Understanding Amazon Ads Reports: Every Report That Matters and What to Do With It

Amazon Ads reporting can be overwhelming. The console surfaces dashboards, downloadable CSVs, and aggregated metrics across dozens of dimensions. Most authors either ignore the data entirely (and optimise on instinct) or drown in it (and change too much based on too little). The path between these extremes is knowing which reports matter, what questions they answer, and what specific actions their data should trigger. This guide maps every relevant report to its function and the decisions it informs.

The Reports Landscape in Amazon Ads

Amazon Ads reports are accessible through the Reports section of the console (the menu on the left sidebar). You can generate reports for specific date ranges, specific campaigns or all campaigns, and specific ad types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display). Reports can be run on-demand or scheduled to deliver automatically to your email. Most reports are available as CSV downloads for spreadsheet analysis.

The reports that matter most for KDP authors are: Search Term Report, Campaign Performance Report, Keyword Performance Report, Placement Report, Product Targeting Report, and Advertised Product Report. Each serves a distinct function in the optimisation cycle, and they are most useful in a specific order of priority. Start with the Search Term Report every session — it is the foundation of all discovery-based optimisation.

Search Term Report: The Most Important Report

The Search Term Report shows the actual queries — word for word — that triggered your ads and generated impressions, clicks, and sales. It is the only place where you can see real reader vocabulary instead of the keyword or targeting you set. Running this report is the core action of every weekly optimisation session.

How to run it: navigate to Reports → Create Report → Sponsored Products → Search Term, set your date range (previous 7 or 14 days), select all campaigns, and download. The key columns to analyse are: Search Term (the actual query), Impressions, Clicks, Spend, 7-Day Total Sales, 7-Day Total Orders, and ACoS. Add a calculated column for ACoS if it is not pre-calculated (Spend ÷ Sales × 100).

Sort by clicks descending. Focus on terms with 3+ clicks. Categorise each into: converter (sales > 0, ACoS ≤ target — add to manual exact match), waste (multiple clicks, zero sales, clearly irrelevant — add as negative), or undecided (3–8 clicks, no sale yet — leave for another week). This workflow is the engine of all Amazon Ads improvement. Done weekly, it systematically eliminates waste and builds a growing list of empirically validated converting keywords.

Run separate Search Term Reports for each ad type. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands generate different search term data. Sponsored Products automatic campaigns specifically are your richest source of discovery data — prioritise this report above all others.

Campaign Performance Report

The Campaign Performance Report shows aggregate performance at the campaign level: total impressions, clicks, spend, attributed sales, ACoS, and CTR per campaign. This is the top-level view that tells you whether each campaign is within your performance targets and whether budget allocation is correct.

Use this report to: identify campaigns with ACoS significantly above target over 30+ days (candidates for bid reduction or structural review); identify campaigns consistently hitting their daily budget cap (candidates for budget increase if ACoS is good); compare CTR across campaigns (campaigns with much lower CTR than average may have keyword/audience mismatch issues); and track total spend vs total attributed sales to calculate your rough ACoS across the full account.

Pull this report monthly for trend analysis. Comparing month-on-month campaign performance tells you whether your optimisation cycle is producing compound improvement (ACoS declining, conversion improving over time) or whether you are on a flat or deteriorating trajectory.

Keyword Performance Report

The Keyword Performance Report breaks performance down by individual keyword within manual campaigns — showing how each specific keyword is performing on impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and ACoS. This is the report that tells you which of your manual campaign keywords to raise bids on, lower bids on, or pause.

Sorting by spend descending reveals where your money is actually going. Sorting by ACoS descending reveals your highest-cost keywords. The decision framework for each keyword: ACoS significantly below target and consistent volume (raise bid 10–15% to capture more impressions); ACoS significantly above target with 15+ clicks (lower bid 15–20%); ACoS above target with fewer than 15 clicks (wait for more data); zero clicks in 30 days (raise bid 25% as a test, then pause if no clicks after two more weeks).

Pull this report weekly as part of your standard optimisation cycle. After the Search Term Report, the Keyword Report is your most frequent action document.

Placement Report

The Placement Report breaks performance down by where your ad appeared on Amazon: Top of Search (first row of results), Rest of Search (below the fold), and Product Pages (on detail pages of other ASINs). Each placement type has different conversion dynamics, and the report reveals whether your ads perform better in some placements than others.

How to use it: compare conversion rate and ACoS across the three placement types. If Top of Search shows significantly better conversion and ACoS than Product Pages, increase your Top of Search bid modifier in the campaign settings (you can increase bids by a percentage specifically for Top of Search placements). If Product Pages are underperforming, lower their modifier or remove it. If all three are roughly equivalent, no modifier change is needed.

Run this report monthly. Placement performance is relatively stable — you do not need to check it weekly, but a monthly review ensures your bid modifiers reflect actual placement efficiency rather than defaults.

Product Targeting Report

For campaigns using product targeting (targeting specific ASINs or Amazon categories), the Product Targeting Report shows which specific product pages or categories generated impressions, clicks, and sales for your ads. This is the equivalent of the Keyword Report for product targeting — it tells you which ASINs are worth bidding on more aggressively and which are wasting budget.

