Amazon has a massive advertising system problem

There is a problem with Amazon's system again, and this time the advertising sector is affected.

A batch of sellers’ advertising data feedback is distorted

In recent days, Amazon sellers have reported that there are problems with Amazon's advertising space.

A few days ago, a seller on the US site suddenly found that the click and order data of his individual ad positions, ad groups, and ad combinations did not match. He also got the same result after downloading the ad position report. This caught his attention, and he found in the subsequent search that not only the data for the last two days did not match, but all the historical data for the ad positions was wrong.

There are many sellers who encounter the same problem as him.

“—Data for one advertising campaign, with a difference in spending of nearly a thousand dollars;

——The ad space shows 63 clicks and 8 orders, but the actual CPC page has 77 clicks and 25 orders. This is a huge difference.

——The cost of the ad space page was reduced by half, and I thought the performance was super good;

——I just encountered it yesterday, and I was a bit panicked. Today, the data is more normal than yesterday, because it just happened yesterday, so it won’t be much different. ”

According to sellers’ feedback on the Zhiwubuyan forum, the US, UK and Italy sites all have the same problem. At first, sellers thought it was a system delay and would return to normal after 48 hours, but in the end they found that both the background and the report, the historical data were wrong.

Moreover, the occurrence of this error can be traced back to the whole of August, proving that this problem has existed for a long time. At the beginning, many sellers did not know where the problem was.

“One day, advertising sales were higher than the entire store sales, and the data exported from the backend was also high. I thought it was a display bug,” said a seller.

There are also sellers who almost directly reject an ad when they find the difference in click counts between ad campaigns and ad groups.

Until recently, the seller mentioned above received a clear answer from Amazon customer service . Amazon customer service said that this was a large-scale system problem, which mainly occurred in the US site, and the technical team is currently fixing it.

After it was clear that there was a bug in the system, sellers all hoped that Amazon would solve the problem as soon as possible. After all, the distorted data feedback had a great impact on them.

One seller said when complaining about the serious delay of the advertising page that the advertising fee was not much at noon, but after 3 pm the fee suddenly increased by 100%.

Another seller saw that the exposure of his ad space on the homepage was very low, so he increased the exposure on the homepage by 30% . But after learning that there was a bug in the system , he lowered it back and will make further plans after the system is fixed.

However, the market environment is changing dynamically, and consumer needs and behaviors are also constantly changing. In order to maintain good advertising results, Amazon advertising cannot be adjusted all the time. How should sellers respond when the system is not restored?

Currently, if sellers adjust BID+ based on ad space data , the operation will be distorted due to distorted data feedback. However, if sellers only adjust bids without considering the ad space allocation, the impact will be small. In this case, some sellers suggest that it is best to fine-tune the operation of the ad space recently, and then ignore the feedback of the ad space when making decisions.

Inaccurate data makes it difficult for sellers to grasp market dynamics and customer needs when making decisions. They urgently need Amazon to act quickly to fix system loopholes and restore accurate data feedback so that they can continue to conduct business smoothly on the platform. Especially now that the peak season is in the countdown.

Amazon ads frequently have bugs

On the Amazon platform, advertising is an important means for sellers to increase product exposure and sales. However, like any complex system, Amazon advertising occasionally has some bugs, which cause a lot of trouble for sellers. Especially during the peak season, when traffic is growing explosively and the amount of data processing increases, problems are more likely to occur.

During this year’s PD, sellers were furious because the advertising page on Amazon’s backend crashed. At the time, sellers were working hard to “grab” orders, but suddenly, the advertising page could not be opened, the cost was completely invisible, and the bid and budget could not be adjusted.

In addition, during the Black Friday promotion two years ago, Amazon's US advertising also experienced serious delays. Due to the huge deviation between advertising data and real-time advertising expenditure and return rate, sellers made wrong judgments and continued to increase advertising budgets, resulting in losses of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The outage affected a wide range of advertising formats, including sponsored products and sponsored display ads, which account for 80% to 90% of Amazon sellers’ advertising budgets.

Every big promotion is a critical period for sellers to boost sales. If something goes wrong at this time, sellers will undoubtedly fall into anxiety and frustration. Their carefully prepared promotion plans may be disrupted, the advertising costs invested may not get the expected return, and they may even lose some potential customers because they cannot accurately adjust prices.

This not only affects the sellers’ short-term profits, but may also have a negative impact on their long-term development strategies. After all, the performance during the promotion period often affects the store’s reputation and ranking, and frequent problems will make sellers doubt the stability and reliability of the Amazon platform, reducing their confidence in continued investment and development on the platform.

In fact, not only during the big promotion period, but even on weekdays, ads frequently have bugs. Some sellers lamented that if they are not strong enough, they will not be able to deal with these problems.

During the epidemic, a major bug in Amazon advertising scared the sellers. At that time, many sellers reported that their advertising costs suddenly increased. One seller said that his sales were only about 7,000, but the advertising ACOS directly soared to 430,000. Another seller even said that their advertising costs have reached hundreds of millions. One seller spent 100 million euros on advertising, and another seller spent more, reaching more than 300 million US dollars.

Advertising is a key means for sellers to increase product exposure and sales. When faced with advertising bugs, sellers must not just wait for Amazon to restore the system, but should have their own set of countermeasures.

For example, establish diversified advertising. Don’t rely too much on one form of advertising. You can use multiple advertising types such as product promotion, brand promotion, and display promotion at the same time to reduce the impact of a single advertising bug on overall sales.

The second is to establish a data tracking system. Sellers can use specialized advertising management software or spreadsheets to regularly record key advertising data, such as exposure, clicks, conversion rate, advertising expenditure, etc. In this way , when a bug occurs, the seller can quickly find abnormalities by comparing historical data.

Third, adjust bids and budgets. During the ad bug period, carefully adjust bids and budgets. If you find that the ad is not effective, you can appropriately lower the bid or reduce the budget to avoid unnecessary losses. But at the same time, be careful not to adjust excessively, so as not to affect the long-term performance of the ad.

Amazon advertising data feedback is distorted