Episode
How Many Clicks Before You Kill a Keyword? (The CPS Rule Amazon Sellers Ignore)
- Published
- Jan 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 798
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Summary
This episode is really about one thing: deciding when “no sales yet” actually means something. Because in real accounts, non-converting spend isn’t some small inefficiency. It’s often 30 percent of spend. Sometimes it’s 50. I’ve seen it hit 80 percent. Ten thousand dollars in ad spend, eight thousand going to search terms that never convert. What changes the way you look at this is separating converting behavior from non-converting behavior. If you include all the wasted spend in your averages, you end up judging new keywords against a broken baseline. Instead, you want to look at what your converting traffic normally does and use that as your benchmark. Another big takeaway is that not all keywords deserve the same level of patience. Branded terms might convert every couple of clicks. Competitor terms might need fifty clicks before you see a sale. If you use one rule across the board, you’ll end up killing keywords that were slow, not bad. We’ll see you in The PPC Den! 🦡 Highlights 0:28 – How many clicks before negating 1:07 – Non-converting spend pain 2:39 – Clicks Per Sale (CPS) 3:18 – Conversion rate → CPS math 4:03 – Account-level CPS misleading 5:22 – High-intent traffic benchmark 7:46 – Brand / generic / competitor terms 8:09 – CPS by keyword type 9:31 – Measuring search terms vs CPS 9:45 – 75%-150% CPS range 10:15 – 1.5× CPS decision point 10:39 – Pulling CPS from search term report 11:09 – Keyword failure options 11:29 – One rule beats no rule 🦡 Resources & Links 🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ Find Michael Erickson Facchin — Ad Badger’s CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising How N-gram analysis found a keyword with 200 clicks and 1 order What Should I Do About Invalid Clicks in Amazon PPC? 3 Filters to Use Wee…