Features
We've updated our starter recipes to make it easier than ever to get started automating your advertising workflow. Recipes give you a powerful way to automatically perform actions such as pausing a campaign or keyword, increasing bids, or lowering budgets based on the criteria that you set. We've simplified the number of recipes from 12 starter recipes down to 6, making it even easier to manage and make changes to your automations, while adding improvements and new functionality. In this video, we'll review what recipes are and how to get started with them, then review each of the new recipes, what they are, how they work, and how to modify them to fit your needs.
If you're not a Merch Jar user, you can still use all the recipes in this video by starting your free 30-day trial, no credit card required, at merchjar.com. All of our starter recipes are designed to work right out of the box for most sellers, so you can automate 90% of your routine campaign optimizations in just a few clicks. Each recipe can also be modified to further meet your needs.
To get started with these recipes, download each of the starter recipes from the links in the description. Once downloaded, we'll head over to Merch Jar to import them to our account. Inside of Merch Jar, we're going to navigate to our recipes page to get started with the import, and next we're going to import all the newly downloaded recipes by going to our create recipe and hovering over the drop-down arrow, and then import recipe. Next, we're going to find all the recipes we just downloaded by clicking the browse button, and then selecting all the recipes we'd like to import.
I'm going to select all 12 of these by shift clicking all of them, and then open. You can import up to 20 recipes at the same time. Next, you can choose if you want to import to all of your ad profiles that are managed by Merch Jar by clicking the switch, or leaving it off to just import them to the active profile. Next, click "Import", and all the new recipes will be imported to your account. You can use these recipes right away simply by enabling them using the switch in the enabled column, or selecting each one with the checkboxes, or by using the "Select All" checkbox at the top, and we're going to select all of our recipes, then use a bulk action to enable, and all of our recipes are now turned on, and will start automating your ad optimizations.
Each recipe is split up into two separate recipes, which is indicated by the A and B aside to each number, A for keywords and B for targets. They're exactly the same recipes, they just target different things. Keywords will target all of your manual keyword campaigns, such as your exact match, broad match, and phrase match, while targets will affect all of your automatic campaigns, such as close match, loose match, substitute, as well as your ASIN product targets, or category targeting.
Next, we're going to look at what each recipe does, and how to make some simple modifications to them if you feel you need to.
Our first recipe is our zero impression recipe, one for keywords and one for targets, which is used to increase bids on anything that's not getting any impressions within the last few days.
This first recipe is pretty simple, where what it's looking for is over the last three days, which doesn't include today's data, and anything that is effectively enabled, so this means the campaign is active, the ad group is active, and any of the targets need to be enabled and active as well. If a campaign is paused and the ad group and the keyword is active, this won't affect it because it's not effectively enabled because the campaign is paused, it's not delivering. So this will only affect any keywords that are currently delivering. And then next, we have our impressions threshold, which we have set to zero. So over the last three days, if any keywords are active and have gotten exactly zero impressions, it will meet this trigger criteria and then perform whatever action that we set.
There's also additional options included that you can enable to further modify the campaign, such as a max bid threshold. If you don't want to increase any keywords that have a bid greater than X amount, and you can do that by simply deleting the first two forward slashes, which, is a comment, and that removes the comment and now enables that for our recipe. You can also enable any of these other options such as a click threshold or a keyword exclusion. For example, if you don't want this to affect your lottery campaigns, you can enable this clause to say, and the campaign name does not contain the keyword lottery anywhere in it. And then at the bottom of each recipe, it does show recommended actions to take with this.
With this recipe, we are increasing the bid in small increments every day that they're not getting impressions. In this case, it's by default said to increase by 2% every day until it sees impressions. If it gets any impressions within the last three days, this recipe will not trigger for that keyword.
You can also change the frequency that each recipe runs by default to run once per day, but you can have it run after every data sync, which is four times per day, only manually when you set it, or on certain days, such as days of the week, or on certain exact days, which is useful if you want to affect certain dates of the year, such as a specific holiday.
Next, we're going to look at recipe two, which is pausing low performers. This recipe is used to pause any low performing keywords that are getting clicks and no orders or are not performing recently.
At the start of the trigger, we have our global options. So these will apply to the rest of our options, which we'll see in just a second. And here, there's a couple options you can include, such as if the campaign name doesn't include a keyword or anything else you'd want to add that would affect all the additional options. Next is the first option inside of this recipe, which is anything that has 0 orders over the lifetime of data that Merch Jar has collected, which is 60 days before you first sync to your account with Merch Jar. So this section here is saying that over the lifetime, the entire date range that Merch Jar has, if any keyword has 0 orders and it has greater than or equal 20 clicks, it will meet this trigger, including our global option. So it has to meet the global options plus this. You can also add additional options here, such as ad spend, or if you did want to add your own, you can do that as well.
