and just cut your PPC more and more if you have to because the deals are going to be what really, really shoots you up the rankings. And if you have a good price during the non-deal, you can turn PPC back up to sustain yourself there instead of focusing on something else. So that's the way that I would encourage you to think about it. It can be a lot more effective if you do it that way. Speaker 2: Well said. When you are considering those things, do you do any study of similarly priced products as like a way to understand like what if someone's product was like over market and they run a deal? And it doesn't give them much impact. Have you ever seen a situation like that where maybe the product was mispriced to begin with and so the deal is not attractive? Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely something we've played with. Usually, we can tell. I would say nine times out of ten, we run a deal. We have a A good idea of what's going to happen, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball, but I can tell pretty quickly if a product can go from 10th to 5th just based on their conversion rates. And then if the deal goes well and we go from 10th to 5th, I can look at our conversion rate during the deal and say, okay, it's highly likely that we're going to stay after the deal, or it's unlikely we're going to stay after the deal just based on the performance of the deal itself. Because In my opinion, Amazon ranks you not just on your total sales, but also your conversion rate to that keyword, because Jeff wants somebody to just show up and buy on repeat. And so he doesn't want them to have to scroll past a bunch of people before they buy the thing they want, even if it makes more sales on that keyword. So conversion rate is really the thing that's been Over and over again, determining product performance long-term. Speaker 2: Of course. I think if Amazon sees someone show up to Amazon and they scroll, they click, and they don't buy something in that session, they consider it like a failure of whatever products they showed these people, they didn't buy anything, and that's a failure. I think Amazon would consider that a failure. So monetizing every session is something that they're really interested in. Someone has a great product but just has a weak conversion rate, like lots of people are just bouncing off, Amazon is going to penalize that product for sure. So absolutely, conversion rate and revenue per session I think is something that Amazon's studying for everyone. So Sean, we have two topics that we cover today. Being sure that you give the bottom of funnel people the attention they deserve. So use Amazon Marketing Cloud. Target these people with add to carts, no purchases, multiple detailed page views, no purchases, high interest audiences, and then layer that in an auto campaign. Be mindful of your budgets there. Be mindful of your modifiers there, your bid modifiers there. And such a sweet period of time to run those deals during peak Q4, which I always consider to be the month of December. I think people should get way more excited over December than even like Black Friday. I just generally feel that the entire month of December always works out to be incredibly strong. So like giving that a bump with deals, absolutely awesome. And I think you said this year it's going to be like December 9th to the 20th? Speaker 1: 22nd. And again, this is if the Q4 shipping cutoff is December 22nd for most of the U.S. Then that's going to be peak shopping. And December 23rd, traffic's going to fall off a cliff because that badge won't arrive before Christmas. It's going to be on the page. Speaker 2: Awesome. So two very actionable things. And of course, tracking your profit when you do those deals to be sure that you're not shooting yourself in the foot for sure. Thank you so much, Sean. Any closing thoughts for that summary? Speaker 1: 2025 is the best year to be selling on Amazon. It's never been better than it is today. But you got to do the right things. I'm so excited. I think this is, I'm hyped. I can't wait. Speaker 2: I think many people would disagree with you and they would say it was much easier. There was a time, I think they would say, there was a time where I didn't have to worry about any of this. I would just put a product and it would sell. I didn't have to even do PPC or I didn't have to even think about my PPC campaigns. And some people would say, those were the good old days. And you know what? Speaker 1: That's okay. But the opportunity has only gotten bigger since then. And so, yeah, you have to try a little bit harder. You have to be a little bit more of a real business person. But the opportunity is immense. And I think a lot of people are about to be caught flat footed. Speaker 2: I mean, you have to have an engine to continuously learn and optimize. That is a must. I mean, I would say that's true for any business that generates revenue from the Internet. I would even say it's starting to extend out to local businesses that don't pay attention to technology and so on and so forth. I would also say Where there is like more stuff to do, those that take advantage of it are generally going to come out on top. Well, thank you so much for coming back on The PPC Den podcast. Your links are in the description and you have a couple, how much more time until you can capture this sick hurricane swell? Speaker 1: I have one day. The hurricane swell is about to go off. Today's the last day. Apparently, it's been amazing all weekend, but I have been moving, so I haven't been able to get out there. But yeah, this hurricane swell, I can't wait to get out. Speaker 2: Is your surfing going to be impaired by all the microdosing on deals that you've been doing? Speaker 1: Here's the thing, no matter how much I microdose fields, I'm still macro dosing surfing, so I'll be okay. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, Sean, thank you so much for coming back on The PPC Den. Everyone right now should be going and creating some AMC audiences, smacking it into a auto campaign and thinking about their deal strategy. It is always an absolute pleasure. We mastermind every Wednesday together and I absolutely love it. So thank you so much. Have a good one. Everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: And picked keywords. I've got my bits. Some placements too. Now bad mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of rankings. Oh yeah I'm the PPC Den, my friend. Two are the PPC. Speaker 2: We did. Unknown Speaker: Time for medicals, cause we fixed the game.