Five years ago you could hire a PPC manager for bids, budgets, keywords, campaign types and structure, and that was the whole job. Today Mike argues that a good Amazon PPC marketer is just a good Amazon marketer, and the job now reaches into what used to be somebody else's problem entirely: fees, refunds, logistics, and the one he thinks is most underrated, stock. This is the case for letting your marketing team into your inventory data, and it starts with a client who flatly did not believe it mattered. Conversion rate is a product page problem and a PPC problem, they said. So Olena on the Ad Badger team built the chart that settled it - unit session percentage plotted against warehouse balance - and the split was uncomfortable. Above one threshold the numbers held. Below it they didn't. Sales, conversion rate, Buy Box. Not out of stock. Just low. That sent Mike into inventory distortion - the combined financial drain of overstocking and stocking out, estimated to cost global retail 10 to 30% of total sales volume, and almost never mentioned alongside ACoS. He breaks the damage into four buckets: lost revenue that doesn't happen evenly (half a million Buy Box checks found roughly one in three products has at least one location with a suppressed Buy Box), rank decay, the PPC tax you pay while competitors take cheaper clicks, and capital locked up in overstock. Then the SOP. Three reports - advertised products, FBA inventory health, and detailed page sales and traffic by ASIN - dropped into Claude with a prompt, and you have a dashboard. Mike walks an anonymized $400K a month account where roughly 30% of the catalog was fully out of stock and a couple of SKUs sat on over 1,000 days of supply. Plus the one nobody automates: nothing tells you when a product comes back in stock, which is exactly when you want the ads switched back on. We'll see you in The PPC Den! 🦡 Highlights 00:00 - Intro00:22 - What PPC management looked like five years ago01:13 - Fees, refunds, logistics and stock: the new scope01:44 - Lost revenue, rank decay, PPC tax and capital lockup02:29 - The client who didn't believe it03:07 - Unit session percentage vs warehouse balance04:22 - Inventory distortion, and the 10 to 30%05:36 - Problem 1: lost revenue, zip code by zip code05:57 - What half a million Buy Box checks revealed06:51 - Problems 2 and 3: rank decay and the PPC tax07:28 - The SOP: three reports across two timeframes09:03 - The case study: a $400K per month account10:50 - Reading the dashboard: days of stock left11:47 - The restocks nobody notifies you about12:42 - A free zip code level Buy Box tool 🦡 Resources & Links 🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEOYou're Not Out of Stock, So Why Are Your Sales Down?Buy Box Checker - free zip code level Buy Box and stock tracking📚 Unlock our FREE Amazon Marketing PlaybookSubscribe to our newsletterReview all our show notes Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno
