How To Build A Comprehensive Amazon Ads Dashboard & What Metrics to Include

Whether you’re a marketer for an Amazon seller or an agency managing the ad spend of multiple Amazon storefronts, understanding Amazon advertising data is critical. As many marketers know, Amazon is one of the most competitive online platforms. That’s why paying for sponsored ads on product listings is often necessary to stand above the competition. 

Using an Amazon ads dashboard can fuel your efforts to make data-driven decisions about your sponsored listing spend. Understanding SEO, targeting, and sponsored product reports can be daunting for in-house marketing teams and agencies. It’s often difficult to discern the accuracy of your data across multiple report types. An in-depth understanding of these reports is essential to managing pay-per-click (PPC) spending on Amazon’s platform and making strategic decisions. 

This article will review building a comprehensive Amazon ads dashboard to cut through the noise and improve your marketing strategy. 

Key Takeaways

• PPC advertising is critical to success on Amazon.
• Amazon Advertising is a platform helping sellers and marketers manage their Amazon PPC ads (including sponsored listings, brands, and more).
• All businesses should use a dashboard to visualize their Amazon advertising data for greater visibility and ROI.
• Some key metrics to track on your Amazon ads dashboard include clicks, impressions, the average cost of sales (ACoS), return on ad spend (ROAS), sales, and ad spend.
• Improvado can help your business drive higher ROAS by automating your Amazon Ads analytics.

The Basics of Amazon Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most crucial elements of an effective Amazon advertising campaign. While optimizing your product listings for higher organic search positions is a right thing to do, they often don’t jump to higher positions overnight. Following SEO best practices alone won’t get your listing to the top. You also need to have a competitive amount of sales and reviews from verified users to rank higher. That’s why investing marketing dollars into a solid paid strategy can help you generate new sales and, at the same time, improve your listings’ search positions.

Sponsored product listings can be expensive—especially if you don’t know how to allocate your spending and plan your campaign correctly. This is where Amazon analytics is handy for sellers and marketers of all sizes. Understanding the basics of Amazon advertising can help you create a good PPC campaign. Learning how to create a comprehensive data dashboard allows you to visualize the results of your campaigns. 

Before we dive into the details, let’s touch on what Amazon advertising is. Essentially, it’s an umbrella term used to label all of the platform’s advertising solutions, and it can be broken into two categories: 

1. Self-Service Amazon PPC: These are advertisements you pay for to appear on Amazon itself. In other words, these include your sponsored product listings, which are most likely the type of sponsored content you care about the most. Brand Registered and otherwise professional sellers trying to extend their reach and expand their audience use PPC ads. Amazon’s PPC ads are the most common advertising on the platform. Besides sponsored product listings, they include sponsored brands and sponsored display ads. 

2. Managed-Service Amazon DSP: These advertisements are shown on Amazon’s platform and across the web. They’re CPM ads, or cost per thousand impressions. This self-managed platform is offered to sellers who sell on Amazon and those who don’t, but want access to Amazon’s data on customer purchasing behavior to more precisely target their advertising. These types of advertisements typically require a large budget and dedicated support from an Amazon Advertising account executive. From there, they can help you set up an Amazon DSP service.

This article will discuss Amazon Ads, or Amazon Advertising (not Seller Central, which is for managing your Amazon store). Amazon Advertising is designed to help you manage your Amazon PPC ads (including all sponsored listings, brands, and more). 

How Does Amazon PPC Work?

PPC stands for pay-per-click, meaning you pay Amazon every time a potential customer clicks on your Amazon ad. Mind that you’re only paying for a click. If the prospect clicks on your listing and doesn’t purchase you still have to pay for this click.

You can set up any PPC ad campaign in just a few minutes. The cost of the campaign, however, depends on the type of ad you’re placing, which keywords you’re targeting, and how competitive the market is. 

