Everything you need to know

PPC Optimizer Pro optimizes your Amazon Sponsored Products ads from the bulk files you already download from Amazon Ads. It is built for Merch on Demand sellers: on Merch there is no product cost, only a royalty, so every bid is judged on what a click can really earn at your royalty, with returns subtracted. It never logs in to your Amazon account. You download files, the Optimizer Lab suggests changes, you review them, and you upload the finished file to Amazon yourself.

How it works in four steps

1. 1
   Download your bulk files. In Amazon Ads → Bulk Operations, download your campaigns for the last 60 days (required) and the last 30 and 14 days, one right after the other. Merch sellers add a fresh sales report (.csv).
2. 2
   Run the Optimizer Lab. Pick your marketplace, add the files and keep the recommended settings. A run takes a few minutes, about 10 with the weekly zero-impression file.
3. 3
   Review every change. The changes the Lab recommends come ticked, and every row says which rule fired and why, with its numbers. Untick anything, or type your own bid.
4. 4
   Upload it to Amazon. Download the final file and upload it in Bulk Operations. Run again in a few days: the Lab remembers what it changed and gives each change 7 days (by default) to work.

What you need

Not on Merch? You can run the Lab without a sales report: your rules still work, but the checks that need a royalty (bid limits, profit checks and bestseller suggestions) are skipped.

Creating your account

1. 1
   Click Start free trial on the homepage or go to /register.
2. 2
   Enter your full name, choose a username, add your email, and set a password.
3. 3
   Choose Monthly or Yearly billing and add a payment method to start your 7-day free trial (see Account & billing — you won't be charged until the trial ends).
4. 4
   Check your inbox for a verification email and click the link to verify your address.
5. 5
   Log in and you'll land on your Dashboard, which links to every step below.

Your first run, step by step

1. 1
   Go to Optimizer Lab in the sidebar and choose your marketplace at the top (US, UK, DE, FR, IT and ES).
2. 2
   Add your 60-day file, the 30- and 14-day files and your sales report. Never opened the Lab? The “How to get your files” guide on the page shows where each one is in Amazon Ads.
3. 3
   Keep the recommended settings and click Run the Lab. A run takes a few minutes; you can leave the page while it works.
4. 4
   Review the changes: the ones the Lab recommends start ticked, and every row explains why (see Reviewing a run).
5. 5
   Click Download final file and upload it the same day in Amazon Ads → Bulk Operations → Upload campaigns.

The Lab reads your bulk files, runs your rules on each time window, applies its safety checks, and gives you a list of changes to review. Only what you tick goes in the file you download.

Why three files

An Amazon bulk file holds one total per row for its whole date range, so the last 14 days can't be worked out from a 60-day file. The Lab runs your DAY 60, DAY 30 and DAY 14 rules on their own files and combines the answers: the most recent window decides, except that it won't cut back something that sold before unless the recent drop is real rather than chance. A missing 30- or 14-day file just skips that window; it is never estimated.

Your files

• Upload the original .xlsx bulk files exactly as Amazon exports them: don't edit column headers or re-save them in another program first. Each file can be up to 120 MB.
• Download them one right after the other. The Lab compares their bids with each other and warns you when they don't match.
• Once a week, tick “Campaign items with zero impressions” for the 60-day download, so the Lab also sees the ads Amazon stopped showing. That run takes about 10 minutes; plain files are fine on other days.
• Sales report: in Merch on Demand, download your sales report for the last 60 days as a .csv (a file named like SALES_REPORT-….csv) and add a fresh one with every run: the bid limits, Visibility Boost, profit checks and bestseller suggestions come from it. Without it the Lab falls back to sales data stored earlier, if your account has any, and otherwise skips those checks. For the UK, DE, FR, IT or ES, attach a report that includes that marketplace.
• Each marketplace keeps its own settings, run history and currency, and the Lab refuses files that belong to another marketplace.

What the Lab checks before it changes anything

• Your rules: the Rules Manager's DAY 60, 30 and 14 rules decide what to change.
• Cooldown: anything it changed is left alone for 7 days (you can change this), so every change has time to show results.
• Evidence: it won't pause or cut something that sold before on thin data.
• Bid limits from your royalty: with your sales report, no bid goes above what a click is worth at the product's price. A bid above it comes down at most 25% a run, and only where clicks cost money. You can set your own max bid per price instead, and upload a price list so a price you just raised counts before the next sale.
• Discovery: a target with no clicks may bid past its limit, because a bid costs nothing until it is clicked. Once clicks come it goes back to the limit, and a budget caps what these raises may spend.
• Pause policy: a keyword, product target or product ad that spent $1 or more in 14 days with no order in 60 days is paused (you set the amount; 0 turns it off). Nothing that ordered in the last 60 days is paused this way.
• No pointless pauses: a pause that would save nothing (no click and no spend lately) isn't suggested.

Limits

You can run the Lab up to 3 times in any 24 hours, one run at a time, across all marketplaces. When the server is busy, your run waits in line and starts on its own; the page shows your place in line.

