This page lists existing rules, and allows you to add new rules and edit existing ones. To assign a rule to campaigns so that they take effect, use the Campaigns screen.
Creating a new Rule
Click the “Add Rule” button to create a new rule.
Editing an existing Rule
Click the name of a rule or the ‘Edit’ icon next to each rule to open the editing panel for a rule.
- On/Off Style: whether the rule simply pauses or unpauses the assigned campaigns, or sets the daily budget to a percentage of the original value.
- Checked – the campaign is paused or unpaused, based on the toggles you define for each period. When paused, it can be assumed that no targets in the campaigns will engage in bidding in the Amazon PPC ecosystem, and will incur no spend.
- Intelligent scaling – this will engage an intraday scaling algorithm to control the daily budget of your campaigns, which is described in more detail below. Leave this option off to simply enable or pause your campaigns, with no change to the daily budget value.
- Unchecked – each period is assigned a percentage value, indicating the percentage of the original daily budget that will be assigned to the campaign’s daily budget value during that period. For example, you may want 20% of the daily budget between midnight and 6am, 100% from 6am until 10pm, and 20% from 10pm until midnight. This does not guarantee that the budget will be spent, as Amazon’s bidding algorithms are still in charge of actual target bidding operations. A poorly performing campaign may underspend for reasons outside of the scope of the day parting rule. It is possible to assign percentage values that total more or less than 100%, so if you want to supercharge your campaigns to a greater budget than the normal daily budget between certain hours you can do so. The “> 100%” button for each day will normalize the current percentage values so that they do total 100%, as a convenience. To aid in assessing the impact, below the chart is a “Fixed” budget amount that is used to show an estimate of how much of that budget would be allocated to each period, for example if the “Fixed” budget is set to $100, and a period has a ratio of 50%, then that period will show $50. You can change the “Fixed” budget to any value, it is purely for informational purposes and has no impact on the rule’s operation.
- Checked – the campaign is paused or unpaused, based on the toggles you define for each period. When paused, it can be assumed that no targets in the campaigns will engage in bidding in the Amazon PPC ecosystem, and will incur no spend.
- Color: a purely cosmetic aid to help you organise your rules at a glance. This has no operational effect but can be useful on the Campaigns screen to see which rule is assigned to a campaign.
- Dry Run: when set, the day parting rule will calculate its intended action, and record a log in the Reports screen, but make no changes on Amazon. This can be useful to double check what a rule would do over time before enabling it, by turning off Dry Run.
Each day is represented as a vertical 24 hour day, divided into periods. Hover the mouse over each day to highlight the ‘+/- icons for each time period. To add a new divider between time periods, click the “+” button to split the period in half. Periods can be resized by dragging the control between them. To collapse two periods into one, click the ‘-‘ button on the divider.
You can copy the setup of one day to the others using the ‘Copy’ button next to each week name.
Make any changes required, and make sure to click Save when finished.
Intraday Scaling
This solves the problem that Amazon is managing your budget allocation behind the scenes, assuming your campaign is enabled all day. If you have a $100 budget, Amazon will allot bid budgets according to that $100 in order that the full $100 is spent during the day, according to historical bid spend throughout the day. Day parting naturally breaks this system, because if your campaign is configured to only be enabled for part of the day, say 12 hours between 6am and 6pm, then Amazon will see it become enabled at 6am, plan to use the allocated $100 budget by midnight, and by the 6pm cutoff time that we will disable the campaign it is very unlikely that the full $100 will have been spent.
In order to combat this effect, Intraday Scaling increases the daily budget value from $100 to a higher value, using a scaling algorithm that respects actual hourly spend, to try to ensure that by the cutoff time of 6pm the expected $100 budget has been used. This may mean the the actual daily budget of the campaign will be set to $150, $200, $300 etc, in order to force Amazon to bid on the associated keywords and thus use the budget. As the budget is used, the increased daily budget value is decreased, and once the $100 expected daily budget has been used, the campaign is paused.
The scaling algorithm is applied hourly, because this is the frequency of data that Amazon provide via the AMS (Amazon Marketing Stream) of real-time data.
The exact operation of this algorithm will depend on your campaigns’ activity and the time periods you define in your day parting rule. We’d recommend that you use it with large single periods, e.g. 6am to 6pm, and not with a very broken set of time periods, such as 6am-8am, 10am-12pm, 14pm-16pm etc, as the hourly scaling algorithm will not be able to make reasonable adjustments.