How data sync works

MerchDash keeps a local, permanent archive of your advertising data and refreshes it automatically. Understanding the cycle explains almost everything about data freshness in the app.

The first sync: a 95-day backfill

When you connect a marketplace, MerchDash snapshots your campaigns and ad groups, then requests Amazon's daily reports — campaign, ad group, search term, targeting, and advertised product — going back the maximum Amazon allows, about 95 days. Reports are requested in 31-day chunks (Amazon's cap for daily granularity), and one report covers the whole account, so a backfill takes the same handful of requests whether you have fifty campaigns or fifty thousand. Amazon can take a while to prepare each report on large accounts, so an initial backfill may run for a bit — you can leave the page.

The refresh cycle: every 12 hours

After the backfill, each marketplace re-syncs automatically about every 12 hours. A refresh always re-pulls the trailing 14 days, not just the newest day, because Amazon restates recent sales as late attribution arrives (see Attribution & settled data). Days are stored per entity and date, so re-pulled days simply overwrite the restated values — your history converges on Amazon's final numbers.

The refresh is split so it feels fast: the sync you see covers the most recent days, then a quiet background pass refreshes the rest of the 14-day window. If a report range fails, MerchDash retries it in smaller pieces and logs any remaining gap so a later sync can fill it automatically.

Keyword & target state sweeps

Metrics come from reports, but a keyword's current state (enabled/paused) does not. MerchDash maintains it with separate state sweeps:

• Entities with clicks refresh about every 3 days.
• Everything else is swept about every 14 days.
• Changes made through MerchDash update the stored state immediately.

Until the first sweep completes — and always for Sponsored Brands / Sponsored Display entities — keyword.state reads NONE. A slightly stale state can only affect rule filtering; applying a change always checks the live state at Amazon first and skips no-ops, so a rule can never “pause” something twice.

Your archive is permanent

Amazon forgets data older than ~95 days; MerchDash does not. Every synced day is archived permanently, which is what makes LIFETIME conditions, long baselines like FROM 30 DAYS AGO TO 90 DAYS AGO, and the accumulated reports possible.