If you're an agency running multiple ad campaigns for multiple clients on Amazon, making sense of the different reports generated by Amazon is a challenge for two main reasons:

1. Disparate data: Amazon product sales and ad data are stored on two entirely separate platforms (Seller Central vs. Amazon Ads). This means you'll need to aggregate the data yourself from the different locations (or find a tool that does this for you) to correlate Amazon Ad performance with sales and create meaningful visualizations and reports.
2. Restrictive data downloads: Amazon has strict time limits on how much data you can download this can be as little as 60 days for some reports. So, unless you ensure you download your data regularly, you risk missing key information.

These two issues can make Amazon Ads reporting tedious and time-consuming for brands or agencies doing significant reporting from Amazon.

In contrast, our analytics platform, TapClicks, can automatically extract all your data from both Amazon platforms, store it in your data warehouse forever, and let you easily create reports, visualize it in a dashboard, or export it to any other analysis or visualization tool (like Google Sheets or Tableau).

In this piece, we'll explain the challenges of Amazon's native reports in more detail and explain how TapClicks solves them.

If after reading this article, you think TapClicks could work as an Amazon data warehouse for your organization, you can try it free for 14-days or schedule a demo to learn more.

Demystifying Amazon Ad Reports

The Basics

There are 2 completely separate Amazon platforms:

1. Seller Central: This is the platform for sellers and brands selling products directly via Amazon to its customers. Sellers use the Seller Central dashboard to list, manage, and advertise the products they are selling via Amazon Marketplace. It has its own suite of Amazon advertising reports.

You can learn more about how to use Seller Central in this article.

1. Amazon Ads (Amazon Advertising): This is the umbrella platform used for Amazon's advertising products. It comprises:

Amazon PPC Ads (for Amazon sellers) which is broken down into campaign types:

• Sponsored Products
• Sponsored Brands
• Sponsored Display

Amazon DSP (demand-side platform) is available to agencies and brands whether they sell via Amazon or not.

As with Seller Central, Amazon Ads has a suite of Amazon advertising reports which you can filter by the different advertising categories and campaign types.

You can learn more about Amazon Ads in this article.

The Amazon Ads Reports

There are 24 reports that span the different categories in the Amazon Ads platform alone. This article isn't the place to cover these but Amazon does provide a great deal of report data, which can be useful if you know how to handle it.

If we look at the Sponsored Products category from the PPC Ads segment (#2 above) as an illustration, the range of reports provided is broad:

• Targeting Report (90 days)
• Campaign Report (18 months)
• Placement Report (90 days)
• Advertised Product Report (90 days)
• Search Term Report (60 days)
• Search Term Impression Share Report
• Purchased Product Report (60 days)
• Performance Over Time Report
• Budget Report

*Source: PPC Ninja

Critically, as we show in parenthesis above, there's a time limit on the data history that's available to download, with some reports only allowing you to extract 60 or 90 days of data (e.g. Search Term Report and Purchased Product Report). We'll talk more about this in the next section.

You can select which report you want to download, the frequency of the download (e.g. weekly), and the data period you want to cover (e.g. 60 days) and download it in an Excel file.

If we look at the Advertised Product Report specifically, we can see the breadth of data Amazon provides. With this report, there are 15 different data metrics. These include Campaign Name, Ad Group Name, Advertised ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), Impressions, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC), 7 Day Total Sales, Total Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS), and Total Return on Advertising Spend (RoAS).

The report provides information on sales and performance on any advertised product (ASIN) that has received a minimum of one impression. These can be broken down by the various metrics and calculated across only 90 days of historical data.

This is just one report within one campaign type for Amazon PPC Ads on one of Amazon's 2 platforms.

Extracting your Amazon data, whether it be advertising data or sales data from the Amazon ecosystem can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if you are a marketer and not a coder.

It's possible, but you will be reliant on your development team creating custom code and ensuring that it's always updated in line with the Amazon API.

So, if you have many brands or clients running multiple advertising campaigns with Amazon, keeping track of all the performance metrics and conversion rates for each campaign or client so you can control ad spend and adjust marketing strategies can be a big logistical burden and put pressure on employee time.

If you're using the Amazon platforms directly without a tool or solution like TapClicks to help you, there's a guide on which reports are the most useful here.

A summary of Amazon's reports can be found in this video:

Amazon Data is Stored on 2 Separate Platforms

Finally, in addition to the restrictions on the date range of data you can download, it should also be noted that Seller Central and Amazon Ads are two different platforms with their own URLs and logins. So, if you or your clients have data within each platform, you would need to log on to each platform individually to download that data separately.

Then, if you want to correlate Amazon Ad performance with your store performance from Seller Central, you'll have to do that analysis manually in a spreadsheet.

How TapClicks Helps with Your Amazon Ad Reporting

TapClicks is designed to be an all-in-one solution for extracting, storing, and analyzing marketing and sales data including data from Amazon Ads.

TapClicks Pulls All Your Amazon Data Automatically and Stores It in One Place

We designed TapClicks so that it can pull data from over 250+ data sources (called instant-on connectors); this includes Amazon. We have 5 dedicated Amazon connectors so we connect seamlessly to the entire Amazon ecosystem:

• Amazon Ads
• Amazon DSP
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon S3
• Amazon Seller

Once connected, your Amazon data will be pulled automatically and daily from all the Amazon sources you specify. This data is permanently stored in your TapClicks account.

