How Minimum and Max Bid Settings Work

Updated
April 18, 2024

Smart Bids within Merch Jar offers a powerful way to maintain control over your bidding strategy with minimum and maximum bid settings. These settings act as guardrails to ensure your bids stay within a range that aligns with your campaign goals.

Min/Max Bid Settings Explained

Minimum Bid

The minimum bid setting is the floor for your bid amounts. If an action within Merch Jar—be it manual, a bulk action, or a Recipe—suggests setting a bid below this floor, the system will automatically adjust the bid to this minimum threshold.

Maximum Bid

Conversely, the maximum bid setting caps how high your bids can go. Any bid that is attempted to be set above this ceiling, whether manually or through Merch Jar's automated systems, will be reduced to this maximum limit.

Default Min/Max Bid Settings

By default, all keywords and targets are regulated by the minimum and maximum bid settings established at the ad account level, which are found in the ad account settings page. This baseline ensures uniformity across your campaigns unless specified otherwise.

Customizing Bid Settings with Smart Bid Profiles

For a more tailored approach, these min/max bid settings can be customized using Smart Bid Profiles. Each profile allows for different min/max thresholds to be set for specific campaigns, ad groups, or keywords/targets. Smart Bids Profiles utilize Merch Jar’s Cascading System Settings (CSS)

To learn more about setting up and using Smart Bid Profiles, refer to the Smart Bids Overview page.

Manual Changes and Error Messages

When manually adjusting bids within Merch Jar, if you try to set a bid outside the established min/max limits, you will receive an error message. For example, if you set a bid higher than the maximum limit, you will see an error: "The given data was invalid. Your bid cannot be greater than $2.50."

Bulk Actions, Recipe Actions, and Smart Campaigns

For changes initiated through bulk actions, Recipe Actions, or Smart Campaign adjustments:

  • If the resulting bid is above the maximum limit, it will be set to the maximum bid.
  • If the resulting bid is below the minimum limit, it will be set to the minimum bid.

This ensures that automated processes respect the boundaries you've set for your campaigns.

External Changes and Syncing

If a bid is set outside of Merch Jar, for instance directly in the Amazon Ads console, and it falls outside the min/max limits you've set within Merch Jar, the next time Merch Jar makes a change to that bid through a bulk action or Recipe, it will automatically adjust the bid to conform to your specified min or max settings.

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