Category: Just for Writers

(See the first part of this article here for background.)

How, exactly, does AMS assign the lagged sales data?

I've established, via occasional spot checks during my tests in the previous article, that it takes several days for the Orders (Units Sold) data to finalize for the AMS-reported sales.

I was asked if it trickles in randomly, or if it is assigned to the particular days that it should have been applied to originally. Since I didn't know the answer, I decided to find out.

I also now had a corrective for my “organic sales = effectively zero” assumption. 3 weeks of testing in August established a baseline for my 2 advertised products (1st book in series for 2 series (ANNWN-N1 and CHAIN-N1) of 0.2 units per title per day.

So, I used the July 1-July 29 test period (which is now over a month old) and took a look.

First, I used the AMS reports to do a day by day look at the reported units sold. I compared that with my spot check during the month of sales as-of a particular date — that ran out well past the end of the month to let the lagging data catch up.

I discovered that the lagged data is assigned after the fact to particular days, presumably the dates that would have been correct at the time. In other words, my spot checks of units sold as of date X for the month are smaller than they would be if I could do that now, because lagging data has been applied to those dates sometime between when I did the spot check and now, a month later.

Undercounting & Missing data

So, now that the data is final, what does the undercounting look like?

(This article continues here.)

For about a year and a half I had a good run with basic AMS Manual Keywords ads — those ad farms of thousands of keywords. Then, in the fall of 2018, something significant changed at Amazon, besides just the AMS reporting system upgrade, and my ads which had been running at a smallish but steady profit basically stopped working well.

At the time, I didn't concentrate on the issue, content to spend several months working on getting my feet wet with Facebook Advertising while my AMS ads ran feebly in the background (at least I wasn't losing money on them). Let's just say that two separate attempts at Facebook product ads ended unsuccessfully and I shut them down to rethink my approach.

So, there I was in June with no effective advertising running and, let me tell you, that is no place you want to be. In the absence of any recent new release, my organic sales on my primary (1st-in-series) books are, at best, less than 1 per day.

But there's an upside to poor organic sales numbers — they make a great background to test against for advertising!

It used to be easier

Oh, for the halcyon days of 2012 and 2013, when your book going up on Amazon attracted eyes, especially since the categories weren't any too large.

I still have my souvenir of being #1 in a niche category.

It spoiled us for a while. We wrote as quickly as we could hoping to outrun the “tsunami of… stuff” rising up behind us. Some of us are still trying that as our primary method of coping.

I'd like to present some more sobering numbers.