Nobody re-bids 400 keywords by hand, so the ones that keep converting sit at the bid they launched with. Bid adjustment rules step each keyword or target up or down on its own trailing ROAS: small moves, a cooldown between them, and a ceiling you set.
A keyword that has returned 6x for a month is still bidding what it did on day one. The one returning 1.2x is too. Re-bidding hundreds of targets by hand is a Sunday nobody gets back, so it does not happen, and the account quietly under-bids its winners and over-bids its losers.
Keywords and targets in a mid-size Sponsored Products account, each with its own bid and its own results. Nobody re-reads all of them, so most keep the bid they were born with.
How long a launch bid typically survives: indefinitely. The results moved weeks ago. The bid did not, because moving it meant a spreadsheet.
The only pace a bid should move. Ten percent, a week apart, never past your cap. Not a black box re-bidding the whole account overnight.
One OAuth handshake through the official Amazon Ads API. Off Hours reads every keyword and target in your Sponsored Products campaigns, with each one's daily results.
Raise bids on winners, or lower bids on losers. One rule moves one way, so a rule can never argue with itself. Run a raise rule and a lower rule side by side if you want both.
Ten percent, or a fixed amount like five cents. How often one target may move. And the ceiling or floor the bid never crosses: required, in your account's currency, yours to raise later.
Each target on its own trailing ROAS, orders and clicks. Lowering rules read only days whose attribution has settled. One step per target per cooldown, every change logged with the bid it replaced.
A morning's run as the rule sees it. Two winners stepped up, one loser stepped down, one held because it moved last week, one sat on your ceiling, one did not have enough orders yet.
Dynamic bidding can shade a single auction up or down on Amazon's guess about that one impression, and the bid you typed on the keyword stays exactly where it was. Nothing in the console reads a target's month of results and moves its bid for you. Off Hours does, in both directions: winners win, losers get trimmed, and every step is one you wrote.
A target holding 5x or better on real order volume earns a raise. Ten percent a week, up to your ceiling, so the keywords already paying for themselves get more of the auction.
A target that has settled under 2x on enough clicks to judge gets its bid stepped down. Same pace, same log, down to your floor. It keeps its place in the account and stops overpaying for it.
Some targets never convert. A lowering rule walks them down to your floor one step at a time, where they cost pennies and stop dragging your ACoS. Every step is in the log, and undo puts it back.
Black-box bidders promise to optimize and ask you to trust them. A bid rule is a sentence you wrote: if this, then that much, this often, never past here. You can read it, undo it, and turn it off.
A keyword is judged on its own trailing ROAS, orders and clicks, not the campaign average. The exact-match winner and the broad-match drag in the same ad group get different answers, because they earned different answers.
Every raise rule has a ceiling and every lower rule has a floor, required before you can save. A target that reaches it stops, you get one email naming it, and raising the cap is a single field edit if the results still say go.
Ten percent, or a few cents, once per cooldown. A week between moves lets one change show up in the numbers before the next. No target moves twice in a cooldown, and no rule moves a bid it cannot see a live value for.
Amazon keeps crediting sales for 14 days after a click. Lowering rules read only days whose attribution window has closed, so a slow converter is never trimmed for sales that simply have not landed yet.
Bid rules move the base bid on individual targets. Dayparting, budget, event, and performance rules handle when campaigns run, how much they spend, what is special this week, and what went wrong. Different levers, no conflicts.
Each change stores the bid it replaced. Undo writes it straight back to Amazon and marks the change reverted in your change log. No per-change emails; your Monday report carries the count, with a few named examples.
As you write a bid rule, the form runs it against your own last 14 days and tells you how many targets it would move today, and by how much. Nothing changes until you save it.
Most accounts live at one of two extremes: bids nobody has touched since launch, or a bidder that moves everything nightly on logic nobody can read. A bid rule is the third option: a small, legible move you defined, on a pace you set.
A bid adjustment rule watches each keyword, product target or auto target in your Sponsored Products campaigns on its own trailing ROAS and steps its bid up or down when the numbers say so. You set the direction, the step (a percent or a fixed amount), how often one target may move, and a ceiling or floor the bid never crosses. Every change is logged with the bid it replaced and can be undone.
No. A bid algorithm decides bids for you on logic you cannot read. A bid rule is a sentence you wrote: if 14-day ROAS is at or above 5x with 4 or more orders, raise the bid 10%, at most once a week, never above $2.50. It moves one step at a time, stops at your cap, and tells you once when it gets there. You can read it, undo it, and turn it off.
Because the bid you set at launch was a guess, and the keyword has since proved itself. A target returning 5x on four or more orders over 14 days is winning fewer auctions than it could, because competitors bidding on the same term have moved and your bid has not. Raising it in small steps, only while the results hold, gets a proven target more impressions and more of the sales it is already earning. The ceiling means it never pays more for a click than you decided that keyword is worth.
Yes. A lowering rule is the mirror image: when a target's settled ROAS sits under your threshold on enough clicks to judge, lower the bid 10% or a few cents, once per cooldown, never below the floor you set. Amazon's dynamic bidding shades individual auctions in the moment, but the bid you set on a keyword never moves on its own. Off Hours moves it, in small logged steps, when a month of results says it should. That is the half of bid management that saves money. Lowering rules read only settled days, so a slow converter is never trimmed for sales Amazon has not credited yet. Run a raise rule and a lower rule side by side and the account moves both ways on its own.
Each target's own clicks, orders, spend and sales over the window you pick, 14 or 30 days, from Amazon's settled daily reporting. Rules that lower bids read only days whose 14-day attribution window has closed, so a target is never trimmed for sales Amazon has not credited yet. Rules that raise bids use every measured day and require a minimum number of orders and clicks before they act.
The rule stops moving that target and emails you once, naming it. If performance is still strong you can raise the ceiling and the rule keeps stepping up from there; if that is as far as you want to go, there is nothing to do. The same applies to the floor on a lowering rule. There are no per-change emails; the weekly report carries the running count.
Yes. Every change stores the bid it replaced. On the Bid Adjustments page each recent change has an Undo button that writes the previous bid straight back to Amazon and marks the change reverted in your change log. Pausing or deleting a rule leaves bids where they are; undo is how you walk one back.
No. They move a different lever. Dayparting decides when campaigns run, budget and event rules decide how much they can spend, performance rules react to campaign-level ACoS and spend, and bid rules move the base bid on individual keywords and targets. A performance rule can also adjust placement multipliers; those stack on top of the base bid rather than fighting it, so the two are worth reading together.
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