Amazon PPC dayparting calculator

A bid is the most you'll pay for a click, so the question is what a click is worth at each hour. The tool measures sales per click and compares each hour with what the same campaigns usually earn per click. That way a campaign that only gets clicks at night can't make the night look better or worse than it is.

• Neighboring hours are grouped into at most four blocks a day, and every block needs enough clicks to judge: by default, enough for about 10 orders at your conversion rate, and never fewer than 50.
• Each block is blended with your average. A block with a few orders stays close to average, and one with hundreds keeps close to its own number.
• A block only gets a change when it's clearly different, about three standard errors from average. The tool tries many ways to cut up the day, and the best-looking cut always flatters itself a little, so the bar is high on purpose.
• Changes are capped at 30% up and 50% down by default, rounded to the nearest 5%, and anything under 10% stays at your normal bid.

In the sample, clicks from 7 PM to 10 PM are worth about 33% more than usual, so those hours get the full 30% raise, and clicks from 10 PM to 8 AM are worth about 37% less, so they get 35% less.

The schedule covers every day together, because the hourly export adds the days up. A file that does carry dates, such as one pulled through the Amazon Ads API with Date and Hour, also gets a week grid and separate weekday and weekend schedules when the two clearly differ.

Fourteen days puts only 14 of each hour behind the chart, and a campaign with a few orders a day has just a handful in any one hour. One good evening can make an hour look like a gold mine. That's why neighboring hours are grouped into blocks with enough clicks to judge, and why a block keeps your normal bid unless it's clearly different.

It's also why a campaign often shows "no block stands out yet" even when the account has a clear pattern. A single campaign needs a lot of orders before its own hours can be told apart from chance. In the sample, only the biggest campaign gets a schedule of its own, and the rest follow the account.

If clicks drop off sharply in the afternoon, a campaign may be running out of budget rather than shoppers going quiet. Check that first, because a schedule built on a budget cutoff points the wrong way.

Not with Amazon's own bulk file. It can change a keyword's bid, but it has no hour-of-day schedule, so this tool doesn't make an upload file. Amazon's schedule-based budget rules can raise a campaign's budget by a percentage during set hours of the day, in the US, Canada, the UK, India and Japan and above a minimum budget, but they change budgets, not bids.

To change bids by the hour, you need something that changes them on a schedule. In Merch Jar, a scheduled Workflow can set bids at the times you choose, in the time zone you pick. Like every Merch Jar automation, it's saved switched off, and you turn it on.

Whichever tool you use, set a fixed bid for each block from your usual bid rather than stacking percentage changes. A 25% raise isn't undone by a 25% cut (it takes 20%), so repeated swings drift. Type your usual bid into the calculator to see the bid for each block.

To turn a value per click into a bid, the target CPC calculator works out the bid that hits your ACoS. To see whether campaigns run dry before the evening, try the campaign budget check. And for which searches deserve a bid at all, the search term report analyzer reads your search term report the same way, in your browser.

Amazon's reporting docs say hours are counted in each campaign's own time zone, so a US campaign and a UK campaign count their hours differently. Keep one marketplace per schedule: when your files cover more than one currency, the tool looks at one at a time and lets you switch. An hourly Campaign report also names each campaign's ad type, and you can look at one ad type at a time.

Your files never leave your browser. The tool reads them on your device, and there's no account or upload.