A Quick Guide to Amazon Ads Console

Much has changed about Amazon in recent years, but arguably no aspect of the platform has advanced more than advertising on Amazon. Selling on Amazon represents a huge business opportunity! As an Amazon seller, you must know where to start and what to keep in mind as you grow your eCommerce business. 

If you are ready to start with Amazon Ads, this article will be your perfect guide with all the best steps to follow. Let’s begin!

Inventory Management 

If you click on the “Manage Inventory” tab, you can see all your listings—active and inactive. 

You should check this page regularly because frequent out-of-stock impacts your campaigns’ performances and your Amazon ranking. The date on the right side of the product shows you the launch date and the date of the last changes made on a product. The date on the top indicates the date the product was listed on Amazon. Lastly, the date of the recent out of stock or any other change will be on the bottom.   

Getting Ready to Advertise – Campaign Manager 

Paid advertising on Amazon starts with the Campaign Manager. Aside from campaign creation, you have the option for various report types and campaign organization by types of products, categories, or any other feature you use to distinguish your inventory.  

Amazon Portfolio 

Campaign portfolios offer a new way to create custom groupings of your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. With them, you can choose to mirror the structure of your business and organize campaigns by brand, category, season, or any way you choose. One of the important features is enabling advertisers to manage the total spending of multiple campaigns within a specific date range by posting a budget cap on the portfolio level.   

Campaign Types

We recommend new advertisers start with Sponsored Products when it comes to campaign creation. This will help customers discover and purchase products that advertisers sell on Amazon. You can use automatic targeting, manual keyword, or product targeting. Sponsored Products ads appear within shopping results and on product detail pages across desktop and mobile. 

Pay only when the ad is clicked, and you choose how much you’re willing to bid for a click. Advertising Campaign Manager is a section within Seller Central PPC that helps advertisers optimize their Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns by making their product listings more visible on the Amazon website.  

 

 

If you are a completely new advertiser on the Amazon platform, you will go on the "Create campaigns" button and choose which type of campaign you would like to create, and you’ll get the following options: 

Sponsored Products - Improve visibility of individual products with ads that appear in search results and on product pages. With Sponsored Products, there are two unique ways to set up your campaigns that determine where your ads will be displayed.  

Sponsored Brands - Sponsored Brands advertisements promote entire brands. Sponsored Brands ads allow for three formats to choose from product collection, store spotlight, or video. Boost brand awareness with your logo and a customized headline in advertisements that appear in search results. 

Sponsored Display - The most recent addition to the Amazon Ads Console, Sponsored Display ads currently offer the unique opportunity to advertise on and off Amazon. Grow your business by reaching relevant audiences on and off Amazon using this self-service advertising solution. 

How to Track Your Campaigns’ Performances?  

Performance metrics are available in the campaign manager interface and within downloadable reports. 

In the Campaign Manager, you have the option to display metrics for today, yesterday, week to date, last week, month to date, last month, year to date, lifetime, or customized (available for the previous 90 days). 

Budget 

Your budget is the average amount you are willing to spend on your campaign per day.

Impressions 

An impression occurs whenever an ad is displayed. The impressions metric counts how many times your ad has been served to a user. The data show you the total number of impressions for each campaign, ad group, and target. 

Clicks

A click occurs whenever shoppers click on an ad. The click metric counts how many times an ad is clicked. The campaign manager displays the total number of clicks for each campaign, ad group, and target. 

Spend 

The total clicks charge for a product ad. We provide the spending for each campaign, ad group, and target. 

Sales

This metric represents the total product sales generated from clicks. For Sponsored Brands, this also includes purchases for your brand's products made by shoppers that clicked on your ad, including sales of any product in your advertised brand made by Amazon and other sellers. 

Orders 

The number of Amazon orders shoppers placed after clicking on your ads. For Sponsored Products, this includes orders from advertised products as well as other products (advertised or not) within your brand sold by Amazon within 14 days for vendors and 7 days for sellers, excluding third-party sellers. 

For Sponsored Brands, this includes orders from advertised products and all products (advertised or not) within your brand sold by Amazon and third-party sellers within 14 days. It can take up to 12 hours for your orders metrics to update. As a result, orders metrics may be delayed in the “Today” date range. 

We recommend waiting until all orders metrics are populated before evaluating campaign performance. Payment failures and orders that are canceled within 72 hours will be removed from orders’ totals. 

ACoS 

Advertising cost of sales (ACoS) is the percentage of sales spent on advertising (total spend/total sales x 100). 

ROAS 

Return on advertising spend (ROAS) divides the total sales by the total ad spend (total ad sales/total ad spend).  

Keyword Tracking – Search Term Report  

Aside from tracking performance metrics, monitoring search terms triggering your campaigns is essential. If you go back to the Amazon Ads Console, you can find a menu with the “Measurement & Reporting” section on the left side of the console. 

 

 

The Search Terms report lists search terms that a significant number of people have used and that resulted in your ad being shown. Tracking search terms is fundamental because this insight gives you information on what search terms triggered by your keyword targeting made sales or made spend without conversion.  

Using search term reports, you can add new keywords into your campaigns or put the ones causing spending into negative/exact phrases. The "Match type" column tells you how closely the search terms that triggered your ads on Amazon are related to the actual keywords in your account.  

Conclusion  

If you’ve never tried advertising on Amazon, this guide will help you take the first step towards advertising and to get to know the Amazon Ads Console. 

This is just a small part of what this powerful advertising platform offers. Numerous reports and data can help you improve your business. 

If you’re ready to begin your advertising journey on the eCommerce giant’s platform and scale your business with Amazon Ads, we’re here to help you with our expertise. Schedule a call today to find out more about our Amazon PPC services!

  

About the author

 

Katarina Krstic is a Senior PPC Specialist at Sellers Alley. She has five years of experience in PPC advertising. During that time, she had a chance to work on strategies for big clients, manage over 4 million keywords on just one ad account, and organize and handle campaigns on accounts with high spend and profits. Katarina is an experienced PPC Team Leader, able to multitask, prioritize, organize, and communicate effectively within the team to help clients reach their goals. She has Amazon and Google AdWords certifications. Additionally, she has experience in using the Quartile and Amazon DSP.