Then next, we have an "or" operator. So what this is saying is this trigger will be met if it's meets this 0 order lifetime in addition to our global options, or the next option, which is our 1 order lifetime. And this section here, again, looks at the entire lifetime of data in your Merch Jar account. And this is going to affect any keywords that have exactly 1 order and at least 50 clicks. And then again, you have some additional options you can enable by deleting the first two forward slashes, such as an ACOS threshold, or if you want to add a spend threshold or anything else, this is where you would add it.
So any keyword that has exactly 1 order and 50 clicks and whatever additional criteria we set or meets our 0 order lifetime with greater than or equal to 20 clicks, meet this trigger criteria. And anytime the trigger criteria is met for that keyword, it will trigger the action, which for this recipe is to pause that keyword. Anything that's any keywords that meet our criteria, any of these options will be paused at the next recipe run for whatever frequency that you set. After our 1 order lifetime, we then have a recent poor performers option, which is used to pause any poor performers that are based on recent sales data. So this specific option within the recipe looks at the last 90 days of data, for any keywords that have 1 or 0 orders and at least 60 clicks, those will be set to pause once they meet this criteria.
This also has an additional clause to it as well, that over the lifetime that keyword doesn't have more than 1 order. So it looks at two different date ranges, so that it's only going to pause if over the lifetime of over the 90 days, it still only has 1 order. And recently, it also has 1 or 0 orders and greater than 60 clicks.
And finally, the last section is the aged poor performer section, which this is used to pause any poor performing keywords or targets for the target recipe that have a longer sales history, but don't perform anymore. And this recipe looks at the last 180 days, so about six months in anything that's got less than or equal to 4 orders, more than 60 clicks, and more than a 60% ACOS. And over the last 21 days, it has gotten 0 orders. You can further refine this again by enabling some options, such as if you wanted to have some sort of click threshold within the last 21 days, you could add that here as well to further modify this recipe to fit your needs. Otherwise, right out of the box, these are some pretty good parameters to have set for keywords you may want to have paused that aren't performing.
Next, we have recipe number three. This recipe is the start of our bid optimization. So this one is targeting any of our low ACOS keywords, which is used to raise bids on anything that is performing well. So anything that meets a criteria in this recipe is going to increase bids by 2%. It has to meet our different options in our trigger here.
These bid recipes are a little more complicated than some of the other ones because we're segmenting the bid optimizations by order volume. We're looking at different date ranges based on how many orders that a keyword or a target is getting with these bid change recipes. So what that means is if we have a lot of orders in a recent amount of time, such as the last 7 days, we're going to look at that date range. If we don't have enough orders to meet that, we're going to look at a little bit longer date range, which is the next one by default is 14 days. And if we don't meet enough orders for within 14 days, we're going to look at even longer, we're going to look at a 30 day window. And all this is modifiable if you need to, but these are pretty, by default, these are set to work for most sellers. So let's take a look at what that looks like.
First, we have our global options again. So this is going to apply to all of our low, moderate and high order volume. So it needs to meet our global options plus one of our low, moderate or high order volume options. And by default. The only option enabled in our global settings is our state. And we're just making sure that the keyword is delivering if we're going to make any bid changes to it. So if the campaign or the ad groups paused, that keyword, even if it's active is not going to have a bid adjustment made to it.
You can then further add other options as well, such as a click threshold. So this would be something where it would only raise bids if it's not getting clicks within the last couple days, or a keyword exclusion or inclusion like the other recipes such as excluding lottery campaigns or only including close match if that's in your ad group name. And you can change any of this information as well to fit your needs.
And then our first option, which in addition to meaning our global options is our low order volume. So this is going to look at any keywords that have at least 2 orders within the last 30 days, but has fewer than 4 orders within the last 14 days. And what this does is eliminates any overlap with our moderate and our high volume options that we'll look at in just a second. So this will only affect if it has at least 2 orders within the last 30 days, but fewer than 4 in the last 14.
And it also needs to have less than 25% ACOS over that 30 day date range. This is our ACOS threshold. And we recommend setting this to 2%-5% below what your target a cost is. So that means if you have a 20% target ACOS, we would want to change our ACOS threshold here somewhere between 15% and 18% for each of these options.
Next, we have moderate order volume. So this is going to look at a shorter date range than our low order volume option, because we have more data within a more recent time frame. And because we have more data within that recent time frame, we prefer to look at just that most recent data. Effectively, we just want to have enough data points to confidently make a bid adjustment using as recent of data as possible.
So this one by default looks at the last 14 days, and there needs to be at least 4 orders within that 14 day window. And again, meet our ACOS threshold. And in this example, we're going to change this to 18%. In the case we have a 20% target ACOS, and then an overlap exclusion here. So over the last 7 days, there's not it needs to have less than 4 orders, which if we look at our high order volume, this matches our date range here where our high order volume looks at the last 7 day window, and there needs to be at least 4 orders within that 7 days for it to only look at the last 7 days. Otherwise, if it has 4 orders within the last 10 days, for example, it's going to fall back to this more moderate order volume. And now it's looking at a 14 day window, and basing the data on that. And the same thing for our high ACOS, we're just going to change that to 18% in this example to match our target ACOS.
