Four Powerful, Quick Amazon Reports You Can Run Using Amazon Ad Data

A Seller’s time is precious. There are many things with Amazon selling that need attention: monitoring sales, working with the right audience, managing the cash flow, ordering and logistics, advertising, and looking for ways to improve the product or the product selection (and how they fit with your brand).

It would be nice if you could just use some sort of data studio to create a custom data representation and see everything you need in just a couple of dashboard pages. But at the moment, that isn’t available.

This is precisely why we’ve come up with our own list of the top 4 most helpful Amazon Seller Central Reports that can quickly give you the majority of the answers you need about the current state of affairs of sales on Amazon.com. 

If you manage to incorporate these into your routine (e.g. weekly) monitoring, they’ll save you lots of time while keeping you well informed about the most crucial aspects of your business.

Before we get to the list, there is one thing worth mentioning: how Amazon’s A10 algorithm works.

Amazon has worked a few years on its search and score algorithms that allow customers to have the best experience. They’ve also worked on the methods to make money from Sellers operating on the platform. 

From our nearly 4 years of experience in running Amazon PPC Campaigns for 6-figure sellers, we couldn't help but notice: the algorithm is geared. 

Amazon A10 algorithm is geared

The A10 algorithm is geared towards:

1. Showing the ASINs that sell the most of a product amongst others in their niche and amongst those relevant to a given Search Query;
   

2. Balancing out the profit for Amazon that consists of both fixed fee, FBA sales speed, and PPC spent by a Seller. This appears to impact your Ads position.
   

3. Being artificially slow to react to any changes a Seller makes to their listing and their PPC Campaign.
   

The first two observations help better interpret the results of reports. Especially if you keep track of how this data reacts to major changes you make to your listing and PPC. 

The latter observation means that, unless your turnover is in the hundreds per day, you are unlikely to get reliable “reaction data” from Amazon over anything less than 7 days. 

This is extra true for Advertising reports. In most cases, we’ve observed that the actual unit sales were being added over the course of 24 hours or even a few days to the past data. This has to do not only with the speed at which the algorithm rebalances the search results after you’ve made your change, but also to do with the sales attribution system. This is where the system counts some sales that physically occurred later on, as being affected by clicking on your Sponsored Ad earlier. 

Conclusion: a good and data-solid period to make any sort of conclusions from the collected data would be 7 days.

Waiting for this long can sometimes be hard. But that is just how we’ve noticed the system works. 

And now to the reports!

Instead of simply going through the reports - let’s see what kind of quick answers we can get from them that will help your business right away.

“Are we all good?” (Amazon PPC ads + organic data)

The last thing a busy Seller needs is to sink deep into numbers just to understand that everything is “normal.” Same goes for an agency with dozens of active clients. So, we need a shortcut. A way to tell if the business is doing well — or if it’s time to look into things and find out what’s wrong.

1 - Amazon Business Report & Sales and Traffic

To do the checking quickly — we always dive first into Amazon business reports. Namely, the Sales and Traffic Report.

From here, you see the total number of Sessions and % of conversions (Order Item Session Percentage) for your account. Now, if there aren’t too many ASINs in your account (1-7) — you can stay here and compare the numbers to the previous period (say, a week). If there is no major downward change, you are OK at the moment, and you can safely switch to Advertising Reports to complete the verification (more on those shortly).

If you have more ASINs under your control, you may still need to drill this data down one step, as some positive and negative oscillations can cancel each other out, thereby rendering the total value less informative.

2 - Go to Detail Page Sales and Traffic, sort by ASIN, and repeat the period-to-period comparison.

What you’re looking for is a significant drop in either: 

a) Sessions  

and

b) conversions (Unit Session Percentage).

The change in a) Sessions (especially if it stands out from your other ASIN’s IPMs) means that there is a deeper problem. In most cases, this is a call for you to drill into the report deeper and look at one of the following areas for a reason:

• Top performing keyword rank changes.
• Recall any changes you’ve made to the ASIN’s picture set or the title wording.
• See if there was a change in Buy Box (%) (i.e., if there are any direct competitors of hijackers operating).
  

Understanding the change in b) conversions, especially if you are selling over 30 items per period, is also an indication of where to look further to get to the route of a problem:

• Recall any changes you’ve made to product listing.
• Look at the new reviews and customers’ comments to see if you’ve missed out on a fresh and particularly nasty negative review.
• Manually example if there is a new strong competitor in your detailed product page carousel that steals your ASIN’s sales.
• If a large % of your sales are coming from your Sponsored Ads, go to Advertising Reports and check there.
  

This is how you can run a quick “go/no-go” check using Business Reports.

The second part of this check refers to Advertising Reports (and is obviously allied only to products that have Sponsored Ad Campaigns).

“Are my Amazon ads Doing Their Part?” (Amazon ads Data)

3 - Advertising Bulk File (for a period)

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. After all, nearly all of Seller Central Advertising reports are from the very same data, arranged in slightly different order and with 1-2 added unique columns.

And to be honest, the fastest way to look at most key data is by using a Bulk File Download and opening it in a Google Spreadsheet. This seemingly bulky (ha-ha) file contains very precious data of Sponsored Ads effectiveness that can provide a range of up to 60 days in the past. For example:

• impressions 
• clicks 
• sales 
• bids 
  

PER targeted keyword/ASIN, PER Ad Group, PER Campaign.

Sort the data by ACoS and you should get a pretty good feel of which keywords bring you sales (think about up-bidding on those) and which sell at a loss (high ACoS with zero sales with lots of clicks… these deserve to be paused).

4 - Amazon Search Term Report

A strong pool of highly relevant PPC keywords that generate sales at good ACoS is not a given (unless you use Profit Whales Zero to Hero Amazon PPC Campaign Turn-Key creator Tool, of course). It’s the result of months of meticulous work with the keywords and their bids.

So unless you’ve already done all that… you should really visit the Search Term Report regularly (we suggest no less than once a month). While not having ACoS data from over the last few days, it does show you the search terms real live customers used to run into your product. By looking at respective CTR and Sales, you can quickly sort them into either: 

1) Be Good: Ones that deserve being adding to your PPC Campaigns or even your ASIN listing,

Or

2) Be Bad: Ones that deserve being added to the Negative Targeting (keywords and comparing ASINs) so as to never bleed your marketing budget again.

In these 4 reports we find the most useful first-hand Seller Central tools that help Sellers (and their respected agents) FIND and START FIXING major issues that impact Amazon’s business effectiveness.

I wish all you fellow Amazonians a good hunt out there!

P.S. Do you want to know how to bring a flatlined listing from $0 sales back to life? Our in house experts recently resuscitated a flatlined Amazon product using the latest listing optimization techniques and PPC strategies. Watch the complete series here.