Guide
How to measure and improve your Amazon Ads campaigns
Launching your campaign is only the beginning. Learn ways to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns to help drive better results.
Start using Amazon Ads to promote your products and create campaigns.
Already a registered advertiser? Sign in to launch and optimize your campaigns.
So, you just published your campaign—congratulations! Once your ads begin reaching customers, and performance insights start coming in, you’ll want to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign. In this guide, we’ll explore various ways you can measure and enhance your campaigns to help drive better results.
Recapping Amazon Ads self-service solutions
Before we explore how to make your campaign more effective, it’s helpful to review sponsored ad solutions and how they differ and complement one another.
- Objective: Help attract traffic to product pages and increase sales.
- Best for performance marketing, driving consideration, and purchase.
- Available to professional sellers and vendors in the Amazon store.
- Ads can appear in shopping search results and product detail pages, linking to your product detail page.
- Objective: Help boost brand awareness and increase sales across your entire catalog.
- Best for driving awareness and loyalty.
- Available to vendors and sellers registered in the Amazon Brand Registry.
- Ads can appear in shopping results and link to your Brand Store.
- Objective: Quickly create display ads to reach consumers anywhere they spend their time.
- Best for performance and brand marketing, driving awareness, and consideration.
- Available to vendors and sellers registered in the Amazon Brand Registry, and businesses that don’t sell in the Amazon store.
- Ads can appear on either Amazon or on a vast network of Amazon-owned and partner websites.
- Objective: Reach new, relevant customers through streaming TV on Amazon and beyond.
- Best for brand marketing, driving brand awareness, and loyalty.
- Available to businesses of all types, even if you don’t sell in the Amazon store.
- Ads can appear in Amazon’s collection of exclusive and premium streaming content, including Prime Video, Twitch, Freevee, and Amazon Publisher Direct.
Clarify your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)
To gauge the success of your campaign, you must define what you want out of it, so you know which performance metrics to focus on.
Campaign goals generally fall into four categories:
Awareness
Awareness goals focus on making your ad more visible to new audiences so more people discover your brand or products for the first time, and remember them while they shop.
Relevant KPIs:
- Campaign reach: how many people viewed your ad.
- Cost per mille (CPM): cost per thousand ad impressions.
- Click-through rate (CTR): percentage rate of shoppers who click on your ad after seeing it.
Consideration
You can drive customers to consider your products by engaging them during the decision-making process as they shop. Help shoppers understand what sets your brand or products apart from other options, and why they should choose yours.
Relevant KPIs:
- Click-through rate (CTR): percentage rate of shoppers who click on your ad after seeing it.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): cost for each time a customer clicks on your ad.
Purchase
Purchase or conversion goals focus on driving sales. If sales are your immediate priority, your campaign is successful when shoppers buy your product.
Relevant KPIs:
- Click-through rate (CTR): percentage rate of shoppers who click on your ad after seeing it.
- Conversion rate: percentage of consumers who complete a desired action (like making a purchase).
- Cost of acquisition: how much it costs you to convert each new customer.
- Return on advertising spend (ROAS): revenue generated for each dollar spent on advertising.
- Sales per visitor, sales per order, units per order.
Loyalty
If loyalty is your focus, your goal is to engage your existing customers to drive repeat purchases. Your campaign should persuade past customers to return and buy from you again.
Relevant KPIs:
- Click-through rate (CTR): percentage rate of shoppers who click on your ad after seeing it.
- Conversion rate: percentage of consumers who complete a desired action (like making a purchase).
- Return on advertising spend (ROAS): revenue generated for each dollar spent on advertising.
- Sales per visitor, sales per order, units per order.
Need more guidance? Amazon’s guide on KPIs offers a comprehensive overview for tracking and analyzing these indicators.
Improving your campaign performance
After your campaign has been running for at least two weeks, review your advertising reports to understand your performance, in light of your campaign goals. The best way to increase the success of your digital ad campaign is to keep testing variables, like your headlines, images, targeting criteria, and more. Below are a few troubleshooting scenarios and opportunities to boost your campaign performance:
The problem: Your campaign has few impressions or clicks.
What you can do:
- Review your bid. Your ads may not be showing because your bid is too low.
- If your campaign has few impressions but a high click-through rate, try increasing your bids and budgets for the opportunity to win more impressions.
- If you’re seeing high impressions but a low click-through rate, review your main product image, title, and price. You can also test new creative elements (message, headline, images, etc.) to discern what is most effective in driving consumer engagement.
The problem: Your campaign is generating few/no sales.
What you can do:
- Review your product detail pages. The imagery and information on this page help customers decide whether to buy your product. What’s missing or could be improved? Do customer reviews indicate an area where shoppers need clarification? Learn more tips about optimizing your product detail pages.
The problem: You want more shoppers to discover and engage with your brand.
What you can do:
- Review the suite of new-to-brand metrics to measure orders and sales from first-time customers of your brand in the Amazon store. Use these metrics to learn how many new customers you’ve reached, estimate the cost of acquisition, and develop strategies for growing your customer base.
- Also try reviewing your new-to-brand keyword metrics to identify keywords with the highest percentage of new-to-brand orders and sales. Consider increasing your bids in these keywords to help generate even more new-to-brand sales.
The problem: You want to better understand your sales performance.
What you can do:
- If your main goal is to drive sales, measure how many clicks converted into orders, as well as your return on advertising spend (ROAS). For a new product with limited awareness, it may take additional budget to drive sales and improve your ROAS.
- If your campaign has a high click volume but low conversions, review your product detail page to ensure images and descriptions are enticing customers and answering their questions. (See more guidance for enhancing your product detail page.)
- If your ROAS is at an unsustainable level for keyword targeting campaigns, continue investing in keywords that are driving clicks and sales, while pausing low-performing keywords.
The problem: You want to know how customers are engaging with your new product in the context of your overall brand story.
What you can do:
- Access a range of metrics in your Brand Store insights dashboard to learn how it’s resonating with customers and supporting your goals.
- Select a date range to see the number of visitors and/or views. Sales, units sold, and orders are your estimated totals from store visitors within 14 days of their last visit.
- Your insights dashboard also provides a breakdown of metrics by traffic source including your ads, your byline on product detail pages, your store’s source tags, and “other sources” (not categorized).
Save time and simplify your campaign management
You always want to work smarter, not harder. You can simplify your campaign management by adopting or experimenting with four practices:
- Instead of making changes (like updating keywords) one by one, use the bulk operations feature to download a bulk file, make edits to campaigns, and then re-upload for processing.
- Use portfolios to organize your campaigns by brand, category, product, or season—whatever makes the most sense for you. Portfolios also include automatic budget capping and simple invoicing.
- Avoid having to make manual updates to bids with dynamic bidding, letting Amazon automatically adjust your bid, based on the likelihood of conversion.
- Understand your campaign performance at a glance: Within your campaign manager, you’ll see a single view of your ad campaigns, so you can easily track your total spend, total sales, and more.
- Use campaign recommendations, which are located on the Opportunity page. You’ll find tailored recommendations that can be accepted with just one click.
For a deeper analysis of your campaign performance, the following reports are available to you. To access and download reports, sign in to the advertising console, and click on the reports icon in the side navigation menu.
- Search term report: Identify top-converting search terms.
- Targeting report: Measure how well your keyword targeting is performing.
- Advertising product report: See how your advertised products are performing over time.
- Placement report: Check how your ad placements are performing.
- Performance over time report: Evaluate average cost-per-click, plus your total spend changes over time.
- Purchase product report: Gain insight into what audiences are buying, and find new advertising opportunities.
Already a registered advertiser? Sign in.