How To Automate Your Amazon Advertising Reports

Just as Amazon has disrupted nearly every vertical in the business world, Amazon Advertising is quickly becoming a major player in the digital marketing ecosystem, providing a wide range of services to help brands and agencies reach hundreds of millions of daily users. 

While there are plenty of in-app analytics and performance metrics available on the Amazon Advertising platform, in order to create effective performance reports, marketers still have to off-load and package data into a presentation format clients and stakeholders will comprehend.

If you are a curious marketer seeking to learn more about Amazon Advertising and how it works, this primer is a good place to start.  

What is Amazon Advertising?

Like other popular digital marketing platforms, Amazon Advertising offers a range of options to help brands and agencies achieve their advertising goals. 

Through self-service advertising products like listings on sponsored pages or products, or display ads on the Amazon Demand Side Platform, marketers can easily set up and manage their Amazon Advertising campaigns.

Similar to Google search marketing, when users type in a certain keyword into Amazon, advertisers have an opportunity to “Sponsor” links and place ads in the search results. 

Depending on the keywords and search results, Amazon offers many opportunities on its search results pages for advertisers to place ads. 

Beyond sponsored search posts, there are several types of ad options on Amazon including sponsored product ads, and headline search ads, all managed through their self-serve or premium ad platforms. 

Among the millions of products available on Amazon, ad campaigns can help ensure your products are rising to the top. 

With compelling copy, properly structured campaign ad groups, a keyword strategy, and proper performance reporting on the metrics that matter, you’ll be better positioned to see returns from your Amazon Advertising campaign. 

Product Marketing Options Unique on Amazon Advertising

Thanks to a highly integrated network of platforms and hardware, Amazon offers unique product marketing opportunities for voice and OTT video advertising within their ecosystem. 

Voice search optimization is uniquely important to effective product marketing on Amazon, on account of the tight connection of the marketplace with Echo products that feature Alexa.

Voice search results on Alexa are sourced from the Yext Knowledge Network, so using Yext to optimize your site and online mentions will increase your chances for a product, or associated website, to show up in Alexa voice search results.

Another way to optimize a product to show up in an Alexa voice search, is to increase the number of Amazon Choice badges and reviews for the product.

With ad distribution networks on Prime video and visual interfaces within Amazon, such as tablets, Kindle, or the FireStick smart TV device, Amazon Advertising offers both streaming and display ad options. 

A few Amazon-exclusive advertising features are worth noting, such as video ad groups tied to star ratings, or ad creative programmed to display as “hints” on the Alexa network. 

Marketers on Amazon have creative, compelling, and customizable ways to spread their brand messages through advertising, so when it comes time to share the results of your campaigns with stakeholders, choosing the right metrics to report on is critical. 

Amazon Advertising Metrics To Track

Amazon provides several familiar digital marketing metrics to help agencies and brands analyze campaign efficiency. 

Along with traditional metrics, such as Impressions, Cost Per Click, and Click Thru Rate, Amazon Advertising has a few unique marketing performance metrics that are worth mentioning. 

• Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) - Calculated as ad spend, divided by revenue, multiplied by 100, ACoS measures the efficiency of an ad campaign as a percentage. An indicator of how well an ad is performing in relation to spend, ACoS is dependent on business goals, profit margins, product life cycles, and more.
  
  
• Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) - A measurement of effectiveness and the inverse of ACoS. Calculated as total ad sales divided by total ad spend, RoAS is displayed as an index to gauge the profitability of an ad campaign. 
  

• Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS) - the highest-level performance metric on Amazon,–and also most fun to say–is calculated as a percentage of how much has been spent on an ad in relation to total revenue. Aim to keep your TACoS metric low to get the most value out of your ad spend.

Marketers looking to track the effectiveness of their campaigns on Amazon Advertising have a wealth of data available on the platform.

As always is the case with marketing performance reporting, it’s never the amount of data that’s the issue, but getting the data off the disparate platforms and into a presentation-ready format. 

The real success of your Amazon Advertising campaign relies on the insights and optimizations you deliver from the data, and the quality of the data story you’re able to present. 

Amazon Advertising Data In, NinjaCat Reporting Out

Effective reporting is more than just gathering facts and figures, it’s how you present that data to stakeholders and communicate value. 

To educate stakeholders and inspire action, an effective Amazon Advertising report should bridge the gap between metrics and meaning, by connecting marketing performance to sales performance, and vice versa. 

Powerful marketing reporting relies on data curation, and the speed at which you can turn insights into action. This is why a marketing report automation workflow is so critical to the success of digital ad campaigns. What gets measured, gets managed. 

Automated Reporting Leads to Better Results on Amazon Advertising

With a firm grip on measuring and reporting on the success of an Amazon Advertising campaign, marketers can shift their focus, and their presentations, to more important strategic initiatives. 

With NinjaCat’s ability to integrate digital marketing data data of all kinds into packaged reporting templates, marketers can generate insightful presentations on all their Amazon Advertising campaigns in one place to bring actionable, brand-level performance metrics to the table. 

Stakeholders connected to marketing reports are eager for insights, but short on time for analysis. While high level performance metrics are nice to see in a report, there’s always the question of how the data impacts the bottom line. 

By integrating Amazon Advertising data with sales performance data in the above example (from NinjaCat), marketers can deliver an effective data story that inspires strategy and informs action.