While the commonly used “on-hand” metrics from Seller Central are useful, they don’t tell the entire story. The true secret to why you’re struggling with Amazon advertising can be found in the six Amazon advertising reports.
Downloading your Data from Seller Central
These reports use your account data. But what if you can’t find account data past 60 days? Well, then you’re SOL (you can look up what that means).
The global powerhouse that is Amazon is terrible when it comes to giving you year-to-year or even quarter-to-quarter analytics. Until this issue gets resolved, it’s your responsibility to download your data before it disappears forever!
Your data will disappear every 60 days
To save your data, make it a priority to download your data from Seller Central every month. Using a task manager, such as Asana, is a great way to stay up to date on downloading your data.
How to Find the Amazon Advertising Reports
You can download the different reports as Excel files(.xlsx) and finding them in Seller Central is a simple process.
- Find Reports in the navigation bar and select Advertising Reports from the menu that appears.
- You’ll be taken to a screen where you can select campaign type, period, and most importantly the type of advertising report.
- Click Create Report, and you’ll be able to download the report as an Excel file.
Now that we actually have the data, let’s dive into the reports and learn how you can use them to improve your Amazon PPC campaigns.
What are Search Term Reports
The Amazon Search Term Report is the best way to learn about which search terms your customers have been using to find your products.
This is the King of Reports. The Search Term Report is the best example of why you should be utilizing reports. Why? Because you can’t see search terms in your campaign manager!
This report includes:
- Keyword targeting
- Keyword Match Type
- Customer search term used
- Sales and conversion rate for that term during a specified period
- Clicks
- CTR
- Impressions
- CPC
- Spend
How to Use the Search Term Report
Here’s an example of how this report can be so vital.
Let’s say you’re managing someone’s campaign that gets a lot of conversions for the broad match keyword “running shoes.”
You obviously want to increase your spend on this broad match phrase, but what should you use for an exact match? That’s where your search term report can act as a keyword research tool and help you harvest the search term that converts best. For this example let’s say it’s something along the lines of “men’s running shoes.”
Using search term reports can also show you search terms that are converting poorly by analyzing Impressions & CTR in the Search Term Report. These terms can be turned into negative keywords.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a search term report only shows things you got clicks for, not impressions. If you’re CTR (Click Through Rate) is only 1%, that means you’ll never see data for the other 99% of impressions.
Use Targeting Reports to Remove Duplicate Keywords
Most people use search term reports, but the rest of these reports are lesser known.
A targeting report shows you what you’re targeting. Crazy right?
But, most people don’t realize what they’re missing out on because they’re not using these reports!
Targeting reports show you every keyword, ASIN, and category that you’re bidding on. Plus, it will show you what kind of match types you’re using for auto-campaigns.
If you want to view every keyword, for every campaign, in your account, that’s what this report is made for. This makes it very easy to identify duplicate keywords. Don’t compete against yourself.
The hidden gem of the targeting report is that it gives you access to ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). This is the only place in Amazon where you can find ROAS and not just ACOS (the inverse).
Advertised Product Reports Highlight your Best Performing Products
In this Amazon advertising report, you can see all of your ASINS and SKUs that are being advertised. This means they’ve won the Buy Box.
If they’ve won the Buy Box, they’ve probably gotten a decent amount of impressions too.
The Advertised Product Report lays out ASINS and SKUs by campaign and ad group. It’s essentially the other side of the keyword coin. It shows you which products are actually getting impressions.
What if you want to see all of the ASINS and SKUs for your entire account? The advertised product report makes it possible!
Sorting ASINS to identify your best performing products can be incredibly useful around the “busy-season” of e-commerce.
Let’s say Christmas is right around the corner, and you want to allocate more Ad Spend a specific product. With the Advertised Product Report, you can use whatever metric you value most and find the product that will perform best.
Gain Broad Campaign Insights with Placement Reports
Guess what this report tells you? Your performance-by-ad-placement data for every campaign! I’m sure you didn’t see that coming.
Similar to the other advertising reports, a placement report gives you an account-wide view of how your campaigns are performing, instead of looking at every campaign individually.
Exporting this report and manipulating it in Excel can make optimizing your bids quick and easy!
Purchased Product Reports Display your Best Keywords
In this report, you can only see keywords, not search terms. The purchased product report also shows you which keyword was attributed to the purchase of that product.
You won’t be able to see if someone found your product by searching “running shoes” or “trail running shoes,” for instance.
There are some other shortcomings of this advertising report. Whenever you add a second ASIN to an Ad Group, you won’t be able to differentiate the search terms that triggered purchases for an individual ASIN.
The Wasted Potential of the Performance Over Time
I hate to see wasted potential.
This report has promise to be incredibly powerful, but it’s still *very much* a work in progress.
What would you expect to see from a “Performance Over Time” report? What would you like to track over time?
- ACOS?
- Sales?
- CTR?
- Conversion Rate?
Well, you might want to see those, but you won’t. The performance over time report only provides you with clicks, CPCs, and total spend.
Let’s say it’s the first day of a new month. You want to track all of your metrics for the next 30 days. In an ideal world, this data would be available in the performance over time report.
Unfortunately, we’re still stuck getting all of these metrics in the campaign manager.
The Bottom Line on Amazon Advertising Reports
Some of these reports are extremely useful. Using search term reports, targeting reports, and advertised product reports can make all the difference when it comes to managing your Amazon PPC account. The data provided by these reports, and the ability to manipulate them in Excel makes it very easy to make account-wide decisions quickly and accurately.
