Setting up Keenbid safety guardrails: a step-by-step walkthrough

Safety guardrails are the feature we get asked about most during onboarding. Done right, they let you run aggressive AI-driven bidding with confidence. Done wrong, they either block the AI from doing anything useful or let it make changes that hurt performance.

The Three Core Guardrails

**1. Max Bid Change Per Action (%)** This caps how much any single bid change can move a CPT. We recommend starting at 20% for established keywords and 10% for keywords with fewer than 100 taps. Lower is safer; higher allows faster optimisation.

**2. Daily Change Frequency Limit** How many times per day can the AI touch a given keyword? We default to 2 for most accounts. More than 3 creates noise in your data — you can't isolate what caused a change in performance.

**3. Rollback Policy** What triggers an automatic rollback? We recommend: ROAS drop >25% within 48h of a bid change, or CPI increase >30% with flat install volume. Both conditions together mean something definitely went wrong.

Advanced: Per-Campaign Overrides

For brand campaigns, tighten all three guardrails significantly — brand keywords are often high-volume and sensitive to CPI changes. For discovery campaigns, loosen the frequency limit to allow faster exploration.

Testing Your Config

After setting guardrails, simulate a bid change in the Keenbid preview panel before enabling auto-execution. The panel shows exactly what would happen to your top 20 keywords under the current config.