Welcome to the tutorial on how to start optimizing your ads with Adspert. You have to create at least one Performance Group, assign your advertising campaigns to it, and set a goal. We will go through the process step-by-step. Along the way, we will share some additional tips on how you can get the most out of the optimization driven by Adspert’s AI.

Before you start optimizing your campaigns, go to Criterion Hub and check Rules settings for your account. This is essential because based on the settings you will choose, they might have an immediate impact on your campaign setup.

I will guide you through Criterion Hub and its associated settings and features. But before I do, let me first explain what Criterion Hub is.

Adspert’s complimentary service is an automation that continuously harvests and suggests the best criteria for your advertising accounts: keywords, ASINs and other qualified criteria for you to target.

The only input that our advanced automation needs from you is to decide exactly how to add those criteria to your advertising campaigns – or not at all. One more important note: for the Criterion Hub features to work, your advertising campaigns need to be optimized by Adspert.

Now: let’s talk about how you can set if and how should Adspert add criteria to your campaigns.

You can do this from Criterion Hub’s Rules page.

Criterion Hub - Rules page

This is the default Rules Simplified Mode that is available for all users. In this mode you can set rules on account level. There’s also the Advanced Mode where you can create rules on campaign and ad group level but it is only available to users with the Enterprise plan. If you want to learn more about the Advanced Mode rule settings and options, check out our Help Center or just get in touch with us.

Now, back to Rules Simplified Mode. Here’s where you can see a list of all your connected advertising accounts and three actions you can choose from (Review, Add and Ignore).

First, locate the account that you would like to set up the rule action for.

Second, choose the rule action you want to apply to the selected account: Review, Add or Ignore.

Keep in mind: whatever action you choose will affect your entire advertising account, meaning all of its campaigns and ad groups.

By default, the rule action is always set to “Review”. This means Adspert’s criteria suggestions for your account appears on the Suggestions Review page and you need to approve them before they are submitted to your advertising account.

Remember, criteria stands for everything that can be bid on: keywords, products, categories, and so on.

If you choose “Add”, Adspert will automatically add all suggested criteria types to corresponding campaigns and ad groups within your advertising account.

Amazon Ads users, attention! If you choose “Add” or “Review” as your rule actions AND you have Amazon Ads Sponsored Products campaigns, Adspert will also automatically create the corresponding manual campaigns as destinations whenever needed.

Sounds like a lot to take in? Don’t worry – If you ever get stuck, click the hand icon in the upper right corner to get on-screen explanations of all elements on the page.

The Goals page is the key page to manage and view your Adspert optimization. In a nutshell, here is where you can select the campaigns you want to optimize and set and adjust your optimization goals.

To get to the Goals Page, click “Control” from the main navigation bar and select “Goals” from the drop-down.

Now we will actually start optimizing advertising campaigns with Adspert.

Before our AI can start optimizing your ad accounts from one or multiple platforms, you need to create Performance Groups, assign ad campaigns to them, and set goals. Don’t worry, I will show you how to do all that in a bit.

As a first step, let’s define …

First of all, this is an Adspert term. A Performance Group is a group of campaigns that are optimized towards a common optimization goal. This means that campaigns with a similar goal should be grouped together in a specific Performance Group. For example, if you have several campaigns to maximize the conversions or common ACoS goals, place them in one Performance Group.

If you just started using our awesome tool, we strongly advise you to create only one Performance Group per account or per marketplace, assign all your campaigns to it and let it run like that for 2-3 weeks. Why? Because like anything and anyone, also our AI needs a bit of time to learn about your campaigns - a short learning phase.

Think of our AI as your new employee. When you welcome a new team member, you probably give them some time to get their head around how things work, right?

As well as your new employee, our AI needs to learn about your campaigns, analyze the data, and figure out what's working well in your account and what's not. And just like you invest some time and let the new employee learn, we recommend you to let our AI learn as well.

In 3 short steps:

The learning phase takes around 2 weeks for Amazon, Google Ads, Bing Ads and 4 weeks for eBay Ads.

Our AI learns on its own. As long as you follow those 3 steps, you don’t need to do anything else than give it time and let it learn. Unlike with your new employee, who definitely needs some training.

Like I mentioned earlier, this learning phase setup works in about 95 % of cases. The remaining 5% applies to exceptions.

Among those, two exceptions are more common. I will present both and recommend a different learning phase setup. If your case does not apply to either, please contact us via chat or email and we will be happy to help.

