3 Ways to Measure the Performance of your Amazon PPC Ads

Most sellers use Amazon PPC advertising, but not all of them can tell how successful their campaigns are. Reading data and understanding the art of advertising are different skill sets than sales, and those Amazon statistics aren’t always self-explanatory. 

Amazon PPC management is more than just bidding on ads. An effective Amazon PPC strategy requires monitoring your performance and adjusting your bids and keywords to maximize sales and minimize costs. But to achieve that, you first need to understand how to evaluate your Amazon advertising campaigns in the first place. 

Below, we outline the 3 best ways to measure the performance of your Amazon PPC ads. Whether you’re a new or experienced seller, this guide can give you a better understanding of how shoppers are responding to your Amazon advertising. 

1. The Amazon Advertising Reports

The most direct way to gauge customer reaction to your Amazon PPC strategy is to check the sales data. Amazon consolidates this information in their advertising reports, which sellers can access here: 

1. Go to the Seller Central.
2. In the navigation menu, click Reports > Advertising Reports.
3. Choose the filters and parameters of your report.
4. Click Create Report to download the file as an Excel document.

Of course, downloading the report is the easy part. It’s much harder to understand the report. Unless you know what those numbers mean, what good is a report in the first place? So here’s a quick breakdown of what the most important statistics mean.

Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS)

This number is the ratio of sales to ad spend. If the sales you’re making don’t justify the costs of the Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands ads, you need to rebalance your budget or make up the costs in other areas like product sourcing or changing the price. 

Click-through rate (CTR)

This percentage reflects the number of clicks your ad got based on how many people saw it (impressions). If your click-through rate is too low, it means your ad has visibility but isn’t attractive enough; try using better product pictures or lowering the price. 

Impressions

This is the total number of people who have seen your ad, or how many times it has appeared on a shopper’s screen. Impressions are vital in conjunction with your CTR to see whether you need to increase the ad’s visibility or improve the ad itself. 

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Your ROAS is how many dollars you earn for every dollar you spend on advertising. It’s a general statistic to give you an overall idea of how your Amazon PPC strategy is working. If your ROAS is unsatisfactory, try redoing the budget of your advertising campaigns. 

Return on Investment (ROI)

One of the most important stats for gauging marketing campaigns is that your ROI tells you how much net profit you earn for every dollar you spend on advertising. This figure is similar to your ROAS, except that ROI also factors in other costs of sales, not just gross sales income. 

2. A/B Testing

So much of your Amazon ad’s success depends on your product pictures. Those images, in conjunction with your prices and titles, are going to either attract shoppers to your pages or be left largely ignored. The difference depends on how appealing they are. 

Aside from using a professional Amazon photography service to ensure the highest possible quality, you can also user test your images with your target shoppers to see which ones resonate with them. Direct user testing is a reliable method for understanding your shoppers with concrete, empirical data. 

One of the Amazon PPC tools for user testing visuals is the A/B test. This format of testing takes two different product photos and shows them each to separate user groups. From there, you can see which photo performs better and which image people prefer. 

A/B testing can identify which product photos work best for your Amazon PPC strategy. The key is only to conduct the tests with your target demographics — different types of shoppers have different tastes, so you won’t get accurate results unless you restrict the testing to only your specific customer group. 

3. Work with Amazon Advertising Specialists

The more you invest in understanding your customers, the more you get out of it. If you only have the bandwidth to check your advertising reports and modify your campaigns every now and then, you’ll still improve sales, but not as much as you would if you worked on it full time. 

But with all the other responsibilities of selling on Amazon, you can only devote so much time to Amazon PPC management. In this case, it’s best to outsource some of your work to an Amazon ads agency. 

Using an Amazon PPC management service not only frees up your time to handle more important business issues, but you can also leverage the talent and experience of professional advertisers and Amazon experts. Managing all aspects of your Amazon account may be practical when you’re just getting started, but to make the most out of Amazon PPC campaigns, you’ll want to invest in an Amazon advertising expert sooner or later. 

At AMZ One Step, we have a dedicated staff of SEO specialists, data analysts, and veteran PPC managers to optimize the results of your Amazon advertising. On top of that, we have professional product photographers and state-of-the-art photo studios in the US, UK, Canada, and China, so we can ensure your Amazon ads always look their best. 

If you have any questions or want to know more about our services, feel free to schedule a free consultation now.