That was the moment I stopped trying to get better at the task and started askin
By michael-erickson-facchin · September 9, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
That was the moment I stopped trying to get better at the task and started asking whether the task should be mine at all.
Here's the math that made the decision for me.
Amazon PPC is a continuous auction. Bids compete every hour, against demand that shifts every hour.
Now count what a person can actually do.
A mid sized account has thousands of keywords. Most search terms get fewer than five clicks, which means signal arrives slowly and in tiny fragments. To make a defensible decision on any single term, you need enough data to separate signal from noise, and to know that you need to look at sixty days, not thirty.
Do that properly, weekly, across an entire account, and you are not doing strategy anymore. You are doing data entry with a strategist's salary.
I know PPC managers who are genuinely excellent, who spend roughly 80% of their week in spreadsheets and 20% on the thinking that actually moves revenue.
Bid adjustment turned out to be exactly that. It's high frequency, rules driven, and it punishes latency more than it rewards brilliance. A bid set on Monday is a guess about last week by Thursday.
Our algorithm now adjusts close to two million bids a day.
I don't say that because volume is impressive. I say it because that's simply what the auction requires, and it makes the point better than any argument I could write: the workload was never human scale. We just kept assigning it to humans because there wasn't another option.
Accounts moving from manual flat bids to algorithmic management typically see CPC drop 8 to 15 percent within 60 to 90 days while holding or improving conversion rate.
But the feedback I care about most isn't the CPC number. It's when someone tells me they got their week back.
Here's what I'd ask anyone still doing this by hand:
What's the task you postpone every week? Not the hardest one. The one you dread.
That's not a discipline problem. That's your process telling you it's overdue.