Every setting starts at its recommended value and is saved to your account as you change it (per marketplace). Change one only when you know why; Reset to recommended in Advanced settings puts them back.

Main settings

Designs to keep paused

A list of ASINs the Lab never switches on: no rule, suggestion, new campaign or “Select all” button can enable them. It is kept on the server, so every browser and every run honours it.

Advanced settings

When a run finishes, the page shows a summary first: how many changes go in the file, how many need your decision, and the changes by kind (bid cuts, raises, pauses, placements, new campaigns). Below it is the review table.

• Recommended changes start ticked; untick any you don't want.
• Suggestions wait for your decision, in three groups: the Lab recommends it, it waits for the cooldown, or the Lab held it back on purpose (best left out).
• Your own value: type a bid on any row. On a row the Lab would pause, a typed bid changes the bid instead.
• Why: open a row to see the rule behind it, its numbers in each window, and anything that held it back.
• Which rows → In the file shows exactly the rows your download will hold; Left out shows the changes you didn't tick.
• The review shows 100 rows a page. The tick at the top of the table acts on the rows of that page only, and the line above the table tells you when rows on other pages are still in the file.

Downloading & uploading to Amazon Ads

1. 1
   Click Download final file: it holds only the rows you ticked, with your values.
2. 2
   In Amazon Ads, go to Bulk Operations → Upload campaigns and upload the file the same day (it is built from that day's bids).
3. 3
   Wait for the “Success” status in Amazon's upload history. Amazon applies bulk changes within a few hours, and your next run picks up from there.

1. 1
   Run the Lab every 3 to 7 days, with fresh files each time, downloaded one right after the other.
2. 2
   Once a week, use the zero-impression 60-day file so the Lab sees ads Amazon stopped showing.
3. 3
   Upload the result the same day, and keep “Save this run to history” on.
4. 4
   Don't worry about running too often: anything the Lab changed waits for its cooldown (7 days by default), so changes don't pile up on top of each other.
5. 5
   Changed something by hand in Amazon Ads? That's fine. The next run reads your current bids from the new files.

The Optimizer Lab is powered by your Rules Manager (in the sidebar), which starts with 193 ready-made rules across the DAY 60, 30 and 14 sheets. A sheet you never saved gets these default rules on your first Lab run, so you can start right away.

Each rule is defined by an entity, which match types it applies to (Exact, Phrase, Broad, product targeting and more), a campaign type filter, metric ranges (impressions, clicks, spend, sales, orders, ACOS, CTR, CVR, CPC), a formula or action, and min/max bid guardrails. You can switch any rule on or off per sheet, edit its numbers, or build your own rules from scratch.

What it does

Auto campaigns are good at finding search terms that sell, but inside an Auto campaign you can't bid on them one by one. The builder takes the search terms that already have orders at an ACoS you accept, and builds new Manual campaigns for them (Exact, Phrase and/or Broad, one campaign per match type), without duplicating targets you already have. Only Auto ad groups with a single ASIN are used.

Step by step

1. 1
   Go to Auto → Manual in the sidebar and add your bulk file.
2. 2
   Set Min Orders (default 1) and Max ACoS % (default 20%): a search term needs at least that many orders, at or under that ACoS.
3. 3
   Set the Daily Budget for each new campaign (default $5), the Max Bid (default $0.50), and the Bid Increase % per match type (Exact +10% by default) over the search term's current cost per click.
4. 4
   Choose the match types to build and click Analyze & Generate.
5. 5
   Review the results by ASIN, edit any bid, untick campaigns you don't want, and download the bulk upload file (one download per analysis).
6. 6
   Upload it in Amazon Ads → Bulk Operations → Upload campaigns. The new Manual campaigns are created there.

The free tools work without signing up: ACoS ↔ ROAS, break-even ACoS, Merch max bid, target CPC and PPC bid calculators, a campaign flat file builder, a campaign naming generator and the search term analyzer.

Search Term Analyzer

Upload a Search Term report from Amazon Ads and the tool ranks every search term by wasted spend (budget burned with few or no orders), most expensive first, so you know what to cut.

1. 1
   Upload your Search Term Report (.xlsx) at /free-tools/search-term-analyzer.
2. 2
   Review the ranked list of wasted-spend search terms.
3. 3
   Enter your email address when asked (once, to unlock the download).
4. 4
   Download the negative keyword list and add it to your campaigns in Amazon Ads.

The Dashboard is the first page you see after logging in. It shows:

• Your plan: trial, active, canceled or past due, with a button to manage or start your plan.
• Your Optimizer Lab: your latest run in the marketplace you used last, how many runs are saved, how many runs you have left today, and how long runs take right now.
• How it works: the four steps, from the Amazon download to the Amazon upload, with links to this guide.
• Quick actions: the Optimizer Lab, the Rules Manager, Auto → Manual and the How to Use guide.

The Lab reopens your latest run in each marketplace when you come back. Earlier runs are kept (encrypted, up to 100 days) so the cooldowns and comparisons work; “Clear run history” in Advanced settings removes them.

