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In this video, I'm going to show you how I reset my bids after last week's Black Friday Blunder. We're going to be making adjustments to our budgets and our bids and placement adjustments using primarily Merch Jar, plus a bit of bulk operations. The bidding budget resets that we do in this video will not only just be useful now if you are affected by this Black Friday Blunder, but any time there's a major shift in ad spend or performance.
I'm going to be doing the majority of this bid fixing in Merch Jar. While one of the optimizations could be done in ad console, Merch Jar gives you a few more tools to make this a little easier. And I've even created some brand-new recipes to help reset all of your bids and budgets that you can download and import to your account. That way, you can run them on your own campaigns super easily. And if you don't have a Merch Jar account, you can sign up for your free 30-day trial. No credit card required using the link in the description and use these recipes for your own account as well to fix your bids.
To fix our bids and budget, we're only going to be using the data, the date range that we look at our performance starting from Black Friday all the way through today's data. And we're going to be doing that pretty much all the way through the end of the holiday sales season. Starting our date range on Black Friday to whatever date we're on or maybe a little bit after that if we want to look at the last seven days, as long as Black Friday is after that last seven-day period. Whenever there is a big shift in sales and ad spend like at the start of a holiday sales period or at the very end of it when a sales shift happens, I only use the data from after that shift happened to evaluate my campaigns. Any of the data that happens before that shift isn't very relevant to the new advertising landscape that happens after that shift. And because of how much I changed my bids and budgets based on inaccurate data from Black Friday, we need to do a pretty big reset on these bids and budgets. Now, we could just slash bids, slasher budgets, and call it a day. But I don't want to do that and miss out on potential sales from campaigns that did perform well, especially for my hero product and so my other best-selling products.
So now that we've cut our bids across the board, we're now going to be raising the bids back up for our best-performing keywords and targets over the last few days to match what the cost per click is so that they're still getting the impressions and clicks and ideally sales that we want. Essentially, what we're doing is taking what this new CPC is the cost per click since Friday through. Now we're going to bring our bids from wherever they're at for our best performers, probably lower because I slash bids. Essentially, what we're doing is we cut all our bids and this would be a good way to start. You could just do a blanket, cut all your bids in half, for example. And then what we want to do is take this new CPC, the cost per click that we're seeing since Friday through today. And we want to get our bids to match pretty closely what that CPC is so that we can and then adjust our bids from that starting point based on their current performance. And since we're bringing the bid to match at least as closely as possible the CPC, we need to first before we do any of those adjustments, remove the placement adjustments that we have across all of our campaigns. The reason for that is if the cost per click is a dollar and you have, let's say, a 100% placement adjustment on your top of search, that CPC is taking that increased bid into account. So, if our new bid, we bring that up to what the CPC is, that top of search is now going to be even higher than what we really want. So, we want to get rid of those, or at least most of those, especially on the ones that aren't performing. And this will end up being kind of a true reset of our bids. We'll start redoing our placement adjustments on this new performance since Black Friday.
So, we're going to jump back into the ad console to get rid of these placement adjustments. And we're going to use Bulk Operations to do that. So, I'm going to show you how to do that. We're going to navigate to the Sponsored Ads section here and then Bulk Operations.
And then you're going to need to download your custom spreadsheet to make adjustments to so you can select a date range. And you could start just from Black Friday through whatever day you're doing this, or if you want a little bit more data for the performance, you can do that.
I started with Black Friday, so that's what I would select just Black Friday to up to, I don't know, seven or 14 days would be fine if this is a little bit later when you're watching this, it never hurts to have a little more data and then just make sure that your placement data for campaigns is uncheck. This is an exclude column. We want to make sure that the placement data is included and then just create spreadsheet.
Create spreadsheet here and then you will see a file start the process. It can take a little bit of time, but it will eventually show download and then you'll just download it and then once you download it, it'll open up. Here I'm using Excel, so if you have that, you can't. Otherwise, there's of course Google sheets you can use. I've already made these changes to my own placement adjustments, so I'm just going to walk through how you do it without actually performing on my own since again, I've already done it.
