PPC Jumpstart, Vancouver, Vancouver, BC (2026)

06/18/2026

The best Sponsored Display campaign in this account had an 8% ACoS.
Claude told me to shut it off. It was right.

Retargeting ACoS sat at 8%. Conversion rate looked beautiful. On paper, the campaign was carrying the account.

Then I pulled the new-to-brand split. 91% of those sales were repeat buyers. People who had already bought from me. People scrolling Amazon who would have clicked the listing anyway.

I was paying Amazon to intercept sales the listing was about to win for free.

That's not retargeting. That's a toll booth I built on my own driveway.

I broke the full audit down in the carousel. The exact columns to pull from the bulk report. How to read new-to-brand percentage by campaign. And the three-branch decision rule I use to keep, cap, or cut each retargeting line.

One thing on AI before you swipe. I let Claude pattern-spot the search terms and flag the outliers. The final call on whether a campaign stays alive is mine. AI does not get to decide what gets killed in my account. Neither should it in yours.

Pull your last 60 days of Sponsored Display data this week. Run the split. You will probably find what I found.

Save the carousel and run the audit before your next bid review.

P.S. The campaign that looks most profitable in your account is usually the one stealing the most from your organic line. Check it first.

06/17/2026

I audited 60 Amazon accounts last quarter. 51 of them ran out of Sponsored Display campaigns budget before 5 PM.

Which means the Sponsored Display retargeting layer never fires when Cart Abandoners actually come back to buy. Here is the fix order I run:

1. Diagnose (read the budget curve)

- Pull Lost Impression Share by hour -> find the cliff
- Map hourly conversion rate -> spot the 6 to 10 PM peak
- Check SD Cart Abandoner spend by hour -> usually zero after noon
- Flag any campaign hitting budget before 1 PM

2. Pace (stop the morning bleed)

- Cap Sponsored Products daily budget 20% under historical run rate
- Pull bids down 15% on broad and auto from 6 AM to 11 AM
- Move discovery campaigns to a separate budget pool
- Protect SD Cart Abandoner with its own budget line

3. Protect (defend the evening window)

- Lock SD View Remarketing and Purchase Remarketing budgets at 100% headroom
- Set placement multipliers on product pages for evening hours
- Audience lookback at 14 days for Cart Abandoner, not 30
- Bid up 20% on Cart Abandoner between 6 PM and 10 PM

4. Verify (close the loop in 7 days)

- Lost IS by hour drops below 15% on retargeting
- Evening attributed sales lift 18 to 30%
- TACoS holds or drops, ACoS shifts to better hours

Before: budget gone by 11 AM, SD spent $4 a day, evening conversions wasted.
After: SD Cart Abandoner spending $80 a day at a 9% ACoS, total ad sales up 22%.

06/16/2026

It's LIVE! The Amazon PPC Scaling Checklist

Comment “CHECKLIST” to get it in 4K.

For Amazon brands wasting ad spend & stuck below their next growth level

It covers:

- Why low ACOS can actually slow growth
- The biggest PPC structure mistakes brands make
- How smart sellers scale rankings without destroying profit

Plus:

- Placement optimization
- Dayparting strategy
- Hero keyword systems
- TACOS-focused scaling
- The exact traffic leaks killing profitability

If your ads feel busy but growth feels stuck, you need this.

Want it?

1. Like this post.
2. Comment “CHECKLIST”

(Repost to get it delivered in under 24 hours)

06/15/2026

A receipt tells you what you spent. A report tells you whether you're winning.

Most monthly Amazon PPC reports are receipts.

I've audited Amazon accounts spending $30K, $80K, $200K a month on ads. And almost every monthly report I get handed looks the same.

ACoS. Total spend. A few keyword rows. Maybe a ROAS chart.

That's not a report. That's a receipt.

I learned this the hard way running my own account. For years I tracked ACoS like it was the only number that mattered. Meanwhile organic rank was slipping, branded spend share was creeping up, and my top SKUs were quietly losing incremental sales.

The dashboard looked clean. The business was bleeding.

So I built a reporting standard. Every account I touch above $30K in monthly ad spend has to meet it. No exceptions.

It answers four questions every month:

Did total profit go up?
Did organic rank move?
Is branded spend share growing or shrinking?
Are the top three SKUs gaining or losing incremental sales?

If your current report can't answer those, it's not built to protect your profit. It's built to look clean on a slide.

I broke down the full standard in the carousel. Myth vs reality on each section. What healthy looks like. What sick looks like.

Pull your last monthly report after you read it. Run it through the checklist on slide 8.

Save this for your next reporting review.

P.S. The fastest tell of a weak report: it shows you ACoS but not TACoS trend. If your report skips that line, the rest is decoration.

