You Ranked First Now What?

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🫠 You Ranked First Now What?

📊 Nearly Every Platform Improved, But Budget Is Still Chasing Last Week's Losers

🏆 Ad of the Day

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Together with Omnisend

Your AI Knows What to Send. Omnisend Sends It.

You've got an AI that can talk strategy all day; what it can't do is open your email platform, pull live data, and build the campaign while you watch

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• See exactly what's driving revenue in your account by campaign, by segment, by send
• Find the automations and sequences you're missing and what they'd be worth if you turned them on
• Say "build it" and watch your AI create the segment, draft the email, and hand it back ready to send

150,000+ brands are already averaging $79 back for every $1 spent on this platform

Switching used to be the hard part. Omnisend migrates your lists, campaigns, and automations free in 5 days, so the only thing you're really deciding is how long you're okay leaving revenue on the table

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🫠 You Ranked First Now What?

For years, Amazon SEO had one objective: earn a higher organic position.

That assumption just broke.

With Alexa for Shopping answering more product searches before the traditional results page appears, shoppers increasingly encounter an AI response first and only reach organic listings if they choose to continue. Your ranking hasn’t changed.

Your addressable audience has.

That’s an important distinction.

A listing ranking first beneath the AI layer may now be seen by fewer shoppers than a lower-ranked listing would have reached a year ago. The challenge is no longer winning the results page. It’s earning visibility before the results page is ever opened.

Measure reachable traffic, not rank.

Start manually searching your highest-revenue keywords.

For each query, record two things:

• Does Alexa answer before the search results?
• If yes, does your product appear in that response or only after the shopper clicks through?

Those are now two separate visibility events. Traditional rank trackers only measure the second.

Optimize for evidence, not keywords.

Organic search rewards relevance.

AI answers reward confidence.

Purchase-verified reviews describing specific use cases, consistent customer satisfaction, detailed product experiences, and trustworthy third-party signals give an AI system far more confidence than perfectly repeated keywords ever will.

The brands that benefit most from this shift won’t necessarily have better listings.

They’ll have stronger evidence.

This is exactly why Stack Influence has become more valuable than a traditional creator campaign. The hardest part isn’t getting creators to talk about your product. It’s generating purchase-verified experiences at scale. 

Every Stack Influence campaign starts with creators buying your product on Amazon, using it themselves, and publishing detailed reviews and original content rooted in real ownership. 

Those aren’t just conversion assets anymore. They’re the exact kind of evidence AI shopping assistants increasingly rely on when deciding which products deserve visibility before shoppers ever reach the search results. 

If your competitors are feeding that evidence layer while you’re still optimizing only for rankings, you’re already playing two different games. You can sign up in the next two weeks and take 10% off your first campaign.

Audit the AI layer every week.

Your organic position can stay exactly the same while your visibility quietly declines.

That’s because rankings measure where you appear. They no longer measure whether shoppers ever arrive there in the first place.

The biggest change in Amazon SEO isn’t happening on the results page. It’s happening one click before it.

📊 Nearly Every Platform Improved, But Budget Is Still Chasing Last Week's Losers

Last week delivered one of the broadest efficiency recoveries of the year, costs fell, CAC improved sharply across the board, and returns rebounded on most major platforms, creating a rare environment where scaling decisions are easier to justify than they've been in months.

The Breakdown:

CPC - Meta, Google, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Microsoft all saw click costs fall while Snapchat pushed higher, with CPCs dropping alongside improving CVR and ROAS on most platforms. This is the week to push budgets on proven creatives rather than holding back.

CAC - Meta, YouTube, AppLovin, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Google all improved while Microsoft barely held flat; broad CAC improvement this clean is a compounding signal; run a 20–25% budget increase on top performers this week and set a CAC ceiling before committing to the full lift.

ROAS - Pinterest led at +25.31%, and Meta posted +14.39% while Microsoft collapsed at -14.59%, Pinterest at 0.48% budget share, with the week's highest ROAS is being left almost entirely untouched; open a dedicated test budget there before the auction reprices the opportunity.

Meta regained share to 54.90% with +14.39% ROAS and +18.87% CvR, the strongest aligned performance signal it's shown in weeks, making this the clearest case to scale it confidently. 

Pinterest at 0.48% share posted +25.31% ROAS and is structurally underfunded. Move budget from Microsoft, where ROAS dropped -14.59%, into Pinterest and YouTube, both of which posted double-digit ROAS gains this week.

🎥 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Benefit Leads Instantly - The oversized benefit headline communicates the core promise instantly, giving the ad a strong thumb-stop ratio while making the value proposition easy to understand on mobile.

Triggers Explain Technology - The three trigger icons turn abstract technology into simple, relatable use cases, reducing cognitive load and helping shoppers quickly connect the product to everyday sweat moments.

Retail Branding Reassures - Degree and Walmart branding sit in high-visibility zones, strengthening recall and purchase confidence while the glowing product render keeps attention anchored on the hero SKU.

Pair one bold functional claim with three visual proof points and a clear retail destination. That structure builds credibility, preserves CTA clarity and shortens conversion friction.

🥳 Events

🔥 What 400+ Sites Reveal About Content That Survives Google Zero

July 23 | 60 Minutes | Virtual Event

Cyrus Shepard mapped the exact differences between sites still growing and those losing ground. Get the five traits behind durable growth, the 17 formats with staying power, and a practical way to score every piece on your content calendar before investing more.

✅ Reserve Your Free Seat

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

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