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Diagnose in the right order
Before you touch bids, check four things in this exact order. One: is your listing converting at category average or better? Two: are your search terms actually relevant to your product? Three: is your bid strategy matched to your goals? Four: are your placement modifiers set to profitable placements? Fix them in order. Skipping to bid changes without checking the first three just moves the problem.
The search terms audit
Pull a 60-day search term report. Sort by spend, descending. Every search term over 5 dollars in spend with zero orders becomes an exact-match negative on that campaign. Every search term converting at 2x your target ACoS moves out to its own exact-match campaign with a dedicated budget. This one exercise typically drops account ACoS 15 to 25 percent.
Bid strategy vs bid amount
Dynamic bids down-only is your default for scaling profitably. Dynamic bids up-and-down is a launch tool, not a scaling tool, because it can burn budget fast on placements that click but do not convert. Fixed bids are what you use once you have proof a keyword converts and you just want stable spend.
Placement modifiers matter more than bids
Top-of-search converts best but costs most. Product page placements convert cheap but at lower volume. Look at your placement report and add modifiers to lean into whichever is winning for your product. A plus-100-percent modifier on product pages for a low-priced accessory item can transform account ACoS.
Match type sculpting is the finishing move
Once auto campaigns have done their discovery, your money-making structure is a broad campaign harvesting new terms, an exact campaign owning the proven ones, and a phrase campaign catching mid-funnel variations. Negatives from broad and phrase feed exact. Exact spends more on winners. That structure keeps ACoS controlled at scale.
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