Sort by spend descending and review which competitor ASINs are receiving significant budget. For ASINs with high clicks and zero sales, add them as negative product targets. For ASINs with good conversion and ACoS, raise bids. For category-level targets, check whether the category is sending relevant books — broad category targets can inadvertently include sub-categories that are tangentially related but not actually comparable to your book.

Advertised Product Report

The Advertised Product Report shows performance broken down by the specific book being advertised — useful when you have multiple books running in the same account and want to see per-book performance without running separate reports for each book’s campaigns individually. It shows impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and ACoS per advertised ASIN.

This report is most useful for multi-book accounts. It enables a quick per-book performance review — identifying which books are advertising efficiently and which are consuming budget without proportional returns. This informs both optimisation priorities (focus improvement effort on underperforming books) and budget reallocation decisions (reduce spend on structurally poor performers, increase on high performers).

Targeting Report

The Targeting Report consolidates performance across all targeting types — keywords, product ASINs, and categories — in a single view. It is similar to the Keyword Report but broader, covering all targeting types simultaneously. Some authors find this more efficient than running separate Keyword and Product Targeting Reports; others prefer the specificity of separate reports. Either approach is valid — the goal is making the same bid and pause decisions from the same data.

Understanding Attribution Windows in Reports

Every metric in Amazon Ads reports is shaped by attribution windows — the time period after a click within which a resulting purchase is credited to that ad. Sponsored Products uses a 7-day click attribution window: a sale must occur within 7 days of the ad click to be attributed. Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display use a 14-day window.

The practical consequence: report data for the most recent 5–7 days is always incomplete for Sponsored Products (and the most recent 10–14 days for Sponsored Brands/Display). Sales have occurred but have not yet been attributed. If you pull a report today, the ACoS for clicks from three days ago will look worse than it actually is — those sales are still within the attribution window and have not yet registered. Never make drastic bid cuts based on data from the last 5–7 days. Always compare recent periods to fully-attributed prior periods to contextualise current performance.

The safest approach: when making weekly optimisation decisions, base keyword-level decisions on the 14–30 day window rather than the 7-day window. This ensures you are evaluating fully attributed data rather than recency-biased data that understates sales.

How Often to Run Each Report

A practical cadence for KDP authors managing active campaigns: run the Search Term Report and Keyword Performance Report weekly (these are the primary action reports); run the Campaign Performance Report monthly for trend analysis; run the Placement Report monthly for bid modifier review; run the Product Targeting Report weekly if you are actively running product targeting campaigns; run the Advertised Product Report monthly for cross-book portfolio review.

For authors just getting started or managing campaigns for the first time, a simplified approach: run only the Search Term Report and Campaign Performance Report weekly for the first three months. Master the Search Term workflow (add converters to manual, add waste to negatives) before layering in the additional reports. Complexity before mastery produces noise rather than signal.

Building a Reporting Spreadsheet Workflow

Maintaining a running spreadsheet with your monthly reporting data transforms reports from one-off snapshots into trend analysis tools. Create a master sheet with tabs for: monthly campaign performance summary (total spend, total attributed sales, overall ACoS, TACoS calculated against KDP royalties); keyword performance tracker (keywords, current bids, monthly ACoS, trend direction); negative keyword log (all negatives added, date added, campaign); and confirmed converters log (all terms promoted from automatic to manual exact match, date, opening bid).

This historical record becomes invaluable after three to six months. You can see which keywords have consistently produced good ACoS over time versus which had one good week and have since reverted to waste. You can see seasonal patterns (certain genres see higher conversion in December; certain non-fiction categories see spikes in January). You can see whether each bid change you made produced the expected result. Without this record, each optimisation session starts from scratch. With it, you accumulate genuine expertise about your specific book’s advertising.

Common Data Traps and Misreadings

The most common data trap is acting on 7-day data as though it is statistically reliable. A keyword with three clicks and zero sales in seven days has not “failed” — it has insufficient data. A keyword with 20 clicks and zero sales in seven days across a two-week period (40 total clicks) has failed, assuming your average conversion rate implies a sale should have occurred by now.

Another common trap: comparing ACoS across campaigns with different budget scales. A campaign spending £5/month at 25% ACoS is less valuable than a campaign spending £200/month at 40% ACoS — both in absolute profit terms and in terms of the organic ranking and review accumulation that higher-volume sales generate. Evaluate ACoS in conjunction with absolute spend and sales volume, not in isolation.

A third trap: using impressions as a performance indicator. High impressions with low CTR means your targeting is reaching irrelevant audiences or your cover is not compelling in that context. Low impressions means bids are too low or metadata is too thin. Neither impression count by itself tells you whether campaigns are working — always pair impressions with CTR, conversion rate, and ACoS to get the full picture.

The KDP Rank Fuel by Vappingo Amazon Ads Generator creates campaigns structured to generate clean, interpretable reporting data from day one — with keyword, match type, and targeting configurations that make it easier to act on what the reports show. And the product that sits behind every click and every report — your manuscript — should be polished and professional enough to convert what the data sends it. Vappingo’s manuscript proofreading service ensures it is.