What are Amazon Ads automation rules?

With our Amazon Ads integration, you can easily create dynamic Sponsored products ad campaigns for Amazon. This article will provide a detailed explanation of the Amazon Ads automation rules. 

What are Automation Rules?

Automation rules are utilized to move, pause, or convert keywords based on performance data from Amazon. For example, if there are multiple campaign groups with different budgets, successful keywords can be transferred to a campaign with a higher budget.

In automatic campaigns, Amazon handles keyword management to enhance ad performance. However, if a keyword performs exceptionally well, it can be moved to a manual campaign with a higher budget utilizing Automation Rules.

Type of Automation rules

There is a range of different types of automation rules available for Amazon ads, in short, these are the automation rule types you can use:

• Keyword search term
• Keyword targeting
• Keyword bidding
• ASIN search term
• ASIN targeting
• ASIN bidding

For more info on what these different types are, read this article.

Rule Groups

Automation rules are used in conjunction with Rule Groups. It is crucial to know that the order sequences of rule groups are very important! If multiple rule groups have a condition for a specific keyword, the last one with a matching condition will determine the executed action. Currently, the order of rule groups cannot be modified. 

A rule group must always contain at least one Automation Rule with an action.

Rule groups can be paused or enabled.

• When paused, they will not run, meaning that no actions will be generated.

• When enabled, they will always run. This means that when an automation rule is matched for the relevant keyword, an action will be generated.

  • An Automation rule group cannot be enabled when any of the automation rules are not valid (for instance, if an action is not selected).

You can only save one automation rule group at a time, meaning that you need to click on the SAVE button within the automation rule group when you are done editing it.

Add conditions

Automation rules have different conditions compared to the standard rules. Automation rules work with filter conditions to determine how the rules should work.

You can add filter conditions with the plus button and remove them with the cross button. Each filter condition is composed of an if-field, a filter type, and a static value.

The if-field can be used to select the relevant performance metric, also referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

The filter type is used to determine which kind of filter (operator) to apply for the condition (<, <=

, =, >=, >, !=).

Finally, a numeric value needs to be provided to match the metric against using the operator.

Execution conditions

For an automation rule to be executed, multiple conditions must be met: 

• The automation Rule Group has to be active
• All performance data has to be present for the configured date range with operators:
  • Use of less than (<) or less or equal to (<=)
  • Use of not equal to, when the filter value is not 0 (!=123)
  • Use of equal, when the filter value is 0 (= 0)
  • Use of is greater or equal to, when the filter value is 0 (>= 0)
• Both the Source and Target generators have to be activated

Rule actions

The action is mandatory and, currently, we only support one action per Automation rule. You can find the action under the THEN column.

Search term Targeting 

• Add as positiveadds the search term from automatic campaigns as a positive keyword with the provided match type to the specified manual campaign generator.
• Add as Negativeadds the search term from automatic campaigns as a negative keyword with the provided match type to the specified manual campaign generator.

Keyword Targeting

• Movecreates a positive target in the destination (if the destination is a manual campaign generator).
  • You need to provide to which campaign generator it should be moved and its match type.
  • For source generators with Manual targeting type, this action will Pause the positive Keyword.
  • For source generators, this action will Create the negative Keyword.
  • For target generators, this action will pause the negative Keyword.
• Pausedisables the positive keyword target (if the source is a manual campaign generator) in the source.
• Convert to negativecreates a negative keyword target and pauses the positive keyword target (if the source is a manual campaign generator) in the source.

Bidding

• Increase bidincreases the bid of the keyword by the specified percentage, without going over the specified maximum bid value.
• Decrease biddecreases the bid of the keyword by the specified percentage, without going below the specified minimum bid value.

Negative BROADdoesn't exist. Therefore, aBROADkeyword will be converted to PHRASE in the below cases:

• Convert keyword to Negative
• Move Keyword

As previously discussed, there are different types of automation rules, and different actions you can create based on the type of rule. 

Date Range

The date range determines the window of time from the performance data you want to test your rules against. The window always counts back from ‘today’ minus the day's set.

We currently offer a choice of fixed time windows of 7, 14, or 30 days.

The data is collected for the selected time window and the final value will be taken into account for the rules. If there is not enough data (for instance because it’s a new keyword), we take the following considerations into account:

• If the rule includes an “is less than” (<) or is matched equally against a static value 0, we will never match until we have enough data.

• If the rule includes an “is greater than” (>) and is not matched equally against a static value 0, we will always match if the data we have matches the condition.

Performance data

The performance data is used to test the conditions against the static value in the filters. This data is downloaded daily from Amazon as a first task in the scheduled run.

Performance data contains:

• Ad cost on sale (ACOS ): How much money you spend on the ads per sale

• Ad spend: How much money you spend on the ads

• Clicks: How many clicks your ads had

• Cost per click (CPC): How much money you spend on the ads per click

• Click-through rate (CTR): How many clicks did your ads have per impression

• Impressions: How many times was the ad served

• Orders: The number of items you sell

• Revenue: The total amount of money you made

• Return on ads spent (ROAS): How much money you earned relative to the money spent on ads

Setting up Automation rules

On this page, you can find a step-by-step guide on how to set up automation rules.