How Budget Rules can Help Boost Ad Performance

Using Budget Rules for Enhanced Ad Performance

Author

George Reid
October 19, 2023

Your ad budget is a crucial element in the ad performance. Good planning helps you get the most out of your ad budget. It ensures you’re not overspending on low-converting or less important strategies and the same time, not going out of budget on the important and high-converting ones.

Find out what’s wrong with your Amazon Ads. Book a PPC Audit.

We often observe a common approach to manage ad budgets by implementing a daily spending limit. While this method is effective in controlling daily ad costs, it can inadvertently cause a successful campaign to stop due to being out of budget, especially during high-demand days or times of the day. This approach also fails to adapt to times when a typically low-performing campaign unexpectedly starts to show better results, leading to potentially missed sales at a likely good return.

Admittedly, it can be hard to track all campaigns at all times, especially, when there are lots of them, but only when you’re not leveraging a highly useful feature on Amazon which is often overlooked. We’re talking about 'Budget Rules.'

The budget rules feature has been there for more than a year. And recently, Amazon has introduced new features to make it so much more reliable as a good automation. While there can be so many ways you can use them, we'll focus on some particularly beneficial ones in this week's email.

1. Performance-Based Rules

A general use case for setting restrictive daily budget limits is the campaigns not meeting certain business goals, like having low Returns on Ad Spend (RoAS). This is where performance-based rules come in handy.

In the above example, the budget rule will automatically increase the budget by 20% only on the days when the RoAS is greater than or equal to 3.

These budget rules can be set to recur on a daily basis or weekly, and you can also choose specific days.

These rules essentially grant your campaign an additional budget when it's performing well. So, if, for instance, it's Prime Day and your conversions are unusually strong, the campaign will have that extra budget to capitalize on the opportunity, all without requiring manual intervention.

2. Event-Based Rules

Beyond improving campaign performance, budget rules are also invaluable for adjusting budgets during significant events like Prime Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, and more. They can be particularly useful during specific time frames. For instance, let's say you're running a special deal and want to increase your ad spend while the deal is active.

Notably, the start and end date scheduling feature allows you to automatically raise the budget at midnight when the deal begins and reduce it to its previous level once the deal ends, again right at midnight. This automation eliminates the need for manual effort or reminders and helps prevent human errors, ensuring the efficiency of your advertising efforts.

3. Weekend / Weekdays

Another valuable strategy made possible by schedule-based budget rules is the ability to fine-tune your budget distribution for weekends versus weekdays or even specific days of the week.

In many cases, a review of daily campaign and account performance reveals that certain days consistently outperform others. Alternatively, some days may see higher traffic, but costs are also elevated without a substantial boost in performance. With the option for weekly recurrence, you have the flexibility to choose precisely which days you want to allocate a higher budget

So, if the Ads spend goes higher on weekends causing high ACOS, You can set the daily budget to be low and let it increase more only on the weekdays. Notably, those specific days vary for each account, product, and the campaign strategy. This needs to be carefully planned with effective data analysis.

4. Hourly Budgets

This is part of a recent feature release that offers even more control over your budget. You can now set hourly rules to increase your budget during specific hours of the day. This new feature takes budget optimization to a granular level, on top of the existing day-based budget optimization, allowing for precise control over when your budget is allocated.

For effective hourly budget optimization, it's essential to identify the specific times of day when budget adjustments are necessary. To aid in this, a recent addition to the toolbox is the hourly campaign report. This report provides valuable insights into campaign performance throughout the day, helping you pinpoint the exact hours that require budget increases or other adjustments.

Rules Stacking

A recent update made it even more effective to utilize the budget rules, it’s the budget rules stacking. With this update, if you have multiple budget rules applied to a campaign, all active rules now accumulate. In the past, only the rule with the highest budget limit could be active at any given time.

So, if you have both an event-based rule and a performance-based rule in place, they can now work in tandem to optimize your budget, ensuring both the importance of the event and the campaign's performance goals are met simultaneously.

This feature allows you to create strategic combinations of budget rules. For example, Rule A can increase the budget by 15% if the RoAS is greater than or equal to 3, and Rule B can add another 20% if the RoAS is greater than or equal to 4. So, if the RoAS exceeds 4, the budget receives a 35% boost.

However, it's essential to exercise caution when setting up multiple budget rules to ensure they work harmoniously and don't inadvertently lead to unexpected outcomes.

In conclusion, these recent innovations in budget rule management open new doors to smarter and more efficient Amazon advertising. As you dive into this exciting world of granular control, remember to leverage these tools thoughtfully and keep a close eye on your data for the best results.

Other learnings:

  1. Amazon introduces Streaming TV ads. These ads now allow brands to reach a wider audience by appearing in various streaming content including Freevee and FireTV channels. [Read more].

  2. New DSP Delivery Metrics are now available. These provide real-time Insights for Enhanced Campaign Performance and Budget Efficiency. [Read more].

  3. Premium beauty product pages on Amazon are distinct. These pages feature a unique layout, and notably, they do not have ad placements for targeting. [Read more].

Thanks,

Himanshu

Read / Listen to last week's, or subscribe.

RESOURCES