Stop Managing Bids, Start Marketing — Amazon PPC with Matthias Habel

When an Amazon seller or brand manager spends hours each week manually tweaking keyword bids, they aren't executing a marketing strategy—they are acting as a human calculator for an algorithm that outpaces them. In a candid episode of Amazon Ads Real Talk, AMALYZE founder Christian Kelm sits down with Matthias Habel of Fisch und Habel agency to tear down the outdated practices that keep brands stuck. Their core message is simple: the era of manual bid management is over. Thanks to hourly data feeds like the Amazon Marketing Stream, machines handle CPCs infinitely better than humans. Instead of pivoting tables, Amazon marketers need to focus on structural advantages: exploiting category refinements, mapping out high-converting Brand Tailor Promotions, tapping into external Twitch traffic, and fixing the literal broken links in their brand stores.

Here is how the top practitioners are stepping away from the bidding console and getting back to real advertising.

Retail Readiness Before ROAS

Before deploying a single euro into Amazon PPC, brands must strip away the complexity and ask a basic question: is this product actually ready to convert traffic?

Matthias emphasizes that an overwhelming amount of ad spend is wasted trying to push products that aren't fundamentally "retail ready." If the title, bullet points, and pricing strategy aren’t aligned with the current market consensus—what Matthias calls the "baseline homework"—no amount of bid optimization will save the campaign.

Furthermore, advertisers must know their exact margins down to the ASIN level before touching their ACOS targets. Christian points out that ACOS is simply a mathematical output: Bid / (Conversion Rate x Price). If a brand doesn't know what profit margins they actually require to survive, they end up arbitrarily aiming for "lower ACOS," completely unaware if they are scaling profitability or just scaling a loss. The foundation of trusting your PPC data is having absolute confidence in your unit economics and your product-detail-page (PDP) conversion rate.

The Absurdity of Fixed Monthly Budgets

One of the largest roadblocks to profitable Amazon growth is corporate budget politics. Matthias frequently encounters brands—especially in the B2B and enterprise space—that enforce rigid daily or monthly ad budgets based on arbitrary historical rules (like "allocate 10% of last month's revenue").

Because consumer search volume doesn't care about a finance department's monthly spreadsheet, this leads to disastrous missed opportunities. Campaigns run out of budget by 3:00 PM, meaning the brand sits out the highest-converting evening hours.

"If you have a strict ACOS target, and the campaigns are hitting or beating that target, capping the budget is financial malpractice. Why would you prevent a machine from printing profitable revenue just because a spreadsheet from last year said you could only spend €100 today?"

Matthias shares a case study of a seasonal DIY and garden brand. When his agency took over, the brand strictly throttled its campaigns, citing budget exhaustion. By simply un-capping the budgets and ensuring campaigns never ran out of stock or out of ad spend, top-line revenue skyrocketed from €19,000 to €119,000 in a single month. Even better, the increased volume allowed the algorithm to optimize, dropping their overall ACOS from 22% to 17%. The takeaway is clear: never let a profitable campaign run out of budget.

Let the Machine Manage Bids

Both Christian and Matthias agree: humans have no business adjusting bids on a Wednesday afternoon based on a trailing seven-day lookback window. The Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) gives advanced software platforms hourly feedback on CPCs, conversion shifts, and click-through rates.

Humans suffer from "decision fatigue" and lack the data resolution to understand that a keyword might be terrible at 9:00 AM but wildly profitable during a Champions League broadcast at 9:00 PM. Relying on "catch-all" auto campaigns because your team is too busy to structure things properly is a recipe for bleeding cash. Instead, modern operators plug in their margin-based targets, let their tech stack handle the hourly dayparting via AMS, and shift their own brainpower to creative and structural strategies.

The "Ping-Pong" Strategy Playbook

When you free up 10 hours a week by automating bid management, what do you actually do with that time? Christian and Matthias trade their favorite advanced tactical deployments:

Category Refinements as a Weapon

Instead of just targeting broad categories or specific ASINs, Category Targeting combined with the "Refine" feature is a massive lever. Christian uses this dynamically to segment the market. If his product costs €50, he will set up three distinct ad groups:

• Targeting products under €40: Here, the messaging positions his product as the premium alternative.
• Targeting products €40–€60: Here, it’s a feature-to-feature dogfight.
• Targeting products over €60: Here, his product is positioned as the high-value, cost-effective choice.

