How to Use and Interpret Amazon Advertising Reports

Amazon advertising reports provide insights into how well your e-commerce ads are performing on Amazon, what traffic they’re driving to your product pages, and how much you’re spending on Amazon ads. The reports help merchants track and determine whether they should continue to invest in Amazon ads or make changes to your campaign. This also means that merchants will be able to track and calculate their profits.

Types of Amazon Advertising Reports

When you're advertising with Amazon, it's important to track your progress and results. Thankfully, with the use of advertising AI, Amazon provides a variety of reports to help you do just that.

There are four types of Amazon advertising campaigns: sponsored products (SP), sponsored brands (SB), sponsored brand videos (SBV), and sponsored display (SD). Each campaign has various reports available for merchants to choose from.

Additionally, consider taking a look at our ultimate guide to effective e-commerce ads.

Sponsored Products (SP)

For sponsored product campaigns, Amazon makes the following 9 reports available:

1. Advertised product
2. Budget
3. Campaign
4. Performance over time
5. Placement
6. Purchased product
7. Search term
8. Search term impression share
9. Targeting

Sponsored Brands (SB)

For sponsored brands campaigns, Amazon makes the following 7 reports available:

1. Campaign placement
2. Campaign
3. Category benchmark
4. Keyword placement
5. Keyword
6. Search term impression share
7. Search term

Sponsored Brand Videos (SBV)

For sponsored brands videos campaigns, Amazon makes the following 4 reports available:

1. Campaign placement
2. Campaign
3. Keyword
4. Search term

Sponsored Display (SD)

For sponsored display campaigns, Amazon makes the following 4 reports available:

1. Advertised product
2. Campaign
3. Purchased product
4. Targeting

Don’t leave your profits up to interpretation. Learn how to generate solid data with an Amazon profit calculator.

How to Use Amazon Advertising Reports

Before we start interpreting and analyzing any of Amazon's reports, let’s first take a look at how to generate and download them:

1. Log into your Amazon seller central account.
2. From the sidebar menu, click the “Reports” submenu item and select “Advertising Reports.”
3. When the page loads, click the “Create Report” button.
4. You will then be presented with the different campaign types under the “Configuration” panel. Select which one you’d like to work with and, using the drop-down menu below, choose which report type you wish to generate.
5. From the same page, below the report type drop-down menu, select the time unit you’d like to use and the reporting period.
6. Below the Configuration panel, you’ll find the “Reporting settings” panel. From here you can name your report, use "email address" to set recipients of the generated report, and schedule times for reports to be generated automatically in the future.
7. Once these above items are designated, click the “Run Report” button to generate and download the report as an Excel XML file.

Are you curious about increasing your sales potential? If so, check out our guide on how to promote your Amazon products.

How to Interpret Amazon Advertising Reports

Now that you’ve downloaded your freshly generated report, let’s move on to the analysis and interpretation. Understand that each report type generates different collections of data, so the interpretation of each report will vary slightly. With this in mind, the following metrics are commonly used across many of Amazon’s advertising reports:

• Click-through rate (CTR) CTR is simply a percentage of ad clicks/impressions. This metric can be used to judge just how well your ads are performing and whether their design may need tweaking or improving.
• Cost per click (CPC) CPC gives a cost value to how much the platform will charge you when a customer clicks an ad pertaining to a certain search term.
• Total sales The number of sales you made for a certain ad.
• Total advertising cost of sales (ACoS) The percentage of the ad cost pertaining to the generated revenue from a sale.
• Spend The total cost of an advertising campaign for a specific search term.
• Advertised ASINs The products advertised.
• Purchased ASINs The products purchased. You can compare purchased ASINs against advertised ASINs to see which advertised products are selling and which products that aren’t advertised are selling.
• Budget The predetermined budget set aside for an advertising campaign.

If you’d like to diversify your sales potential or are simply wondering whether to move your products over to a website of your very own, why not check out our Shopify vs. Amazon comparison guide? Or, if you’re already running your own website, learn of all the ways you can increase organic traffic.