Access rapid retail analytics to get sales, traffic, and inventory reports in near real time

We live in a world where the speed of information matters. Businesses seek new ways to obtain information faster, gather audience insights more quickly, and make decisions at a rapid pace.

At Amazon Ads, we’ve sought new ways to meet those customer needs. To help, we’re introducing rapid retail analytics, giving both vendors and sellers access to near real-time retail analytics. This can help advertisers improve efficiency and operational decisions, giving enhanced power and opportunity to businesses that sell on Amazon.

Rapid retail analytics from Amazon Ads provide near real-time analytics, providing the “last hour’s insights” within minutes for sales (ordered units, ordered revenue, and ASINs), traffic (detail page views/glance views and ASINs), and inventory (highly available units and ASINs). Programmatic access is available for these retail metrics, with information available minutes after the close of each hour.

Advertisers can use rapid retail analytics for intraday reporting to understand when shoppers engage with a brand at an ASIN level. For example, an advertiser can see that sales performance is strong during a consistent set of peak hours and adjust advertising campaigns to feature high-performing (and inventory-available) ASINs during these times. Beyond understanding ongoing peak shopping hours, businesses can also use rapid retail analytics during key shopping events, like Prime Day or holidays, to make optimal adjustments to advertising strategies and ensure appropriate inventory and product promotion are in place.

Additional applications for this feature can vary, but some common ways that rapid retail analytics can be used are:

• Trend analysis: Advertisers can understand days and hours when shoppers are engaging more frequently with their products, leading to the development of “peak” shopping periods for each ASIN.
• Dayparting: Rapid retail analytics give enhanced flexibility to the optimizations that advertisers can make to campaigns, so advertisers can schedule ads or modify budgets based on expected hourly sales and create custom dayparting algorithms.
• Actual vs. expected analysis: With more control to forecast retail metrics, advertisers can review actual performance and understand performance against expectations, helping better refine business goals and measure performance.

Businesses using rapid retail analytics can gain additional insights into client campaigns to help better understand hourly sales by ordered units, ordered revenue, and individual ASINs. This helps enhance automated strategies, better understand peak purchase hours, and optimize bids and budgets in accordance with these new insights.

In Q1 2023, Acorn-i was able to help Naturediet improve their Amazon Ads campaign efficiency and optimize performance outcomes for total retail sales using rapid retail analytics. They observed a 27% increase in return on advertising spend (ROAS) during the rapid retail analytics test period, compared to Q4 2022. Additionally, they saw a considerable reduction in time spent, creating campaign optimizations through tool optimizations informed by rapid retail analytics, reducing operational time spent by 90%.

“Rapid retail analytics has helped Acorn-i develop enhanced measurement, reporting and optimization solutions for advertisers, resulting in improved operational efficiencies and performance uplifts,” says Ross Caveille, co-founder of Acorn-i. “With this new information available, we can help advertisers make smarter decisions.”

To access rapid retail analytics, advertisers will require an API integration with Amazon’s Selling Partner API. Using notifications or reports endpoints, analytics can be pushed programmatically to an Amazon Web Services destination or ingested as asynchronous reports. Advertisers can join these reports with other business analytics to make decisions quickly.