Every Amazon PPC manager has been there: looking over your Amazon PPC campaign data, trying to sift through a sea of metrics for important figures and insights. Some Amazon PPC employees believe that reporting is busywork devoid of any substantive work. They are completely mistaken.

Your reports provide you the chance to consider and evaluate strategy and activities, verify or disprove previous ideas, combine novel ideas to advance, and develop business intelligence about what functions well in your account.

Your ability to analyze reports or that of your PPC manager will determine how accurate your Amazon reports are. Data on a spreadsheet is just a collection of numbers without any meaningful analysis or decision-making. Use a uniform procedure for how you evaluate your campaigns to give each campaign and campaign report the same star treatment.

How Not to Report an Amazon Campaign

Let’s build up a fictional Amazon seller named Lazy Larry and use him as an example of the most common type of Amazon “reporting.” When Lazy Larry decides on a campaign based on data, he opens a report, scans it, and then decides quickly without doing any further research. This is not news coverage. This is the absolute bare minimum you might do to comprehend the performance of your campaign.

For a wise optimization of your Amazon campaign, you need good, reliable reporting. Your campaign performance plan must be supported by data. You can uncover this proof in your campaigns by keeping your objective and the crucial KPIs in mind.

Amazon Reporting to Support Your Strategic Goals

Consider your strategic mission when creating your Amazon reports for efficient reporting. Do you want to boost sales? Are you trying to raise awareness?

Whatever your objective, make a note of it before you begin reviewing your reports, and keep it in mind at all times. This makes it easier for you to view your stats through a consistent viewpoint. Additionally, this helps you determine how realistic your goals are.

Maintaining focus on your goal also enables you to make informed decisions about your measurements. You can tell the performance is good given your objectives if you are gradually getting closer to them.

Analysis of trends

You cannot effectively optimize your campaigns going forward without a thorough understanding of cycles and trends that have occurred in the past. For products whose data is seasonal, this is doubly true. A 3-month decline in conversions could freak you out if there is no context, but if it is June and the campaign is for snowblowers, it makes a lot of sense.

You can perform your trend analysis in reports. Look for any trends throughout time, and then predict how it might continue in that direction or shift based on changes in input.

Additionally, trend analysis helps you better understand how various Amazon KPIs relate to one another in your campaigns. For instance, changing the bids may increase ACOS in one campaign while decreasing it in another due to other factors like ad placement or search term diversity.

Reading Your Amazon Reports to Learn

If there is one Amazon Advertising concept we respect to more than any other, it is that you should constantly be learning and developing. You must continually grow and update your knowledge base to keep up with the always changing world of Amazon selling.

Your Amazon reports aid you in continuously learning about your advertising because they are no different. They assist you in figuring out what’s good, what’s terrible, and why some things have changed.

Imagine the campaign as someone you’re almost dating: with each new report, you learn more about them and have a better sense of what they like and dislike. You discover how they respond to specific actions or changes.

Using Amazon Reporting to Improve Your Campaigns

It’s time to think of methods to improve your campaigns going forward after you’ve done your data analysis with a goal-focused perspective, compared your recent performance to historical trends and cycles, and proposed some explanations for changes in metrics.

While you are reviewing your reports, you should begin formulating your plan for how you want to go toward your objective or restart your campaign. Seeing the effects that your prior activities have had on your important metrics, both recently and historically, makes this much simpler. You know not to retry a previous tactic if it didn’t produce the outcomes you were hoping for.

Set realistic goals for how well your Amazon PPC optimization efforts will turn out. When you next evaluate your reports, you can use these expectations to determine the general strategy’s level of success.

Main Points

Your optimization must be data-driven if you want to make wise, performance-improving Amazon PPC decisions. To achieve this, you must carefully examine your campaign reports and examine not only the data but also the relationships between changes in strategy and KPIs.

Never report in a lazy Larry fashion. It takes much more than simply looking at the stats without giving them any further thought or analysis to get true value out of your Amazon reports. Do some spreadsheet caving without hesitation.

Make sure you have your main goal in mind and in view before you do anything else. This prevents you from going down any metric rabbit holes that don’t really have a big impact on your goal.

For your marketing, consider past trends and cyclical patterns. In general, those who are ignorant of the history of their campaign are doomed. Be certain of what is heading in which direction and keep an eye out for trends.

Once you’ve identified the changes to your campaigns, look into the causes. Discover the special characteristics of your campaign, then use that information to optimize it in the future.

Create a strategy with tasks that are clearly specified to assist you increase your performance after you know what and why you are doing it. Establish precise and fair expectations for how each task will impact your metrics.

Reporting on your Amazon PPC campaigns or those of your clients may occasionally seem like meaningless busy work, but with the help of this four-step method, you can confidently advance your Amazon PPC goals.