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Last night, many of my products started showing delivering dates past Christmas day, which means I'll be paying really high cost per clicks just for someone to show up at the product page to find out they can't get it delivered by Christmas, which means they're probably not going to be as likely to convert and I'm going to be paying these higher cost per clicks without the conversion rate - leading to lots of wasted spend.
As a result, I need to make some adjustments to my bids and budgets to reduce spending on those campaigns. In this video I'll show you what adjustments I made and how I did them using Merch Jar.
During this time of year, when delivery dates extend past Christmas and your sales start to fall off a cliff, it is necessary to make some pretty big adjustments to our ads and budgets. That way you're not going to waste so much money on these campaigns. You have a few different options at this point of the year - you can just pause all campaigns, reduce all of your bids and budget to an absolute minimum, or make a percentage-based decrease.
I'm not a big fan of ever pausing my campaigns. I would much rather reduce those bids greatly even setting those to a bare minimum, two cents per bid, instead of pausing those campaigns. It's okay if you do pause them, I would just prefer to keep them going. I don't want to come back later and try to figure out which campaigns I was running and which ones weren't. So I'd rather keep those enabled and at the bare minimum, just set them to a minimum possible bid which is two cents what I'll be doing instead there's just a large percentage based decrease. I want to have some kind of proportional changes there. So when I start re-optimizing them coming out of the holiday sales season, there's still those proportional bid. So I still have some higher and some lower based on if they were previously running at a much higher bid and higher CPC to get that optimization working a little bit quicker than having everything start at the absolute minimum making really small increases until we get back to that point.
You have a few options when it comes to adjusting your bids in your budget, you can either use the Native Ad Console where we're at now using the targeting page and management page or use their spread, bulk operation spreadsheets as well. Using Native Ad Console on the targeting page you can use to make bulk adjustments to your bids.
The one issue I have here is that I can't filter to exclude campaigns that are still delivering or still have delivery days by Christmas. The other big issue is if you have a ton of targets like here, I have over 13,000 different enabled targets and keywords, you can only make adjustments to up to 300 at a time. I've also had some issues lately where it hasn't been running bulk adjustments for whatever reason. So I'm not going to be using this.
Under the management tab this is a pretty easy area to make bulk adjustments to your budgets by selecting all the campaigns you'd like making adjustments. There is still that limit of 300 per page, you can only make adjustments to which I do have fewer campaigns than that. However, the issue I have is that I want to exclude certain campaigns that are still delivering by Christmas which there isn't an easy way to do here.
The other option for using the Native Ad Console is the bulk operations spreadsheets. You can download these for specific date ranges and make all kinds of filters to them to make any kind of adjustments you really need. I'm not going to walk through exactly what that would look like step by step, but this is an option as well that you can do. All the things I'm about to do in Merch Jar through the bulk operations spreadsheets. Merch Jar just makes that a little bit smoother experience and quicker to do. So we're gonna jump right over to Merch Jar and just run through all these changes. Okay, so we're over at Merch Jar now and we're just gonna be making a few changes.
This is pretty quick process now we want to exclude all of our products that are still selling and I have three right now that are still delivering by Christmas. So I want to keep those campaigns as they are. The first thing we're gonna do is reduce our bids on everything that is not those products. So we're gonna start on the target's page here. This is going to be all of our auto campaign targets like loose match, close match substitutes, compliments as well as our ASIN targets and any category targeting that we have as well. And we're going to go through and make an adjustment for products that aren't delivering by Christmas. I'm going to do a 90% reduction just across the board.
So the first thing I'm going to do is exclude the ASINs that are still delivering. So I'm going to do an exclusion in search which is -not:<asin>. So the way this works is excludes anything with a key word in the campaign or ad group name. And I've named all of my campaigns for a product with ASIN in it. So it makes it easy for me to just put in, don't include this ASIN any campaigns with this ASIN in the title, it's going to remove those. So I have three of those. So I'm gonna just paste the first one and I'm going to add another exclusion by doing the same thing. Just space then -not:<asin> paste in my other. And then my third, the same thing -not:<asin>.
So I have all three ASINs here and I'm just going to enter and this should exclude anything that has a campaign name with any of those three ASINs in it. And then I'm simply going to select all of my targets. I'm going to select all of them from all pages. So this is every target that's not one of the products that is delivering. And then I'm going to make a bulk action and change bid. Then decrease the bid by a percentage. I started with 90%. Now I've already made this adjustment, so I'm not going to run this but this is exactly what I did. And you can just put in the percentage you want to decrease it by. I used 90% and then click change bid.
Now this is where you have some options to, you could have this lower or smaller if you want to base it on any metrics. I just did a blanket adjustment across all of my bids that aren't still delivering by Christmas. The other option too is if you wanted to be even more conservative and still not pause campaigns, you can just set the bid to a specific amount, as low as two cents bid per target. You would just change bid and those would process to get changed to whatever you have set here.
Then I copy what I have in the search. We're going to go to a couple different pages to make these same changes. So just copy that. And then I'm gonna do the same thing on our keywords page. So I'm going to navigate to the keywords and then paste the search. I just copied. So it's the three ASINs I don't want to change bids on. I'm gonna do the same thing with selecting all of my keywords now in our manual campaigns, bulk action change bid and the same 90% decrease. And again here is where you can set it to a specific amount or decrease by a specific dollar amount. I like the proportional changes with the percentage. So I'm sticking with that.
So now that all those changes have been made, the last thing I'm going to do is make adjustments to my campaigns. A lot of the campaign budgets were increased throughout the holiday sales season. So now that that's over for most products, I'm gonna take the budgets on those products that aren't delivering anymore and just greatly reduce those as there's not really much reason for them to have as high budgets. I'll adjust those again over time as we re-optimize these campaigns over 2023.
So next we're gonna head over to campaigns and the same thing on our campaign page is just pacing our string that we copied of our actions that are still delivering. So we're going to exclude those. Then we're going to start making adjustments to our budgets. And I started by setting a filter to anything with a budget greater than $5. The reason I'm selecting greater than $5 is that I'm using a percentage adjustment of that 90% still. Then I go to bulk actions and click change daily budget. So again here this is where you can change by percent or set to a dollar amount. So I started with anything above $5 and made a 90% adjustment and that would be a pretty big adjustment on any campaigns are kind of in that $5 - $20 range or so where it'll be below even a dollar to for a budget. So next what I did, if anything was already below $5 I change it to anything with a budget between, we could just use $0 and $5. So this is going to be the whole range. I set all of these to just a $3 daily budget, which same thing, selecting all, change daily budget, and set to a daily budget. So anything in that small range, I just kinda took everything and brought to a $3 daily budget and I'm just going to run that again to make sure that everything is set to $3 and that I didn't miss anything and then I'll perform that action and update everything to $3 that was between the $0 and $5 range.
That's it for the adjustments I made for all the products that stopped delivering by Christmas, I keep it pretty simple just making blanket changes across all the products that aren't delivering anymore, excluding the ones that are. And I'll keep an eye on those delivery dates and do the same process on those products specifically when they extend past Christmas. I hope this video is helpful if you found any value at all, please like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video!
