Features
Are you running (or getting ready to run) Amazon ads? If so, you’ll want to get familiar with your Amazon ads dashboard. This is the place where you’ll create, launch, and manage your Amazon ads, whether you’re running sponsored products, sponsored display ads, or video ads.
If you’re using a third-party ad management software like Merch Jar, you’ll have access to an additional dashboard with additional metrics and management options. The point of these dashboards is to enable sellers to streamline advertising efforts. You can perform all ad-related tasks from this one centralized location.
Today, we’re going to go through how to navigate your Amazon ads dashboard and how to take full advantage of it. We’re also going to look at some of the key metrics within your dashboard to prepare you for your campaigns.
But before anything else…
At Merch Jar, we understand the challenges of running an Amazon advertising campaign. Hence, we made it our mission to provide Amazon sellers with reliable and sophisticated tools designed to optimize their Amazon advertising campaigns effectively.
Our tools have helped multiple Amazon sellers refine their ad campaigns for better profitability and time efficiency. Success stories of clients like Christopher Goettl show you just how much faster the process gets.
Not only that, but you can also enhance your Amazon ads campaigns’s effectiveness without constantly micromanaging them.
An Amazon ads dashboard is a dashboard where you’ll find everything you need to run your Amazon ads. As well as summaries of data like sales, impressions, and spending, there are graphs for visual representations of your campaigns. You may also view detailed reports of your marketing efforts via ‘Advertising reports’ and share your data with others. Whether you want to build new campaigns, analyze data, or check the status of your ads, your Amazon dashboard is the place to go.
If you’re using Merch Jar, you’ll benefit from reports of your entire Amazon ad history. With this information, you can track your progress over time. You can use your past data to make smarter decisions moving forward based on what’s worked and what’s not.
Head on over to the Amazon Ads login page and, you guessed it, log in.
Your campaign manager is the place where you can manage all your campaigns. They’ll be listed under ‘Management’ on the left-hand side of your dashboard. Click on individual campaigns to see detailed metrics on each one.
You can customize your Amazon Ads dashboards to display the metrics between specific date ranges by clicking on the ‘Date range’ tab and selecting your range.
Customizing your columns is also super easy. Simply click on the ‘Customize columns’ tab. You’ll then be presented with a popup box like the one below:
Creating evergreen designs is a strategy that ensures your products have a long-lasting appeal, generating steady sales over time regardless of seasonal trends or temporary fads.
Timeless Appeal: Evergreen designs should not be tied to specific events or seasons. They should be relevant and appealing year-round.
Broad Audience: They should cater to a wide audience, increasing the potential customer base.
Consistent Demand: These designs should be based on themes, interests, or messages that have a consistent demand.
Occupations: Create designs related to specific professions like nursing, teaching, or firefighting. For example, a t-shirt with the slogan "Proud to be a Nurse" or "World's Best Teacher" can appeal to professionals in these fields.
Workplace Humor: Funny quotes or relatable messages for office environments, such as "I Survived Another Meeting That Should Have Been an Email" or "Chaos Coordinator" for managers.
Sports and Fitness: Designs related to popular sports or fitness activities like running, yoga, or cycling. Examples include "Run Now, Wine Later" or "Namaste in Bed".
Pet Lovers: Designs for pet owners, such as "Dog Mom" or "Cat Dad", which celebrate the bond between pets and their owners.
Motivational quotes that inspire or uplift, such as "Believe in Yourself" or "Dream Big, Work Hard". These types of designs can appeal to a broad audience looking for positive messages.
Light-hearted and funny designs with universal humor can be evergreen. Examples include "I'm on a Seafood Diet. I See Food and I Eat It" or "Sass Queen".
Designs that reference classic movies, books, or TV shows can also be evergreen if they have a timeless appeal. For instance, quotes from beloved characters or iconic scenes that fans will always appreciate.
Research: Use tools like Google Trends to identify topics that have consistent interest over time. This helps ensure your designs have a lasting appeal.
Quality and Simplicity: Focus on creating high-quality designs that are simple yet impactful. Avoid overly complex graphics that might deter potential buyers.
Versatility: Design products that can be easily customized or adapted to various products like t-shirts, mugs, and tote bags.
Feedback and Iteration: Pay attention to customer feedback and sales data. Refine your designs based on what resonates most with your audience.
By focusing on these strategies and examples, you can create a portfolio of evergreen designs that generate consistent sales, helping you to advance through the Merch by Amazon tiers more rapidly.
Partnering with entities such as local bands and event organizers can provide bulk order opportunities for your merch. Bands often need merchandise for their fans, and events require themed apparel. Approaching these entities with tailored proposals can secure significant sales and increase your exposure.
You can also design merchandise for local sports teams. Pitch your design idea to coaches and team organizers as a way to streamline their merchandise ordering process. This can lead to bulk orders and regular sales, helping you advance through the Merch by Amazon tiers more quickly!
