What are the automation functionalities in Downstream?

Downstream has 6 core automation functionalities. Each optimizes for a different outcome:

• Dayparting: Control your spend with bid multipliers for each day of the week or each hour of the day.

• ROI Optimization: Achieve your desired ROI. Downstream's machine learning engine will work to improve this campaign's ACoS / RoAS by actively changing bids and gathering data on unexplored keywords in a campaign. Set a maximum acceptable ACoS or minimum acceptable RoAS and Downstream will target this benchmark and work to continuously improve beyond your goals. Your campaign ad spend may need to be reduced to reach your maximum ACoS / minimum RoAS.

• Sales Maximization: Maximize your sales with a budget constraint. Downstream will automatically update your campaign to spend a desired budget quota within a specific time window, and achieve the best ROI possible with the budget. You must choose a time window of at least 30 days.

• Shelf Planning: Downstream will automatically adjust your campaigns to achieve a target "digital shelf" for a single search term.

• Keyword harvesting: Downstream will automatically find customer search terms that drive sales and add them to a target campaign. You can also choose the match type of the harvested keywords. For best results, we recommend using Keyword Harvesting automation in parallel with ROI Optimization.

• Advanced Budget Control: Save time managing your budget with custom budget multipliers for each day of the week. Distribute your budget evenly by the hour to ensure your ad is being served all day.

Can I enable more than one automation at a time? 

Keyword Harvesting, Advance Budget Control and Dayparting can be turned on simultaneously with any other automation. A campaign can only have one of ROI Optimization, Shelf Planning, or Sales Maximization enabled.

Overview

Advanced Budget Control or "ABC" allows you to do more with your campaign budget. ABC has two main functions: a) setting a different campaign budget for different days of the week, and b) distribute the budget evenly through the hours of the day.

• Setting a different budget by day: Use the budget multipliers to make your base budget increase or decrease for a specific day of the week. For example, if your base budget is $100 and your multiplier on Monday is 2.0X, then each Monday will have an effective budget of $200 while automation is enabled.

• Distribute the budget evenly: Turn on budget distribution if you want to ensure that your budget is spent throughout the day. ABC will continually adjust the budget to cap your spend by each hour of the day. This will ensure that your campaign is delivering in the evening and night hours. For example, if your campaign budget is $100, turning on distribution will make it so you will spend no more than $25 or 25% of your budget by 6am (25% of the day), no more than $50 or 50% by 12pm, $75 or 75% by 6pm, and $100 or 100% by 11:59pm. For campaigns that frequently run out of budget, this will mean that instead of spending continually until the budget is expended, your budget may be exhausted each hour, but then restart at the top of the next hour. (Note: If using budget distribution, it may take up to 20 minutes for the campaign to start delivering again after the budget is exhausted within an hour.)

When to use Advanced Budget Control

Use ABC if you want to have a different budget cap by day of the week (e.g. you want to spend less on weekends), or if you want to ensure your ad will be seen in parts of all hours of the day.

Supported campaign types

ABC can be enabled on any campaign type.

Using an end date

The automation has an optional end date. If an end date is selected, you must also choose a budget to revert to at the end of the automation. We default to your current campaign budget, but you can choose to return to a different budget. The End Date is the last day of the automation, so if you were to choose Monday, 12/2/2019 as the end date, the campaign would still have its budget adjusted on Monday 12/2/2019 through the automation, but on Tuesday 12/3/2019, the automation would no longer control the campaign.

Example Use Case

ACME company wants to set up different budgets for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in advance of the big sales week known as the "Turkey 5." The Ad Manager at ACME uses ABC on Campaign A with a $100 budget to set a multiplier of 2.0X for Black Friday, 2.5X for Cyber Monday, and 1.0X for all other days. She sets the start date for Thanksgiving, 11/28/2019 and the end date for Monday, 12/2/2019. Now she knows that Campaign A will have a budget of $200 for Black Friday, $250 for Cyber Monday and $100 for the weekend in between. She also turns on budget distribution to make sure her ads are seen by afternoon shoppers.

What is the difference between "Budget", "Daily Budget" and "Active Budget"?

In the Campaigns table, you'll now see 2 budget columns, and the popover includes a third budget description:

1. Budget. This is the campaign daily budget in the absence of any automation.

2. Daily Budget. This is the total budget for the day after applying the automation multiplier.

3. Active Budget. This is a snapshot of the current max budget during automation.

For example, if your daily budget is $100 and if Saturday has a 1.5X ABC multiplier, and you have "distribute budget by hour", then on Saturdayat 12pm you will see the following:

1. Budget - $100 (The budget without automation)

2. Daily Budget - $150 (Budget times the daily multiplier)

3. Active budget - ~$75 (since it is noon, ABC will be capping the budget at 50% of the Daily Budget)

For campaigns without ABC enabled, Budget will always equal Active Budget.

