How to Find Your Amazon Cross-Sales and True Organic Sales [The PPC Den Podcast]

Today Mike is joined again by Steve Patenaude, the closest thing this show has to a PPC detective  to open a case that starts with a boring question and ends somewhere much more interesting: which of your products is actually earning the sale?

Amazon has retired the old sponsored product reports. The drag-and-drop builder that replaced them looks like extra homework, and it is but it also hands you two columns the old reports kept apart: the ASIN that was advertised, and the ASIN that was purchased. Put those side by side and the account stops looking like a list of products and starts looking like a set of relationships.

Steve found it while doing something ordinary. He was tightening up CM1, CM2 and CM3 to set targets product by product, and the numbers refused to sit still cross-sales were everywhere, in an account with no parent-child variations at all. In the episode he and Mike build two reports out of that: one that shows what share of each ASIN’s ad revenue was really a cross-sale (one product in the sample: 94%), and one that lands on a number almost nobody calculates correctly true organic sales, business report revenue minus same-ASIN ad sales minus the sales that product picked up as somebody else’s halo.

You’ll also hear why total ACoS per product is usually wrong in both directions, what a 0% same-ASIN product is telling you, the loss-leader SKU trick that pulls shoppers onto a listing, and the stock-out that tanked a hero product’s sales except the hero product was never the one doing the work.

We’ll see you in The PPC Den!