The Perils of Set and Forget: Why Your Amazon PPC Account Needs as Much Care as Your Garden

Have you ever bought one of those self-watering plant globes? You know the ones—those glass bulbs that promise to keep your houseplants watered while you’re away on holiday. Pop them in, fill them up, and Bob’s your uncle—plant care sorted for the next fortnight.

Except it rarely works out that way, does it?

I’ve lost count of how many plants I’ve returned to find either bone dry or swimming in water despite these clever contraptions. And it got me thinking—this “set and forget” approach to plant care bears a striking resemblance to how many Amazon sellers treat their PPC accounts.

The Allure of Automation

It’s quite tempting, isn’t it? Set up your Amazon PPC campaigns, establish some automatic rules, and then leave them to their own devices while you focus on other aspects of your business. After all, who doesn’t want to save time and effort?

I certainly understand the appeal. When I first started selling on Amazon, I dreamt of perfectly optimised campaigns that would tick along nicely without my interference. Rather like those automated irrigation systems that promise to give your plants exactly what they need, precisely when they need it.

But here’s the rub—both plants and PPC accounts exist in constantly changing environments. And both will wither without regular attention.

Changing Seasons, Changing Needs

Think about your garden for a moment. A plant that thrived in spring might struggle in the scorching summer heat. The watering schedule that worked perfectly in June could drown your plants in November.

Your Amazon PPC account faces similar seasonal shifts:

• Christmas shoppers behave differently from summer holiday browsers
• Back-to-school season creates entirely different search patterns
• Mother’s Day brings unique traffic that disappears the following week

I’ve watched sellers maintain the same bid strategy year-round and then wonder why their once-profitable campaigns suddenly start bleeding money. It’s rather like expecting the same watering schedule to work for your garden in both drought and rainy season.

Unexpected Weather and Market Storms

Even the most carefully tended garden can be blindsided by unexpected weather—a sudden frost, an unseasonable heatwave, or weeks of relentless rain.

Your PPC account faces similar unpredictable elements:

• A competitor might suddenly double their ad spend during a product launch
• Amazon could change its algorithm overnight
• A viral TikTok video might send unusual traffic to your product category

I once had a client whose conversion rate plummeted without warning. After some digging, we discovered a competitor had started targeting our client’s product pages with their own ads—effectively hijacking our traffic. No automated system would have spotted this or known how to respond.

Pests, Diseases, and Competitive Threats

Any gardener knows that pests and diseases require swift attention. Leave that aphid infestation unchecked, and before you know it, your roses are history.

Your PPC account faces its own invasive species:

• Competitors bidding on your brand terms
• Irrelevant search terms eating through your budget
• Changing customer preferences making your previous targeting obsolete

I’ve seen accounts where over 40% of the budget was being wasted on search terms that would never convert—rather like watching slugs devour half your vegetable patch while you’re not looking.

The Weeds of Wasted Spend

In gardening, weeds compete with your plants for nutrients, water, and sunlight. Left unchecked, they’ll eventually take over your entire garden.

In your PPC account, wasted spend functions exactly like weeds:

• Unprofitable search terms quietly drain your budget
• Poorly performing ads continue running alongside your winners
• Excessive bids on low-converting keywords steal resources from potential growth areas

The most frustrating part? Just as weeds seem to grow faster than anything you actually want in your garden, wasted spend often accumulates more quickly than profitable sales.

The Limitations of Amazon’s 60-Day Window

Here’s where the plant analogy becomes particularly apt. Imagine if you could only see the last 60 days of your garden’s history—no records of what worked last year, no memory of which plants thrived in which locations, no data on how your garden responded to different care routines.

That’s precisely the challenge Amazon sellers face with the platform’s 60-day data limitation. This short-sightedness makes it impossible to:

• Compare year-on-year seasonal performance
• Identify long-term trends versus temporary blips
• Make decisions with the benefit of historical context

I’ve watched sellers make panicked adjustments based on short-term data, only to discover they’ve accidentally killed off campaigns that were historically their best performers—rather like pulling up a dormant perennial because you’ve forgotten it’s supposed to die back in winter.

The Cost of Neglect

Leave a plant unattended long enough, and eventually, it will die. The same is true for your PPC account, though the death might look different:

• Rising ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) slowly erodes profitability
• Declining click-through rates as your ads become less relevant
• Decreasing conversion rates as you fail to adapt to changing customer preferences

The truly painful part? Just as a dead plant often can’t be revived, a severely neglected PPC account sometimes can’t be salvaged without starting fresh—losing all the historical data and optimisation you’ve built up over time.

Tending Your PPC Garden

So what does proper PPC gardening look like? Here are the essential care routines:

Regular Pruning

Just as you’d prune away dead branches to encourage new growth, regularly review your search terms to identify and eliminate wasted spend. But be careful—overzealous pruning can do more harm than good.

I’ve seen sellers hastily add negative keywords for any search term without sales, only to discover they’ve accidentally blocked variations of their best-performing terms. Remember that Amazon treats singulars, plurals, and phrases with or without “stop words” as matches—so “box of gifts” will also match “boxes for gifts” and “box gift.”

Feeding and Nurturing

Plants need the right nutrients to thrive. Your PPC campaigns need budget allocated to the right places:

• Increase spend on proven performers
• Test new opportunities with controlled experiments
• Adjust bids based on actual performance, not assumptions

Consistent Monitoring

The best gardeners observe their plants daily, noticing subtle changes before they become problems. Similarly, successful Amazon sellers develop systems for regular PPC review:

• Weekly checks for any major performance shifts
• Monthly deep-dives into search term performance
• Quarterly strategic reviews to align with business goals

Leveraging Your Data Ecosystem

Smart gardeners keep records—noting which varieties performed well, which fertilisers worked best, and how different weather conditions affected their plants.

For Amazon sellers, your accumulated PPC data is equally valuable:

• Use it to inform organic listing optimisation
• Apply learnings from existing campaigns to new product launches
• Build a growing list of proven negative keywords to give new campaigns a head start

Finding the Balance

Now, I’m not suggesting you need to obsess over your PPC account every waking hour. Even the most dedicated gardeners don’t spend all day staring at their plants. The key is finding the right rhythm of attention—enough to spot problems early without micromanaging every fluctuation.

I’ve found that most successful Amazon sellers dedicate a few hours each week to PPC management, with deeper analysis monthly. This balanced approach prevents both neglect and overthinking.

The Long Game

Both gardening and PPC management are long-term endeavours. The work you put in today might not show results tomorrow, but over time, the difference between a tended and untended account becomes dramatic.

I started managing a client’s account that had been on “set and forget” for over a year. In the first three months of proper attention, we reduced their ACoS by 32% while actually increasing sales—simply by addressing the accumulated inefficiencies.

Worth the Effort

Yes, proper PPC management takes time (though not much with AdRazor). Yes, it requires ongoing attention. And yes, it sometimes feels like you’re making tiny adjustments that hardly matter.

But so does gardening—and yet, few things are more satisfying than watching your garden flourish through the seasons, knowing it’s thriving because of your consistent care.

Your Amazon PPC account deserves the same attention. After all, unlike plants (which merely bring joy and oxygen), your PPC campaigns directly impact your business’s bottom line.

So perhaps it’s time to put away the self-watering globes—both for your houseplants and your PPC strategy. Some things simply can’t be automated, and that’s perfectly all right. The rewards of proper tending are always worth the effort.