What happens with your campaigns when AMS is updated by Amazon

Amazon improves the AMS platform quite frequently. They have the bad habit of not letting their customers know about this though, and no matter how much you will try to get an answer from them, the safest and maybe the quickest ways of finding answers to how the platform works, is to test it yourself (they sometimes don’t even let their own teams know about the changes on the platform, but that’s another topic).

I’ve tested AMS with many campaigns so far and I can assure you that something that works in a certain way this week, might work differently next week. To give you an example, the AMS platform, even if it is supposed to be auction based, wasn’t working properly as an auction and it was prioritising different campaigns on factors which I can only call “unknown”. This was one of the biggest issues that I’ve dealt with for a couple of months and I pressurised my Account Managers from every country to give me an answer as to why AMS isn’t auction based. Unfortunately, the only answers that I ever got from them on this was that they don’t understand the system themselves and that it should be working normally. Three months after I firstly presented my study cases to them, I noticed that the impressions that I was getting with the AMS campaigns were slightly different, so I went back to the drawing (testing) board.

I’ve launched new campaigns and I played with the bids on multiple keywords and categories. Since April 2017, AMS finally started to give impressions based on the bid per keyword. Not even today did I get an update from the Amazon Account Managers as to what has happened, but I like to believe that the product development team investigated the platform after I put so much pressure on them.

After speaking with a senior person that worked with Amazon, I also discovered that the team that is developing the AMS system is continually making changes to the code behind the platform in order to improve it. The catch is that if they are making an update, they aren’t able to update current running campaigns with the changes. This means that only the campaigns that are launched after the update was made, are going to run based on the update, while the ads that were already running while the update was made, are going to continue running on the previous settings of the platform.

As an advice, sometimes it is better to stop old campaigns and launch new ones if you wish to have the latest system updates. If your campaigns are running exceptionally well as they are though, don’t stop them: keep managing the budget, the bids, and the keywords, but leave them run.