Overview

ASIN Harvesting allows you to automatically identify the highest performing Product Target ASINs from selected ad groups, and place them into a new ad group of your choosing. Based on metric thresholds you provide, Downstream will copy ASINs (from your selected sources) into your target ad group.

Rules

When configuring ASIN Harvesting, you can set 1 or more "rules" for the automation to follow. For each rule you will:

1. Select one or more Product Targeting ad groups as your source.

2. Based on 1 or 2 thresholds you provide, Downstream will automatically copy ASINs that meet the threshold into a target ad group of your choosing.

3. You can exclude any ASINs from being harvested by adding them to the Exclude ASINs list.

Here is a list of each configuration:

• Search term source(s): The ad group(s) in which to look for ASINs to harvest. This is a 2-step process. Find Ad Groups in the Dropdown, then click Add Source to add them. *Note: The source can be the campaign on which you are enabling ASIN harvesting.

• Target: This Ad Group is where the newly harvested ASINS will go.

• Metric Threshold(s): Set one metric threshold, or combine two metrics using AND / OR arguments for extremely granular harvesting logic.

• Exclude ASINs: Downstream will not harvest any ASIN that you list here.

Overview

Budget Maximization allows you to set a spend requirement, or budget quota, over a period of time and Downstream will automate pacing your budget to spend your quota within the allotted time period. Downstream will also work to achieve the best ROI possible given your spend requirement. Thus, this automation seeks to achieve the maximum possible sales given a specific ad spend requirement.

Requirements

You must set a start and end date spanning a minimum of 30 days, and you must specify the amount to spend in that period.

When to use Budget Maximization

You should use Budget Maximization when your primary goal for a campaign is to spend a specific amount in a set period of time. If your main goal is profitability, then we recommend using ROI Optimization instead of Sales Maximization.

Factors considered in the algorithm

The Budget Maximization algorithm considers keyword bids, campaign budget, RoAS/ACoS, clicks, frequency of campaign running out of budget, and campaign cost and sales. The algorithm doesn't currently take into account the bid placement multiplier, or average sale price of your product.

Manual intervention on the campaign

Any manual adjustment of the campaigns while automation is running introduces additional variables into the algorithm that may have adverse affects on the automation. We recommend limiting changes to budget, keyword bids, and placement multipliers while the automation is running. If manual changes are necessary, do not worry! The algorithm will adjust over time to account for your changes.

What is Dayparting?

Dayparting allows you to specify bid multipliers by day of the week or hour of the day.

When to use Dayparting

Use Dayparting when you want your bids to be higher or lower depending on the day of week or time of the day. Common use cases for this include:

• Changing bids for certain hours of the day. For example, to avoid bidding in the early morning or to double down on the afternoon commute shopping times.

• Extending budget throughout the day. For example, reducing bids early in the morning to ensure that there is budget left for later in the day.

• Employing different bids on weekends vs. weekdays. For example, reducing bids across the board for Saturday and Sunday compared to the rest of the week.

Recommended approach

There are many ways to take advantage of Dayparting. A simple recommended use of Dayparting that may provide quick performance improvement is to reduce your bids in the earliest hours of the day, from 12am to 3am or 4am. This allows you to avoid bidding against other advertisers when few shoppers are in active consideration.

Some important notes about Dayparting

• When the bid multiplier is set to 0.00x, Downstream reduces bids to Amazon’s minimum bid of $0.02. 

• After enabling dayparting on a campaign, we recommend managing the campaign in Downstream rather than the Amazon Console for best results.

Overview

Keyword Harvesting allows you to automatically identify and begin bidding on new keywords not already found in your campaign. The automation will pull search terms from the source, and place them in the campaign on which you are enabling the automation, according to the parameters you set. The bids for newly harvested keywords are set to either a) the CPC if there is a CPC history, or b) the Amazon minimum bid of $0.02.

Rules

When configuring Keyword Harvesting or Negative Keyword Harvesting, you can set 1 or more "rules" for the automation to follow. Contained within each rule are the following configurations:

• Harvest Keywords or Harvest Negative Keywords: Before you do anything else, choose whether you are harvesting Keywords or Negative Keywords.

• Search term source: The ad group(s) in which to look for potential search terms to convert to keywords. Downstream supports multiple sources. For example, you might want to pull search terms from both an automatic campaign, and an ad group from a broad-match campaign and place the keywords in an exact match campaign ad group. *Note: The source can be the campaign on which you are enabling keyword harvesting.

• Add Harvested keywords as Negative on the Source(s): This optional field allows you to add the harvested keyword as a negative match in the source campaign. It is not an option if you choose to Harvest Negative Keywords.