But we'll start by navigating to the Sponsor Products Campaigns tab at the very bottom, and then we're going to add a data filter by clicking Data and then Filter. And this will add filters to all of our columns we can use. And we're going to start by the entity column and just on select all of these and we're only going to include the Bidding Adjustment. You can add some other filters too, for example, if you want to create a filter for your campaigns. I excluded my Lottery Campaigns, for example, which you could exclude tax that contains lottery. If that's a keyword in your campaign names, there's portfolios you could use as well. So, there are some additional options. I'm again, not going to make those changes, but I did exclude Lottery Campaigns from this one. I did it and next step, we're just going to knock this out right away. But we need to make sure we add an update for any of the rows that we are going to actually update. And I'm just going to drag this all the way down now. Just make sure all the placement adjustments get updated. You could drag it. You could copy and paste it through all of them. And there we go. So, we just want to make sure that it says update or when you upload your spreadsheet, nothing's going to happen. And then as we scroll over, we'll see our placement and if there's any adjustments here.
So, this being an older sheet, there are some that have higher placement adjustments that I'm going to want to bring down like 100% here. So, I think what I'm going to do is start by filtering my worst performers, and I'm going to do that by ACOS and I'm going to create a custom filter and first include anything that is 0.00% for whatever reason it requires to be exact, and then or greater than 30% and you could use 0.3 there.
So, this is going to take any of my placement adjustments that aren't performing that great, and any of these I just want to zero out. So, we're going to do zero. I'm going to copy this row all the way down and we're going to just zero out all of these placement adjustments. Now we should see zero and every column. Perfect.
Now, let's get rid of that filter. Let's just clear filter and then let's take our Performers. Anything that's less than 30%. So, actually let's do that's including our zero. So, we want to do is Less Than 0.3 and Greater Than The this gives us our performance. So, this is anything that's performed fairly well. And here this is going to be kind of up to you what you want to do. You could zero these hours as well. If you just want to start from scratch, I'm going to filter out anything that's zero blanks. So just I just want to see what's what has a placement adjustment on it that is performing.
And if there's anything that's high, I'm just going to adjust it. So, it looks like 25 is the minimum I think we're going to do is just bring all these down to 25.
So, the ones that were like 50, 40%, we're just going to bring these down a little bit. These were performing before and I want to still give them a little bit of juice for the placement adjustments that they had and then next, we're just going to make sure we clear all of our filters. Actually, you can also just turn off the filter soon. It's going to go back to exactly how it was and then we're going to save I'm hitting control + s and save it. And then once it's saved, you'll just navigate to find your file, select it and import it.
And you should successfully process changes. And how many rows were processed depending on how many that you selected or put update for.
All right, so we've gotten rid of all of our placement adjustments. Now we can jump in and make a reset to our budgets and our bids. We're going to start with budgets now. I could jump into ad console that is possible, which I'll show you here what that looks like would be under your Campaign Manager.
And you can just select all your campaigns and adjust the budget and do something like a 50% reduction.
I'm going to jump over to Merch Jar though, because I want to exclude my Lottery Campaigns, which there's not a real way to do that inside of ad console without just deselecting those after selecting all of them. The other issue with adjusting budgets in ad consoles if you have more than 300, you're going to have to go page by page to do this. You only can select three rows at a time. I only have 285 so I could do this. But again, I want to exclude Lottery Campaigns, so I'm going to do that inside of Merch Jar. Here we are inside a Merch Jar inside of the Campaign page, inside of Ad Manager, which you can navigate to here under Campaigns, inside of Ad Manager.
