Amazon has unveiled a new budget feature to help utilize unspent daily Sponsored Products campaign budgets. This can be done at the portfolio level and is used monthly.
Campaigns that are not using their entire daily budget are nothing new on Amazon, especially considering that many campaign budgets are set with the goal of staying active the entire day. The tricky part about budgeting for Amazon Ads is that traffic on Amazon in certain categories isn’t always consistent from day to day.
To give a quick example, for some categories, shoppers are much more active on the weekends than they are during the week. This new feature will help make sure your campaigns are staying active during your high-traffic days by using the leftover budgets from your lower-traffic days.
Before we get much further into this topic, I think it’s important to point out that this feature is in the beta phase and is unfortunately not available for every account at this time.
Let’s take a quick look at how to navigate to this tool to see if you have access. You have to start by pulling up your Amazon Advertising Console. Once you have your ad console up, you will need to click on the portfolio tab on the left.
Once you’re in the portfolio tab, select the portfolio with which you want to use this feature.
You will have to go to “Modify Portfolio” next:
This page is where you will be able to see if this feature is available to you at this time. If it is, your screen should look like this:
If you have access, the “Unspent campaign budget” feature will be at the bottom of the settings. Now that we know how to check to see if we have access to this tool and where to find it, let’s dive into how it works.
As I was saying above, the unused budgets from the low-traffic days can be put to use for days when traffic is high. I made a table to help visualize how this process can work within a portfolio.
There was $50 that went unused on Thursday that can now be shifted to higher traffic days. So if on Saturday, the Branded Keywords campaign hits $50 in ad spend relatively early in the day, that $50 of unused spend will automatically be made available for that campaign to keep it active longer in the day. This process will continue for the entire month. Any budget not used at the end of the month will be reset for the next month.
An important thing to note that might help ease potential concerns is that the portfolio won’t spend more than the budget it has been allocated for the month. Looking back at the example from the table, the total daily budget for those three campaigns is $150. If there are 30 days in the current month, that’s a budget of $4,500. The amount of $4,500 will not be surpassed in spending for the portfolio. The point of the feature is to take full advantage of an ad budget, not to go over budget.
Many new tools across PPC were put into place to make sure campaigns are automated to be active when traffic is high. It would be nearly impossible to manually adjust budgets daily to make this happen while staying under a monthly budget. The new unspent campaign budget feature is a great addition by Amazon to help capitalize on high-traffic days, and I hope this feature will soon be available for every account.