When planning and executing a PPC campaign on Amazon, you must keep track of crucial metrics. Luckily, this is where Amazon pulls through with provided metrics to help you track each campaign’s success. One of the best ways to know how your advertising efforts influence Amazon sales is to visualize marketing data on an Amazon ads dashboard. 

What Is an Amazon Ads Dashboard?

Using a marketing dashboard to visualize your data is one of the best ways to internalize and interact with meaningful metrics. An Amazon ads dashboard is a marketing dashboard you can build to display all required metrics in a visually engaging, easily digestible way. 

Think of your Amazon ads dashboard as a central information hub. Whether you’re a marketing agency that needs to deliver reports to your clients selling on Amazon or an in-house marketing team with an Amazon seller, you need a dashboard. Dashboards make it easy to share information and report the results of marketing efforts.
Essentially, dashboards make reporting on Amazon ads a breeze.

Learn how Improvado can jumpstart your Amazon Ads analytics

Share some details about your case and set a date to discuss it with our  dashboarding experts. On a 30-min call, we’ll review your business objectives and analytics requirements to see how Improvado can help.

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Why Use Amazon Advertising Reports?

In theory, Amazon Ads dashboard can help you find lots of unobvious trends and significantly improve ROI of your ppc campaigns. However, the dashboard is not a panacea. It’s crucial to understand which areas of your Amazon marketing it can improve to avoid overexpectations. So, let’s dive into areas that can be improved with an Amazon dashboard.

It helps you get measurable results

One of the most frustrating parts about marketing is quantifying your results. When stakeholders and clients ask about their spending, they want concrete evidence that their investment is effective. Many marketing teams still rely on spreadsheets to communicate, but those can be lengthy and confusing. 

A dashboard lays out the most critical data and metrics in a clean, straightforward way leading to actionable insights. Your clients and stakeholders won’t have to scroll through endless spreadsheets without understanding the effects of marketing efforts. Everyone will be on the same page. 

It enables collaboration across team members

The same goes for your internal team. Implementing a dashboard allows for more effective internal communication. When you tell your team members a particular metric is part of a common goal, they’ll visualize that metric’s relationship to the whole. 

It makes your analytics more effective

Instead of relying on sales and revenue as your primary success metrics, you can dive into more granular indicators. CTR, impressions, cumulative reach, keyword search volume, and loads of other metrics can help you get actionable insights into every campaign you launch. 

With different levels of granularity you can easily compile a high-level overview for stakeholders as well as optimize campaigns based on derived insights from low-level data.

Overall, using an Amazon ads dashboard is critical to your overall success. When you use a dashboard, you benefit from greater transparency, clear picture of your ROI, in-depth insights into your audience behavior and buying intent, and more.

What Metrics to Include in an Amazon Ads Report

Now that you’ve decided to use an Amazon ads dashboard, you must know how to populate it. Amazon Ads, as well as any other platform, offers quite a lot of metrics you can track. And, this often leads to a question “What am I looking at?”. So, selecting the right metrics is crucial to make the dashboard informative, and, at the same time, concise. 

Below are some of the most universally beneficial Amazon Advertising metrics to track on your dashboard report. Having a firm grasp on these metrics can help you set goals, strategize, and gain a competitive edge with your ad campaigns.

Impressions

You might be familiar with impressions metrics from your Google PPC ads or social media advertising, which work in essentially the same way on Amazon. Impressions will show how many times Amazon displayed your ad to a customer.

Clicks

This critical metric shows how often someone has clicked on your Amazon ad. If the idea of invalid clicks enters your mind, Amazon is one step ahead. They adjust the report for invalid clicks (accidental or otherwise) within three days, which is immensely helpful for accurate reporting. 

Average Cost of Sales (ACoS)

This valuable metric measures the effectiveness of your sponsored ads. It represents the percentage of ad-generated sales spent through advertising. ACoS is one of those metrics that will go a long way with clients and stakeholders. It provides a quantifiable number to show them the value of their dollar. 

