Ultimate Guide to Amazon Advertising Reports
Amazon Advertising: The whole story
Amazon has a powerful set of reports that give a holistic view of campaign performance. They provide several useful pieces of information that can be used to optimize campaigns to get better results. Let’s look at how to use these reports to get diverse insights into your business health and performance
First all, there are 8 types of Amazon advertising reports that are available to download
- Search Term Report
- Keyword/Targeting Report
- Advertised Product Report
- Purchased Product Report
- Campaign Placement Report
- Campaign Report
- Performance Over Time
- Keyword Placement Report
Each of these reports can give a glimpse into something unique, a piece of the puzzle.
Let’s have a look at what insights each of these reports provide
Purchased Product Report
My personal favorite, of course after the Search Term Report is Purchased Product Report.
It gives a real look into the shopping behavior and helps us disconfirm beliefs. This does obviously help us find the best performing products and can be incredibly useful to strategize further advertising campaigns.
It also gives a peek into which keywords work best for the products (but does not contain search terms). If you’d like to understand which search term works best, which is one step deeper, then you can create individual campaign for each product
The following questions can drive the analysis of this report
- Which product is advertised versus which product is bought and why
- Correlation between the keywords and purchased product
- Correlation between the keywords and advertised product and CTR
- How to replicate similar campaign strategies targeting purchased product
- Purchased product performance over time
Also, make a list of best selling products and track keywords to monitor advertising campaign’s effect on organic ranking
Advertised Product Report
A very similar report to the Purchased Product Report is the Advertised Product Report. With this report you can get a very clear picture of the product performance across different campaigns. This will help us identify which strategies work best and which don’t. Remove the product from the campaigns where it doesn’t perform well.
Search Term Report
Search Term Report and Targeting Reports are almost identical except for one extra metric, that is “Search Terms”. So, instead of talking about both reports separately, I will only address the most popular and useful report, Search Term Report. Debatably, it provides most insights and can solely help in optimizing campaigns
What’s so unique about this report is that it has the actual words used by shoppers to search for the product. With this report we can figure out if we are targeting the right keywords.
Certain actions can be undertaken such as -
1. Identifying keywords that are irrelevant and draining money without enough sales and mark them negative.
2. Identify keywords with good ACOS and high sales and increase the bid or refine targeting for more sales
3. Identify high ROI search terms in Automatic campaigns and Manual campaigns and add them as keywords in Manual campaigns
4. Refine Targeting from Broad to Phrase to Exact for high ROI keywords
5. Adjust bids to control ACOS
Placement Reports
Between the two Placement Reports available, I find the Keyword Placement Report to be rather more insightful than campaign placement but the catch is that it’s available only for Sponsored Brands.
Campaign Placement, on the other hand gives insights into the bidding strategies along with placements whereas Keyword Placement is only for placement analysis corresponding to keywords.
- Correlate keyword performance versus products advertised and ACOS. Optimize the bids and placement for better results
- From the Campaign Placement Report, you can correlate the dynamic bidding strategy with the campaign and placements and optimize them.
- Carry out A/B testing to find out which strategies work the best
Campaign Report
Lastly, the Campaign Report can be downloaded and stored for different time intervals to check performance over time accurately at the individual campaign level
With this knowledge I hope, you can analyze all the different reports, understand what’s working and what isn’t, and make informed business decisions. Information is only as good as its application