And the first thing we want to do is exclude our Lottery Campaign. So we're going to negate that from our search results, which we can do by hitting -not:”lottery” and it works this way. And if you have multiple keywords you want to include, you would just put it in bracket. So, if you had a lottery keyword, you would do that and we just have the one. Or if you did have multiple different words, you would just add another, not whatever keyword we just have the ones, we're just going to exclude that. And now it's only showing our campaigns that are not Lottery Campaigns do make a bid adjustment. We're just going to select all of them. So, 274 in my case, by selecting the little dropdown arrow and then select all from every single page. So, you don't have to go page to page. Doesn't matter how many campaigns you have, whether it's 500 or 3000, whatever that looks like. And once we have selected, we're going to use a bulk action and Change Daily Budget. And here, you can do the same kind of thing, Decrease Daily Budget by whatever percentage of that you want to. I did a 50% reduction across all of my campaigns. I really mean that reduction. So, I'm not going to do it here.
And one other way we can do this is with a recipe that I wrote. So, we're going to navigate to the Recipe page and I'm going to import these new recipes. There's one for slashing the budgets on campaigns, which you saw how easy it was to do inside of the Ad Manager so you could do it there or you can use this recipe. And then I have four recipes for resetting all of our bids across our keywords and our targets for the performers and the underperformers. So, I'll show you how those worked. So first, we need to import the new recipes into our account. You can find all the recipes down in the description below. Just click on each one and I'll download the recipe file. And once you've downloaded all of them navigate to the arrow next to create recipe and import recipe.
And you can import up to 20 recipes at once and you can choose if it goes to just the current active profile that you're on or across all of your different advertising profiles. We're going to browse and I'm going to shift to select all five and open them in.
This should import and click import and we should get all of our recipes, perfect.
So we have our Budget Cuts recipe, Bid Reset on our Performers|Targets, Bid Reset on our Performers|Keywords. So, these are the same recipes. Just one targets your keywords, one targets your auto targets and ace targets and then ones that have a high ACOS. We're going to bring down to our Target CPC and same thing with keywords.
The performers increase the bids to match our CPC for anything that's performing well and anything that has a high ACOS where the bid's still above the new CPC that's happening, it's going to bring those down. So first, we're going to start with the Budget Cuts and if you want to see what it's going to affect with any recipe, you can go in here, see what the recipe looks like. And down at the bottom there's a refresh which I'm covering here, but just a little circle. You can click on it. It'll tell you how many items it's going to affect. And within our recipe here, we have an ACOS filter. So anything above 25% and has at least zero orders for the campaign. The campaign does not contain lottery as a keyword and has at least a $3 budget. So, you can make some adjustments to that if you want to not decrease budgets that are higher than $3 will make it five or ten where that looks like or if you want to get rid of this campaign name exclusion, you can delete it or add a simple comment line with two slashes and then I'll just grayed out and it won't count anymore. And that's it. So, I'm going to save this, keep it as is, and then to run it, all you do is go to Actions. Run now. Again, I already ran that one. I don't want to cut my budgets anymore. It's set to 25% by default, going back to our recipe, you can change that too if you want to do it.
Or the other option is you can just run this more than once. So, decrease by 25%. And if you run it one more time, it'll decrease the new budget by another 25%, which ends up 25% off or 25% is like 45% decrease. So, you have a couple of options there.
And then next, we're going to run our recipes for the Performers. These are kind of crazy recipes, the way they had to work out. But they work. So how these work is, these will reset those bids based on the recent data to match the bid to the current CPC for whatever date range you select. I have it set at three days, so that's today's Monday. It's going to it does not include today's data.
So, it's going to be Sunday, Saturday, and Friday, the last three dates excluding today's data, and then have an ACOS filter. So, I'm going to do this on anything that is less than 40% ACOS and you can make adjustments if we want to make that, let's say 30% I think would be appropriate. And anything that has at least one order and again, the watery campaigns are very kind of adjusted. My Lottery Campaigns, how I want to manually. So, I'm not going to let this affect those. But if you did want to change the days, let's say you're doing this when this video actually comes out, it's now four days. You could just change from the last three days to four and make sure you do that down here and it will count that. But essentially what this is doing is there's different brackets for CPC. So, anything between zero and five cents CPC, if that bid is less than $0.05, it's going to bring that up to that five-cent bid. Same thing with between five and $0.10, the bit is less than ten cents. It's going to make increases. You slowly bring that up in 10% increments. You can increase that if you want or even decrease it. It's set at a lower percentage so that you can run this multiple times so that a bid doesn't go way past what you actually want it to. So it's going to be slower increments at a time. And there's one for your targets and one for the keywords. These are the exact same.
