Amazon Advertising Reports: How to Interpret & Use Them

Overview

Every Amazon Seller knows how important it is to run effective Amazon PPC campaigns. In a heavily saturated market, the only thing setting you apart from competitors is the quality of your listing and how visible it is to customers. In 2021, it takes a lot to optimize Amazon PPC campaigns, which is why Amazon Advertising Reports are an Amazon Seller’s best friend.

The key to Amazon PPC is monitoring your performance metrics and constantly optimizing your campaigns. Find out which Amazon Advertising reports are the most useful to you, and how to interpret them.

Types of Amazon PPC reports

Amazon offers a variety of Amazon PPC reports for each campaign type. There are 4 campaign types, Sponsored Products (SP), Sponsored Brands (SB), Sponsored Brand Videos (SBV) and Sponsored Display (SD). Each of these campaign types have different reports available for your selected time period.

Sponsored Products

For sponsored products, the following reports are generated by Amazon:

• Search term report – contains data about search terms or competitor ASINs that lead customers to your products, including metrics for 7 Day sales, AcoS, RoAS, Orders, Units, CVR, advertised SKU units and advertised sales
• Targeting report – contains data on performance of targets i.e. keywords, products, categories, brands, etc.
• Advertised product report – provides performance metrics for all advertised ASINs that received at least 1 impression
• Campaign report – provides insights on the overall performance of all your SP campaigns
• Placement report – provides performance data for 4 placements – top of search, rest of search, product pages, remarketing off Amazon
• Purchased product report – provides performance data for ASINs that were not targeted by you, but were purchased by customers after clicking your ad
• Performance Over Time report – summarizes all ad data over a selected period including clicks, cpc and spend
• Search Term Impression Share report – provides performance data on how each search term compared to other advertisers and overall ad impressions received compared to others

Sponsored Brands

For sponsored brands, the following reports are generated by Amazon:

• Keyword report – contains data about buyer search terms or related ASINs that lead customers to your products, including metrics for 14 Day sales, AcoS, RoAS, Orders, Units, CVR, advertised SKU units and advertised sales
• Keyword placement report – contains data about what you are targeting i.e. keywords, products, categories or brands including their placement type for each
• Campaign report – provides insights on the overall performance of all your SB campaigns
• Campaign placement report – provides performance data on which ad placements your products showed up for and buyer reactions & interactions with those ads
• Search term report – contains data about search terms or competitor ASINs that lead customers to your products, including metrics for 7 Day sales, AcoS, RoAs, Orders, Units, CVR, advertised SKU units and advertised sales
• Search Term Impression Share report – provides performance data on how each search term compared to other advertisers and overall ad impressions received compared to others
• Category benchmark report – provides performance data on your brand, category and subcategory relative to other advertisers, including metrics such as impressions, CTR, RoAS, ACoS, etc.

Sponsored Brands Video

For sponsored brand videos, only four reports are generated by Amazon and these are:

• Keyword report
• Campaign report
• Campaign placement report
• Search term report

An SBV campaign is still within Sponsored Brands, so each report provides the same information as is stated in the “Sponsored Brands” section above.

Sponsored Display

For sponsored display, only four reports are generated by Amazon and these are:

• Campaign report – provides aggregated performance data for SD campaigns
• Targeting report – provides performance metrics on targeted audience for every campaign that received at least 1 impression
• Advertised product report – provides insight into sales and performance metrics for advertised products in all campaigns that received at least 1 impression
• Purchased product report – provides data on non-advertised products that were purchased by customers after they clicked on your SD ad

Don’t forget your Amazon profits and goal

All of the reports and data Amazon provides you is for you to ultimately profit and succeed as a seller. Amazon continues to expand on the different types of advertising products they offer. Only a few years back, it was limited to keywords and was much easier to track than today. With such diverse Amazon advertising options nowadays, it’s vital to stick to your goals.

Your ad goals may be to increase traffic, liquidate old or slow-moving inventory, or to maximize profits. Whatever your goals may be, it’s important to use an Amazon profit calculator to ensure your margins are adequate and you are profitable over the long run.

How to download your reports

Downloading your Amazon Advertising reports is fairly easy. First you go to Seller Central, then to the Advertising tab where you will find Campaign Manager.

Once you are in the campaign manager, click the sidebar and select “Reports.”

Once you do, it’s very straightforward. You can see a list of reports you have previously generated. To generate a new one, click “Create report” and it will open a new window.

In this new window, you can select the Campaign Type, the type of report you want, the time unit and select a time period. Underneath this, you can name the file, and choose to receive an email once the report is available for download. Click “Run report” in the top right corner.

