Optimize Amazon PPC campaigns: SellerApp’s Automation Edition

Amazon sellers often find managing PPC campaigns challenging and time-consuming.

Constant monitoring and bid adjustments are crucial to reduce wasted ad spends and improving conversions. However, this can take away your valuable time spent on finding new products, improving existing ones, and increasing brand awareness.

That’s where SellerApp’s Advertising automation feature comes in. With our automation rules, you can easily manage Amazon PPC campaigns. The self-learning algorithm takes away the complexity of bid management, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.

SellerApp’s automation feature manages your entire campaign for you without any further input. Just set up rules based on your advertising goals, and rest assured that your campaigns are being optimized to achieve your desired results.

Let’s see how to use the SellerApp advertising automation feature.

A Quick peek into the article:

• How to find SellerApp Automation Tool
• What are the metrics you can find in the Overview section?
• Pre-set rules in SellerApp advertising automation
• Can I edit my automation rules?
• How to set up automation rules in the SellerApp advertising automation tool
• How to set up dayparting with SellerApp
• How do you edit the dayparting rule and increase the budget?

How to find the automation tool

• Log in to SellerApp Dashboard, and connect your Amazon Advertising account with SellerApp. You can do it easily with this guide.

• Once you connect your advertising account, navigate to Advertising → Automation from the left sidebar.

What are the metrics in the SellerApp Advertising Automation Overview section?

The Automation Dashboard provides a comprehensive summary of essential metrics, including

• Total number of automation: It refers to the total number of automation rules that you have created for your campaigns, which includes both running and paused campaigns.
• Total actions executed to date: It refers to the total number of actions that have been executed by all of your campaigns combined.
• Total money saved: It’s the total amount of money that you would have had to spend if you were to hire an account manager to execute all of your rules manually.
• Total time saved: It represents the amount of time that you would have had to spend if you were to perform all the actions that have been taken manually.

Additionally, the dashboard shows you the list of all the automation rules you have set previously. For each rule, you can access the following details:

• Rule Name: The name you gave to the automation rule when creating it.
• Campaign Type: The type of campaign for which the automation rule was created. You can choose between Sponsored Products (SP) or Sponsored Brand (SB) campaigns, and this metric will reflect your selection.
• Action: The specific action set for the automation rule.
• Sources Associated: The number and type of campaigns the rule applies to. For example, “All Campaigns” indicates the rule is set for all campaigns, while “Manual-20” implies that the rule is set for 20 manual campaigns.
• Date Created: The date the rule was first created.
• Status: Indicates whether the automation rule is currently active or deactivated.

Furthermore, you can enable, disable, edit, and delete rules directly from this section.

Pre-set rules in SellerApp advertising automation

SellerApp offers a range of advertising pre-set automation blueprints that can help sellers achieve different campaign goals. These pre-set rules include:

• Wasted Click Eliminator: Choose this rule to minimize wasted clicks by identifying and excluding non-performing ad placements or keywords. It improves overall campaign efficiency.
• ACoS Reducer: Apply this rule to manage advertising costs effectively, optimizing campaigns to achieve your target ACoS.
• Down Bid Optimizer: Use this rule to adjust bid amounts to optimize cost efficiency while maintaining campaign performance metrics for effective budget management.
• ROI Maximizer: Implement this rule to maximize return on investment by optimizing ad spend, ensuring that your campaigns deliver the highest possible return for the resources invested.
• Keyword Picker:  The Keyword Harvester rule is designed to increase visibility and generate more impressions and conversions for your campaigns.
• Target Harvester: Use this rule to identify and leverage optimal target audiences, improving campaign targeting precision and overall advertising efficiency.
• Dayparting: It allows you to adjust the advertising budget on Amazon for certain times of the day to maximize the efficiency of the ad campaigns. By default, the ad campaigns on Amazon run 24/7. But with dayparting, you can fine-tune your campaigns for different times of the day to get more conversions.For example, if you observe from past data that the CVR is maximum from 8 pm to 10 pm and lowest from 2 am to 7 am for your product, you can set a high ad budget for 8 pm to 10 pm to get more sales. Similarly, you can reduce the ad budget from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. to avoid unwanted ad consumption.Jump to this section to create dayparting with SellerApp.

Can I edit my automation rules?

Unfortunately, direct editing of automation rules is not possible. However, we’ve made it easy for you to make changes by duplicating existing rules and customizing them to fit your needs.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Go to the “My Automation” section. Find the rule you want to modify and click the “copy” button next to its name.

• In the pop-up menu, give a relevant name for the rule, and click “Duplicate and Edit.” Remember that when you duplicate an automation rule, the previous automation will be paused to prevent wasted ad spend.

You can re-enable the automation going forward if needed.

• Make the desired changes to the duplicated rule in the next section. Once you’re done, click the “Review and Enable” button to activate the updated rule.

This simple process saves you time and ensures consistency across your campaigns.

We’ve removed the direct editing option to mitigate any potential discrepancies caused by previous conditions, giving you a clear and dependable framework for your advertising actions.

