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

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <i>"big enough to read, small enough to test."</i> 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.</p><p>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."</p><p>We'll see you in The PPC Den!</p><p><b>🦡 HIGHLIGHTS</b></p><p>00:00 – Welcome back, Priscilla Wagner<br />02:54 – Why forecasting is harder than auditing<br />06:19 – "Are ads just stealing our organic sales?"<br />08:45 – Step one: 90 competitors in Helium 10<br />11:06 – Tiering competitors 1 through 4<br />16:30 – Picking a realistic target: 1.5% to 8%<br />18:40 – The four keyword buckets<br />19:50 – Reading impression share in Search Query Performance<br />22:00 – Where CTR and CVR come from with no history<br />25:10 – CTR and CVR decay as impressions grow<br />30:30 – Turning keywords into a starting budget<br />31:20 – Case study: fix the buy box before you spend<br />35:00 – What 3% looks like when 8% is too aggressive<br />39:00 – Everyone has a plan until they get punched<br />42:00 – How often to rerun the forecast</p><p><b>🦡 RESOURCES &amp; LINKS</b></p><ul><li>🦡 <a href="https://www.adbadger.com/pricing/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">GET AD BADGER</a></li><li>Find <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Michael Erickson Facchin</a> — Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising</li><li>Find Priscilla Wagner at <a href="http://relentlessb2c.com" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Relentless B2C</a> — MBA, Marine Corps veteran, and full-service Amazon PPC + SEO strategist (<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/priscilla-wagner-mba-80402135" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a>)</li><li><a href="https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/advanced-amazon-ppc-bid-optimization-the-ppc-den-podcast/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Advanced Amazon PPC Bid Optimization</a></li><li>📚 Unlock our FREE <a href="https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook</a></li><li><a href="https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Subscribe to our newsletter</a></li><li>Transform your workflow with our <a href="https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist</a></li><li><a href="https://www.adbadger.com/podcast" rel="