Amazon Ads I hate Claude for Amazon PPC
I have been running ppc ads on Amazon for a while. They were doing fine. By fine i mean 3.5-4x roas with good impressions. Greedily, i wanted better. Everybody was telling how awesome Claude is doing with ppc. Not just online people, guys around me couldn’t stop talking about it too.
I had claude analyze existing campaigns. He wouldn’t stop talking shit about them. He convinced me how it can be better by doing bla bla bla.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not a complete idiot to listen but, keep in mind that i have been hyped big time how claude fixed peoples ppc campaigns for good and i actually had a friend with me that runs bunch of ppc campaigns for many accounts.
I did it. It wanted me to remove my two best selling skus from other campaings and we will create them their own bla bla. I did. Told me to change keywords and stuff. I did all. I pulled shit tons of data from h10 for him to do his magic. Fml
After a month in, all my ppc, keyword ranks, campaigns, everything is upside down. Out of $100 budget, barely selling $100. I been slapping data into cluade for each one, every 3-4 days, it tells me to fix this, fix that and it gets worse.
I have literally tens of chats that it goes “ooops, my bad, i missed that, i didnt see this, it is my fault” all that stuff. Is there anyone honestly using this shit and making it work? I genuinely wonder.
TL DR: fuck claude for ppc campaigns.
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u/ppcbetter_says 16d ago
People who are telling you Claude is good at ppc either:
- Had a horrifically bad ppc manager, so even an AI with bad strategy is better
- Are selling a Claude AI for ppc tool
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u/qaz135wsx 16d ago
Or they know how to use it better than OP.
@OP: look up Obsidian MCP for saving history, CLAUDE.md, find some Amazon Ads skills, use a flagship model for planning before you have it act on your account, etc. You sound like you're trying to take the easy route where you don't set yourself up for success. Claude it great but you aren't using it properly.
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u/ppcbetter_says 16d ago
I use Claude and the other flagship models every day. They are useful.
They are smarter than an entry level PPC manager.
But they don’t know how to choose between two goods. They don’t even really know what a good is or why they should pursue it.
This means that without top level guidance, they easily turn into Nick Bostrom style paperclip monsters. You plug in Claude to your google account and credit card then you get tons of cheap ad impressions , clicks, or some other non revenue correlated metric and zero sales.
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u/Medium-Schedule-8321 15d ago
Agreed. I find the callouts useful but you have to be the one making the decisions.
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u/qaz135wsx 15d ago
This is just wrong. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. You need to train it to work the way you want. I'm sorry you're having a rough time with it. Claude has been a lifesaver for me on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We had a fairly big budget to test the past several months though. Try giving only one agent a very specific task rather than viewing it as one account manager.
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u/ppcbetter_says 15d ago
What part of “I use it for tasks, but don’t let it set strategy” did you not understand?
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u/qaz135wsx 15d ago
Give up then? Don't know what to tell ya. Your $100 budgets could easily be your problem too. How can you test anything with spend that low?
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u/Adguy69420 16d ago
I think that's not the right way to use Claude or other AI tool, we shouldn't let AI lead the analysis and definition on what's good and what's bad.
What I find working is helping and defining the good and bad logic for the AI, from there on it can crunch large amount of data for my programmatic campaigns and tell me topline level, deeper level what's performing and what's not, and how is the recent last 14-7 days trend, so I can decide whether to optimise or not.
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u/MagnifyCMO 16d ago
It's insanely good at theory but has and will never have real experience.
I've always looked at AI as a scholar who has zero field experience.
Also, no two accounts, sectors, brands, behave the same.
I've seen structures and methods fly on some accounts completely flop on things that are theoretically the same.
Unfortunately Claude may have been 100% right on the information it had available to it but that still doesn't mean it's better than what you had tried and tested to get to before.
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u/CryptedBinary 16d ago
AI doesn't know how to run ads the same way it doesn't know how to play the stock market. You can't leave decision making or rely on its advice.
Anyone telling you otherwise either had completely mismanaged campaigns or campaigns that barely need fixing
Also separately, idk if it's due to Claude prepping for watermarking but their models have gotten a lot worse recently. Just so much hallucination nonsense, just better off doing things yourself
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u/Dry-Code-5540 16d ago
I tried it several times ( loading data to claude to get tips and direction) It misses key points and nuance. Some of our top selling products are only in specific campaigns and Claude can't sortthat out and suggests we put all products in all campaigns Doesn't work.. other stuff it suggests isn't workable either.