Wait for a few minutes, then refresh the page. The download symbol will have appeared on the right, click it to download the file. Reports are all generated in .csv format, you can convert them to Excel manually if you prefer.

Which reports are useful and why?

While there is a great abundance of reports, not all of them are useful. For example, the Performance Over Time report is a one-line report that doesn’t really offer any useful information, just a 1-line summary that tells you total clicks, CPC & spend for your all your ads.

So which reports are useful?

SB & SP Search Term Reports

This is the most useful report Amazon Advertising has to offer. Search term reports are a gold mine because they tell you which of your targeted keywords are actually converting into clicks & sales. SB and SP search term reports are the key to PPC optimization, without them, it’d incredibly difficult to find out which keywords are performing well, and which aren’t.

You get performance metrics like Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC, CVR, Sales, Spend, ACoS and RoAS for your keywords-

Not only that, you can actually see the exact search queries customers are making! You can then find new keywords to bid on from these queries. You can also see which keywords are being allocated to which search term. Using CPC, you can calculate the average CPC for a set of search terms, or you can sort by Impressions to find out where you’ll get the highest visibility. Search term reports are a treasure trove of information that every seller should be analyzing!

SB Keyword & SP Targeting Reports

SB keyword reports are the next best Amazon Advertising report you should be generating multiple times a week. For SP campaigns, the equivalent is the Targeting report. These reports tell you how every keyword or ASIN you are targeting is performing over your selected time period.

Similar to the Search term report, you can see valuable performance metrics for every target in each campaign & ad group. These include- Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC, Sales, Spend, CVR, ACoS, and RoAS. You can filter the header rows easily in Excel. For example, filtering above a target CTR to remove underperforming keywords or ASINs in your campaign. Even better, sorting it by highest to lowest ACoS then adjusting bids for high ACoS targets.

Search Term Impression Share Reports

Search term impression share reports for SB and SP are similar to search term reports, but they contains 2 extra pieces of information. These 2 metrics are something a lot of sellers find useful – 1) search term impression rank 2) search term impression share.

Search term impression rank

This metric compares your SB or SP ads to your competitors’ ads, and assigns you a rank. So if a search term/keyword has a ST Impression Rank of 1- you’re beating all your competitors in impressions! This metric is perfect for isolating any keywords you are not gaining impressions for.

Search term impression share

This metric also compares your SB or SP ads to your competitors’ ads, but in a different way. ST impression share shows you the share of ad placements you won from all the SP or SB product impressions in that period. For example, a search term impression rank of 60% on June 1st for the keyword “foosball table”, means you won 60% of total SP impressions that the keyword got on that day.

Out of all the Amazon Advertising reports, Search Term Impression share report is one that lets you benchmark your keywords against competitors. It’s one report every seller should generate at least once a week.

SP Placement Reports

Ad placement is a key focus for Amazon PPC. The most visible and desirable placement for a Sponsored Product ad is Top of Search. These are the first products the customer see, and most of the time, these are the ones they end up buying.

Downloading a .csv of placement data from Amazon is extremely useful. You can get a broad overview of how many impressions each type of ad placement is getting. Usually Top of search perform the best, but it is good to monitor this, just to see if maybe ads in the Rest of Search are actually performing better. Whenever these placements perform better, you can increase your bid adjustment % to get even better results.

This is especially useful to keep an eye on how your Top of Search ads are performing, and which campaigns need an adjustment.

SD Advertised & Purchased Product Reports

The bulk of the useful reports lie in SB and SP, but there are still 2 reports that are vital for SD campaign optimization. These are the Advertised Product report and the Purchased Product report.

As a brief overview, the Advertised product report provides insights for all your Sponsored Display advertised products (as long as they had at least 1 impression). The purchased product report provides data on NON-ADVERTISED products that were purchased by customers who clicked on your SD ad.

These two reports are best used in conjunction with each other.

Using the Advertised Product report you can see how well your SD ads are doing overall, and adjust bids if necessary. Using the Purchased Product report you can see which ASIN led to a product purchase, this might not be your own product. Often customers who end up purchasing your product actually clicked on another ASIN first. This provides you with a perfect list of competitor product pages to target with more SD ads. Both these reports together provide a holistic overview of how well your SD ads are doing.

Conclusion

Constant optimization is how every seller can achieve the perfect PPC metrics, and a successful Amazon store. That’s why it’s important to know which Amazon Advertising reports will provide the data you need to optimize well. In this article we provided an overview of Amazon PPC reports available for each campaign type, and then went on to tell you 5 of the best ones.

We hope that you found this a useful read, and will leverage this knowledge to analyse the best reports Amazon Advertising has to offer.