And then at the bottom of each recipe, we have our recommended actions, which in this case is increasing the bid because they're performing below our target ACOS. And what the percentage increase recommendations are based on how conservative or aggressive you'd want to be with the default being said at the moderate 2% for each of our recipes.
And our next recipe is recipe number four, and these are for our high a cost keywords and targets, which these recipes look almost identical to our low ACOS recipes. We're now just looking at lowering bids on anything above our target ACOS. So looking at these, these are again, segmented into low, moderate, and high order volume, starting with our global trigger.
The one difference between our low a cost and our high a cost is there is a click threshold set by default, which this stops lowering bids on high ACOS keywords that they're no longer getting clicks within the last couple of days. And you can modify this just to look at the last one day, or if you want to look at a longer date range, or disable that option entirely by turning this line into a comment with two forward slashes.
And this anything that's grayed out here, which it is, is now no longer part of this trigger. And we're going to scroll down to get into our individual options, which it starts at low order, which is the same 30 days with at least 2 orders. But now we're looking at anything greater than 30% ACOS by default. And again, set this 2% to 5% above your target ACOS. So this would be a good starting point if your target ACOS is between 25 and 28%. If it's different than that, just again, change it to 2% to 5%, whatever your target is. And again, same thing with our moderate order volume looks the exact same as our other one, just again, looking at anything greater than target ACOS and our high order volume. And then our recommended changes with the same conservative, moderate, and aggressive percent with the default at the 2% for decreasing the bid.
And next we have recipe number five. This is our brand new recipe that was not part of our original ones, which is we're now calling our booster recipes. So this is the first booster recipes. And these are designed to stack on top of your low and high ACOS recipes. If you use our original starting recipes, these replace the very high ACOS. And in this case, very low ACOS recipes make even bigger changes to your keywords and targets that are further away from your target ACOS. So these stack on top of your low and high ACOS recipes number three and four without having to make any changes to them. So what this looks like is these are segmented the exact same by order volume. We want to look at more recent data if we have the order volume, the data points to support that with very similar global options.
And it looks very similar to for this one, our low ACOS recipe. But with this, we want to set an even lower ACOS threshold. So in this case, we want to only affect our very best performers. And by default, that's set to 12%, where the low ACOS recipe is set to 25%. If a target or keyword has less than 12%, it's going to be adjusted twice, one by the low ACOS recipe, because it is less than 25%. And then again, by this recipe, our booster, because it has less than 12%, it meets criteria for both of them.
So there's gonna be 2 recipe runs where it's a 2% adjustment by default, unless you change this from the low ACOS recipe, and then another 2% adjustment by the booster. And you don't need to make any other changes. It's okay for those to stack. It's not quite a 4% adjustment, because it's 2% off of 2%, be there two individual optimizations.
So these work really well for increasing your bids more for things that are performing really well. And if we go through the recipe, they're going to look exactly the same with the same ACOS.
So you can make adjustments to this. If you want to only affect say less than 8%, or you want to bring up to 15%, whatever you would consider to be your really well performers, you want to make even bigger adjustments to than you want for keywords of targets are a little closer to your target a cost. And lastly, the high order volume, again, looks the same. So just modify this. And we have our recommended actions set to moderate by default.
And finally, our last recipe, which is number 6, our booster for our high ACOS. So this works exactly the same as our booster for our low ACOS, except it's going to boost our high ACOS recipe. This is going to affect only keywords and targets that are the furthest away from your target ACOS, which are your worst performers. So if we scroll down to our options, this is set by default to anything greater than 50%, which you can modify to what makes most sense for your campaigns, which you would then do across each order volume. And by default, it's set to a moderate 2% decrease.
So again, if anything is above our 50%, it's going to trigger both recipes, our high ACOS recipe and our booster high ACOS recipe. So we'll first make a 2% decrease to your bids from the high a cost recipe. And then another 2% decrease from our booster recipe.
Over the course of the week, what that would look like for a decrease in bids, because it's 2% off of 2% each day. Over the course of seven days, if it met both triggers each day, it would be approximately a 25% reduction in bid. If you wanted to then further segment these more, you could even add additional booster recipes to affect even higher, for example, you could duplicate this recipe and then change that threshold to 75% to where now you would have your high ACOS recipe, your medium booster and your high booster. So anything above 75% ACOS, those keywords and targets would have a 2% a 2% and then a 2% decrease on the same day. If you did want to duplicate a recipe, you can simply do that under the actions and then "Duplicate" and make any modifications.
