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Smart Bidding

Adjusting thousands of keyword and product bids by hand does not scale, and every one of them drifts as competition, conversion rates and demand shift. Smart Bidding does that work for you. You set a destination for each campaign, a Target ACOS and a goal, and SellerJar moves each bid toward it in small daily steps.

You set the strategy. SellerJar sets the individual bids. If you are new to ACOS, read Understanding ACOS first.

Set your Target ACOS​

Your Target ACOS is the advertising cost you are willing to pay for a sale. Every bid decision is measured against it.

  • The account Target ACOS is set during onboarding and defaults to 30%. It applies to every campaign without its own value.
  • A per-campaign Target ACOS can be set inline in the Sponsored Ads Manager and always overrides the account default.

Two anchors for choosing the number:

  1. Your break-even ACOS, which is your margin before ad spend. A target at break-even means ads pay for themselves; below it, every ad sale is profitable today; above it, you are deliberately investing in rank, reviews or a launch.
  2. What the campaign actually achieves. Its ACOS over the last 30 to 60 days is what its keywords can realistically deliver right now, so it is the honest starting point.
A target the campaign cannot reach starves it

Smart Bidding takes your target seriously. Set it far below anything the campaign has ever achieved and bids keep stepping down, the ads lose their auction positions, and the campaign quietly goes dark. The optimizer did what you asked; the ask was impossible.

Tighten gradually: lower the target a few points, wait two to three weeks, confirm sales held, repeat. If a campaign's real job is growth, give it a growth goal instead of a profitability target it cannot meet.

Pick a goal​

A goal tells Smart Bidding how hard to chase sales relative to your Target ACOS. Each goal aims at a zone around your target and decides which keywords are allowed to be bid up.

GoalWhat it doesUse it forACOS zone
BalancedHolds campaigns at your target. Steps over-target keywords down, leaves proven winners alone, gives new keywords a fair chance to collect data. The default.Steady, profitable products.95 to 100% of target
EfficiencyLike Balanced with no grace band: keywords are held at or below your target, and winners are never bid up.Products where margin matters more than growth.75 to 100%
LaunchBids above target to buy visibility, and raises keywords that are working. New keywords get a guided discovery phase that steps them toward Amazon's suggested bid instead of waiting on a bid that may never collect data.A new product building its first clicks and reviews.100 to 125%
LiquidateTrades margin for unit velocity and allows more spend per keyword before pulling back.Overstock, seasonal leftovers, discontinued lines.100 to 150%
RankThe most aggressive goal. Keeps raising keywords that are still converting inside its zone, the way sustained sales velocity moves organic rank. Decisions are driven by each keyword's ACOS, never by ad position.An established product you want ranking higher, on a focused campaign.150 to 200%
Budget UtilizationA different engine: paces bids so a campaign spends its full daily budget instead of chasing an ACOS. Never lowers bids, needs a daily budget, and turns off dayparting for that campaign.Campaigns that keep going dark before peak hours.Not ACOS-based

By product stage: new product, Launch. Steady seller, Balanced. Margin first, Efficiency. Want organic position, Rank. Clearing stock, Liquidate. Budget unspent by evening, Budget Utilization.

What to expect from the growth goals. Launch, Liquidate and Rank spend more and run a higher ACOS than your target on purpose. That is the goal working. Move the campaign back to Balanced when the launch converts, the stock is gone, or organic sales carry the position.

Rank and Top of Search. Ranking is won at the top of the results page, so the first time a Sponsored Products campaign is put on Rank, SellerJar sets its Top of Search placement adjustment to 30% if it is lower than that. This happens once per campaign and the value is then yours: raise or lower it in the Placements tab whenever you like and SellerJar will not set it again, even if the campaign later leaves Rank and comes back. Campaigns already at 30% or above are left as they are. The Placement optimizer also respects this: on a Rank campaign it can raise Top of Search when that placement earns more per click, but it never suggests a value below 30%, and it never lowers a value you have set below 30% by hand. The change is logged in History Vault as Rank TOS Default and can be reverted there.

How a bid moves​

Every day Smart Bidding looks at each target's recent performance and puts it in one of a few situations. Each has its own response.

  • Over target with real history. The bid steps down gradually toward the level its results support. Cuts wait for evidence, so one expensive sale does not trigger anything, and a keyword with a healthy longer-term record is protected from a noisy short window.
  • Spending with no sales. The bid is pulled back before the spend gets out of hand. Growth goals allow more room here, because new listings often convert late.
  • New or barely seen. Small, careful raises so the target can gather data. On Launch this becomes the discovery phase.
  • Under target on a growth goal. Launch, Liquidate and Rank raise it. Balanced and Efficiency leave it alone, so your proven keywords keep their stable, profitable bids.
  • A proven keyword goes quiet. On Balanced, Launch and Rank, a keyword with real sales history that suddenly loses its impressions, usually because the auction got more expensive, is nudged back up until it is being shown again. It only goes as high as that keyword can afford at your target, and it never undoes a cut you or Smart Bidding made recently. These show in the change log as Traffic collapse raise.

The guardrails​

Every goal, including the aggressive ones, runs inside the same limits:

  • No big jumps. Each bid can move only so far per day, in either direction, whatever the data says. Growth goals cut more gently than the account's general limit.
  • A daily raise allowance per goal. Increases are funded most-proven first, so an aggressive goal cannot stampede an account's bids upward in one day.
  • Evidence before cuts. ACOS-based cuts need multiple orders of history.
  • Ceilings. Exploratory raises never exceed your Bid Ceiling setting, which is tied to your typical cost per click, or the top of Amazon's suggested range when Amazon provides one. Proven keywords are bounded by their own revenue per click instead.
  • New-target protection. Fresh targets get gentle treatment while they gather data.

Your own limits in Optimizer Settings, such as the maximum daily increase, always apply on top.

Off means static bids​

Turning Smart Bidding off is not a goal. The campaign keeps the bids it has, and SellerJar stops adjusting them until you change them or turn Smart Bidding back on. Use it when you want to manage a campaign entirely by hand.

What to expect​

Smart Bidding is deliberately gradual. It runs against a rolling window of recent performance and never makes a big jump in a single step. Plan on two to three weeks before judging a goal change; that is long enough for the adjusted bids to gather fresh clicks and conversions.

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