He also aggressively targets products with a rating of less than three stars. New products entering the market start with zero reviews and often fall into this bucket. Slapping your 4.5-star product ad directly onto a 2.5-star competitor's page provides an immediate conversion windfall.

Brand Store Routing and Relevance

A staggering amount of Sponsored Brands (SB) traffic is wasted because advertisers point generic product searches to generic store homepages. If a customer searches for "men's running socks," they should not land on an Amazon Brand Store homepage showing women's yoga pants and water bottles.

Matthias stresses that SB campaigns using product collections must map exactly to logical sub-pages inside the brand store. You must build out "Sitemap" style navigation within your Amazon Store and route SB traffic directly to the node that answers the customer's specific query.

Video Ads: The Top-of-Search Hack

Video ads are still fundamentally misunderstood. Most advertisers link their Sponsored Video ads directly to a PDP, and rarely check if users watch the content. Christian’s aggressive tactic here is to link Sponsored Video ads to the Brand Store rather than a PDP. Doing this frequently unlocks premium "Top of Search" video placements that dominate the mobile viewport. Furthermore, he recommends uploading three or four variations of the same video to ensure rotational presence in the mobile "endless scroll."

The Twitch to Brand Store Pipeline

Sponsored Display (SD) ads extend off-platform to Twitch, opening up incredibly cheap top-of-funnel awareness. For just a few thousand euros, a brand can buy tens of millions of impressions on Twitch.

While Twitch viewers rarely click ads on their secondary monitors, Christian notes a massive behavioral shift: viewers will see the ad on screen, pick up their mobile phone, and search for the brand directly on Amazon. The ROAS on the Twitch ad itself looks terrible, but the Brand Store traffic and organic branded search volume spike immediately. If you aren't running SD Twitch ads, you are ignoring the cheapest awareness engine Amazon offers.

Retargeting and Brand Tailor Promotions: The Ultimate Funnel

Perhaps the most potent combination discussed is the interplay between top-of-funnel PPC data buying and bottom-of-funnel Brand Tailor Promotions.

Historically, the entry barrier for building complex Amazon funnels was using Amazon DSP or Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). Today, Brand Tailor Promotions have democratized funnel building. Here is how the loop works:

1. Buy the Data: You run Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display ads. Not all of this traffic will convert immediately, but it leaves behavioral footprints. You are essentially "paying" for data.
2. Capture the Audience: Amazon aggregates users who viewed your brand or added items to their carts but did not purchase within the last 90 days.
3. Close for Free: You set up a Brand Tailor Promotion—offering a 10% to 50% coupon—exclusively targeting these cart abandoners.

The beauty of Brand Tailor Promotions is that they do not carry a CPC fee. The customer only sees the coupon in the SERP or on the PDP as a personalized offer. Christian runs these campaigns in rolling 90-day windows, constantly feeding the funnel with PPC traffic and scooping up the conversions at the bottom with high-intent coupons.

Rounding this out is Sponsored Display Remarketing. Matthias points out that failing to retarget users who visited your PDPs in the last 30 to 90 days is leaving pure profit on the table. It is the lowest barrier to entry for highly profitable conversions.

External Creative Testing and Naming Conventions

Before wasting money testing broad messages on Amazon, Matthias advocates for external creative vetting. Ad formats on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok allow for vastly cheaper testing of hooks, copy, and visuals. Once a specific video or image format is proven to stop the scroll and drive clicks on Meta, the agency imports that winning creative into Amazon's Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display ecosystems.

Finally, Matthias issues a warning about campaign hygiene. "Naming is gaming." If an account lacks strict naming conventions—designating ad type, targeting method, ASIN, and strategic intent in the title—evaluating performance becomes a nightmare. While advanced tools like AMALYZE can parse through messy accounts to optimize bids regardless of naming, humans still need to read the reports. A structured naming convention is the prerequisite for scaling complex strategies without losing your mind.

Bottom line

Amazon PPC has evolved past the point where a human clicking "increase bid by 10 cents" adds any value. The highest leverage activities today are structural. Ensure your product is retail-ready. Break the shackles of fixed daily budgets that choke profitable campaigns. Hand over the bidding automation to tools leveraging the Amazon Marketing Stream, and focus your human capital on what algorithms can't do: segmenting competitor price tiers, building hyper-relevant Brand Store landing pages, testing off-platform creatives, and architecting iron-clad retargeting loops with Brand Tailor Promotions.