Today Michael welcomes back Priscilla Wagner of Relentless B2C, Marine Corps veteran, and quite possibly the most spreadsheet-brained guest in Badger Nation. She's been on the show for the visibility death spiral, for classifying keywords by how they actually behave instead of by raw console numbers, and for the custom Excel bidding system Michael still talks about. This time she's opening up her forecasting model.
The idea: auditing an account that's already running is the easy version. The data is sitting right there. Forecasting is the hard version, because you're projecting spend and revenue off keywords that have zero performance history attached to them. As Michael puts it, the digital marketer in all of us wants to launch big and find out fast but sitting down to plot it out first is what real businesses do.
Priscilla walks through the entire build. Tiering roughly 90 competitors by relevancy using Helium 10 and Claude. Bucketing keywords into core, expansion, branded, and broad discovery. Pulling current impression share straight out of the Search Query Performance report, then picking a lift target that's "big enough to read, small enough to test." She also shares the variable Michael had never seen anyone put in a forecast before: click-through rate and conversion rate decay, because your CTR cannot possibly hold steady as your impression bucket multiplies.
And there's a real case study in here. One client's forecast surfaced a buy box problem before a single ad went live so the recommendation wasn't a campaign structure, it was "stop selling to resellers first."
We'll see you in The PPC Den!
🦡 HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 – Welcome back, Priscilla Wagner 02:54 – Why forecasting is harder than auditing 06:19 – "Are ads just stealing our organic sales?" 08:45 – Step one: 90 competitors in Helium 10 11:06 – Tiering competitors 1 through 4 16:30 – Picking a realistic target: 1.5% to 8% 18:40 – The four keyword buckets 19:50 – Reading impression share in Search Query Performance 22:00 – Where CTR and CVR come from with no history 25:10 – CTR and CVR decay as impressions grow 30:30 – Turning keywords into a starting budget 31:20 – Case study: fix the buy box before you spend 35:00 – What 3% looks like when 8% is too aggressive 39:00 – Everyone has a plan until they get punched 42:00 – How often to rerun the forecast
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