How to Forecast Amazon PPC Spend & Revenue Before You Spend a Dollar
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
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