Short version: as often as your category is competitive. For busy keywords that can mean daily, hourly, or even every 15 minutes during peak sales hours — not "whenever your data provider decided to refresh."
Quick answer
- Low-competition keywords: daily is usually enough
- Competitive keywords: hourly, so you catch sponsored movement throughout the day
- Peak sales hours on busy keywords: every 15 minutes — this is where PPC is won or lost
- The rule: fresher & faster access to what competitors do on the sponsored fields you appear in = higher chance of more efficient PPC
The problem with tool-scheduled data
Up until now you've probably been pulling rank data from tools like Keepa, Helium 10 or Jungle Scout. Here's how those work: they maintain a database, and they decide how fresh it is — weekly, monthly, whenever. When you make a request, you get back what they have stored.
That's fine for history and search volume. It's a problem for PPC. Amazon PPC has gotten brutally competitive, and a lot of activity happens throughout a single day — bids change, competitors turn campaigns on and off, sponsored placements shift by the hour. If your keywords are competitive, a database that refreshed at some point in the past is already stale by the time you act on it.
Why refresh frequency changes PPC results
Sponsored rank is not static. The advertisers above and below you are adjusting bids all day, and the SERP you appear in at 9am is not the one at 8pm. The tighter your feedback loop, the better your decisions:
- Catch competitor moves early — see when a rival ramps a keyword and react before it eats your ACOS
- Bid into the right moments — track how placements shift during peak hours and push spend where it converts
- Stop guessing — decisions based on this-hour data beat decisions based on last-week's cache
As always: fresher & faster access to what a competitor does on the sponsored fields you appear in > higher chance to run more efficient PPC.
Your schedule, not the tool's
This is the core difference with Asgard. Our scrapers go grab whatever datapoints you ask for, at whatever time, at whatever frequency you set. The data updates on your brand's schedule, not on our tool's timeline — and everyone doesn't get served the same stale snapshot.
- You set the cadence — daily, hourly, every 15 minutes, per keyword
- Live per request — each pull is a fresh scrape of Amazon right now, not a stored record
- ~98–99% sponsored rank accuracy — Amazon-specific retry logic captures the sponsored placements a single scrape drops, so you see the real ad set on each keyword
Frequently asked questions
- How often should I refresh rank data for PPC? Match it to competition: daily for quiet keywords, hourly for competitive ones, and every 15 minutes on busy keywords during peak sales hours.
- Why not just use Keepa / Helium 10 / Jungle Scout? They refresh on their own schedule and serve stored data. For PPC you need this-hour freshness on your own cadence.
- Is more frequent always better? Only where it pays off. Competitive keywords and peak hours justify high frequency; low-competition keywords don't need it.
- Can I set different frequencies per keyword? Yes — you control the cadence for each datapoint you track.
The short version
Rank data should update on your brand's schedule, not your data provider's. For competitive PPC, tighten the loop — daily, hourly, or every 15 minutes when it matters — and act on data that's fresh right now.
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