So I'm just going to make it an adjustment to 30% there and save it. Now, one tip on these to make these run maybe a little bit smoother or faster is to change the way bids get rounded. And this will be useful mostly for small bids. So, I'm going to jump to our settings and for the recipes for our performers. I'm going to always round up.
Normally I recommend weighted rounding for everything in Merch Jar, but this is a specific case where we're going to round up. The reason being if a bid is too small adjustment, it may it's going to take longer to reach that next set with the weighted rounding. So, this is just a quick way to speed it up.
So, we're back in the recipes and all we need to do now is run our Performers recipes. We're just going to go to Actions and Run Now to run the first one and let that do its thing. And that one updated four targets. And we can just then keep running this multiple times until there aren't any more targets or you're kind of at a place where you feel pretty good with it and you can always click back into the recipe and see what else it'll apply to on the next run.
So still three that all apply to you with our current metrics, and you can make any adjustments here if you need to as far as like number of orders, minimum costs, that sort of thing, save that, and then we're going to run again. All right. So that one's been updated and I'm just going to kind of let that go for now. But you can run that as many times as you need to. Again, these are meant to stack on top of each other. And then we're just going to move to the next Performers with Keywords and do the exact same thing. We're just going to run it. Let's do its thing and keep running it until we're happy with how many items are left.
And we're going to run that again one more time. What that update did 12 the first time and what it update this time as well, and only three of that time. So it's I'm pretty happy with where that's at. So next, we're going to move to our high ACOS. So, this is going to bring the bid for anything above the CPC down to it. So, we're just going to go back into the settings and now we're going to change our recipe to Always Round Down just to make things a little bit smoother and then head back to recipes and run our high ACOS. But first, let's jump inside. Just take a look here.
So, this will decrease bids based on recent data, but here you can make adjustments to your ACOS, number of orders, how many days, so again, the number of days. I would say anywhere between three and seven would be appropriate with kind of that whatever shift happening being the start of that date range. And there's also one here for anything that's got zero orders and with more than zero clicks and you can adjust this too for the recipe. So, I might do anything more than four clicks in the last few days and we can see what this apply to. So that's going to be the majority. Maybe we'll drop this down there, see what's going to apply to you. Perfect and save and run that same way we did the other. This would be the same thing where you can run this multiple times until it's hit all of your different targets. So, we're on again. It's only updating one this time, so we're pretty good with that and we're going to do the same thing for the Keywords and I'm going to go in here and just suggest a click. So, anything greater than three, let's see what that does and save. Run this one as well and run again. All right. So that updated seven that time and I think we're pretty good with that. All right. So, we've made all of our Actions that we want to make after this big shift happened after Black Friday Blunder by resetting all of our bids and our budgets.
And just to recap what that looked like, we drastically decreased our budgets on all of our campaigns. We've decreased all of our bid to the tune of about 40% decrease in bids, and we removed our placement adjustments using the Bulk Operations. Then we increased our bids back on our performance to match the most recent CPC using recipes and reduce the bids on all of our non-performers to catching that were still above our CPC after making those blanket adjustments from the last few days.
I hope this video is useful for any of those of you that were affected by this Black Friday Blunder and need to make any adjustments to their bids. You can also use the strategies and recipes in this video any time there's another major shift, such as the end of the holidays or even now that we're past Cyber Monday, you could do a reset on your bids just from the most recent data after Cyber Monday.
Again, that's kind of another big shift from Hyatt's ad spend different performance down to lower ad spend right after Cyber Monday. There is multiple, multiple times you can use these kind of strategies and recipes. So not just after this Black Friday Blunder, but in the future as well. If you found anything at all useful in this video, make sure to give it a like and subscribe and I will see you in the next video.
