Writer Sanctum
Corporate Sector => What are Amazon doing now? [Public] => Topic started by: Simon Haynes on October 17, 2019, 03:52:07 AM
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Okay, I've had this happen twice in the past week, and it's confusing the hell out of me.
For the sake of this example, let's say I fired up an advert 10 days ago with a daily budget of $5
Over the past 7 days, the cumulative spend on that ad is $3.45. Not per day, that's the entire week.
Amazon just emailed to say my ad has been paused because I hit my daily limit.
I switched my AMS reporting view to today only, and my total spend is 75 cents on that ad. Yesterday was 35 cents.
So, I upped the budget and they happily unpaused the ad.
(You might argue that there's a mystery $4.25 in ad spend which isn't showing on the report, but last time around there was no magical adjustment later on.)
My question is ... were their reporting algorithms put together by Wile E. Coyote using equipment salvaged from an Acme yard sale?
But being serious again - is there any wonder we have trouble spending daily budgets if they count 75c as 'over budget' on a $5 limit?
Speaking as a computer programmer, I would not be surprised if there was meant to be a 'soft' limit of maybe 85% of the total budget, and once you hit that they slow down delivery so you don't get 4000 clicks in three seconds and they end up eating the cost difference. Also speaking as a programmer, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they've got the 85%/15% limit reversed in their algorithm, so the slowing happens silently almost before the ad has begun to work.
The only test would be to stick a daily limit of something like $200 on one of my ads, and see whether there's a huge spike in impressions (if not clicks.)
Always remembering that AMS was probably set up to sell laptops and PCs and diamond rings and a ton of other high-value items, not $2.99 ebooks.
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Initial thoughts:
What are your bids on keywords set at? And are you allowing Amazon to auto-up/adjust your bids?
I think this warning goes out of you get close to the limit on a potential bid.
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No, the bids are set to reduce only.
It's an auto targeted ad, I think the max bid is 65 cents from memory.
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We've had threads on this before I think. I don't get it either, it's like they are saying, "You could get two clicks at the bid price OMG raise your budget now."
I got it most often on category campaigns but I'm not doing a lot of those right now.
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Under 'budget utilisation' in the email it said >100%
I'm just trying to figure out whether there's a deeper problem which might also slow delivery for campaigns with higher budgets. If they ever fix this bug (if that's what it is), those 100 ads with $200/day budgets each are going to raise Amazon's market cap for sure - if they manage to collect all the debts.
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I don't think it's a bug, but I'm wondering if the back end math changes based on the number of bids you are likely to win. For example, a few of mine ride the edge of the lowest viable bid and only hit late in the day (presumably when others using those keywords have eaten through their budget). On those, I spend close to the whole days' budget in the last hour or two. Is it possible for this warning to trip when enough keywords hit within a short enough timeframe?
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You know how the reports lag by a few hours for clicks? Maybe internally it's triggering the message, those clicks have already happened but we aren't seeing them yet. Just a guess and I may have explained it poorly, sorry.
I know when I experimented with turning the ads off overnight they still kept getting clicks for several hours after I paused them.
I'm not sure I understand Simon's "concern" with Amazon not being able to collect if ad spend suddenly goes up like crazy. They'll get the money from the credit card company on the account. If the user can't pay the credit card bill, Amazon won't know or care. Concern in quotes because it's not quite the right word but I couldn't come up with the right one.
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If they left the tap on full until the last second, then had to slowly turn it off over the next half hour, the bucket would overflow. That's the analogy I was getting at.
So, maybe they start throttling early?
Anyway, I boosted the limit to $15 per day, and they spent $12 before suspending the ad again. I think PermaStudent is right, and they knew they could spend the budget easily, and just got in early.
I've dropped the bids a little and restarted the ad.