We had been tracking Amazon Ads and how the charges seemed to balloon the last 5 days of the Ad billing cycle. To test what was going on, we cut out some of our targets and lowered the bid amounts. Prior to this for a few years, we were budgeting and hitting between $70 to $100 a month.This year it started floating up to around $125 to $135.
We achieved bring it down and then, when the billing came out for the month, we see this …
So Amazon is saying that less than 20% of the clicks during this month were correct or admitting that those prior months had some over charging at the end of the month (as we were thinking)?
Just for context, do you have Amazon competitors on the products in the campaign?
Just trying to account for the possibility that you clicks ballooned not because it was the last 5 days of your cycle but because it was the 5 days a month of “run them up” of your competitor’s cycle.
If you have no Amazon competitors, then I think it very well could be Amazon saying “oops” (without explanation or penalty).
You won’t be able to determine this just based on the discussion at hand so far nor from the amazon ads console alone.
You need Brand Analytics data at the child level aggregated by weekly. And you need to repeat this for a few months. And then look at impression vs sessions for your ASIN vs market.
Even then, it would be a waste of time just for the amounts overcharged. I would, however, be using the BA data as part of your ppc SOP’s because without that you are as blind as a bat.
No … our own product. There are similar products (they got caught duplicating their own FBM listings and were knocked down) but most similar products are completely different materials.
We have seen this behavior for over two years. Our cycle follows the monthly cycle so the end of our ad cycle is the end of the month. We don’t think it has anything to do with a competitor because it has been the constant pattern for several years. This year the pattern grew in dollars at the end of the cycle above what we had seen the years before. Amazon made some changes early this year which meant our average price per click went up in addition to the last 5 days of the month climbing up over even what had happen in the past.
Unusual … no … usually a lot of clicks and cost without conversations during that 5 day period (at least that is what Amazon was reporting). Amazon started reporting conversation different this year where an order of 4 items is being counted as 4 conversations. In prior years, an order of 4 items was counted as 1 conversation.
Normally, we haven’t chased this rabbit down the hole (too afraid the hole would land in Brazil ). NSFE has had several posts on USPS overcharges that Amazon has been refunding several sellers lately. We posted this mainly to alert everyone to watch their Amazon adversting billing for a similar refund. With smaller accounts like us, something like this stands out like a sore thumb. Larger accounts might not even notice something like this.
). NSFE has had several posts on USPS overcharges that Amazon has been refunding several sellers lately. We posted this mainly to alert everyone to watch their Amazon adversting billing for a similar refund. With smaller accounts like us, something like this stands out like a sore thumb. Larger accounts might not even notice something like this.