Merch Jar Tutorials | Promotions

Updated
June 7, 2023

Promotions automate adding positive and negative keywords to your ad groups based on their performance. Promotions are based on one or more ad groups that they monitor or add positive and negative keywords too. Based on one or more rules you can customize to your campaigns. Using multiple rules, they can work with even the most complex campaign structures removing the most tedious parts of managing your campaigns and saving you hours of manual work.

Promotions are often used to automatically move keywords from one campaign to another, such as moving a search term from an automatic targeting campaign to a manual targeting campaign once it's sold or automatically negating keywords in their source ad groups that have been added to other ad groups preventing overlap in search term targeting across your ad groups and campaigns. And automatically negating poor performing keywords like this one across multiple campaigns and ad groups.

To create your first promotion, navigate to the promotions link in the menu at the top of your Merch Jar app. Here, you'll be able to see all of your existing promotions and whether they're active or disabled, the number of rules they have and the number of ad groups they contain. To add a new promotion. Just click add promotion, then give your promotion a unique name by using the name field.

Each promotion is set up by choosing the ad groups that the promotion will monitor and add any positive or negative keywords too. To add your ad groups to your promotion just click the Add Items button, then use a search field to find the groups you like to add, which uses the campaign name to filter your ad groups. Click each add group you'd like to add to the promotion and then click add items.

Any ad group you'd like to remove, you can do so by clicking the minus button. To create your first promotion rule, click Add Rule and give your new rule a descriptive name using the name field. Each rule is made up of three components the search term source or the ad groups that will have their search terms evaluated, the trigger or conditions that need to be met for the action to be executed, and the action or which ad groups a positive or negative keyword will be added to if the trigger is met.

We'll start with the search term source, which is the used search terms from here column. Each group that is selected will have every one of its search terms evaluated each day by the trigger. If more than one ad group is selected, the search term data for all selected ad groups will be aggregated together.

So, if the same search term appears for two or more ad groups that are selected, all the impressions, clicks and orders from all the selected ad groups will be added together. Merch Jar also combines the search term data together if they would share the same targeting, such as with singular and plural forms of the same search term, allowing actual decisions to be made on search terms even faster.

Once the search term data from all the selected groups is aggregated together, every search term will be evaluated by the trigger individually. The trigger determines whether the action is performed or not. The trigger consists of a set of conditions that must be met and a date range or look back window for the data that will be evaluated by those conditions.

If all the conditions during this look back window was met for a search term, the trigger is met and the actions are executed, meaning the search term is added as a positive or a negative keyword to the selected groups in the action section. If any of the conditions are not met during the lookback window, no action is performed.

This process of checking the conditions for the look back window is done every single day for every search term in the selected ad groups. For the trigger, you can set conditions for the number of orders, ACOS and clicks and the number of days to look back at the data. For example, using a 30 day look back window, only the search term data between today and 30 days ago from the ad groups that are selected in the search term source will be evaluated by the conditions set in the trigger.

If left blank, the rule will use a search term data between today and 60 days prior to the date you first sync your account with Merch Jar, which is when Merch Jar begins logging all of your campaign data. If our trigger is met, all of our actions are performed. The actions are the ad groups that the search term will be added to as a positive or a negative keyword.

Select the match time for the positive or negative keywords for each ad group. You'd like them to be added to. When promoting keywords, you can also increase or decrease the bid of a newly created keyword using a fixed dollar amount or a percentage change. When you have your search term sources, your trigger and your actions click add to save your rule.

Each rule is turned off by default to enable promotion rule. Click the switch next to the rule name so that it shows blue. You can disable it simply by clicking the switch again so that it shows Gray. To save your new promotion, click Save in the top right.

By default, your new promotion is turned off, but before turning on your promotion, we recommend using our dry run-on testing feature to ensure your promotion is working as intended before it affects your live campaigns. To use the dry-run feature, just click the dry run button for the promotion you like to test and all of your promotion’s rules will run, and you'll be shown all the changes that your promotion would make without affecting your live campaigns.

Once you've ensured your new promotion is working as intended, you can enable it using the switch next to the promotion name so that the switch shows Blue. Once enabled, your promotion rules will start running once each day. To disable promotion, simply click the switch again so that it shows Gray.

To see any actions that your promotion rules performed navigate to the logs page in the menu at the top of your Merch Jar app. The logs page will show you the date and time that an action was performed, the campaign and ad group that a keyword was added to and the type of keyword that was created.

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