Improved Performance, Intelligence, and Speed with AI-powered Hourly Bidding

Flywheel 2.0 has leveled up with hourly AI-powered bidding changes, starting today Amazon Market Stream (AMS) sends performance metrics to the platform every hour, on the hour, and Flywheel 2.0 AI adjusts and updates your ads just as fast. Flywheel 2.0 is the only solution in the market that leverages hourly bidding with fully-automated optimization to maximize efficiency and ad spend, every hour of every day. This is huge news for sellers looking to immediately improve sales and performance for Amazon Sponsored Product campaigns.

We’re breaking down what AI hourly bidding exactly is, why this matters for you, and how we’ve included it in Flywheel 2.0 to make sure you get the most out of every ad dollar you spend.

Amazon Marketing Stream Makes This Possible

Amazon Marketing Stream, also referred to as AMS, is the reason Flywheel is able to learn from and adjust your bids every hour. It’s a new streaming service that gives advertisers access to Amazon Ads’ hourly performance data in near real-time. With the initial release, this API strictly provides access to Sponsored Products data for North America (all countries are expected to be available soon); however, Amazon has made it clear that this is just the beginning. Team Teika will continue to adapt to AMS data as it changes. Current expectations are for these updates to launch in 2023.

Amazon’s New Update + Flywheel 2.0

With AMS for Sponsored Products Ads, Flywheel 2.0 now optimizes bids at an hourly clip, improving conversion rate forecast models and adjusting aggressiveness based on key performance metrics including total impressions, clicks, cost per click and more. The outcome of this is that advertising performance improves substantially, allowing for better optimized budgets, efficiency, and faster adjustment to market demand. Additionally, any changes you’ve made in Flywheel 2.0 to ACOS targets and min/max bids will now be posted to Amazon in near real-time.

Figure 2. Intraday CVR pattern by product categories and biddable entity targeting types. 

Results & What This Means for Flywheel 2.0 Customers

With this update Flywheel 2.0 now updates your bids up to 6 times more frequently than before with many customers seeing meaningful improvements to both ad sales and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Team Teika conducted testing to compare the advertising performance between the newly implemented hourly bidding (treatment) and the current existing method (control). Our efforts found:

  • Daily performance saw a 13% increase in net revenue, and a 10% increase in CVR (percent change of treatment over control)
  • Intraday bidding became more efficient, saving money during early hours to allocate to hours that bring highest value
  • Overall impressions were boosted by 8%, with top-of-search share increasing by 9% on average.

Results found AI-powered hourly bidding was able to maximize net revenue while maintaining a similar level of advertising efficiency (characterized by ACOS or ROAS). With this update, more ad spend was allocated to the time of day where the conversion rate tended to be higher, and with higher cost-per-click in most cases, more sales were captured. Hourly bids were reduced for the early and late hours, leading to an improvement of advertising efficiency. 

Looking to the Future

The inclusion of AMS data into Flywheel 2.0 for Sponsored Products Ads is just the beginning of our commitment to maximizing your potential on Amazon and beyond. The combination of real-time data ingestion with Flywheel AI-powered optimization technology offers Teikametrics customers a true competitive advantage and improved efficiency. As more data becomes available for more ad types, Teikametrics is committed to staying the leader in AI optimization to ensure you receive both unrivaled ad performance and overall growth for your business.