How to set up an automation rule in the SellerApp advertising automation tool

If you’re looking to set up an automation rule in SellerApp’s advertising automation tool, follow these steps:

• Go to the “Automation” tab. Click on “Create New Rules”. Choose a rule from the list, and click on the Use Template button.

• If you want to modify the rule, click on “Create from blank.”

Give a rule name

Give your rule a descriptive name. A good naming convention will help you easily understand what the rule is doing at a glance. For example, “Black Friday – 30 days – reduce ACoS” or “Bid Reduction – 30 ACoS – 10 Order – Bid 2% – $1.” This is also helpful when looking at the changes made in the “History” feature.

Besides, this helps you to look back at the changes you made by referring to the ‘History’ feature.

Select source

• Next, select the campaign type and targeting type. Do you want to apply the rule for sponsored product campaigns or sponsored brand campaigns?
• After that, choose the targeting type. For Sponsored Product campaigns, choose between Manual Targeting and Automatic Targeting. For Sponsored Brand campaigns, there’s only Manual Targeting.

Both targeting types have the following options:

• All Enabled Manual/Automatic campaigns – Includes all the active campaigns from your advertising account
• Select manually – Allows you to select specific campaigns manually

You can select “All Enabled” for the generic rules, like targeting negative keywords (or Money savers). For other rules, manually select the campaigns for which you want to apply these rules.

Note: Click the checkbox “Include future campaigns to this automation” to include all of your future campaigns in this automation. This is only applicable when you are applying this automation for all enabled manual campaigns.

Rule application

After you choose the source, select where to apply the rules.

SellerApp offers two options.

Search Terms: If you select this option, the automation rules will be applied to Search Terms only. The applicable actions on Search Terms are – Increase Bid, Decrease Bid, and Negative Targeting.

For Increase and Decrease Bid actions, a new target will be created corresponding to the Search Terms that qualify the set conditions.

Targets: Targets have two options. ASIN target and Keyword target. If you select any of them, automation rules will be validated for the selected target.

The applicable actions on Targets are – Increase Bid, Decrease Bid, and Pause Target.

Analysis duration

This option lets you set the time duration to analyze the advertising metrics and validate automation rules after discounting a 72-hour attribution period.

SellerApp offers 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days, and 60 days analysis duration.

It means if you set the automation on the 15th of a month, it will consider the last 7/14/21/30/60 days of data, starting from the 12th, to check advertising metrics and validate your rules.

Note: The attribution period is the number of days to skip from your last sync date in order to minimize errors due to Amazon attribution. By default, the attribution period is set for 72 hours. But you can change the attribution duration from the tool. Click on “Advanced Options” on the right side. And then, select a custom attribution period from 3 days to a maximum of 14 days.

Set conditions

In this section, you have the option to set different conditions for your rules from the drop-down menu:

• Bid
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Orders
• Spend
• Sales
• ACoS
• RoAS
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Conversion Rate (CVR)
• CPC (Cost Per Click)

You can even set multiple conditions for one rule with “AND” or “OR” logic so that when the campaign meets the criteria, some actions are triggered.

Note: If you choose to modify a template, then you can only edit existing conditions but can’t add more rules. On the other hand, if you create a custom rule, then you can add as many conditions as you want.

To add more conditions, simply click on the “Add More Conditions” option.

Additionally, click on the “Add Another Block of Condition” button if you want to add another block of rules.

You can also switch between ‘AND’ and “OR” by simply clicking on them.

Once you set conditions, choose an action to execute when these conditions are met. SellerApp offers three different actions to choose from:

• Pause: Pause the targets that meet the conditions to reduce wasted ad spend and lower ACoS.
• Increase bids: Increase the bids on your high-performing Keywords/ASINs when the conditions are satisfied. If any target’s existing bid is higher than the ceiling bid, it will reduce to the ceiling bid.
• Decrease bids: Decrease the bids on your low-performing Keywords/ASIN targets. If any target’s existing bid is lower than the floor bid, it will increase the bid to the floor bid.

Let’s understand this with an example. Assume your goal is to increase sales and visibility. So, you can set a condition like: “When the campaign ACoS is less than the target ACoS, and orders are more than 10, increase keyword bids by 10% until the bid amount is $5. Assuming your target ACoS is 20%, the condition will look like this:

ACoS < 20% AND Orders > 10 → Increase Keyword Bids by 10% up to $5

Exclusions

Once the conditions have been set, you can add some search terms, words, or phrases to the exclusion list to prevent the automation rules from being applied to those terms.

This feature provides two options:

• You can exclude search terms that include certain words or phrases, or
• You can exclude an exact match search term from the automation rule.

Example: Let’s say you have an automation rule applied to your campaign. However, you don’t want this rule to apply to the search term “cheap running shoes.” You can add the search term as exact in the excluded tab to prevent the automation rule from being applied to that specific search term.

