Starter Rules

Starter Rules builds a full Automation set for a seller who has none yet: Bidding and Negation rules (and Import rules on Advanced), the Criteria they use, one Objective per kind of campaign, and two Dayparting rules. Everything it creates is switched off and assigned to nothing. Nothing reaches Amazon until you assign the Objectives and switch them on.

While a seller has no rules, Overview and the Rules list invite you to start it. It is always in the Rules list under Manage › Starter Rules, next to Assign Starter Rules.

It needs live ad groups and at least 14 days of Ads history. Until then it says which of the two is missing and builds nothing.

Step 1 — the numbers

Field	What it does
Target ACOS (%)	The anchor. Every ACOS threshold in the set is a multiple of it. The hint shows the ACOS your Ads actually ran at
Loss budget per target	How much a single target may lose without orders before Automation lowers its bid. Pre-filled from your account’s costs per order and per click
Lowest bid	Automation never bids below this on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (Dynamic Up & Down differs, below)
Highest bid	Automation never bids above this on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (Dynamic Up & Down differs, below)

The two bids are pre-filled from what your clicks cost when there is enough click history; otherwise you enter them.

These numbers are written into the rules themselves. They are separate from the Break-even ACOS, Target ACOS and Max bid under Product Lines, which the AI Analyst uses, and changing a Product Line later does not change a Starter rule.

The other campaign types get limits of their own:

Campaigns	Bid limits
Sponsored Products · Dynamic Up & Down	Half of your Lowest and Highest bid, because Amazon may raise these bids by up to 100%
Sponsored Display, billed per click	30% of your Lowest bid and 40% of your Highest bid
Sponsored Display · Reach, billed per 1,000 impressions	Taken from that campaign type’s own measured costs, or from your Highest bid when there are none

Step 2 — how much, and where

How Much Automation offers two presets:

• Basic stops losing targets, lowers bids that cost too much, raises bids that pay, and blocks search terms that never sell.
• Advanced adds re-enabling recovered targets, Momentum and Target ACOS bidding, more negation rules, removing negatives, and harvesting search terms into new keywords.

One of them is marked Suggested: Advanced when at least 20 of your targets reached 10 or more orders in the last 30 days, Basic otherwise. Advanced is not available on every plan; when yours does not include it, the wizard says so and Basic stays available.

Which Campaigns lists the kinds of campaign the seller runs, with an ad group count for each. Every kind you tick becomes one Objective:

Kind of campaign	Objective
Sponsored Products · your own keywords	Starter · SP Keyword
Sponsored Products · ASIN and category targeting	Starter · SP Product Targeting
Sponsored Products · Auto	Starter · SP Auto
Sponsored Products · Dynamic Up & Down	Starter · SP Dynamic Up & Down
Sponsored Brands	Starter · Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Display	Starter · Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display · Reach	Starter · Sponsored Display (Reach)

Rules that read search terms — Negation, Negation word, removing negatives and Import — go only to the keyword, Auto and Sponsored Brands Objectives.

Two Dayparting rules come with the set and are attached to every Objective. Always On runs every hour of the week. Standard Hours switches the ad groups off at 00:00 and 23:00 while the Objective’s ACOS is at or above 1.2 × your Target ACOS over both its last 30 and 60 days. Those two hours are a starting point to edit, not a measurement of your account.

Step 3 — review and create

The last step counts the Rules, Conditions and Objectives it will create and lists each Objective and Dayparting rule. Create Rules, Switched Off writes them.

The set only uses Data Windows your plan allows and your history can fill. Rules that need a longer window than your plan allows are left out, and the review says how many. With less than 30 days of history the longer windows are skipped, and the wizard warns you.

Running Starter Rules again reuses any rule whose name and settings already match. A rule with the same name but different settings is rewritten while it is still switched off and unassigned; once it has been switched on or assigned, the review names it and creates nothing until you rename or delete it. The same applies to a Starter condition whose thresholds you edited. Starter rules from an earlier run whose names no longer match are left as they are, and the review counts them.

The families it builds

Rule names carry their own settings, for example Starter [SP·SB] Explore · 14d · ≤20 Impr · ≤1 Click · 0 Ord → +$0.02.

Family	Preset	What it does
Pause	Basic	Pauses a target with at most 2 orders whose Excess Spend reaches 1.5 × your loss budget. Advanced also pauses a target that keeps converting at a high ACOS
Loss Guard	Basic	Lowers the bid of a target with at most 2 orders once its Excess Spend reaches 75% of your loss budget, and by more once it reaches the full budget
Decrease	Basic	Lowers the bid by a percentage when ACOS is at or above its threshold
Growth	Basic	Raises the bid by a percentage when ACOS is at or below its threshold
Hold	Basic	Leaves the bid alone while ACOS sits in a band around your Target ACOS — a 0% Hold
Explore	Basic	Raises the bid of a target that is getting almost no impressions
Negate · no sale	Basic	Blocks a search term that took clicks and spend without an order, or one shoppers see often but rarely click
Enable	Advanced	Switches a paused target back on when its ACOS has recovered
Momentum	Advanced	Raises the bid of a proven target whose order pace has fallen
Glide	Advanced	Target ACOS bidding with Glide, on 60 and 90-day windows
Further negation	Advanced	Converting terms at a high ACOS, terms that convert too rarely, terms that used to sell and stopped, and whole words
Unblock	Advanced	Removes a Negative Exact or Negative Phrase — see Negation and unnegate rule
Harvest and Rescue	Advanced	Import rules that create keywords for search terms that sell

Explore: the rule for targets with no traffic

Most rules only see a target that had traffic in their Data Window. Explore is built for the ones that did not. Its Criteria are at most 20 impressions, at most 1 click and no orders over 14 days, and it raises the bid by 0.02 in your currency — up to the Highest bid for that kind of campaign. It also reads every enabled target that had no traffic at all in the window, and evaluates it at zero.

It has no limit tied to average CPC, because a target without clicks has no CPC to measure against. Its cooldown is one day, so a target that stays quiet can be raised again on a later day. Its priority is below every other Starter Bidding family, so any of them that wants the same target wins.

Assign Starter Rules

Assign Starter Rules opens one section per Starter Objective, with the matching ad groups listed underneath. Ad groups that are not in any Objective are ticked for you, except those in a campaign with a placement adjustment above 20%: a placement adjustment multiplies every bid Automation sets, so those are left for you to review and tick yourself. An ad group already in another Objective is flagged and left unticked; ticking it moves it to the Starter Objective, because an ad group belongs to one Objective.

Assign each Objective with its own button, at most 2,000 ad groups at a time. You can come back and assign more later.

Assigning still switches nothing on. The rules and Objectives stay off until you enable them, and Preview Changes shows what they would do first.

Considerations

• The Objectives are created with Blacklist and Whitelist switched off. Turn them on once you have added entries. See Blacklist / Whitelist.
• The Starter numbers are a starting set built from your account’s history, not a measurement of what each rule will achieve. Read them in Preview Changes before switching anything on.
• Every Starter rule is an ordinary rule afterwards. Edit, disable or delete any of them under Rules.