A common obstacle for sellers who leverage Amazon advertising campaigns is budget management. Potentially running out of budget keeps sellers, advertisers, and agencies on the run. Now, there’s a new procedure for helping prevent campaigns from running out of budget.
Amazon’s developed a new feature for Sponsored Products consisting of budget rules. These new budget rules allow users to prepare budgets in advance, reducing manual effort put into adjusting budgets on the fly.
What Are Budget Rules?
With Amazon Sponsored Product Budget Rules, you can schedule daily budget increases for a range of dates or recommended events, including Cyber Monday or Black Friday. During specific events like Prime Day or seasonal events like Back to School, budget rules allow flexible budgeting without necessarily going through a complex operation.
Two Types of Budget Rules
Amazon’s provided budget rules with a bifurcation for using them in two unique ways. To get to budget rules first you need to go Advertising > Campaign Manager. This will open the Amazon Ads campaigns management dashboard.
As with any new feature within Amazon Ads, we recommend testing this first. Select a campaign that will not impact the overall performance of all of your advertising campaigns. In other words, test this on a campaign that has traffic, but not your best-performing campaigns.
After selecting the campaign that you want to test, click on the Budget Rules link in the left-side navigation. Next, you will click on the “Add Budget Rule” button. Your next step will be to choose whether to use schedule-based or performance-based rules for this campaign.
Schedule-Based Rules
Use this rule for customizing campaigns for events or date ranges. Think Black Friday/Cyber Monday or Prime Day. The rule can increase campaign budgets by a percentage defined when the rule was originally created. Your options include choosing a recurrence based on the nature of your traffic (daily, specify days, weekends).
Example:
You have a date range and a considered budget increase. Say, for the week before school opens, you want a rule to increase 20% each day of that period.
You create a rule with the daily recurrence and date range set with a start of that first day and ending at any point in that week before school returns.
Performance-Based Rules
Performance-based rules are just as they sound, rules that can increase the budgets via certain performance thresholds. Thresholds get measured through campaign performance metrics, including click-thru, ACoS, and conversion rates. The performance metrics are calculated utilizing data from the previous seven days for sellers and 14 days for vendors.
Example:
You want a budget increase for a campaign that starts on Black Friday and ends that Sunday. You want it to increase by 10% but only if the ACoS falls below 20%.
Learning how to use budget rules includes creating a rule that monitors the metric name via the ACoS. You’d set 10% as the threshold of measuring performance. Your final step would be to take the rule and associate it with your campaign.
Benefits of Amazon Sponsored Product Budget Rules
With auto-budgeting, running out of budget is a thing of the past. Missed opportunities due to discovering (too late!) insufficient budgets are off the table.
Here are other benefits you’ll take advantage of.
Improve Opportunity for Sales
Budget rules are beneficial to campaigns, ensuring high performances that do not run out of budget. You reduce the chance of missing opportunities and greatly enhance your chances of additional clicks and sales.
Budget Recommendations
During shopping events, Amazon provides suggested budgets founded in historical shopping activities. Event recommendations can help keep budgets on point when important shopping events arise.
Advanced Budget Planning
With budget rules, you plan and set campaign budgets for sales events and seasonal festivities without a stressful amount of preparation.
Reduce Manual Effort
The most effective feature of the budget ruling is using rules to save time and auto-increase campaign budgets. Manually adjusting campaigns have always been a burden on campaigners, especially adjusting strategically for upcoming events and seasonal shopping.
How We Can Help Increase Sales
Budget rules are just another tool that helps sellers, advertisers, and agencies can use to better optimize performance. These new rules allow for greater opportunities with Amazon Sponsored Products to generate more sales. Just like any automation, advertisers need to understand the impact and measure the performance to make sure they are maintaining goals.
At OperationROI, our Amazon paid search experts understand how best to use these new rules to maximize performance. If your Sponsored Products campaigns are underperforming, contact us for an account review. Our marketplace marketing experts understand how to get the most out of Amazon advertising.
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