How to Manually Calculate ACoS

To calculate your ACoS, divide the amount you spent on ads by how much revenue your ads generated. In other words, if you spent $100 on advertising, and it brought in one sale of $200, your ACoS would be 50%.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Monitoring your ROAS has several benefits, especially for understanding the efficiency of your campaigns. Whenever a company engages in new marketing efforts, a crucial question is whether that investment is worth it. 

Marketing dollars are worth it when they drive additional revenue, which is precisely what this metric determines. What is the value of your marketing dollars, and specifically your ad spend dollars?

How to Manually Calculate ROAS

ROAS is the inverse of the ACoS metric: if you have a ROAS of 6, that means that for every dollar you spent on ads, you collected $6 in revenue. 

Sales

The sales report shows the number of product sales generated within a week of ad clicks. 

A good Amazon Ads dashboard allows you to track sales across different regions, demographics of your buyers, and more. Here’s an example of Improvado’s dashboard with sales breakdown by different states:

Ad Spend

Another clear metric is spend, which tells you how much you invest in a particular ad campaign. Ad spend equals the total number of click charges per product ad.

Drive Higher ROAS with an Improvado-Built Amazon Ads Dashboard

Improvado is a marketing analytics platform that helps companies collect and visualize marketing data in a single, functional and easy-to-use environment. The platform integrates with 500+ marketing and sales platforms to automatically pull data and transform it into actionable insights. 

Ecommerce is one of Improvado’s primary areas of focus. With its help, you can easily extract over 600 different metrics and data dimensions from Amazon Ads and Amazon DSP and create a single source of truth for your paid advertising data. 

What would take days to gather and transform data can be done with Improvado in a few minutes. Simply choose the required marketing platforms, turn the connection on, pick the metrics of your choice, and Improvado will do the rest for you.

The platform also offers a wide range of ready-made dashboard templates for all the popular visualization tools (Looker Studio, Tableau, Power BI, etc.). After you choose the template, Improvado automatically puplates it with business-ready data so you’re ready to start analyzing. All templates can be customized in a way you need to match the metrics you want to monitor and objectives you want to achieve with analytics.

Additionally, the Improvado team offers help with building custom dashboards and provides analytical guidance for complex omnichannel ecommerce use cases.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Are Amazon Sponsored Ads?

Amazon Sponsored Ads are a form of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising available to sellers and vendors on Amazon's marketplace. They help businesses promote their products and increase visibility among potential customers by displaying targeted ads in search results and on product detail pages. Sponsored Ads help sellers and vendors drive more sales by reaching shoppers who are actively searching for products similar to theirs.

What Are Amazon Advertising Reports?

Amazon Advertising Reports are detailed data and analytics reports provided by Amazon to help sellers and vendors understand the performance of their advertising campaigns. These reports offer insights and metrics that help advertisers optimize their marketing efforts, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately increase the return on investment (ROI) for their advertising budget.

What Are the Different Types of Amazon Sponsored Ads

There are three primary types of Amazon Sponsored Ads:

1. Sponsored Products: These ads promote individual product listings and appear in search results or on product detail pages. They're targeted based on keywords that the advertiser selects, and they're designed to help increase product visibility and sales.
2. Sponsored Brands: These ads showcase a brand logo, a custom headline, and a selection of products from the brand's catalog. They appear in prominent locations within search results, such as the top or middle of the page. Sponsored Brands ads are designed to help businesses increase brand awareness and drive sales for multiple products.
3. Sponsored Display: These ads are display ads that can appear on Amazon's website, its mobile app, and third-party sites within Amazon's advertising network. Sponsored Display ads use audience targeting to reach potential customers based on their browsing behavior, shopping history, and demographics. These ads are meant to drive brand awareness, retarget shoppers, and generate more sales.

What Is the KPI for Amazon Ads?

For Amazon Ads, there are several KPIs that advertisers can track to measure the performance of their Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns. Some of the most important KPIs for Amazon Ads include:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS)
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Total Sales
• Conversion Rate