The first exception is if you have connected to Adspert two or more advertising accounts AND some of them are ecommerce accounts (Amazon Ads or eBay Ads) and some are search accounts (Google Ads or Microsoft Ads). Ecommerce and Search campaigns have very different goals and costs. You simply bid on different things and also differently measure the success of those campaigns. In this case, I recommend you create two Performance Groups. Assign ecommerce-related campaigns to one and search-related campaigns to the other Performance Group.

The second exception is if you have very marketplace-specific goals or a fixed budget for two or more different marketplaces. For example, your budget for Germany is 500€ and the budget for the UK is 1000€. If you put the campaigns from both marketplaces to the same Performance Group, Adspert might allocate more budget to one of them. If you need to make sure to spend 500€ for Germany and 1000€ for the UK, then I recommend you create two Performance Groups. Assign Germany-specific campaigns to one and UK-specific campaigns to the other Performance Group.

When you let our AI learn all about your account, you get better results in the long run. Our algorithm gains more bidding flexibility. It learns faster and better about all the factors that improve the performance of your campaigns. And when the algorithm works better, it boosts the ad optimization which brings you more sales and more profits. All that happens automatically, saving your time, letting you focus on your core business and help it grow.

Click the “Create New” and follow all the steps: Campaign Selection, Name, and Goals.

A special note: there is an option that allows you to create an empty Performance Group. This is an advanced option that should be used only in special cases and we don’t recommend it to those who recently signed up to Adspert.

Click “Next” and select the campaigns that you want to optimize towards the same goal in the same Performance Group. Whichever method you use, the aim is the same: to pick out campaigns with a similar goal. Also, the default data range for the metrics is 30 days.

Further to the right there’s Filters. When you click the icon on the right, it expands or collapses the active filters on the left and an option to add filters.

After you’ve set the filters– or not –, scan through the list of available campaigns on the left. To add a campaign to the new Performance Group, click on it and it will automatically appear on the top of the list on the right under Selected campaigns. If you select a campaign by accident, you know exactly where to find it - at the top. To remove a campaign from the Selected campaigns list, click it again and the campaign will move back to the left, to the Available campaigns list.

There are “Select all” and “Deselect all” options as well. This can be especially useful if you use filters to filter campaigns and want to add or remove all campaigns from the Selected campaigns list on the right. When you are happy with the selection, click Next to move on to the next step.

Name Performance Group

Choose a unique name for your Performance Group and type it in the box.

The last step in the Performance Group creation is to set its goal. The Scenario view forecasts the possible results of the selected goal. By default, it shows the Cost per Day goal while taking into consideration the last 30 days. See how the chart changes as I click on different goals? Here is where you can play around with different goal options.

Unless you just started with Adspert! Adspert first needs to learn about your campaigns and therefore Scenario won’t show 100% reliable numbers.

In this case, follow the learning phase guidelines I explained earlier. Click “Set the goal manually” and select Cost per Day goal.

See the two drop downs in the upper left side? I will show you how to explore different combinations of goals and context. This gives you an idea what results you can expect based on your account’s historical data.

Click the drop-down under Goal.

Select a different goal type or click one of the metrics under the chart.

See how the chart changed? As you switch between goal types, the curve changes and impacts the context metrics represented on the y axis.

I strongly recommend you to choose a value that is not more than 20% lower or higher than your current value. If you would like to improve your goal by let’s say 40% don’t do it at once because it’s too big of a change. First set a 20% higher goal value, wait until the goal is reached, and then adjust it for the additional 20%.

There is another way to set a goal: simply click on a dot on the chart. Then click “Set as Performance Group goal” and proceed to the final steps.

This is the last step in the process of creating a new Performance Group - the goal confirmation page. Here you can check the goal value once more to make sure it is realistic to reach and in line with your business objectives.

Congratulations, you have created a Performance Group and started optimizing your campaigns with the help of our state-of-the-art AI! Adspert will automatically schedule the submission of initial bid changes and start working towards reaching the set goal within the next 24 hours.

If this is the very first Performance Group you have created, you will get an additional note confirming that you have kicked off the optimization.

Before we move on, I want to bring your attention to the “Yellow banner”.

If some advertising campaigns in your account are not associated with any Performance Groups, a yellow notification banner appears at the top of the Goals page. Why is this an important issue to address? Because Adspert can only optimize your campaigns if they’re assigned to a Performance Group. If a campaign is not assigned to any Performance Group, Adspert cannot optimize it. And the yellow banner warns you about all such campaigns.