Amazon’s Sponsored Display Reports: What You Should Know

January 13, 2021
By The Badger

Huzzah! After a year of being an awareness-boosting ace and retargeting rockstar, Sponsored Display finally has its very own reports. What are these reports, and how can you use them? Let’s find out!

Why These Sponsored Display Reports are Important

Sponsored Display spent an entire year with no dedicated reports of its own. At first, it rented out some report space from its big brother, Sponsored Products, but after a while that valuable Sponsored Display data disappeared into the ether.

Before these reports were released, the only place advertisers could view their Sponsored Display performance was in the Campaign Manager. While this is good for viewing your campaigns at a glance, it’s more of a bird’s-eye view of your campaigns and doesn’t really get granular enough to offer you any mind-blowing insights.

While your Campaign Manager is a valuable tool for looking at how your campaigns are performing, there is some information that wouldn’t make sense to put there. Some of the more in-depth metrics would be superfluous and clutter the Campaign Manager’s UI.

Reports can be surface-level and just parrot the data in Campaign Manager in a different format, albeit with a few extra rows. On the other hand, some reports give you data and insights that you really can’t get anywhere else. These new Sponsored Display reports mostly fall into the former category.

Advertised Product Report

Of the new Sponsored Display reports, this one is the most straightforward and easy to understand.

The Advertised Product Report shows what you advertised, and then lists the stats of that product. This allows you to quickly view your metrics across a bunch of campaigns all in one report.

You can really kick this report into high gear by using it to combine things in different ways with the power of pivot tables. If you haven’t taken the opportunity to learn all about pivot tables and how they can help your performance analysis, now is an excellent time to do so.

However, one issue with this report is that it combines “views and clicks” and “click only” conversions into a single report. This can be confusing for some Sponsored Display novices.

Campaign Report

This one is your basic Amazon Advertising report. It shows your campaign name, spend, and other familiar metrics you’re used to seeing in reports from other ad types. Like the Advertised Product Report, this one is pretty surface-level.

At its core, it’s really just information you can find in the Campaign Manager or Advertising console, just presented in a different way.

In this report, you’ll also see metrics like “14-day orders,” “14-day sales,” etc. What these measure is how many sales happened within 14 days of a customer first engaging with your ad. However, what these metrics don’t show us is if any of our customers engaged with multiple ads. We also don’t yet know how Amazon Advertising’s data lag influences this data.

Make sure that you give your Sponsored Display campaigns descriptive, informative campaign names to truly get the most out of this report. The data analysis is much quicker and easier when you can tell just at a glance what your strategy and goals are for each campaign. Informative campaign names also help you to filter your results and run pivot tables if needed.

Our Dream Sponsored Display Report

We want to see a Sponsored Display report that acknowledges Sponsored Display’s off-platform capabilities. A report that shows where your ads appeared both on and off Amazon would be just the thing to help sellers negative target certain placements and only have their ads appear where they should appear. It could work in a similar way to Sponsored Products’ search term report, so you could block certain placements that are irrelevant to your product or just don’t bring in clicks and conversions.

Another great report would be one that tells sellers which tells advertisers which ads are triggered Sponsored Display by people searching for product-related keywords. That way, they could easily add those keywords as negatives to their Sponsored Display campaigns so they don’t pay twice for the same keyword.

Key Takeaways

While we’re grateful for these new reports, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed. After all this time waiting for these reports, the end results are a little underwhelming. These reports don’t quite give us the truly deep insight we want in our reports.

They don’t really take advantage of some of the unique facets Sponsored Display has to offer. Sponsored Display ads appear to customers in a variety of different places, different searches, and to people at every stage of the consumer life cycle. We don’t get any information about these from the new reports.

Don’t count them out just yet, though. These reports still allow you to do some valuable analysis, particularly if you use pivot tables, and they’re liable to change and evolve over time.

In order to get the most out of these reports, properly naming your campaigns is an absolute must. Clear, concise names that tell you exactly what each campaign is doing will make these reports a lot clearer. Be sure these names include what type of targeting you’re using.

While nice to have, these reports are mostly surface-level information, and are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what could be for Sponsored Display reporting. Hopefully, Amazon will release more in-depth reports for Sponsored Display, allowing us to do the data deep dives that reveal hidden insights to upgrade our campaigns.