12 New Recipes That Automate 90% Of Your Workflow

Intro

We recently released 12 new recipes for getting started on Merch Jar that work with any account, product, or ad spend. In just a few clicks, you'll be able to completely automate 90% of your ad account maintenance using only these recipes.

In this video, we'll review what recipes are and how they work, how to import them to your account, and how to customize them to reach your campaign goals. So, you can sit back, let Merch Jar do the heavy lifting.

If you don't yet have a Merch Jar account, you can still use the recipes in this video to save you time and drive more sales completely automated by starting your free 30-Day unlimited trial at merchjar.com or using the link in the description.

What are recipes?

If you're new to using recipes, recipes give you a powerful way to perform actions such as pausing a campaign or keyword, increasing bids or lowering budgets based on criteria you set. Each recipe has 4 components. The source which determines what part of a campaign is evaluated by the recipe, the trigger which is the criteria the source needs to meet in order for the recipes from run the action which is what will happen when the recipes trigger criteria is met. And the frequency which is how often the recipe will run.

Importing Recipes

The import these Getting Started recipes here account simply download them using the direct download links in the description. Or you can browse and download all of our available recipes on Merch Jar as recipe world also links below.

Once you've downloaded the recipes you'd like to import, navigate to the recipes page on your Merch Jar account, click on the Create recipe drop down then import recipe. Next, click Browse to find and select the recipe you'd like to import. You can use the switch to import the recipe across all of your ad profiles are Amazon marketplaces managed by Merch Jar or leave it off to import it to only the currently active add profile, click Import and the new recipe will now appear on your account. By default, the recipe will be disabled and will not run the turn the recipe on click the switch in the enabled column and it will now run automatically based on the frequency set. You can also export a recipe file, make a copy of the recipe for the current ad profile, or run the recipe immediately using the action button.

In a previous video, we covered 5 ad optimizations that you should be making every week to get the most out of your ad spend. You can find that video linked below in the description. These 12 Getting Started recipes automate 4 of those 5 optimizations they're also set by default to run each day give you an advantage of making smaller, more frequent changes, which we would find that campaigns respond better to Recipe number 1 is for getting more impressions recipes number 2 and 3 pause keywords and targets that only have one or zero orders, but still getting lots of clicks recipes number 4 through 9 lower bids on high ACOS keywords and targets and recipes number 10 through 12 increase bids on low ACOS keywords and targets.

Each recipe has two versions. An A version for keywords, which are your exact phrase and broad match keywords in your manual campaigns and a B version for targets which covers your automatic campaign targets like loose match or substitutes, and category and product targets in your manual campaigns. Otherwise, each version is exactly the same for every recipe. If you're only running automatic campaigns, you can download and import just the B versions of each recipe. However, if you're running manual campaigns, you'll want both versions running. Each Getting Started recipes trigger is structured in a similar way. The first part of the recipes trigger contains the name of the recipe along with a description for what the recipe does, followed by the trigger itself, which has the criteria that must be met for the action to be performed. Within each trigger. There are additional trigger options that you can enable to further customize the recipe. And finally, the recommended actions and frequency for the recipe.

What's inside the recipe?

Everything you see that is grayed out inside the trigger is a comment that provides additional information or context and is not taken into account by the recipe there's two different types of comments that can be used. The first is a block comment which can cover multiple lines of text a block comment is started with a forward slash followed by an asterisk and ended by an asterisk followed by a forward slash. Anything between the start and the end of a block comment will be grayed out and not be read by the trigger or other type of comment using recipe triggers is an inline comment. An inline comment is started using two forward slashes and covers only a single line of text. Anything that's on the same line after the start of an inline comment will not be read by the trigger. While anything on the same line before the two forward slashes will still be red, making them useful for notating. What a line in the trigger is for like you see here on line 8. He trusts me as default metrics that should work for most advertisers. However, you may find you need to make some changes to them to fit your campaign goals or make additional customizations to each recipe. You can change any of the existing metrics by simply deleting it and changing it to what you'd like it to be. Or even add additional trigger criteria by starting a new line with and then adding your new criteria. You can find a list of all metrics currently available for recipes on the recipe Help page linked in the description. In each Getting Started recipe we've included a number of useful options that you can enable. To give you an idea of how you can further customize recipes to create your own unique automations. Each option is on its own line and uses an inline comment to disable it by default. Following the first inline comment forward slashes is the option trigger, which will be read by the recipe when it's enabled. Then there's a second set of forward slashes on the same line to start another inline comment, which is followed by a description of what the option is for. To enable an option, simply delete only the first two forward slashes starting the line. The first part of the option will no longer be grayed out as a comment and will now be included as part of the trigger. The options description will still be part of a comment from the second set of forward slashes which you'll want to keep in there you can then further modify the enabled option by editing any part of it.