That means, once you're connected, you will be continually accumulating and storing all of your Amazon Adsdata within your TapClicks account without the risk of losing any data. So one, two, or three years from now, anyone on your team can look back and do analysis on all historical Amazon performance without any restrictions.

Store Your Amazon Data Alongside All Your Other Sales Streams

In addition to our Amazon integrations, TapClicks also has the ability to connect to thousands of digital marketing and sales platforms and store all of it in your TapClicks account.

This means TapClicks can become a single location where your team can find all marketing and sales related data, analyze it, visualize it, build reports, or push that data to any other visualization tool (like Tableau or even Google Sheets).

So, for example, if you want to look at sponsored product ads across your Amazon campaigns as well as your social media campaigns, you can easily incorporate the data from each campaign into your reports because it's all being pulled and stored within the TapClicks platform. Or if you are running broadcast TV or radio ads and want to see how they correlate with increases in sales on Amazon or Amazon Ad performance, you can do that easily with TapClicks because all of that data lives in one place.

Another benefit of using the TapClicks platform is that our team manages the APIs for you, so no developer resources are required from your company to maintain APIs or fix any issues or bugs.

You can learn more about using TapClicks as a data warehouse here.

Create an Amazon Ads Dashboard Once and Use It for All Your Clients or Brands

We've discussed above how TapClicks can automate the downloading and storage of that Amazon Ads or Seller Central data, but as we'll discuss in this section, TapClicks also shines in automating the analysis and visualization of that data (in both dashboards and PDF or PowerPoint presentations).

Analysis Automation

TapClicks lets marketers easily add, average, total, subtract, or do any other calculations on your data. You can then save these calculations, name them, and have them ready for all future reports. This is an incredible time-saver for repetitive monthly or weekly reporting.

For example, in the case of Amazon Ads reporting, you can define and name metrics like total spend across all campaigns and that number will always be ready for you to drop into a PDF or PowerPoint report (that you can easily build inside TapClicks) or use in a dashboard.

Or, a more complex example may be creating a metric that compares CPC for each keyword to average CPC across all campaigns so you can track which keywords or campaigns are under/over performing the average. This is normally a tedious calculation involving spreadsheet work every month. Again, with TapClicks you can define this metric once, name it, and drag and drop it into any report or dashboard and ensure it'll have updated numbers anytime that report is generated.

In the experience of our users, this can save marketing teams and agencies dozens of hours a week of tedious report generation time.

Dashboard Automation

TapClicks also comes with a fully-featured dashboard and visualization tool. So, in addition to automating calculations, you can also automate the visualization of Amazon Ads data.

Specifically, a marketing agency can create a master Amazon dashboard that lays out the charts, graphs, and metrics of Amazon Ad performance exactly as they want to show them to every client, and simply have a data filter to show that dashboard with one client's data at a time. Clients can get a unique link to their version of the dashboard.

That way, if you want to make an update to all dashboards, you can do that once and it'll automatically update all dashboards.

This level of customization and flexibility means that the whole process of analyzing and reporting on your Amazon campaigns can be applied at scale to dozens or hundreds of campaigns or clients.

Next, we'll explain how easy it is to convert your Amazon data into reports.

With TapClicks You Can Create PowerPoint Style Reports from Your Most Up-to-Date Amazon Ad Data

As well as being able to view up-to-date data via your dashboard whenever you want (and by whoever you give permission), you can also create and schedule customized reports to be sent to your clients or stakeholders at specific times (e.g. weekly, monthly, etc.).

TapClicks ReportStudio is a report builder which populates PowerPoint-style reports with the most up-to-date data automatically. This is powerful for regular (monthly, weekly) reporting. You can create the standard monthly report slide deck, for example, except every graph or number field will be a variable that will automatically update to the latest numbers whenever that presentation is saved, opened, or sent to stakeholders.

Everything that you configured in your Amazon dashboard can be pulled across into ReportStudio to create your reports. You can use one of our report templates and customize it or create your own from scratch.

And, if you want to include advertising data from other channels (e.g. Facebook or Google display ads), you can add those as well.

You can also set up reports to be automatically generated and emailed whenever monthly, weekly and to whomever you want.

 

You can read more about configuring reports for more than one channel in this article.

Want to Try TapClicks for Your Amazon Ads Reporting?

We've seen that navigating different reports on both Amazon platforms can be challenging, especially if you're an agency or brand handling multiple Amazon ad campaigns.

Restrictions on the time span of data you can download and having to fetch it from different locations means that you need to invest in a lot of time-consuming, tedious, and repetitive work just to ensure you have the data you need.

TapClicks provides an easy-to-use solution that automatically pulls all your Amazon data as well as all your other sales and marketing data into one central data warehouse. From here, you can customize a single Amazon dashboard that can be used across all your clients and create PowerPoint-style reports that can be sent to stakeholders to any schedule you wish.

If after reading this article, you think TapClicks could work as an Amazon data warehouse for your organization, you can try it free for 14-days or schedule a demo to learn more.

You can read more about configuring reports for more than one channel in .We've seen that navigating different reports on both Amazon platforms can be challenging, especially if you're an agency or brand handling multiple Amazon ad campaigns.Restrictions on the time span of data you can download and having to fetch it from different locations means that you need to invest in a lot of time-consuming, tedious, and repetitive work just to ensure you have the data you need.TapClicks provides an easy-to-use solution that automatically pulls all your Amazon data as well as all your other sales and marketing data into one central data warehouse. From here, you can customize a single Amazon dashboard that can be used across all your clients and create PowerPoint-style reports that can be sent to stakeholders to any schedule you wish.