Plans

There is one plan — PPC Optimizer Pro — billed either monthly ($19.99/mo) or yearly ($149/yr, ~38% cheaper than monthly) at the launch price. Every plan includes all features: the Optimizer Lab, the Rules Manager and the Auto → Manual Campaign Builder. Changing plans only changes your billing cycle, never what you can use. On renewal, standard pricing applies ($29.99/mo or $239.88/yr).

New accounts get a 7-day free trial. A payment method is required to start it, you aren't charged until it ends, and you can cancel any time before then from Settings.

Changing your plan or payment method

Go to Settingsand use the subscription section to change your plan or update your payment method. Payment updates for past-due accounts go through Paddle's secure customer portal (linked from Settings).

Cancelling

1. 1
   Go to Settings in the sidebar.
2. 2
   Find the subscription section and click Cancel Subscription.
3. 3
   Confirm the cancellation. Your access continues until the end of the billing period you already paid for — you are not cut off immediately.

Invoices & billing history

Your Settings page has a billing history table with every billing event, its status, transaction ID, amount, and a link to the receipt or invoice where available.

Two-factor authentication (2FA)

Also in Settings: scan the QR code with an authenticator app and enter the 6-digit code to turn 2FA on; enter a current code any time you want to turn it off again.

Account security

Each account can be logged in on one device at a time. Logging in from a new device ends the previous session (you'll see a "Session Expired" notice there). Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and are never visible to anyone, including our team.

My Lab run failed

Make sure you're uploading the original Sponsored Products bulk files (.xlsx) exactly as exported from Bulk Operations — don't rename column headers, delete columns, or re-save them in Excel or Google Sheets first. If the Lab says your files look like another marketplace's, choose the right marketplace at the top of the page.

I'm not seeing any changes

Check that rules are switched on for each window (14/30/60-day) in the Rules Manager, and that your campaigns actually meet their conditions — if nothing matches a rule, nothing changes, and that's expected. Anything the Lab changed in the last 7 days also waits for its cooldown (those rows show as “waits for the cooldown”).

The file has rows I thought I unticked

The tick at the top of the table only covers the page you are on (100 rows a page). Choose Which rows → In the file to see every row the download will hold, or use Leave them out in the line above the table.

The download button isn't working

Download final file needs at least one ticked row, and every value you typed must be valid (a wrong one is marked in red). A failed run has nothing to download: fix the files and run the Lab again.

My run is waiting in line, or I reached the daily limit

When the server is busy, or another of your runs is going, your run waits and starts on its own; the page shows your place in line, and you can leave meanwhile. You can start 3 runs in any 24 hours; the Lab shows how many you have left.

I can't log in

Make sure your email is verified — check your inbox and spam folder for the verification email. Accounts work on one device at a time, so logging in elsewhere ends any other session. Still stuck? Contact support.

New to Amazon PPC? Here are the terms used in this guide and in the app.

Royalty

What Merch on Demand pays you for each sale. It replaces “price minus cost”: an ad click is only worth what it can earn in royalty.

Break-even ACOS

The ACOS at which an ad sale earns exactly what it cost. On Merch that is royalty ÷ price, much lower than for a product with a normal margin.

ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales)

Ad spend ÷ ad-attributed sales × 100. How much of your ad-driven revenue the ads cost.

TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales)

Ad spend ÷ total sales (organic + ad-driven) × 100. How much of your whole business the ads cost.

Bid

The most you are willing to pay for a click on a keyword or product target.

Cooldown

The days the Lab waits after changing an item before it may change that item again (7 by default), so each change has time to show in Amazon's numbers.

Match type

How closely a shopper's search has to match your keyword to show your ad — Exact, Phrase or Broad (from most to least strict).

Search term vs. keyword

A keyword is what you targeted; a search term is what the shopper actually typed. Broad and Phrase match can show your ad on search terms that don't exactly match your keyword.

Bulk file

The .xlsx spreadsheet from Amazon Ads → Bulk Operations, holding every campaign, ad group, keyword and target with its numbers for the date range you chose — the file the Lab reads and writes.

Zero-impression file

A bulk file downloaded with “Campaign items with zero impressions” ticked. It also lists the ads Amazon isn't showing, so the Lab can help them.

Placement

Where your ad shows — Top of Search, Rest of Search or Product Pages. You can bid a percentage higher for each placement.

Merch group (Creator, Plus, Premium)

Merch on Demand's seller groups. Plus and Premium pay more and depend on part of your sales coming from ads (your ad share), which is why the Lab can protect that share.

Negative keyword

A search you block your ads from showing for, usually because it keeps spending with no orders.

CTR / CVR / CPC

Click-Through Rate (clicks ÷ impressions), Conversion Rate (orders ÷ clicks) and Cost Per Click (spend ÷ clicks).

Auto vs. Manual campaign

Auto campaigns let Amazon choose which searches show your ad; Manual campaigns target the keywords or products you choose, each with its own bid.