Ad Automation

Overview

The Ads section enables you to create, manage, and optimize paid advertising campaigns across multiple marketplaces from NexusCommerce. Instead of logging into Amazon Campaign Manager, eBay Promoted Listings, and other ad platforms separately, you manage all campaigns in one place.

Supported ad platforms:

Key Concepts

Campaign — A collection of ad groups targeting a specific goal (e.g., launch a new product, defend a top ASIN, clear overstock). Each campaign has a daily budget cap and a bidding strategy.

Ad Group — A subset of a campaign containing specific SKUs and keyword/targeting settings.

Keyword — A search term you bid on. NexusCommerce supports exact, phrase, and broad match types.

ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) — Ad spend / ad revenue. The primary efficiency metric. Lower ACOS = better ROI. NexusCommerce shows ACOS alongside TACOS (Total ACOS = ad spend / total revenue) for a complete picture.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) — Ad revenue / ad spend. Inverse of ACOS (higher is better). NexusCommerce displays both metrics.

Auto-bidding — NexusCommerce's AI adjusts keyword bids automatically to hit a target ACOS. The bidding model runs daily and adjusts bids based on conversion rate, competition, and position data.

Getting Started

Navigate to Ads in the left sidebar.

Create Your First Campaign

1. Click New Campaign
2. Select a marketplace and ad type
3. Set campaign name, daily budget, and start/end dates
4. Select a bidding strategy (manual or auto-target ACOS)
5. Create an ad group within the campaign
6. Add SKUs to the ad group
7. Add keywords (or let NexusCommerce suggest keywords from the product listing)
8. Set initial bids (or let auto-bidding set them)
9. Click Launch Campaign

NexusCommerce pushes the campaign to the marketplace via the ad API. Campaign go-live typically takes 1–4 hours depending on the marketplace's review process.

Features

Campaign Dashboard

The campaign dashboard shows all active campaigns with key metrics:

Click a campaign to open the campaign detail view with day-by-day performance charts and ad group breakdown.

Keyword Performance

The Keyword Performance view shows all keywords across all campaigns:

• Bid, impressions, clicks, CTR, spend, revenue, ACOS
• Bid change history (if auto-bidding has adjusted bids)
• Match type (exact / phrase / broad)
• Quality score (where provided by the marketplace)

Actions:

• Pause keyword — Stop bidding on a specific keyword without pausing the entire campaign
• Adjust bid — Override the auto-bid with a manual bid
• Negate keyword — Add as a negative keyword to prevent irrelevant traffic

Auto-Bid Optimization

Enable auto-bidding on a campaign by setting a Target ACOS. The AI bidding model:

1. Reads the last 14 days of keyword performance data
2. Calculates the current conversion rate per keyword
3. Computes the max CPC that achieves the target ACOS at the current conversion rate
4. Adjusts bids up (for high-performing keywords) or down (for poor-performing keywords) by up to 20% per cycle

The model runs daily. Manual bid overrides on specific keywords are respected and not changed by auto-bidding.

Budget Management

Set daily budget caps at campaign level and (optionally) at ad group level. NexusCommerce shows budget utilization:

• Budget spent today vs. daily cap
• Estimated end-of-day spend based on current pacing
• Days remaining in campaign (if an end date is set)

Alert: if a campaign is pacing to exhaust budget by 2 PM, NexusCommerce surfaces a budget warning on the Dashboard.

Bulk Operations

• Pause / Resume — Pause or resume multiple campaigns at once
• Budget update — Increase or decrease daily budgets by a percentage across selected campaigns
• Bid adjustment — Increase or decrease all bids by a percentage (useful for peak season ramp-up)

Ad Performance vs. Organic

The Attribution view compares ad-attributed revenue vs. organic revenue per SKU. Useful for understanding true product performance and identifying SKUs where ads are cannibalizing organic sales vs. genuinely additive.

Keyword Suggestions

When creating an ad group, NexusCommerce suggests keywords by:

1. Extracting key terms from the product title and bullet points
2. Calling the marketplace's keyword suggestion API (where available)
3. Pulling high-converting keywords from similar campaigns in your account

Each suggested keyword shows estimated search volume, competition level, and suggested bid range.

Configuration