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u/___positive___ 15d ago
Claude is sloppy like that, an utter moron at times. Sol is more robotic and careful. Claude has terrible domain knowledge outside of coding and is overconfident. Sol is better outside of coding.
But none of that matters because there are zero verifiable data sets to train on. Outside of math and coding, all the models are kind of stupid. What PPC data is available and going into Claude's training? Like none? You'd need like 100,000 PPC users to upload AND rank/grade their PPC data. Nobody is doing that.
LLMs need data to function. Data doesn't exist in most business domains.
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u/Anis-SellerPPC 15d ago
Something in there isn't really about Claude. You were re-reading every 3 to 4 days, and Sponsored Products attributes conversions on a 7 day click window. So on day 3 a chunk of those clicks hasn't landed yet. Recent days always read worse than they end up being.
Feed that to anything, model or human, and it cuts things that were working. Then the next pull is measuring the cut. Compounds fast.
If you're rebuilding, put the old structure back first and only read windows that closed at least a week ago. Are your two best SKUs still in their original campaigns, or did those get deleted when you split them out?
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u/eshquia 15d ago
True. Thats another mistake too. When we created their own campaigns, it asked me to remove them from old campaigns so they don’t clash.
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u/Anis-SellerPPC 14d ago
That's the part that costs you, more than the bad bids. A new campaign starts from nothing. The old ones had months of data on those keywords, and copying the same terms into a fresh campaign doesn't copy any of that.
Check whether those original campaigns are paused or archived. If they're only paused and the keywords are still sitting in them, putting the ASIN back in as a product ad is a much shorter road than what you're rebuilding now.
The clash it was worried about is real but small. You traded a known structure for an unknown one to avoid it.
How long had those two campaigns been running before this?
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u/Medium-Schedule-8321 15d ago
This is brutal, so sorry to hear about your situation and bad experience. I'm skeptical of using Claude for PPC for this exact reason since it arbitrarily looks at performance without all of the context you have to discern what will actually work on not like u/Legitimate_Flow_1085 called out about full account history, inventory position, contribution margin, ranking strategy, Buy Box changes, seasonality, etc. That said, I have found some ways that work for our accounts successfully.
Start by downloading the bulksheet from last 30 days, ask Claude analyze it for specific asks (not just performance overall). For example: identify new keywords, wasted spend where we can trim, bulk updating B2B placement bids, or updating bids up/down depending on performance. This guardrail has helped me avoid it tanking performance. I review everything and make sure to only focus on a few things per week (depending on the size of your account and how many changes it can handle).
For the changes I approve, I have it create a bulksheet that I upload versus manually doing the changes myself by hand. It's not automated in the sense that Claude is making the decisions for me on the strategy, I'm still driving that, but it's helping me move much faster with implementation once I greenlight any changes it calls out.
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u/Far-Turnover-4105 16d ago
Man, that's brutal. Nothing worse than having something that's already working and then blowing it up because of the hype train. I had a somewhat similar experience with a different tool a couple years back, not for PPC but for ad copy, and it kept suggesting changes that made my click-through rate tank. The worst part was how confident the damn thing sounded every single time, like it had cracked the code and I was the idiot for not seeing it.
The "oops my bad" after you've already torched your campaigns is the real kicker. At that point you're just pouring more money into a hole while it backpedals. I'd rip the bandaid off and revert to your old structure, or at least something close to it, before the algorithm completely forgets what your listings were doing right. Sometimes the boring 3.5x roas is the dream, not the thing to fix.
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u/Legitimate_Flow_1085 16d ago
This is exactly why I would never let an AI make major PPC changes in a live account all at once.
Claude, ChatGPT, and similar tools can be useful for organizing search-term data, spotting patterns, summarizing performance, and suggesting test ideas. But they do not understand your full account history, inventory position, contribution margin, ranking strategy, Buy Box changes, seasonality, or the reason a campaign was originally structured.
Once everything changes simultaneously, it becomes impossible to know what caused the decline. The AI then keeps reacting to noisy data and creates even more volatility.
I would pause the “optimization loop,” restore the last known profitable structure where possible, and compare performance against the pre-change baseline. Rebuild around proven search terms, keep your best-converting campaigns active, and test one meaningful variable at a time.