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.
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:
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
