1. Do your Prime Day sales report before or after the discount?
This is the one almost nobody talks about. Different deal types report revenue differently. Lightning Deals, for example, report sales gross of discount, so you need a separate financial report to see what you actually kept. Other promotion types report net. This can vary deal to deal and even ASIN to ASIN, so it is worth confirming before the event, not during it. If you are reading performance mid-event without knowing which version you are looking at, your revenue read is off and your profit math is worse.
There is a bigger question sitting behind it. During Prime Day, you are going to discount and your margins will compress. Have your TACOS goals been adjusted for that? An efficiency target built on full-margin economics does not survive a 20 percent deal week. So ask your team two things: do my Prime Day sales report gross or net of discount, and have we reset our efficiency targets for compressed margin?
2. Could a lower ROAS actually be good?
ROAS is useful. We use it every day to allocate spend across search terms and placements, because Amazon's attribution does not give a complete picture of incrementality. But ROAS in isolation is misleading, and what it means depends entirely on the details underneath it. It tells you ad spend converted into sales. It does not tell you whether those sales were new-to-brand or shoppers who were already searching your brand name and would have converted anyway.
Sometimes a falling ROAS is the signature of good work. If an account is over-invested in branded search, shifting that budget toward non-branded and competitor-conquesting search terms is what actually drives new customer acquisition. ROAS dips for a few weeks. Total sales grow. Spend gets more efficient. The dashboard looks worse while the business gets better.
So ask the question directly: my ROAS dropped and my total sales grew, is that good or bad? The answer tells you whether your partner is optimizing for acquisition or for a clean-looking report.
3. How much of your new-to-brand strategy is really just brand contamination?
This is the one most brands never check. Nearly every account spends against branded search unless someone is actively negating it. You can set up a campaign built to conquest a competitor and still rack up spend from shoppers typing your own brand name. The only way to quantify it is the search term report. It is one of the first things performance marketers at Aisle3 pull on a new account.
Why does it happen? Sometimes the team running the ads does not fully understand how targeting and match types behave. Sometimes they do, but the cleanup work slips: negating branded search terms, adding negative brand targeting, layering in negative ASINs against your own detail pages. And sometimes brand contamination simply makes the report look good, so nobody is in a hurry to fix it. That incentive problem compounds when an agency is paid as a percentage of spend, because they earn more when you spend more, not less. Aisle3 runs the opposite direction: the minimum effective spend on your own brand without giving up defensive ground.
So ask it straight: how much of my ad-attributed revenue is branded search, and which campaigns is it hiding in?
4. What is actually inside your auto campaigns?
Some products perform no matter what. Strong creative, an established name, deep reviews, a fair price. Put an auto campaign on a product like that and the topline holds up: decent ROAS, normal spend, nothing flagging. Then you pull the search term report and the picture falls apart. Spend is scattered across irrelevant terms, with a handful of genuine winners buried in the pile. The work is graduating those winners into their own exact-match campaigns and negating everything that wastes money.
There is a strategic layer underneath this too. Not all ad placements help you equally. Winning placement on a real search term also lifts your organic rank. An ad served on a competitor's detail page does not carry that benefit. So a passable auto campaign is not the same thing as smart spend. Ask what is really inside yours, and how much of your budget is compounding into organic rank versus just renting clicks.
The real test
None of these four questions are traps. A good partner has already brought them to you. That is the whole point. Prime Day does not create any of these problems. It raises the cost of them. You are discounting, margin is compressing, and the gap between what your reports say and what your business keeps gets wider for a week. That makes it the most expensive time of year to be misreading your own numbers, and the best time to find out whether your reports are telling you the truth. Bad ads can be dressed up to look good. Good ads are a lot harder to fake.