Using SplitMetrics Acquire, you can automatically lower or increase the CPT bids for your campaigns at a certain time or for a certain period.
The most frequent case for business apps, for example, is decreasing bids during the weekend and increasing them back up during the weekdays. For games, it can be vice versa.
Below, you will find instructions on how to create these types of rules in SplitMetrics Acquire. If set up correctly, they will save you a couple of hours 🕙 a week for sure.
👉 A few important notes before getting started:
The rules are applied based on the organization's timezone — the timezone of your account. This means if your account timezone is Vancouver, for instance, the rules will be applied based on the Vancouver timezone. Take this into account when creating rules for different storefronts. You need to separate the campaigns correctly and convert the time of these campaigns when setting up rules. A good tool for that is https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html.
You might need to select a different day for some storefronts because of the time difference.
Use the duplication option to save your time.
Here are the workflows for the US and UK storefronts in the example of the Vancouver time zone.
US Campaigns storefront
1. On the Campaigns level, filter out the campaigns by storefront(-s): select the "Storefront contains any" filter.
2. Choose the necessary campaigns by selecting the corresponding checkboxes.
3. Click Rules > Create rules for keywords.
The dialog for creating an automated rule for all your US campaigns will appear.
4. In the Action section, select Change keywords bids > Decrease by and specify value or percent. We set "5%" as an example.
5. Clear the Limit action frequency checkbox and select the Lower bid limit checkbox (We recommend specifying the lower bid limit to ensure the bids won't get too low once the percent decrease is applied).
6. Leave the date range as it is.
7. In the Run frequency section, select Weekly, Every week, the desired day, and time. In the example below, we select Sunday. If you want to apply the rule to the whole weekend, select Friday or Saturday.
8. Enter the rule name.
9. Click Create the rule.
Now, you can create a new rule to return to the initial parameters (to increase the bid in our case) after the weekend.
10. Go to Automation. Select the rule, and click the Copy rule icon.
11. The same rule with a "copy" word in the name will appear.
12. In the duplicated rule, click the Edit rule icon.
13. Change the action to Increase by and set the new value using any percent change calculator. When creating the first rule, we decreased the bid by 5%, so we have to increase it by 4,67% now to return to the previous parameters.
14. Change Run frequency. If you want to increase the bids back by Monday, select Monday and 12 AM.
15. Click Save changes.
Note. Don't forget to specify the upper bid limit or clear the box.
16. Click the rule’s name to quickly change it by the inline edit and unpause (enable) the rule.
The rules will appear on the dashboard.
💡 Tip. You can also simply create all the rules and then make bulk changes to their status. To do this, select the rules and click Actions > Enable.
UK Campaigns storefronts
1. For other storefronts, just duplicate the rule.
2. Click the text in the Apply to column.
The dialog shows the campaigns that the rule is applied to.
3. Clear the US campaigns checkboxes.
💡 Tip. You can also click Clear All in the upper-right corner or double-click the checkbox next to the app name.
4. Enter "UK" in the search field.
5. Select the checkboxes of the necessary campaigns.
6. Click Done.
7. Click Edit rule again to check Run frequency. For the rule to lower the bids for UK campaigns on Sunday morning, you need to check your organization’s timezone and compare it with the UK. You can use this world clock tool.
Thus, for the rule to run on Sunday at 12 AM UK time, we should configure it as Saturday at 4 PM.
8. Change the frequency.
9. Save the rule.
10. Change the name of the rule and unpause it on the dashboard.