Furthermore, suppose you want to prevent the automation rules from applying to any search terms that include the word “cheap.” In that case, add the word as an exclusion with the “contain” condition to avoid the automation rule being applied to any search term that contains the word “cheap.”

How to set up dayparting with SellerApp

• Go to the “Automation” tab. Click on “Create New Rules”. Choose the “Dayparting Rule from the list, and click on the “Create Dayparting Rule” button.

• Add a nomenclature that works for you.

• Further select if you want to do an account or campaign-level dayparting. If you select “Account level,” the dayparting will be applicable to all your sponsored campaigns.

Alternatively, if you select “Campaign level” dayparting, it will open up two more options. Choosing “All Campaigns” will set dayparting for all active Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand campaigns.

You can also choose “Select campaign manually” and then select the campaign you want to set up dayparting for. The best part is you can set custom daily budgets for each campaign manually for better control. Click “Next.”

• On the next step, enter the start and end date and give a daily account budget, which will reset every day at midnight → Click “Next.”

• Now, we have come to the most exciting part of the campaign. Here you can split the daily account budget into different slots according to your requirements.

Select the time of the day and add a specific budget for that hour. Add multiple times to set different ad budgets for different hours.

• You can also click on “Advance Settings” if you want to get more control over the dayparting campaigns.

This feature is especially useful for experienced sellers who analyze their historical sales patterns and understand which day of the week and at what time they get more sales.

• First, you can set up whether you want to have the budget control in terms of percentage or absolute in $.

• Next, select if you want to change the dayparting rules hourly, every three hours, every six hours, or every twelve hours.

• Now, in the next section, manually add the budget for different times on different days of the week.

• Alternatively, you can toggle the “Divide budget Equally” option on the right. It’ll divide the previously-mentioned daily account budget equally throughout the week. You can then tweak the budgets according to the historical data from the business report for the past six months.

• Once you fill in all the details, click ‘Review and Enable.’ Double-check the rules, and click “Enable.”

Congratulations! You’ve successfully launched your first dayparting campaign.

Now, all is left for you to review the campaign performance periodically and review the campaign budgets based on sales velocity on different days to maximize conversions and campaign performance.

How do you edit the dayparting rules and increase the budget?

Modifying dayparting rules is a straightforward process. Follow these steps for seamless editing:

The process is slightly different for account-level dayparting and campaign-level dayparting.

Edit account-level dayparting rules

Let’s see how the editing process for the account-level dayparting looks like:

• Go to the Automation tab and find the dayparting rule you want to modify. Click on the edit icon next to the relevant dayparting rule.

• Within the rule, choose the specific step you want to edit. In this example, you want to edit the budget, so click on “Step 2: Initial Steps of Dayparting”.

• In the selected step, click on the “Edit” button, edit the overall account budget, and click “Next.”

These are the steps to edit the daily budget for the account-level dayparting rules. Now, let’s see how to do it in campaign-level dayparting rules.

Edit campaign-level dayparting rules

When a rule is created at the account level, editing the budget for a specific campaign within that rule is not possible. You have to create a new rule in that case.

Now, if you already have a campaign-level dayparting rule, let’s see how you can edit it:

• Navigate to the automation tab. Find the dayparting rule you want to modify, and click on the “edit” icon.

• To manually add or remove campaigns or adjust the campaign budget, click on “Step 2: Level of Dayparting” and then “Edit.”

• Next, select “All Campaigns” to apply the dayparting rule to all of your campaigns, or you can click on the “Select manually” button to add or remove any campaign from the rule.
• In the pop-up dashboard, click on the “+” button to add campaigns and the “x” button to remove campaigns in the dayparting rule. Once satisfied, click on “Add these campaigns.”

• If you don’t want to add or remove any campaigns and just want to edit the daily campaign budget, then you can skip the above step and directly click on the “View and Edit” button.

• In the popup dashboard, edit the daily budget for each campaign.

• SellerApp gives you the option to override individual campaign budgets and set a common daily budget for all your selected campaigns in the dayparting rule. Go to “Step 2: Initial Steps of Dayparting” and follow the process:
• Click on the “Yes” option for the question, “Do you want to override the budget for the selected campaigns?” 

• Set a common daily campaign budget for the selected campaigns.
• Click on “Next.” It will override the individual campaign budget you set in the previous step.

Finalizing Changes for Both Account and Campaign-Level Rules

• To change the hourly budget in the dayparting rule, click on “Step 3: Setting up Dayparting.” This step is the same for both account-level and campaign-level dayparting rules.

• Once satisfied, click the “Review and Update” button to activate the updated rule.

• Next, on the rule preview, click on the Enable button to apply the new rules.

Congratulations, you’ve successfully edited the dayparting rule.

Final Thoughts

Adjusting your campaigns manually can affect the automation rules you set. So limit manual changes to your ad campaigns and keyword bids while automation is running.

Still have doubts about creating automation rules for your PPC Campaigns?

Schedule a call with us, and we’ll tell you everything you need to know about automating your advertising campaigns to maximize conversion.