Scale Insights — one of my and a lot of brands' favourite tools in the Amazon PPC space — used our Amazon API to go destroy the rank tracking space. This is a quick look at what they built and why live ranks matter so much for PPC.
Quick answer
- Who: Scale Insights, an Amazon PPC automation tool
- What they added: a realtime Amazon ranks scraping API (the one missing piece) from Asgard
- Why ranks matter: they measure how effective your PPC is and drive what you do next
- The payoff: daily fresh ranks feed automations that mine keywords, cut wasted adspend, and adjust bids by rank
Why ranks were the missing piece
Scale Insights knew — way before most of the firms we work with — that ranks are central to PPC. Ranks let you:
- ⤷ measure the effectiveness of your PPC
- ⤷ decide what actions to take next
The only thing missing was a realtime Amazon ranks scraping API, which is what I integrated for them. Once fresh ranks were flowing in, the automations they built on top were mindblowingly good.
The automations they built
These are the ones worth calling out — but they're just the start.
- SQP keyword mining — discovering keywords with low ranks but high potential (good CVR or CTR) and boosting them on PPC.
- Preventing wasted adspend (ad cannibalization) — when both organic and sponsored ranks reach the top, you may want to cut the wasted adspend and capture those sales organically instead.
- Rank-drop bid rules — if on any given day your organic rank falls below X, increase bids by Y%.
- Rank-strength bid rules — if on any given day your organic rank is well above X, reduce bids by Y%.
...you get the idea. There are many more.
Why daily fresh ranks make this work
None of these rules work on stale data. A bid rule that fires on last week's cached rank is reacting to a SERP that no longer exists. The whole point is a tight feedback loop:
- Fresh scrape per pull — each rank is Amazon right now, not a stored record refreshed on someone else's schedule
- ~98–99% sponsored rank accuracy — Amazon-specific retry logic captures the sponsored placements a single scrape drops, so the ad set you see is the real one
- Your cadence — track daily, hourly, or tighter on the keywords that move
Frequently asked questions
- What did Scale Insights integrate? Asgard's realtime Amazon rank-scraping API, which fed their existing PPC automation engine.
- What is ad cannibalization? Paying for sponsored placement on a keyword you already rank top organically for — spend you could cut and still capture the sale.
- What is SQP keyword mining? Finding keywords with low current rank but strong conversion or click-through potential, then pushing them in PPC.
- Do I need Scale Insights to use the API? No — the rank API is available directly. Scale Insights is one example of what you can build on top of it.
The short version
I'm just a data provider. If you've read this far you probably have better ideas than me for how to use the API. All I know is how useful daily fresh scraped ranks are for PPC in tools like this one.
☞ https://asgardata.com/