Select which columns you want to be able to view straight away in your dashboard and click ‘Apply’.
Conveniently, you can filter your ads in your Amazon dashboard by searching for them in the search box. For example, you could type in ‘Sponsored products’ to see campaign information for your sponsored products. Alternatively, you can click on the ‘Filter’ button and select the filter you want to apply, such as Budget or Clicks. You can also filter your ads by campaign name or attributes.
Auto-campaigns, such as those run with Merch Jar, allow Amazon sellers to identify and harvest high-performing keywords. Merch Jar is particularly useful for Amazon sellers with a lot of products to sell, whether that’s hundreds or thousands. Automated campaigns will help you identify the best-performing keywords for each of your products.
Once you’ve run your auto-campaigns for a couple of weeks, analyze your performance reports to learn which keywords have performed well. For example, you might find that some keywords have garnered more sales and revenue. You might also identify keywords that have a lower ACoS. Select the high-performers and reuse them in your product ads.
Once you’ve identified your best-performing keywords, you can raise your bids for them in your Amazon dashboard. This will mean your products will show up in more Amazon searches, which will increase your revenue.
Merch Jar uses Smart Bids for winning bidding strategies. Amazon sellers can create PPC campaigns and set their target ACoS, maximum bid, and minimum bid. The software will then run your bids on autopilot and ensure they're always optimized to generate the most exposure. When you set this up correctly, you’ll see your clicks increase as your spending increases. Additionally, providing your product page is appealing, you should get more purchases.
Your Amazon dashboard tells you where your ads are placed in searches. For example, they could be at the top of the search or lower down on product pages. Understanding where your ads are placed in relation to your bids and keywords will help you refine your choices and adjust your goals accordingly.
Amazon bases your ad placement on three things; impressions, clicks, and conversions. This means that when your ads perform well, they could be bumped up on the products page. This, in turn, can increase the performance further. Therefore, optimizing your bids and choosing high-performance keywords as discussed in the previous sections, can boost your placement and by extension, your exposure.
Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want your ads to display for. You’re essentially telling Amazon that these words are not related to your product. For example, if you sell drinking glasses, you wouldn’t want your sponsored product to be displayed in a search for sunglasses. They both contain the word ‘glasses,’ so without adding the negative keyword ‘sunglasses’ it’s possible your ad would show up in a search for these.
You can add negative keywords to your PPC campaigns through your Amazon dashboard. This is a step we highly recommend to stop you from throwing money away by paying to show up in irrelevant searches. You can target negative keywords at an ad group level, i.e. the negative keywords apply to all ads within that group. You can also target negative keywords at a campaign level so that no ads within that campaign are associated with the keyword.
The ‘Search terms’ tab in your Amazon dashboard is an ultra handy guide for matching your keywords to search terms. You’ll see which search terms your ad showed up in and generated clicks. With this information, you can adjust your keywords to drive more clicks and also identify negative keywords.
With the Amazon Ads Dashboard, you can effectively manage budgets for both ad campaign monitoring and optimization. Here’s how:
Start by setting clear budget allocations for each campaign. The Amazon Ads dashboard allows you to set daily and monthly budget caps, ensuring you stay within your financial limits.
For instance, the 'Budget Reports' tab allows you to track your spending and make necessary adjustments to avoid overspending or underspending.
Meanwhile, the 'Performance Dashboard' provides an interactive view of your campaign metrics and keyword performance over time, allowing you to visualize spending trends and adjust your budgets accordingly.
Filters can also be applied to drill down into specific campaigns and identify underperforming areas that might require budget reallocation.
The Amazon Ads Dashboard offers several tools to optimize your ad campaigns and achieve better performance within the allocated budget. Let’s do a quick walkthrough of these tools.
One of the said tools is the ability to make bulk and inline edits, which allows you to adjust budgets, bids, and campaign settings across multiple campaigns simultaneously. By doing this, you can save time and ensure consistent budget adjustments based on performance data.
Another crucial tool is the 'Keyword Optimization' that identifies high-performing keywords and automatically adjusts bids to maximize visibility and conversions.
Next, the 'Placement Reports' help you understand where your ads are shown and how different placements impact performance. By optimizing your bids for better placements, you can enhance the efficiency of your ad spend.
Finally, the 'Suggested Bid' feature can provide insights based on past ad bidding activity, and can also help you set competitive bids that are more likely to win auctions without overspending.
Amazon Attribution is another useful feature of the Amazon Ads dashboard. This comprehensive measurement and analytics tool helps advertisers understand the impact of their non-Amazon marketing channels on Amazon sales.
For starters, Amazon Attribution gives detailed access to marketing performance metrics by tracking customer interactions across various channels and devices.
These include:
Armed with this information, you can gauge the effectiveness of your Amazon advertisement efforts.
