5 AdBrew rules every Amazon advertiser should be running
Setting up and optimising Amazon campaigns properly takes hours every week. You've got to check your bids, clear out the search terms that aren't working, move your best keywords into the right campaigns, and keep an eye on which hours of the day actually sell. Most small teams just haven't got that time, so the work that keeps an account efficient never gets done. Bids stay on Amazon's default setting, search terms that stopped converting a month ago are still running, your best keywords sit in the wrong campaign, and budget gets spent at 3am when nobody's buying. None of that is because the campaigns are bad; it's simply that there's no one with the hours to stay on top of them.
AdBrew is built to close those gaps for you, automatically. The catch is that it only works once you switch the right things on. Plenty of accounts we take over are paying for a tool that's barely doing a third of what it could.
If you haven't used it, AdBrew is a management and automation platform for Amazon Ads. It sits on top of your Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns and takes on the bidding, budgets, negatives and reporting that would otherwise take up hours of your time every week. We've run it across every one of our clients who trade on Amazon for a couple of years now, and it's earned its keep.
So here are the five rules we set up first on any account we run through AdBrew. Each one pays for itself, and AdBrew makes them quick to switch on. Get all five running and your account starts working harder for you.
We run Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) for apparel, beauty and skincare brands, so the examples below come from real accounts. They're anonymised, but the numbers are real.
One quick definition before we start, for anyone who doesn't live in this stuff: ACOS means Advertising Cost Of Sale. It's the percentage of your sales that you spend on ads. Lower is better, higher is worse. That's the number most of these rules are there to protect.
Rule 1: Set every campaign's bidding on purpose
The rule: No campaign stays on Amazon's default "dynamic bids, up and down". If keeping ACOS under control matters more than chasing volume, put it on Down Only (there are times when we want to be aggressive, but its a good rule to start with, you can always change it later if you need to, see below).
Why it matters: "Up and down" lets Amazon raise your bid by up to 100% on a click it thinks will convert. On a tight-margin product, that's how a campaign quietly drifts to a 60% ACOS without you touching a thing. Down Only still lowers your bids on weak placements, but it never inflates them. You keep the savings and lose the nasty surprises.
There are times when up and down is a good idea. Launching a new product, for instance, when you want to win every click that might convert while you build up sales, rankings and reviews, or running a healthy-margin hero that has room to scale. As a first step on most accounts, though, Down Only is the safer place to start. You can always loosen it later, once you can see the numbers.
How AdBrew helps: the Dashboard's Issues & Opportunities panel spots this for you and flags "high-ACOS campaigns not on Down Only" as a live to-do. This is one of the many things AdBrew does really well. It points you straight at the quick fixes that matter, instead of leaving you to hunt through the account for them. Set the change at campaign level, or bake it into a Rule Set so every new campaign inherits it on its own.
Example (illustrative): one skincare brand we run had three campaigns sitting on default bidding and drifting past a 60% ACOS. Moving them to Down Only lifted the return from roughly £1.60 to £2.90 back for every £1 spent, inside a fortnight. Same ads, same budget, better rule.
Quick check:
✅ No live campaign is on default "up and down" unless you chose it on purpose.
Rule 2: Read your search terms every week and cut the losers
The rule: Every week, look at what shoppers actually typed to find your ads, and add negatives for the terms that spend without selling.
Why it matters: auto and broad campaigns keep paying for loosely-related searches until you tell them to stop. Left alone, that's the single biggest source of wasted spend in most accounts.
How AdBrew helps: open Search Terms to see the raw report of what people typed. Then let N-Grams do the heavy lifting. An N-Gram is simply a single word, or a short run of words, taken from a search term. AdBrew's N-Grams tool breaks all your search terms down into those words and shows you how each one performs, so instead of reading every line one by one, you see the data grouped by word. Block it once and it's gone. Better still, switch on a Negative automation rule. AdBrew then watches the search terms for you and adds a negative the moment a term spends more than the limit you set with no sales behind it. The obvious waste gets blocked the day it happens, not the next time you remember to look.
Example: on one account, a single search term had quietly taken £53 in clicks with not one sale to show for it. One negative keyword, added once, stopped it for good. Do that across a whole account, week after week, and the savings stack up fast.
