Setting up budget optimisation
Once you have your metrics and bidding rules set up, the bulk of the optimisation is done. However, if you want to go the extra mile, the Budget Optimisation feature will ensure that your money is assigned to the campaigns with the best performance. This way, you won't have to worry about manually shifting budgets from one campaign to another: BooksFlyer will do it for you.
By the end of this article you should:
Understand how the Budget Optimisation feature works.
Understand how to set it up.
Understand where to see its results and how to enable/disable it at will.
The Budget Optimisation Section
The Budget Optimisation section can be found in the lateral menu. When you click on it, you’ll see information regarding the feature itself, and why it makes sense to enable it:
⚠️ Important! ⚠️ If you do not have metrics enabled, this feature won't work, so make sure you add metrics first. Additionally, this feature is not recommended until your campaigns have bidding rules in place that keep them optimised. This way, you'll make sure that budget optimisation only happens once each campaign is properly optimised on its own.
Once your metrics are added, you’ll be asked to Add Portfolios to be optimised.
Enabling budget optimisation
We optimise campaigns using portfolios. When advertising, each series/book usually has its own budget, and this depends on how profitable the campaigns advertising it are.
We assume that any book you are advertising has a few campaigns promoting it, so the budget will be adjusted only within the group of campaigns that advertise that book. This way, we avoid taking budget away from any other series/book you are advertising.
Once you click on Add Portfolios in the below section, you will be able to either add any of your existing portfolios or create a new one. If you create a new one, it will also appear on your Amazon Ads dashboard:
Either way, the minimum daily budget for a portfolio will be the sum of all its campaigns' budgets:
If you’d like the daily budget of your portfolios to be lower, make sure to lower your campaigns’ budget on Amazon Ads.
What campaigns to include per portfolio
As mentioned above, you should include all campaigns related to one series/ebook you are advertising. Avoid mixing defensive campaigns (campaigns where you are advertising to people searching for your own book) with the rest, and avoid mixing multiple formats of a book within a portfolio, because the results may be biased.
Not mixing competitor campaigns with defensive ones is the most important rule: defensive campaigns usually perform great (you are advertising your book to people already looking for you), so most of the money would shift towards those campaigns, and you'd want to avoid that.
How Budget Optimisation works
Once you save your portfolios, the following popup will show up to begin the budget optimisation:
When you click on Enable, you’ll be redirected to the Budget Optimisation section, where you will see the changes that have been made at a general level, and within each portfolio:
When you click the arrow pointing upwards in any portfolio, a dropdown will open with the information per campaign. This information per campaign can be any of the following:
New campaigns — any campaign launched within the last 30 days is left completely untouched, giving it time to gather data before being judged.
Underspenders — campaigns spending less than 90% of their daily budget have their budget trimmed down to what they actually spend, and the freed-up amount goes into the portfolio's pool.
Overspenders — among campaigns using their full budget, the weaker half by ACOR performance will donate part of their budget to the pool.
Overperformers — the stronger half by ACOR performance will receive the pooled budget, starting with the best performer, until the pool runs out.
Find below an example of each campaign type:
Safeguards keep every change measured: no campaign grows by more than 50% in a single run, budgets never drop below $1, and money only moves between campaigns within the same portfolio — never across portfolios.
The optimisation takes place once a week (or whenever you run it manually by clicking the button “Run Optimisation”). Each campaign is assessed on its ACOR over the last 30 days and its average daily spend over the last 7 days — hence why the optimisation should run weekly at least.
Disabling the feature
You can disable the automatic optimisation by toggling off the portfolio that you wish to stop optimising:
Once disabled, the feature will not run again unless you enable it. You can also delete the portfolio from the portfolios section, in which case you’d have to add it again if you wanted to run the optimisation once more.
Checking the history
Whether you keep the feature enabled or you end up disabling it for any of your portfolios, you will always have access to the history of the changes in the Budget Optimisation screen by going to the calendar, where you will see the dates where it was actually executed. You can click on them to see further details:
With this final setup, you'll be maximising our tool's ability to optimise your performance!
Now we can get to the final part— monitoring and understanding the results on your dashboard.
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