Should we trust software to make PPC decisions?

In this era, artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed to become an essential part of our lives; I still doubt the reliability of software solutions. Working in the tech industry with a testing mindset, I always look to find bugs in software systems. Therefore, I do question the full software solution for making PPC decisions of any business around Amazon.

Don’t get me wrong here; I do understand software solutions can have many benefits. One of the most important advantages is scalability. One Amazon account can take up to 2 million keywords/targets. It is impossible to perform manual PPC management on such a big scale.

Even though the high tech world is pouring billions in the AI industry, I believe there is not a single software solution in this market that encompasses all aspects of the PPC. My testing mindset pushes me to test a few solutions in the market. Some solutions are better than others, but I always run into limitations using this software.

By giving full control to software solutions, it is very challenging to understand what is happening. What are the issues? How to debug issues? If we don’t debug issues, how are we going to fix the issues? It can become a nightmare. I don’t want my business to operate in this uncertainty zone.

Last but not least, if the solution is fully automated, humans tend to take less interest in understanding and debugging underlying processes. I want to engage with PPC at all times as it has a direct impact on business.

If we are not going to work on the full software solution, how are we going to manage PPC? There can be many products in the seller account, and for each product, thousands of products and keywords are targeting. Auto campaigns, sponsored brand campaigns, product display ads add more workload. How to deal without a complete software solution?

Amazon provides us a partial solution to this problem. The website provided us bulk reports, search term reports, targeting reports. We can use these reports to manage PPC. As these reports are available in Excel, we can use Excel’s features to speed up the process. However, if we look at these files, one can easily get confused as to what needs to be done for PPC management.

Sean Smith (my mentor) came up with a solution to the problem. Sean has been well known within Amazon PPC communities. He developed a method that is proven over the years and on multiple accounts. In the beginning, I doubted his methodology. Over time, I started to understand and admire his methods and processes. Still, there were many manual steps involved.

In AMZ PPC GURU, we started developing a process to automate some aspects of Sean Smith’s processes. We started applying on multiple accounts. We have observed wonderful results across different accounts. Our developed system has become the solution to all our problems as it is tested, partially automated, and scalable.