Quick check:
✅ Search terms reviewed in the last 7 days.
✅ A negative automation rule switched on, so wasteful terms get blocked on their own.
Rule 3: Graduate your winners from auto to manual
The rule: When a search term proves itself in an auto campaign, move it into a manual campaign where you set the bid yourself. Don't leave winners buried in auto.
Why it matters: auto campaigns are for discovery. Once a term is selling, you want a deliberate bid and match type on it, not Amazon's best guess. This is the other half of Rule 2. Cut the losers, and promote the winners.
How AdBrew helps: Target Movement does the graduation for you. It moves proven targets between campaigns and match types on rules you set, for example "three orders at under a 30% ACOS, move it to the manual exact-match campaign". You set it once, and it harvests your winners while you sleep. Doing this by hand across a busy account is a chore most people skip. AdBrew makes it automatic.
Example: on one account, a hero product's best-selling search term was promoted out of auto into exact match, with the bid set to its breakeven point. Within a month it was one of the most efficient lines in the account.
Quick check:
✅ Target Movement rule live, so proven terms don't get stuck in auto.
Rule 4: Give the automation a real target, per product
The rule: Don't hand AdBrew one blanket ACOS target for the whole account. Set a target for each product, based on its margin.
Why it matters: a hero product on a healthy margin can afford a higher ACOS to win its category. A small-margin product can't. One account-wide settings will overspend on some products and starve others of the budget they deserve.
How AdBrew helps: Product Goals lets you set a revenue and ACOS target for each Amazon product (each ASIN, or Amazon Standard Identification Number) and feeds those targets straight into the automation. The rules then work to each product's own breakeven point, not a one-size-fits-all guess. Pair it with bid floors and caps so nothing runs away. It's a simple idea, and AdBrew makes it easy to run across every product at once.
Example: on one account, splitting a single account-wide target into per-product targets let the strong margins push harder and the low ones pull back, and the blended return improved without increasing total spend.
Quick check:
✅ Every hero product has its own target, set from its margin, not a single account number.
Rule 5: Advertise on your clock, not Amazon's
The rule: If your sales clearly cluster at certain hours or days, pull your bids back when they don't convert. This is dayparting.
Why it matters: most accounts spend fairly evenly around the clock, but they don't sell evenly. Paying full bids at 3am, when almost nobody buys. Dayparting helps to optimise your campaigns for the most profitbale times of the day.
How AdBrew helps: this is where AdBrew's Hourly Performance dashboard really shines. It shows you exactly when your sales happen, and you can flip between metrics like Sales and ACOS to see which hours and days are the most efficient to bid on, and which ones are quietly wasting money. Once you can see the pattern, Dayparting lets you set an hourly bid, budget, or placement change to match it. And you don't have to fill in all 168 hours by hand. AdBrew lets you upload a simple comma-separated values (CSV) file to apply your whole weekly schedule in one go. Start small, then widen it once you trust the pattern.
Example: take one account's live schedule. Overnight, from 11pm to 5am, bids drop to an average of about 0.63x, which pulls spend in those quiet hours down by roughly 37%. At the deadest point, around 3am, bids are cut by about 60%. Then in the daytime, when the sales actually come in, bids run up to 1.3x. Same budget, aimed at the hours that pay.
Quick check:
✅ Checked Hourly Performance, flipping between Sales and ACOS.
✅ Dayparting schedule live, uploaded as a CSV, if the pattern is clear.
The rule behind the rules
Automation does the graft. It doesn't do the thinking. Every one of these rules gets a human check before and after it goes live. We read what changed in AdBrew's Change History, we sense-check it against what we know about the account, and we report performance back to the client in spend-to-sales bands first, rather than a raw ACOS number on its own. AdBrew gathers and acts. We decide.
That's the balance we'd recommend to anyone: let the tool do the heavy, repetitive work it's brilliant at, and keep a person on the judgement calls.
Run Amazon ads and not sure which of these you've actually got switched on? That's the first thing we check when we take on an account. Get in touch, or see how we run Amazon PPC.