• Target match type: The match type of any newly harvested keywords. For example, if you are harvesting to a campaign that you set to contain only exact match keywords, you may choose "Exact" as the target match type.

• Metric Threshold(s): By default, Downstream will harvest any search term that experiences at least 1 conversion in the trailing 2 weeks. You can adjust this threshold or select a different metric altogether. You can also combine two metrics using AND / OR arguments for extremely granular harvesting logic.

• Exclude/include text: Including Exclude text means Downstream will not harvest any keyword that contains that text string. For example, you may use Exclude text if you want to keep out branded terms from a non-branded campaign. Using Include text means Downstream will harvest keywords only if they contain that text string. For example, you may use this to harvest branded terms into a branded campaign.

When to use Keyword Harvesting

Use Keyword Harvesting if you spend time manually looking through the Search Term Reports to identify new keywords. Our automated Keyword Harvesting has the potential of saving you hours each week by automatically finding the search terms customers are typing in that are leading to positive performance for your campaigns.

Recommended approach

We recommend isolating match types in each campaign. For example, have a campaign with Broad match keywords only, and have a corresponding campaign with the same ASINs that contain exact match keywords only. Then use Keyword Harvesting to "mine" keywords from Automatic campaigns, to broad, to phrase, to exact. This strategy will allow you to maximize your reach on finding new customer search terms that could lead to sales, and will also allow you to optimize your budget over time to spend on the most efficient keywords.

How are bids set when they are pulled into an Ad Group?

Bids are set based on the average CPC of the search term in the source campaign/ad group.

Overview

ROI Optimization allows you to target a specific return on investment metric for a campaign. To use ROI Optimization, simply set a target maximum ACoS or minimum RoAS and Downstream will optimize your bids to achieve this target.

When to use ROI Optimization

You should use ROI Optimization when your primary goal for a campaign is achieving a target ACoS/RoAS or better. In other words, use this if you know the level of profitability you need to achieve, or if you are trying to continuously improve the profitability.

Recommended approach

We recommend starting by setting an ROI target about 10% better than your average performance over the previous 14-30 days and slowly ratchet your target to continuously improve.

Potential side effects

You can set any target ACoS or RoAS, but if you set an aggressive target, your campaign ad spend may need to be reduced to achieve your target. In other words, ad spend and sales may need to be sacrificed to achieve your ROI goal.

Supported campaign types

Currently, only manual, keyword-targeting campaigns are supported for ROI optimization. We are working on support for category and product targeting campaigns.

Factors considered in the algorithm

The ROI Optimization algorithm considers keyword bids, campaign budget, RoAS/ACoS, clicks, frequency of campaign running out of budget, and campaign cost and sales. The algorithm doesn't currently take into account the bid placement multiplier, but this is coming soon.

Manual intervention on the campaign

Any manual adjustment of the campaigns while automation is running introduces additional variables into the algorithm that may have adverse affects on the automation. We recommend limiting changes to budget, keyword bids, and placement multipliers while the automation is running. If manual changes are necessary, do not worry! The algorithm will adjust over time to account for your changes.

Overview

"Rulebooks" is a simple but powerful rules-based automation tool.

To create a rulebook, go to the Automation page, select the Rulebooks tab, and click "New Rulebook." Give your rulebook a name that summarizes what you're trying to accomplish, then start adding rules!

Rulebooks are comprised of one or more rules, and creating a rule is simple:

1. Name the rule

2. Select how broadly you would like the rule to be applied. You can filter out keywords by campaign, country, brand, ad type, etc. or you can select specific Keywords you'd like the rule to apply to.

3. Set the condition that will need to be met to trigger a change. For instance, you may want to lower the keyword bid on any keywords that have an ACoS of 35% over a five-day period. Select the appropriate metric, threshold (above, below, etc.) and over what time frame that standard should be applied.

4. Select an action to take if the conditions are met. Currently only percentage-based bid adjustments and pausing resources is supported, but we plan to expand this feature in the near future.

Once you have your set of rules, you can drag them above or below other rules to determine their priority. If there is a conflict, the rule higher up on the list will be applied.

When to Use Rulebooks

If you want an automation to optimize bids but you want more control than ROI Optimization provides, Rulebooks is a good solution. With Rulebooks you can specifically set how our systems updates bids.

Rulebooks can also be more flexible depending on your goals. If your campaign is young and geared towards market share, perhaps ROI isn't your primary aim. Creating a Rulebook allows you to set up a bid-adjustment automation with other objectives in mind.

Rulebooks can also be helpful for applying bid adjustments in bulk.

Can I use Rulebooks to target campaigns that have other automations running?

Yes, but there are some automation types that you should filter out because they don't work well with Rulebooks:

• ROI Optimization

• Shelf Planning

• Budget Maximization