Is it just me or is Amazon going to be the most powerful company in the world (if they aren’t already)?
Mind you, Amazon literally started as an online BOOK market… They have sold books from the inception of the company. They should be pretty good at it, right?
This post is tailored for those more familiar with Amazon’s advertising “scheme”…. Admittedly, my limited knowledge is more on the self-publishing (KDP) side…
In several cities in the United States, Amazon can deliver products in 1 hour or less. In most of the US they can (and do on a regular basis) deliver products in less than 24 hours.
Translate that to an ebook, which can be delivered to a kindle within minutes of purchase.
Under Advertising for KDP Books in the Campaign Reporting section under Performance metrics
Amazon notes: “The data in the campaign manager is updated every hour. Sales and ACOS data takes up to 48 hours to populate and might be incomplete”
They state clearly the ability to track ‘Impressions’ and ‘Clicks’ and ‘Spend’ on an hourly basis but arguably one of the most important metrics ‘Sales’ takes 48 hours to populate.
Amazon expects me to believe that any customer in the US could potentially have the product that was purchased from an Amazon ad in their hands for a full day before Amazon is capable of reporting the sale to the merchant?
How is that even possible?
Why does this matter anyway? Well, if I am running multiple ad campaigns marketing my product(s) on Amazon, it would be very beneficial to know the specific campaign(s) responsible for a sale. Having such information within an hour or two of the sale would allow me to focus on the successful campaign and lower the priority of less successful ones or perhaps cancel them completely. Imagine if I am running 5 or 6 campaigns, each one with a daily budget of $50 or $60. Waiting 48 hours to provide sales information means Amazon could potentially charge me $500 before I have access to the metric that would make it possible to determine which, if any, campaigns are viable and producing sales. Obviously if one (or more) were a clear runaway winner(s) I could kill the loser(s) and save the ad spend money, right?
According to 2017 report by ScrapeHero the company was adding an “average of 1.3 million products added each day”. All those merchants are clamoring to sell their new products so they are probably
I would assume there would be ad campaigns for each product… and for 48 hours every seller is kept in the dark about sales data, spending money on ads…
This company has some of the most advanced metrics tracking in the entire world. AWS is a great example of the ability for Amazon to track compute (virtual computers) instances by the minute yet they deny the ability to reliably share sales information from their own platform in a timely manner.
I’ve been known to sell some stuff on eBay from time-to-time and do you know how long I wait for a payout from them? 24 to 48 hours. Amazon holds on to authors ”payout” for 60 days before relinquishing the funds. I can get the proceeds for selling a house faster than that!
How is that even possible?