Understanding seasonal trends can affect Amazon sellers’ inventory, pricing, and advertising decisions. This article explores how the easy integration between Defog’s Google Sheets spreadsheets and OpenAI’s ChatGPT can help an Amazon Seller or Agency quickly conduct seasonal sales and advertising cost analyses.

Below is a chart showing the sales and advertising costs for each week in 2024. It provides a clear view of how sales trends changed and how advertising spending aligned with them.

How to Read the Chart & Extract Key Insights

Understanding the chart is essential for identifying weekly sales and advertising cost patterns. Here’s a breakdown of what to look for:

Look for spikes or dips in specific weeks to identify when to react.

• High Sales & Ad Spend: These weeks indicate effective ad campaigns leading to strong sales but with low margins.
• High Ad Spend & Low Sales: This could mean ads are not converting well, signaling a need to adjust targeting, budget, price, or listing details.
• Sales Spikes Without Ad Spend: Suggests organic demand (e.g., seasonal shopping trends, product popularity).
• Consistently Low Sales & Ad Spend: Indicates slow periods when additional marketing efforts are needed.

By regularly analyzing these patterns, businesses can fine-tune their advertising strategies, adjust inventory planning, and create promotions to align with seasonal demand while they are happening. They may also plan for the following year’s seasonal changes, moving beforehand to counter or surf the trends.
One good thing about doing this in Defog’s spreadsheet is that as soon as Defog updates the data, you will have the latest information about your customer behavior as the answer if you repeat the prompt. 

ChatGPT – Setting Up Google Sheets Integration

Step 1: To facilitate the data upload from Defog to ChatGPT, we suggest you connect your ChatGPT with Google Drive. Here is how to set up this integration. Start by clicking on the paper clip icon and then click on Connect to Google Drive (see images below):

Follow the login and authorization process presented by Google Drive. Then, you can upload data from Google Drive to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT – Upload Your Defog from Google Drive

Step 2: Now that you have connected your Google Drive with ChatGPT, click on the paper clip icon again and then click Add from Google Drive.

Choose your Defog on Google Drive. In this example, we will use a Defog named “Joe’s Coffee Store – Defog.”

Generating a Weekly Sales and Ads Cost Chart

Step 3: Copy and paste the prompt below into your ChatGPT and press send.

Create a column chart (not stacked) to compare 2024 weekly sales and advertising costs using the 'OrdersTable' and 'AdsTable' data. In the 'OrdersTable', the column 'Item Price' has the sales amount. Use the 'Purchase Date (PT)' in 'OrdersTable' and 'Date' in 'AdsTable' as the date columns. Ensure that: Only add weeks in 2024 to the chart.
Sales are represented in light blue, and advertising costs are in light grey. Add a legend to the chart to explain what each series of columns is.

The x-axis displays the first day of the week per week of the year. Show dates as 'mm-dd-yy'. To make the label readable, use a small font and slant it 45 degrees.

Only plot data in USD currency code. The two sheets, 'OrdersTable' and 'AdsTable,', have a 'Currency code' column for that.

Remove the legend and the vertical gridlines for clarity. Add horizontal gridlines.

After ChatGPT analyzes the data, you will get a result like the one below.

If you want to learn what a particular column stands for on Defog’s tables, please visit our glossary.

Thank you for reading this post. If you still haven’t used Defog, you can do so for free here.

If you need any help, we are here for you.

Disclaimer: Defog is not responsible for any decisions made by the reader of this post regarding the data, formulas, prompts, and visuals provided.