ACoS stands for advertising cost of sales. You’ll see ACoS floating around your dashboard quite a bit, so it’s important you understand what it means. In a nutshell, ACoS refers to how much you spend on advertising vs how much revenue you’ve generated in sales as a result of your advertising. Keeping track of your ACoS tells you whether your campaigns are generating enough money compared to how much you're spending.
In general, new campaigns tend to have higher ACoS because you have little-to-no data to fine-tune your campaigns. When you begin analyzing your data to identify high-performing keywords and negative keywords, your results will improve, along with your ACoS.
Another factor that makes time an Amazon ad campaign’s best friend is the opportunity to gather reviews and feedback. Seeing positive reviews from other buyers will give your business more credibility and encourage trust in your brand. In short, people are more likely to buy things from a seller with positive reviews.
The equation for working out your ACoS is simply your ad spend divided by your sales. If you make $100 in sales and spend $20 on ads, your ACoS is 0.2 or 20%. The ideal ACoS is between 15-20%.
Clicks mean the number of people who clicked on your ad. Impressions, on the other hand, refers to how many times people saw your ad, whether or not they went on to click it.
Sellers are charged for clicks but not impressions. If the number of impressions your ad generates is low, you might not be bidding high enough for the keyword. Alternatively, you might not be targeting the right search terms.
With an intelligent Amazon Ad automation tool like Merch Jar, you gain unlimited access to crucial click and impression data for your target keywords. We empower Amazon sellers to identify top-performing ads and optimize their strategy to better reach their target audience.
CPC stands for cost per click. It refers to how much money each click costs a seller. CPC varies greatly across categories and the keywords you choose. Other factors that impact CPC are what time of day someone has clicked on your ad and where your ad is placed.
To calculate your CPC, divide your total ad spend by the number of clicks. If you spend $200 on ads and receive 150 clicks, your CPC would be $1.33.
In the Amazon dashboard, your sales are broken down into products and categories. Obviously, the more sales, the better. Tracking sales data over time gives you a good picture of your business's performance. For example, you’d hope that you see an increase in sales over time, corresponding with a higher ad spend.
CTR, or click-through rate, is the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it. A high CTR is good because it means that a lot of impressions lead to clicks. It also means you’re choosing strong keywords and targeting the right search terms for your product.
A low CTR, however, means that people see your ad but don’t click on it. If this happens, your task is to decipher why. Have you set the right negative keywords, for example? If you’ve analyzed search terms and have established that the problem isn’t with your keywords, look at your ad copy and images. Does your title describe your product well enough, for instance? Do you have competitors with lower prices and more reviews? All these things can influence a consumer’s decision to click on an ad.
You can calculate your Amazon CTR by dividing clicks by impressions and then multiplying it by 100 to get your percentage. For example, if your ad receives 1,000 impressions and 20 clicks, your CTR would be 2%.
Ad Spend, short for advertising spend, refers to the amount of money a company or individual invests in advertising activities within a specific time frame.
In the context of Amazon Ads or other digital advertising platforms, Ad Spend typically includes the costs associated with running ads, such as the cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) fees paid to the platform. It may also include any additional fees or expenses related to managing and optimizing the ad campaigns.
ROAS is a metric used to measure the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue generated from the advertising campaign by the total amount spent on the campaign.
For example, if you spent $1,000 on advertising and generated $5,000 in revenue, the ROAS would be:
ROAS = ($5,000 / $1,000)
ROAS = 5
This means that for every dollar spent on advertising, you generated $5 in revenue, resulting in an ROAS of 5. A higher ROAS indicates a more effective advertising campaign, as you are generating more revenue for each dollar spent.
This metric shows the total amount spent on your advertising campaigns. It helps you track your advertising expenses and manage your budget effectively. This includes the cost of all clicks and impressions generated by your ads.
By monitoring your Total Spend, you can optimize your campaigns to achieve a better return on investment (ROI) and maximize the impact of your advertising efforts.
In the Amazon Ads dashboard, "Units" refers to the number of products (units) that were sold as a result of your advertising campaigns. This metric helps you track the direct impact of your ads on actual product sales.
By monitoring the number of units sold, you can measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns in driving purchase behavior and generating revenue.
Orders refer to the number of orders that were placed for your products as a result of your advertising campaigns. Evidently, this is an important metric for tracking user purchasing behavior.
Each order represents a transaction where a customer purchased one or more units of your product.
Amazon dashboards provide lots of metrics to help you on your Amazon ads journey. To make the most of your Amazon dashboard, it’s necessary to familiarize yourself with all its features and functionalities. From there, you can build your campaigns and individual ads to target the right Amazon consumers.
If you’ve got a lot of products to sell and, by extension, a lot of ads to create, consider using an Amazon ads automation software like Merch Jar. Merch Jar puts advertising on autopilot and automates your bid adjustments for you. Sign up today for a 30-day free trial.
