Monitoring Budget Optimisation
Once Budget Optimisation is enabled, BooksFlyer will start moving budget between the campaigns in each portfolio, giving more to the ones that perform best and less to the ones that don't. Just as with bidding rules, though, it pays to check in every now and then: the way budget is being distributed tells you a lot about the health of your campaigns, and it will point you to the ones that need a closer look.
This article walks you through the questions worth asking yourself when you review your portfolios, and what to do depending on the answer.
By the end of this article you should:
Know where to see how budget is being distributed across your campaigns.
Understand what underspenders, overspenders and unassigned budget are telling you.
Know what to do when you add or pause campaigns within an optimised portfolio.
Checking the budget optimisation adjustments
Go to the Budget Optimisation section to check on your latest adjustments. You can also use the calendar to look at past adjustments made by BooksFlyer. Below are some of the things the dashboard may be telling you:
Do I have a lot of underspenders? If so, any of the following could be the cause:
Low bids. You can create a simple manual rule to increase bids by 4 cents for targets with fewer than 5 clicks and see if this helps the ad spend increase.
Targets with low visibility. Your keywords or ASINs have very low visibility, so they are barely clicked on. The ad spend will remain low even if you increase the bids.
Non-profitable targets. After optimising your campaigns, there may be some where most of the targets are simply not profitable, in which case their bids will have been lowered to the minimum. This will likely drop the ad spend below the daily budget if those targets need a higher bid to keep spending.
Do I have a lot of overspenders? Not to worry: we'll optimise the bids in these campaigns over time, and in the meantime the budget will go to better performers instead.
Do I have freed-up budget that hasn't been assigned? This is budget you can use to create new campaigns. Make sure you create different campaigns from the existing ones because that usually means the existing ones are not performing great.
As for the overperformer campaigns, if they are either a category, auto or expanded-ASINs campaign, make sure the search terms in it are not mostly your own if you don’t want most of your budget to go towards your own terms.
Give BooksFlyer two to three months to optimise your bids and your campaigns' budgets. If you keep getting underspenders after this period, either the campaigns are not relevant for your book, or Amazon Ads may simply not be working for that book at the moment.
Adding or pausing campaigns
If you add new campaigns and want their budget to be optimised, make sure you add them to their corresponding portfolios. The portfolio's daily ad spend will be increased once we detect new campaigns in it.
If you pause campaigns and would like the allowed daily budget to decrease for a specific portfolio, please adjust it in the Portfolio section.
Make sure you monitor and adjust your bidding rules
Just in case you skipped it, this article explains how to monitor and adjust the bidding rules, as this will determine the campaigns' results.
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