- Advertisers are buying ads to promote their products during Amazon’s two-day Prime Day sales event.
- Amazon’s ad platform has suffered glitches that cost advertisers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Some advertisers are building tools to avoid overpaying and reeling in their budgets.
Amazon’s two-day Prime Day sales event is in full swing, and many marketers are buying ads to promote their discounted products. But this year, advertisers are being extra cautious in tracking the performance of their campaigns.
Three Amazon-focused ad agencies told Insider that they’re planning for possible contingencies in case the ecommerce giant misreports metrics about the performance of their critical Prime Day ad campaigns.
Since late last year, advertisers have been frustrated with Amazon because it has misreported how much advertisers are spending, causing them to blow through their daily ad budgets too quickly or to underspend and miss out on sales. These problems tend to happen when traffic to Amazon’s site is particularly heavy like Black Friday.
In November 2022, a glitch in Amazon’s advertising tool cost advertisers advertisers up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, with only some advertisers receiving partial credits for the lost ad money months later in January. A similar glitch underreported how much advertisers were spending this past June, according to three ad buyers Insider spoke to.
“We are preparing for anything to happen so we can catch it quickly and make adjustments as needed,” said Todd Bowman, VP of services at Momentum Commerce.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Advertisers are betting on screenshots
Both Momentum Commerce and the marketing agency Envision Horizons have built tools that take screenshots of Amazon’s ad console throughout the Prime Day event to keep tab on clients’ ad spend.
The screenshots Envision Horizon is taking show Amazon’s data about the amount advertisers are spending and time of day that ads run, said founder and CEO Laura Meyer.
Meyer wants to have proof to show Amazon reps about the pace of ad campaign spend in case there are reporting errors after Prime Day ends.
“We’re approaching this with added precaution,” she said. “We can better ensure the reimbursement for our clients.”
Some advertisers are moving away from using data from Amazon’s ad console altogether
Destaney Wishon, CEO and cofounder of agency BetterAMS, said that her company is not using data from Amazon’s ad console to gauge the success of her clients’ Prime Day campaigns.
Instead of using reporting data within the ad console, she said she looks at data from another Amazon product called Amazon Marketing Stream that pushes advertising data to Amazon Web Services’ accounts hourly. However, not all Amazon advertisers use AWS’ services.
Typically, advertisers go into big sales days like Prime Day with fluid budgets that can increase throughout the day if sales are high. This year, Wishon said that she is advising brands to set locked budgets ahead of time to avoid overspending. She said she helped clients calculate how much to spend ahead of Prime Day based on how much they spent last year.
“We don’t want to be reactive the day of and adjust budgets,” she said.
Wishon said that she’s also advising brands to ramp up ad spend after Prime Day when people are still looking for deals and Amazon’s ad prices decrease.
“Everyone allocates the majority of their budget to the two biggest days so it drives up advertising costs, but customers view Prime Day as a week-long period,” Wishon added.
These ad platform glitches are coming at a time when Amazon is aggressively trying to grow its nearly $40 billion ad business by building ad products beyond its search formats to grab big budgets.
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