Amazon is always improving, but it’s no secret that the platform still lags behind other digital advertising giants when it comes to offering insights in a simple, user-friendly format.Doesn’t mean this info doesn’t exist, but it can be difficult to find and even more difficult to finesse into something worthy of presentation.

With all its day-to-day metrics such as Sales, Spend, ACoS, NTB, it’s easy to get lost and lose sight of some of the high-level metrics your boss, direct reports, or clients want. After all, how often have you come to a meeting prepared with a full table of ACoS data only to be stumped by the question, “What products are performing best in the ads?” or, “How much are we spending on this product?” 

Again, this information is available on Amazon, it just is hard to put into a simple report. Fortunately, with some time spent upfront with the steps in this guide (and the use of a few free tools), the whole process can be fairly quick.

Step 1: Pull an Advertised Product Report

You can find the report by logging into the Amazon advertising console, going to “Reports,” “Create Report,” and then clicking on “Advertised Product.” For the purposes of this article, we’ll use a Professional Seller account. 

Once you’ve selected the report, you can set the time frame as well as the Time unit (either Summary, which will aggregate the product data over your selected Report period, or Daily, which will segment the product data by day — this can be a very large report if you have a large number of SKUs and cover a long Report period).

This can be a tedious process if you’re doing it every week — especially if there are other Amazon reports you need to pull and/or you manage other accounts. Fortunately, Amazon makes it a bit easier for you by offering the option to automatically have the report delivered to your email address (it doesn’t need to be your account login; it can be emailed to anyone).

For that, simply select the “Recurring” option under “Schedule,” set your frequency and preferred delivery day, and then select an appropriate End date — this is when the report will cease to regularly pull. If you are running recurring reports, be sure to take note of your End date, because you may want to extend the recurrence period!

When configuring the report, it’s usually best to pull data at least a week (and preferably two weeks) in arrears — so if you’re pulling a report on the 25th, the latest data you’ll want to pull should be the 18th (and preferably the 11th). The reason is that revenue data for Amazon tends to have a good deal of latency — ad data such as clicks, spend, impressions and so on are fairly reliable in real time, but revenue (and in turn ACoS) are almost never real time. The nice thing is that you’re almost always in for a pleasant surprise each time you log in, with revenue increasing and ACoS decreasing, but the bad thing is if something is wrong with a campaign, it can take some time for you to notice.

Either way, always account for the lag time when pulling your reports.

We typically schedule ours to pull on a weekly basis, a week or two in arrears, and looking back over the last 30 days. That leads to pasting over a lot of data, but it’s going to be more accurate.

In terms of the report itself, whether the data is broken down by day, week, or month is entirely up to you, but if you’re following along with this guide, we recommend breaking the data down by month…

To read the full article, you can find it here.

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