06/11/2026

I ran my own brands for years before I figured out auto-to-manual graduation.

I just kept dumping new keywords into manual campaigns on launch day and hoping. Meanwhile my auto campaign was quietly finding the search terms that actually converted.

I never moved them. There was no system behind it, just guesswork.

That cost me real money.

Here is what I missed back then. Every Amazon auto campaign is a discovery engine. It surfaces search terms that match your listing better than anything you brainstormed at setup. But auto runs on loose match. You pay loose match prices for terms that deserve exact match precision.

The breakage point: sellers scale spend on auto hoping the winners will keep winning. They do not. CPC climbs. Your buried winner keeps getting bid up to $2.40 when it should run at $1.10 in manual exact.

The math says you cannot scale spend until you graduate the winners first.

I broke the full rule into 6 slides. CVR threshold. ACoS threshold. 14-day window. The negate rule. The stay-in-auto rule. And the mistake I made for years.

See the carousel for the exact numbers.

Save it. Run the check every two weeks on every account you own.

P.S. The most expensive auto report is the one nobody reads.

06/10/2026

Broad keywords win the click. Long-tail keywords win the order.

Average Amazon CPC sits at $1.10 to $2 in 2026. Over $2 in electronics, supplements, and home. Broad-term waste is the biggest profit leak I see on accounts above $30K spend.

Here is the modifier filter I paste into every search term report:

1. Buyer-intent modifiers (keep and promote)

- "for [use case]" buyer knows the job
- "with [feature]" spec-aware shopper
- "[size or count] pack" ready to add to cart
- "best [product] for [persona]" decision stage

2. Comparison modifiers (keep, watch ACoS)

- "vs [competitor]" mid-funnel, still convertible
- "alternative to [brand]" switcher intent
- "[product] or [product]" shortlist behavior

3. Browser modifiers (negate fast)

- "diy" research, not purchase
- "free" wrong shopper
- "what is" top of funnel noise
- "near me" Amazon channel mismatch

4. Promote-to-exact triggers

- 3+ orders in 60 days on a search term
- ACoS under target on 15+ clicks
- Repeat across two reporting windows
- Margin holds after fees and ads

A clean modifier filter cuts CPC faster than any bid change.
The terms you keep matter more than the bids you set.

06/09/2026

19 PPC fixes that can add an extra $18K-$63K/mo.

Want it? Comment “FIXES”
And I'll share it in your DM.

It covers:

1. How to stop Amazon from wasting budget on bad traffic
2. How to structure campaigns so winners scale faster
3. Why most sellers focus on the wrong PPC metrics
4. How to lower wasted spend without killing growth
5. The exact campaign mistakes quietly destroying profit

Amazon brands often are leaking money from:

- weak keyword targeting
- problematic campaign structure
- duplicate keywords
- poor placement control
- and irrelevant traffic

This resource breaks down the exact fixes.

Want it?
Comment “FIXES”.

PS - One seller recovered over $10K/month in wasted ad spend just by rebuilding campaign structure properly.

06/08/2026

CPC spikes cost more than any bad keyword.

I learned this the hard way.

A competitor enters or exits your category. CPCs jump 30 to 60% inside 48 hours. Your bids sit at the old ceiling. You overpay for two days before anyone notices.

I ran a $1,000 per day campaign through this exact event. Caught it at hour 54. The bleed was $1,100 in excess spend.

Then I built a detection rule. Caught the next spike at hour 6. Bleed was $140.

Same campaign. Same competitor event. The only change was when I looked.

I check impression cost trend every morning now. Two minutes. That is the whole protocol.

Most sellers do not have a keyword problem. They have a detection lag problem.

The visual breaks down the before and after.

Follow Vadim Soin

06/06/2026

A brand was spending $1,100 per week on Amazon PPC.

Sales on one ASIN dropped 60% in ten days.
Nobody noticed.

I pulled the variation report.
The top two sizes had been out of stock for eight days.
The ads never paused.

Amazon doesn't stop your ads when a variation sells out.
The parent ASIN stays active. Clicks keep coming.
Shoppers land on the listing and see "Currently Unavailable."

On a $30K monthly spend, one stockout variation wastes $800 to $1,500 per week. Zero sales to show for it.

This isn't a rare edge case.
I see it in almost every account with 3+ variations.

Here's the weekly check I run to catch it:

1. Pull your variation-level business report
2. Match each child ASIN to active ad campaigns
3. Flag any variation with zero units and active spend
4. Pause or negate those child ASINs right away
5. Set a calendar alert every Monday morning

This takes 10 minutes per week.
The waste it prevents can save you thousands per month.

See the full cheat sheet above for the exact workflow.

Follow Vadim Soin ♻️ Repost to help other Amazon sellers.

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