Interpreting Amazon's Advertising Reports
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Interpreting Amazon's Advertising Reports

Updated: Mar 13, 2023



[Updated on November 10, 2021]

Did you know that Amazon provides 24 different types of reports just for advertising? Check out our latest podcast interview with Norm Farrar where we talk about 3 new ad reports that need to start leveraging today:




If you are running Sponsored Ads on Amazon you're probably familiar with Amazon's ad reports. You're also aware that access to this data is not available in perpetuity. In fact these reports will typically let you go back 60 or 90 days (depending on their type).


Hopefully you (or your VA) are NOT having to download these csvs manually, but rather rely on a tool like PPC Ninja that will do the downloading for you 24x7x365.


 Sign up for PPC Ninja's 14 day trial: https://app.ppcninja.com/signup/

In general, Sponsored Products sales are reported within a 7 Day attribution window, while Sponsored Brand sales are reported within a 14 Day attribution window.


As of November 2021, Amazon provides the following types of Advertising Reports:



 Search Terms
 Targeting
 Advertised Product
 Campaign
 Budget
 Campaign Placement
 Purchased Product
 Performance over Time
 Search Term Impression Share
 
Keyword
Keyword Placement
Campaign 
Campaign Placement
Search Terms
Search Term Impression Share
Category Benchmark
  • Sponsored Brands Video Campaigns (4 reports)

Keyword
Campaign 
Campaign Placement
Search Terms
  • Sponsored Display (4 reports)

Campaign 
Targeting
Advertised Product
Purchased Product

Locate these reports by clicking on Reports in the left menu bar of your Advertising Console.





Sponsored Products Reports

 

1. Search Term Report (60 day look back)

Perhaps the most commonly downloaded report, this contains important information about search terms or competitor ASINs that led buyers to your products.


While most of the fields in the report are fairly straightforward and easy to understand, such as Impressions, Spend etc. there are a few columns that are not entirely self explanatory. We'll dive in a little bit:


7 Day Total Sales : Amazon attributes sales generated from ad clicks made up to 7 days back from the selected time frame. This does NOT mean that you are getting data for only 7 days.

Total Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS): "Total" here refers to all the sales that resulted from the ad, not just the advertised SKU.

Total Return on Advertising Spend (RoAS) : RoAS is just the inverse of ACoS and it tells you how much return on your investment you made.

7 Day Total Orders (#): The sum total of orders for all the SKUs that were purchased through that ad for that keyword, attributed over a 7 day look back window. Again this does NOT mean that you are only getting data for 7 days when you requested a 60 day report.

7 Day Total Units (#): Sometimes people buy more than one of a an item in an order

7 Day Conversion Rate: Ratio of the number of Orders to number of Clicks. (Note: This is NOT the number of units to number of clicks)

7 Day Advertised SKU Units (#) : Units of the advertised SKU sold and attribute

7 Day Other SKU Units (#) : Units of products not advertised in the ad group will be reported here

7 Day Advertised SKU Sales : Revenue generated by the ad for the advertised SKU

7 Day Other SKU Sales : Revenue generated by the ad for SKUs not advertised in the ad group. The sum of these last two columns should add up to the amount in the 7 Day Total Sales column.


How do people use the Search Term reports? Typical use cases include:

  • New keyword discovery: Set a filter on ACoS < Target ACoS and 7 Day Total Orders > 5 (or other threshold) to find potential keywords to discover. Then, with a bit spreadsheet work, you should be able to check them against your existing manual targets to see if they don't already exist. Alternatively, you could simply use PPC Ninja's Discover Keywords tool where we've already done the work of data download, extraction and discovery. We only present you with those keywords that do not already exist in any campaign that includes the SKU - A huge time saver!


  • Negative Keyword Discovery: The Search Terms report can also help you find buyer search terms that are irrelevant to your product or that are bleeding you money with clicks and no sales. Again you could set up Excel formulas yourself to filter clicks and no sales to find these terms, OR you you could just use PPC Ninja's Manage Bleeding Keywords view.



2. Targeting Report (90 days)

This report contains data about the performance of your targets, whether they are keywords, products, categories or brands. With a 90 day look back you can access more data than the Search Terms report.


Amazon Advertising Reports
Amazon Advertising Reports

Many sellers are confused about the difference between these 2 reports. We've written a whole post explaining the differences. Here's the link:



3. Advertised Products Report (90 days)

Advertised product reports provide insights about performance metrics for your advertised ASINs in all campaigns that received at least one impression. It will exclude data about other products that were purchased through your ad.


4. Campaign Report (18 months)

This report gives you insights about the overall performance of your campaigns.


5. Placement Report (90 days)

There are 4 placements that Amazon reports data on for your your sponsored Ads. These are:

  • Top of Search

  • Rest of Search

  • Product Pages

  • Remarketing off Amazon

With the availability of Placement Bid Modifiers (from 0-900%) this report becomes critical in evaluating the performance placements for your ads. While you can't modify bids for Rest of Search placements (as of July 2020), you can for Top of Search and Product Pahes


Read more about Placements in our other blogposts:

PPC Ninja now provides the Campaign Placements View to help you analyze all your placement data in a single place, with the ability to make bulk changes to bid placement modifiers.



6. Purchased Products Report (60 days)

The Purchased Product Reports provide performance details of ASINs that you did NOT specifically target, but a shopper purchased after clicking on your ad. This report can help you find new advertising opportunities and get insights into what shoppers are buying.



7. Performance Over Time Report

A pompous title for a meaningless one-line report! This report summarizes your ad data over the selected period. What's funny is that these 5 columns still don't tell you anything about the performance of your ads. What were my sales? What was my ACoS?



8. Search Term Impression Share Report

A report that tells you what percentage of the impression share for a search term went to any of your campaigns. In other words, which searches does Amazon considers you relevant for. Even if these search terms never had a click or a sale, you will know if Amazon consider you relevant. This is valuable information because you can simply ride on the leverage that Amazon is giving you.


9. Budget Report

A report that tells you your budget utilization. If any of your campaigns are performing well in terms of sales and ACoS then you do not want to limit the spend on those campaigns as they are your money generators. With this report you identify campaigns with good ACoS and filer on those that had an "Average Time in Budget" less than 100%. You would ideally want to increase the budgets on these.


Sponsored Brand Reports


 

1. Keyword Report (90 days)

Perhaps the most commonly downloaded report, this contains important information about buyer search terms or related ASINs that led to your products.



2. Keyword Placement Report (90 days)

This report contains data about what you are targeting, whether it is keywords, products, categories or brands.


3. Campaign Report (60 days)

This report gives you insights about the overall performance of your campaigns.


4. Campaign Placement Report (90 days)

A new type of report for most sellers, this is where you can find out which placements on Amazon did your products show up for and how buyers reacted to your ads in those placements.


5. Search Term Report (60 days)

Perhaps the most commonly downloaded report, this contains important information about search terms or competitor ASINs that led buyers to your products.


Free Excel-Based tool

For a limited period of time we are offering a free excel-based tool to help you conduct a self audit using the Targeting report. To use this audit, download the past 60 days worth of data from seller central and copy-paste it into the first sheet. The tool will generate and audit and also give you recommendations on what to improve about your PPC. You can access this tool from here:



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Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you!

Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.



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