u/hnayr

Bit of context — I've been running ads on my own catalog for years, and one question that always bugged me: how many of my "ad sales" would have happened anyway?

Attribution on Amazon tells you what the console wants to tell you. If someone searches your exact niche, clicks your ad that's sitting one row above your organic spot, and buys... that's an ad sale on the dashboard. Would they have scrolled one more row? No idea. The data doesn't exist. Or it exists and we don't get it, whatever.

So I ran the dumbest possible experiment. Took an established listing, decent organic rank, ads profitable on paper, and just... turned them off. Three weeks.

What happened: total sales dropped way less than the dashboard implied they would. Ads were "responsible" for maybe ~40% of units, but when I shut them off I lost closer to ~15%. So a decent chunk of my ad spend was paying for sales I was getting anyway. Cool cool cool.

Before anyone yells at me, yes, I know the caveats. Three weeks is short. Seasonality is noise. And the one that actually worries me — some people believe the sales dip itself hurts your organic rank, so the test isn't free. Honestly I half expected to come back to a wrecked listing and that didn't happen, but one listing one time proves nothing.

I turned the ads back on afterward, but at a lower budget, and profit per unit is better now. That part I'm confident in. What I'm NOT confident in is whether this generalizes or I just got lucky with a listing that had strong enough organic to coast.

Has anyone else actually tested this instead of theorizing about it? Especially curious if anyone's seen the organic rank damage everyone warns about, or if that's one of those things we all repeat because it sounds true.

I mostly play on DraftKings, so I'm drafting all 20 rounds.

Who's your favorite Round 20 target this year?

Mine are:

• Tyler Higbee
• Devaughn Vele
• Tez Johnson

Who else belongs on this list?

Been thinking about this one for a while and I don't have a clean answer, but I'll give you mine anyway.

I used to just... keep adding budget. Campaign's doing okay, ACOS looks fine, so why not push it. That was basically my logic for two years running ads on my own catalog. More spend, more sales, line goes up, feels productive.

Then at some point I actually sat down and looked at margin per unit after ad spend, not just revenue, and realized I was scaling a product that barely broke even once everything else got backed out. The ads were "working" in the sense that ACOS looked fine on a dashboard. They weren't working in the sense that actually matters, which is, was I making money on each sale.

So now my rule, and honestly it's less a rule and more a gut check, is this: when I'm about to bump budget, I ask whether I'm doing it because the listing's already proven and I'm just adding fuel, or because I'm hoping more spend quietly fixes a conversion problem I don't want to deal with. Those are two completely different situations. They get treated like the same decision way too often.

If it's proven, fine, scale it, that's the easy case. If I'm not sure, I stop and go look at the listing first. More budget on something that isn't converting just buys you a faster, more expensive way of finding that out.

Honestly the harder part isn't even the ads side. It's admitting a product might not be worth more of my time even though the ads could technically push more volume. That one's less PPC and more ego, if I'm being straight with myself.

Anyway. Where's everyone else drawing that line, is it a specific ACOS or TACOS number, a gut feeling, or you just keep pushing until profit tells you to stop?

DraftKings just abruptly shortened the Best Ball pick clock from 30 seconds to 20 seconds.

It was still 30 seconds this morning.

I'm in a new Best Ball draft right now... and it's 20 seconds.

I tested Amazon’s built-in Video Builder tool recently for Sponsored Brands video ads and it was a lot easier to use than I expected.

I’ve mostly avoided video ads in the past because producing them felt like too much work relative to the size of the campaigns. But this workflow is basically:

• choose the ASIN
• generate a few variations
• remove the bad assets it pulls in
• adjust the text overlays
• export

Took maybe a few minutes to get something usable.

One thing I noticed immediately though: the output quality is heavily dependent on your listing images. If the listing has weak mockups or cluttered graphics, the video ends up looking pretty rough too.

The AI also doesn’t always choose the right assets. It was pulling in things like sizing graphics and secondary images that I wouldn’t want in an ad, so I still had to manually clean things up.

I don’t think this replaces proper creative testing or fixes a weak product page, but for testing video ads quickly it seems useful, especially for smaller sellers that aren’t going to hire editors or make custom UGC videos.

I could also see it being useful for products that already get decent CTRs from search and just need something that stands out more visually in placements.

For anyone already running Sponsored Brands video ads regularly:

Are you seeing noticeably better CTRs compared to static Sponsored Brands campaigns?

I definitely am on my print on demand video ads.