How to Automate Amazon PPC Budget: Amazon Budget Rule

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Have you ever felt the frustration of campaigns going out of budget, leading to missing out on potential sales, or, worse, overspending on the wrong audience?

It’s a common struggle for many advertisers.

But fear not! In this blog post, we will discuss how to automate Amazon PPC budget so that the system can make adjustments on your behalf to optimize your campaigns.

Why Automated Amazon PPC Budget Management is Important?

  • Cut down ad spend on low-performing campaigns: One crucial aspect of an efficient Amazon ad strategy is identifying and cutting down spending on underperforming campaigns. By doing so, you free up resources that can be redirected to more successful campaigns, boosting your overall advertising efficiency.

  • Increase spend on high-performing campaigns: On the flip side, increasing budgets for high-performing PPC campaigns is equally vital. When you identify campaigns driving substantial sales with a favorable Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS), allocating more budget to these winners ensures that you maximize your return on investment.

  • Plan for Special Events: During special events like Prime Day or Black Friday, the increased traffic on Amazon can significantly impact the performance of your campaigns. Automating your Amazon ads budget allows you to proactively plan and allocate higher budgets for these events, ensuring you capitalize on the heightened consumer activity without the manual stress of adjusting budgets.

Manually adjusting budgets while considering all the mentioned factors can be a daunting task, especially with a large number of products and campaigns. This is why automating Amazon ads budgets becomes crucial.

Automating Budget with Amazon Ads Budget Rules

Amazon offers a feature called ‘budget rule’ that helps you automatically adjust the budget of your ad campaigns.

There are two types of budget rules that you can use:

  1. Schedule-based rules: This rule helps set budgets in advance for special events such as Prime Day or based on a custom date range or period. The rule will increase the campaign budget by the percentage you specify during the time and date range you set in the rule or during the selected special event.

  2. Performance-based rules: This rule is helpful when you want to set rules to increase your campaign budgets only when your campaigns meet a certain performance threshold, using campaign performance metrics such as ACOS, CTR, CVR, etc. Amazon calculates these metrics using data from the previous 7 days of the campaign. Please keep in mind that your campaigns must have a minimum daily budget of $10 to use performance-based rules.

How to use Amazon Budget Rules?

Step 1: Open the campaign for which you want to create a budget rule.

Step 2: Click on ‘Budget rules’ in the sidebar.

Step 3: Click the ‘Add Budget rules’ button.

amazon budget rules

Step 4: First, give your budget rule a name. Then, select the type of rule you want to create. For our example, let’s select the “schedule-based” rule.

Step 5: Under the date range, select either a recommended event or a specific date range when you want to run the budget rule.

Step 6: Choose whether you want to run this rule daily or on certain days of the week.

Step 7: Enter the percentage by which you want to increase the budget.

automate amazon ppc budget

If you are setting up a performance-based rule, you will get an additional option to define your performance metric criteria.

Limitation of Amazon Budget Rules:

While Amazon budget rules are helpful for certain cases, there are a couple of limitations to this feature that make automating budget management very inefficient and ineffective.

Lack of an option to decrease the budget

An important aspect of effective budget management is to cut down on the campaign budget if it is not driving the desired outcome.

For instance, if you want to increase the budget for a campaign driving sales with less than a 10% ACOS, you would also want to decrease the budget for campaigns driving sales with a 100% ACOS or maybe not driving any sales at all. In such cases, Amazon’s budget rules become entirely ineffective.

Absence of criteria to determine the actual need for more budget

Regardless of how much one increases a campaign’s budget, there comes a point where the additional budget remains unspent. This occurs because the keywords and targets in the campaign have a limit on the number of daily searches. Increasing the budget without assessing whether the campaign is utilizing the existing budget is not helpful.

Lack of flexibility to adjust campaign budgets based on different periods of performance

Amazon’s performance-based budget rules employ a fixed 7-day lookback period to assess campaign performance and adjust the budget. Given that campaign types like Sponsored Brands and Display have a 14-day attribution window, you may want to consider a longer lookback period to analyze campaign performance and make informed budget decisions.

Only One Performance Criteria in Rule

You can adjust the budget based on only one performance criterion.

Separate rule for each campaign

There is no way to create a single budget rule and use that across a set of ad campaigns. You need to create a separate rule for each campaign, which becomes very inefficient if you are working with a large number of campaigns.

How does Adbrew Overcome these Limitations with its Budget Automation Capabilities?

Adbrew’s budget automation capabilities are much more robust and have been created while keeping all sorts of budget management use cases in mind.

  1. Both Increase and Decrease Budget: You get the flexibility to both increase and decrease budgets based on the performance of the campaign.

  2. Check Budget Utilization Percentage and Average Time in Budget: Adbrew provides some unique budget utilization criteria that let users adjust the budget based on what percentage of the existing budget is utilized or how many hours the campaign budget lasts. For instance, if the existing campaign budget is $100, and the user sets to increase the budget only when the budget utilization percentage is over 90%, then automation will only increase the budget if, on average, the campaign is using $90 from $100 of the ad budget.

  3. Flexibility to Make Changes Based on Performance of Various Timeframes (7, 14, 30, 60, 90, and 120 Days): You can make budget adjustments by considering a campaign’s performance over different timeframes, ranging from 7 to 120 days.

  4. Multiple Performance Criteria: You can adjust the budget of your campaign based on multiple criteria, such as increasing the budget for campaigns with at least 100 orders and a 15% conversion rate.

  5. One Rule for Multiple Campaigns: You can create one budget rule and link it with hundreds of ad campaigns within one click.

Ready to get started with Adbrew?

Utilize Adbrew budget automation to automatically adjust the campaign budget based on its performance.

How to Setup Budget Rules in Adbrew?

Step 1: Create a new campaign management rule for “budget”.

Step 2: Choose the number of days of data based on which the rule will be evaluated.

Step 3: Choose when the rule will run in your account.

Adbrew-Edit-Ruleset

Step 4: Now create rules to check campaign performance based on different metrics and then increase/decrease the campaign budget.

adbew amazon ppc budget automation

Ready to get started with Adbrew?

Utilize Adbrew budget automation to automatically adjust the campaign budget based on its performance.

Final Thought

To sum it up, using budget automation for your Amazon Ads is a game-changer. It helps you save time and lets you focus on smart strategies and creative ideas. While Amazon does provide a budget rule for automating campaign budgets, it comes with its limitations. This is where PPC automation platforms like Adbrew step in, offering a distinct edge in automating your campaign budget effectively. Adbrew’s capabilities go beyond the constraints of Amazon’s native tools, providing a more versatile and tailored approach to budget automation.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How often should I review and adjust my budget?

It is recommended to review and adjust your budget at least once a week.

Can budget automation help me save money on my Amazon PPC campaigns?

Yes, budget automation can help save money by preventing overspending and optimizing budget allocations for maximum ROI.

Is there a risk of overspending with automated budgeting?

While automated budgeting can help prevent overspending, it is important to regularly monitor and review campaign performance to ensure the budget is being effectively allocated. It is also important to set max budget limit to avoid unexpected overages

Can I automate my keyword bids?

Yes, Adbrew allows you to automate your keyword bids along with Amazon’s PPC advertising budget.

Can I automate budget allocation across different ad groups within a campaign?

No, unfortunately, budget allocation within individual ad groups isn’t directly supported by Amazon Ads. The platform currently only allows setting a campaign-level budget.

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