The follow-up to the budget overflow! Amazon actually plans to get away with it this way...

Yesterday, Xiaofenshen reported a bug that caused a large overflow of advertising budgets. Many sellers told me that they had encountered it, with some experiencing a 3- or 4-fold overflow, some even experiencing a 7-fold overflow, and some even experiencing a $1 budget but actually spending $24! If you missed yesterday’s report, click below to view it.

Something went wrong with the backend ads! Check to see if you have been overcharged by Amazon!

The picture above is the backstage of the student who reported to us that the budget had doubled. You can see that the advertising plan with a budget of $10 actually cost nearly $80.

At present, the case opened by Xiaofenshen has not received a response from customer service, and even the sellers around him have not received an official response.

This morning, when I opened the backend, I was terrified and prepared to double the budget, but I found it strange that not only did it not double, but even the budget that could usually be completed at this time was only spent a little bit today.

And this is not an isolated case. Students and sellers have come to report

Today's budget is unusually low!!

Let's take a look at a screenshot of a seller's response

The actual cost was just over $3 but it was shown as over budget...

And this student seller told his clone that he turns off the ads at about this time every day, and usually the budget is fully utilized. But today, when he turned off the ads, he found that only $3 of the $10 budget had been used up, so the ad was stopped because it exceeded the budget.

The little clone quickly collected everyone's questions and asked the sellers who reported that they had a large budget overrun yesterday whether their budgets today also had such anomalies.

I didn't expect that many people said they encountered this situation.

Everyone's advertising budget has been abnormal again, but this time it is the opposite of yesterday's situation. The money that should have been spent has not been spent yet. Do you think that's the end? There are even more extreme situations.

The same college seller who broke the news contacted Xiaofenshen again in the afternoon. After discovering that the budget was unusually low in the morning, he still followed the old routine and closed the ads. Unexpectedly, he accidentally opened it in the afternoon and found that the suspended advertising plan was actually running the budget silently!

A suspended advertising plan ($3.29 when closed) actually quietly increased by more than ten dollars!

This BUG is very powerful. The budget is not limited at all. I can run several times more. I turned off the ads. I didn't expect it to be good now. Turning off the advertising plan can't stop my brother-in-law from deducting your money and running ads for you!

However, this is a low-probability event, and the small clone did not receive a large-scale response. Let's take a look at what the situation is with the budget being too small.

The little clone thought about it and there are two possibilities.

First, last night everyone reported the budget overflow to Amazon, and then Amazon urgently repaired it. Unexpectedly, this time the operation of the system caused a reverse bug. It really fulfilled what the little clone said yesterday, "Wherever there is an update, there is a draw."

Second, this possibility was also pointed out to me by Teacher Alice. Yesterday’s large budget overflow was indeed an unintentional bug in Amazon’s backend, but today’s extremely low budget was intentional.

Why did Amazon do this? Yesterday, an error occurred in the backend of Amazon, causing sellers to suffer losses, and the amount was horrible. A small seller's account had to pay an extra 30 to 100 dollars for four or five activated advertising campaigns. The budget of a medium or large seller was horrible. A 2,000 dollars extra deduction from a budget of around 500 dollars was a small amount. From this perspective, the overall loss of sellers caused by the budget system error was at least over a million dollars, and it was even possible to lose tens of millions.

If Amazon admits its mistake and compensates the seller for the excess, it will need to spend a lot of manpower and calculation costs, and the compensation will be sky-high. So is there any other solution?

What if the overspending yesterday is actually the budget for a week or even a month for your campaign? Because of dynamic bidding, the budget for a month (week) was spent yesterday. In the next few days, the budget will be exceeded and the campaign will be suspended. This way, the monthly budget will not be exceeded. This method can be used to replace the compensation (after all, the overspending budget spent yesterday is actually converted into exposure, not taken by Amazon for nothing)

This was a guess made by my little clone in the afternoon. I didn’t expect it to be verified by Amazon officials soon. We opened a case and received an official response…

(Click to enlarge the image)

For those who cannot see the full image clearly, I have copied the original text of the email below for your convenience.

To briefly introduce the content of the email, Amazon has admitted that this is a system technical failure that affects sellers worldwide, and promised to refund everyone the overcharged advertising fees! (However, due to the huge amount of calculations in the system, there may be a delay in the arrival of the funds, so please pay more attention)

But at the end of the email, he still argued for himself, claiming that the daily budget he set for everyone would actually be allocated on a monthly basis.

For example, if the daily budget is set to $100 and there are 31 days in this month, the system will place ads for you to gain exposure according to your monthly budget of $3,100. In this case, the exposure you get each day (that is, the actual cost) will not be directly equal to the daily budget. Although the daily cost will fluctuate (for example, spend $50 today and $150 tomorrow, so the daily budget for both days is still $100), it will not exceed the monthly budget of $3,100 in general.

This is a very cunning statement. Teacher Alice also told me that this was actually the algorithm used in the background before, but because the actual expenditure and daily budget are not much different, the difference is not big.

However, it is too much for Amazon to use this incident as an excuse. The reason why sellers need to control budgets and time the advertising plan is to avoid unnecessary invalid exposure. Although Amazon's operation will bring exposure, the actual conversion rate is much worse, which makes the seller's advertising budget go to waste! The effect of running a $100 budget 24 hours a day and a $100 budget for 5 days and only running 20 dollars a day during prime time is absolutely different.

Fortunately, Amazon corrected its mistakes, and although it was harsh in the end, it finally returned the money it had spent. This is the result of everyone's frantic efforts to speak out to the authorities in the past two days. In the future, we must be careful about advertising.

For subsequent updates and for those who need to know more about dynamic advertising bidding, you can scan the QR code to chat with me privately for consultation!