How rules work
Your own IF/THEN over ad performance, replacing the built-in logic for the campaigns you point it at. Matches land in Suggestions — nothing reaches Amazon until you approve it there.
One exception: automate is a setting on the profile, not on the rule. When a profile is set to automate, proposals for its campaigns are accepted, approved and sent to Amazon with nobody clicking. The builder only ever creates suggest-mode rules, so check the profile before assuming a rule is just advising.
Scope lives on the profile, not the rule
A rule has no campaign picker. It acts on whatever its profile governs, and the profile’s bid and budget rails bound everything it proposes.
One live rule per kind per profile. Two bid rules over the same campaigns could propose two bids for one keyword in a single batch, and applying both leaves the second unrevertible. Ladders go inside one rule as multiple clauses.
While your rule is on it takes over that family from the built-in advisor for those campaigns. Disable it and the built-in resumes immediately. Campaigns owned by a launched AI Goal can’t be attached — the goal already sets their rules.
What each kind acts on
| Bid | Each keyword or product target. Sponsored Products only — there’s no write path to an SB or SD bid. |
| Negative | Each search term, per campaign and ad group. |
| Harvest | Each search term. Emits the promotion and its paired negation together, or neither. Needs a destination campaign and ad group ID. |
| Budget | Each campaign’s daily budget. |
Four things that aren’t obvious
- Clauses are not an ordered ladder
All of them are evaluated against every candidate and the biggest change wins — not the first match. A pause outranks any bid move; below that, the largest relative move; ties break on clause order. Overlapping clauses are fine and expected.
- Unknown is not zero
A condition on something never measured evaluates to unknown, and a clause with any unknown condition does not match. A target with no clicks has no CVR, so CVR below 5% will not fire on it — which is the point, since most targets on this account have never had a click.
- The click floor is required, not defaulted
“Only above (clicks)” is checked before the conditions, and the clause is skipped below it however the numbers read. You have to state how much evidence the rule needs.
- The window is two numbers
Lookback, minus a trailing exclusion for conversions Amazon is still attributing. What’s left has to be at least a week of settled data, and the trailing exclusion can’t be zero.
Preview, then turn it on
Preview evaluates against live data and shows every candidate, the proposed value, and which clause decided it — writing nothing. Hundreds of matches means your thresholds are loose; zero usually means the profile governs nothing, or the click floor is above anything in the account.
Rules run alongside the advisor a few times a day, not on save. A new rule fires on the next pass.
After a match
Rows appear in Suggestions naming the rule that proposed them. Dismissals stick. If the numbers move and the rule no longer stands behind a proposal, it withdraws it rather than leaving it standing.
When nothing happens
| “Profile governs no campaign” | Nothing attached, or the campaigns belong to a launched goal. |
| “Too little settled data” | Lookback minus trailing days is under a week. |
| Runs, matches nothing | Thresholds or click floor too strict. Loosen one condition at a time and preview. |
| Harvest proposes nothing | A destination ad group was archived. The whole rule stops rather than blocking terms it can’t re-home. |