Adam VanBaale

by Adam VanBaale | Amazon Advertising

Throughout 2020, Amazon has been telling us they are expanding the reporting features of Amazon Advertising, and finally, those new reporting features have arrived!

In this post, we’ll cover two new reports for Amazon Sponsored Brand ads, the Search Term Impression Share report and the Category Benchmarks report, covering the features that will matter most and our tips for using them. We’ll also briefly cover updated Sponsored Display reporting. These new reports are being rolled out over time, so you may not have them just yet, but they’re coming. This breakdown will help you prepare for how you can use them to improve your ad planning in 2021.

Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Product Search Term Impression Report

This is one report that everyone’s been asking for. “Search Term Impression Rank” displays ad ranking for each search term by campaign. “Search Term Impression Share” shows the percentage of times your ad was shown in relation to total searches. Note: you can rank number one, but still have a sub-100% search term impression share.

View of new Impression Rank and Impression Share data

Metric Theory Tips for Amazon Impression Rank & Impression Share Reporting:

  1. Filter the Match Type column to Phrase and Broad match. This will help determine new keywords you can add to your Sponsored Brand or Sponsored Product manual keyword campaigns.
  2. Sort the impression share column from largest to smallest. For search terms below 100% impression share, check KPIs like CTR, Sales and ROAS to see if it makes sense to increase bids and get closer to 100% impression share.
  3. Filter by brand searches. Note any branded terms that are below 100% to raise bids there as well and make sure you’re capturing as much of your brand real estate as possible to prevent sales loss to competing brands.

We plan to test these tips over the next 60-90 days on a limited product mix to determine the impact of bid changes to impression share and sales, and plan to report back with those findings. To sign up for updates, you can join our Monday email by dropping your email address in the form on the right!

Sponsored Brand Category Benchmark Report

Have you ever wanted to know how your ads stack up against your competitors’ on impressions, CTR, ACoS and ROAS? This report does exactly that! Amazon aggregates these KPIs at the Category and Sub-category levels, and the report provides the totals and averages of peers in the Bottom 25%, Middle 50%, and Top 25% of each metric to show you what you’re up against. As of this writing, this report is in beta, but Amazon says it should start general rollout to more brands in early 2021.

Below is an example of the report broken out by impressions, but it also has CTR, ACOS and ROAS:

Partial view of new Category Benchmark Report

Metric Theory Tips for Amazon Category Benchmark Reporting:

  1. Test specific category and sub-category campaigns. For example, with categories where your impressions, CTR, or other metrics are below benchmarks you can test a new SB category-targeted campaign. We recommend using the highest-converting search terms from the Search Term report in the Sponsored Brands Report. After 2-4 weeks, pull another Category Benchmark report and see if this test is closing the gap with benchmarks.
  2. Prioritize product pages for review. Retail readiness has been discussed for years and will be more important than ever for Amazon Advertising in 2021 as competition grows. Customer experience will separate your brand and raise performance to benchmarks. When your product pages have a strong title, bullets, images (both product and lifestyle), and video, it’s been proven that this impacts Amazon Ad KPIs in a positive way. You can use the Category Benchmark reports to know where you should start or invest limited resources on more ambitious updates like video. But the impact can be huge. For one Metric Theory client, adding a video raised their CTR 68%!

Sponsored Display Reporting

We’ve been waiting for Sponsored Display reporting since it came out in Q4 of 2019. Note: Sponsored Display reports are available for product targeting campaigns created after September 1, 2020, and remarketing campaigns created after November 17, 2020. Campaigns data before those dates won’t be viewable. The report options are like other campaign types which include Campaign, Targeting, Advertised Product and Purchased Product.

The Purchased Product report for Sponsored Display will be especially useful for your ad strategy in 2021. With it, you can see the advertised ASIN, and if a different ASIN was purchased, it will also show a Brand Halo ASIN purchase. If you see many advertised ASINs with alternate ASINs purchased, we recommend evaluating your product detail page to see what could be making other ASINs more appealing. Some common reasons could be the number of ratings, overall rating, images/video, content of the copy and more.

We believe these new reporting features are just the beginning of what Amazon plans to rollout in 2021. We have started testing some of the tactics mentioned in this article already and will be publishing a follow up article in the next 60-90 days with the results of these tests. Be sure to check Metric Theory’s blog for the next blog by the end of Q1! If you’re looking for more strategic help like this with Amazon Advertising, contact us to learn more.

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