“Decrease by 10% if ACOS is over target” is a guess wearing a rule’s clothing. At 500% ACOS it takes months to arrive, and running it twice in a week compounds an error you never chose. This calculates the exact bid instead — from revenue per click, in one move — and tells you which of its own formulas are safe to run again tomorrow.
Target CPC = RPC × Target ACOSSorts every keyword and product target into one of four categories, then applies the formula that category needs.
The standard Sponsored Products bulk file — the same export the other tools take.
Bulk operations export with performance data included — .xlsx or .csv
Parsing rows…
It is the industry default, and almost every part of it is arbitrary.
Nobody can tell you. It is not derived from your margin, your conversion rate or your revenue per click. It is a number that sounds cautious, applied to accounts that have nothing in common.
Cutting ten percent at a time from five times your target is a long walk. The maths can tell you the right bid immediately, and every week spent walking there is money spent at the wrong bid.
Percentage rules step from the current bid, so running one twice in a week applies it twice. Ten percent a day halves a bid inside a week on data that never changed.
Most people apply the percentage to the bid. The bid is a status — whatever it happens to be set to. The CPC is what actually happened. Calculate from the data, not the setting.
Your cost per click should be a calculated percentage of your revenue per click. Everything else is that idea in context.
Target CPC = RPC × Target ACOS. A keyword making $100 on 10 clicks has an RPC of $10, so at a 30% target its bid is $3.00 — reached in one move rather than eleven weekly cuts. And because the formula recalculates from the file instead of adjusting whatever the bid currently is, the same data always produces the same answer.
Categories 1 and 2 recalculate from data: run them hourly if you like, the output only moves when the data does. Categories 3 and 4 step up from the current bid, so running them twice applies them twice. The tool asks when you last optimized and locks the compounding half until a week has passed. No other free tool draws this distinction, and it is the one most likely to cost you money.
Archiving everything with $20 spend and no sales treats a $200 product like a $15 one. Instead: Target CPC = Target ACOS × (AOV ÷ (clicks + 1÷CVR)). The bid steps down on its own as non-converting clicks accumulate — $0.36 at fifteen clicks, $0.30 at twenty — so the target keeps trading until it has spent about one target CPA, then prices itself out.
One click and one sale on a $20 product implies a $6.00 bid — a bet that a 100% conversion rate holds at thirty times the current CPC. So low-data targets inherit from the ad group, then the campaign, then the account, and every row is labelled with the level it used. Borrowed numbers are marked as borrowed.
Anything within 10% of your target is left alone and counted. Constantly adjusting keywords that are already working buys volatility, and you are not only paid to optimize — you are paid to know when not to. Most tools generate a recommendation for every row, because a longer list looks like more value.
A 96% ACOS on $450 of spend outranks 400% ACOS on $12, always. And when the correct bid is further away than one cycle’s cap allows, the tool shows both numbers and how many cycles it will take — rather than quietly capping and letting you believe you are done.
Keyword and Product Targeting rows — their bids, clicks, spend, sales and orders — plus ad group and campaign rows for the data hierarchy. A settings-only export has bids but no performance, and there is no revenue per click to calculate from.Operation set to Update, the Bid column carrying the new value, and every other field copied verbatim from your own file. IDs are written as text so 15-digit values survive Excel. Review it before submitting, as with any bulk upload — then send it through Bulk operations.The complete method this tool implements — every formula, every edge case.
Read the guide → ToolThe other half of the system. Bids and placements have to move together.
Open the tool → GuideWhere bidding sits in a full account review, and what to check first.
Read the guide → ToolEdit and validate the changes before you upload them.
Open the tool → ToolScore the whole account before you start moving individual bids.
Open the tool → AllThe full set, grouped by the stage of work they belong to.
Browse tools →The formulas handle eighty percent of the work. The rest — date range selection, when to hold, when to push — is judgment, and that is what you are actually hiring.