Recipes number four through 12 are all related to raising or lowering bids on targets and keywords based on their ACOS. All recipes one through three are fairly straightforward. Bid changes require more recipes to get better optimization and are a little more complex. Recipes four through nine are all related to lowering bids on keywords and targets that have a high or very high ACOS. These recipes are segmented by order volume, low order volume, monitor order volume and high order volume. This allows for a dynamic look back window that's based on the recent volume of orders that a keyword or target is generating the look back window is the date range of data that the recipe will look at when evaluating your campaigns. When a target is getting a lot of recent orders. The recipes will use a shorter look back window so that it's only using the most recent and relevant data when making changes to your bid. If a keyword or Target has a lower order volume, it will need to use a longer look back window to get enough data points in order to make bid optimizations.

Low and Moderate order volume recipes each have an extra line in the trigger that prevents overlap with the other bid change recipes making it so multiple recipes aren't making changes to the same targets simultaneously. By default, high order volume is any target or keyword that has at least four orders in the last seven days. Moderate volume is at least four orders in the last 14 days, but less than four in the last seven days and low volume is at least two orders in the last 30 days but less than four in the last 14 days you can make changes to the number of orders or the look back window for any of these recipes. However, if you make changes to the moderate or high-volume recipes, you'll need to be careful to change the other recipes so that there is no overlap. For low order volume recipes. The number of orders can be changed or the look back window increased without having to make any changes to the moderate or high-volume recipes.

We've also included optional recipes for very high ACOS targets and keywords in order to stagger your bid changes making larger or more frequent adjustments for targets and keywords that are well above your target ACOS each of these very high ACOS recipes is paired with a high ACOS recipe based on the same order volume segmentation. Recipe 5 is paired with recipe 4, recipe 7 is paired with 6, and recipe 9 is paired with recipe 8. When using very high ACOS recipes, you'll need to enable the max bid option in its paired high ACOS recipe to prevent any overlap these recipe pairings and which options to enable are in each recipe description, so you don't have to worry about trying to remember all these. By default, the ACOS threshold for high ACOS recipes is 30% which you can modify to fit your campaign goals. This should be anywhere from two to 5% above your actual target ACOS. The default very high ACOS threshold is 50%. Meaning these recipes will only apply to keywords and targets with an ACOS of 50% or higher during the lookback window. If you modify the very high a cost threshold from 50%, You'll also want to change the max ACOS option in its paired recipe to the new ACOS threshold.

Recipes 10 through 12 Raise bids for any of your performing keywords or targets that have a low ACOS. These are also segmented by order volume. And the same way the high a cost recipe is so that the most recent and relevant data is being used for optimization. By default, and the low ACOS threshold is set to 25%. So only keywords and targets that are below 25% will be changed by these recipes. You can change this to match your campaign goals, setting it two to 5% below your target ACOS.

Pitching recipes 4 through 12 are all designed to work without the use of smart bids. And it's not recommended that use both bid change recipes and smart bids at the same time. As it could lead to over optimization of your bids. There are some pros using one or the other, which I'll cover to help you decide which is right for you Recipes, the biggest pro over smart bids is the dynamic look back window based on ever changing order volume. Order volume is constantly changing for your keywords and targets. And as that volume inevitably changes from week to week or month to month, recipes can dynamically change the look back window that's being used to optimize those keywords and targets. Here with lots of recent orders you want to use a shorter look back window, you're using more relevant data or slower selling keywords and targets need to have a longer window to have enough data to make informed optimization changes. While you can do this with smart bids using multiple smart bid profiles that each have a different look back window. They need to be changed manually which can take a lot of time to keep up with ever changing order volume. For smart bids, the biggest pro is the dynamic use of the target ACOS fueled for your keywords and targets versus the fixed a cost threshold. That's in recipes. If you have a lot of products or campaigns with wildly different target ACOS you may find smart bids is a better fit currently for you. While it is possible to use recipes now and have multiple target ACOS you'd have to use some sort of keyword system within your campaign and ad group names as well as have multiple sets of these bid change recipes. In order to make that work.

In a future recipe update, we'll be adding the target ACOS field as an available metric to make this easier without having to have multiple sets of these recipes. Once that happens, I'd recommend using recipes over smart bids for pretty much everyone and there's not really any additional advantages to using smart bids over recipes. If you're ready to save hours managing your campaigns and getting the most out of your ad spend head over to merchjar.com and start your free 30-Day unlimited trial.