Off Hours has always drawn one line clearly: we run your schedules, budgets and guardrails, and we leave your bids alone. As of today that line moves, on your terms. Bid adjustments are live as the fifth rule type, and they step keyword and target bids up or down on each target's own trailing ROAS. Small moves, a cooldown between them, a ceiling you set, and every change undoable.
This post covers what a bid rule is, what it will and will not do, the settings we recommend, and how to set up your first one.
Why we built it
Launch bids are forever bids. A keyword that has returned 6x for a month is still bidding what it did on day one, and so is the one returning 1.2x. Re-bidding a few hundred 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.
The usual fix is a bid algorithm: hand the whole account to something that re-bids everything overnight on logic you cannot read. We did not want to build that, and most of the sellers we talk to do not want to buy it. So we built the thing in between: a rule you write, in a sentence, that moves one bid one step at a time.
What a bid rule is
A bid rule reads like this: if 14-day ROAS is at or above 5x with four or more orders, raise the bid 10%, at most once every 7 days, never above $2.50.
Every part of that sentence is a field you set.
- Direction. 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.
- Trigger. A ROAS threshold over a 14 or 30 day window, plus a minimum number of orders and clicks so a single lucky sale cannot move a bid.
- Step. A percent (1 to 50%) or a fixed amount, like three or five cents. The fixed amount suits accounts where bids sit under a dollar.
- Cooldown. How often one target may move. Seven days is the default, so one change has time to show up in the numbers before the next.
- Ceiling or floor. Required. A raise rule will not save without a ceiling, a lower rule will not save without a floor, and the bid never crosses it.
- Which targets. Keywords (broad, phrase, exact), product targets, auto targets, or any mix, across the campaigns you pick.
Recommended settings
Four starting points ship in the rule builder. Pick one, set your ceiling or floor, and adjust from there.
If you are choosing between percent and a fixed amount: 10% of a $0.40 bid is four cents, which is fine, but 10% of a $3.00 bid is thirty cents, which is a bigger jump than most people want weekly. Use the percent step for accounts with bids in a similar range, and the fixed amount when a few outliers would otherwise move too far too fast.
What it will not do
Most of the design work went into the limits.
- It will not move a bid twice in a cooldown. One step per target per window, no matter how good the numbers look.
- It will not cross your cap. A target that reaches the ceiling or floor stops there. You get one email naming it. Raise the cap and the rule keeps going; leave it and nothing happens.
- It will not re-bid the account overnight. It moves only the targets that cleared your trigger, by your step, and logs each one with the bid it replaced.
- It will not move a bid it cannot see. Every morning's run reads the live bid from Amazon before stepping it, so a change you made by hand yesterday is the starting point, not something to be overwritten.
- It will not email you per change. You hear from a rule once, the first time it changes a real bid, and once per target when one reaches your cap. The running count lands in your Monday report.
And if you disagree with a change, undo it. Every change on the Bid Adjustments page 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.
Setting up your first rule
From the dashboard, open Bid Adjustments in the sidebar and choose New bid rule.
- Pick the account and the campaigns. All campaigns, or a selected set.
- Choose a starting point. We would start with Scale winners.
- Set your ceiling. Look at the highest bid you would be comfortable paying for a keyword that is clearly earning it, and put the number there. It is yours to raise later.
- Read the preview. As you edit, the panel on the right runs the rule against your own last 14 days and tells you how many targets it would move today, with a few named examples. Nothing changes until you save.
- Save. The rule runs each morning once the day's targeting report lands, and the first time it changes a real bid you get one email saying so.
Give it two weeks. If the winners it picks are the ones you would have picked, add a Trim losers rule with a floor. If they are not, tighten the trigger: more orders, a higher ROAS, a longer window.
Where it fits with the other four
Bid rules move a lever the other rule types never touched. Dayparting decides when campaigns run. Budget and event rules decide how much they can spend. Performance rules react to campaign-level ACoS and spend. Bid rules move the base bid on individual keywords and targets. Different inputs, different outputs, no conflicts, and the rule types overview now covers all five.
One thing worth knowing: a performance rule can adjust placement multipliers (Top of Search, Product Pages). Those stack on top of the base bid rather than fighting it, so if you run both, read them together.
Frequently asked
Is this a bid algorithm?
Which ad types does it cover?
Does it cost extra?
Bid adjustments are live today for every Off Hours account. Start a free 14-day trial, no credit card required, and set your first ceiling in about 90 seconds.