Amazon Marketing Stream: Near-Realtime Ads Data

Amazon Advertising Marketing Streams

Supercharge Your Online Marketing Strategy

As of June 2022, the Amazon Advertising team offers a beta of the Amazon Marketing Stream service. The service delivers near real-time performance data to advertisers.

Amazon Marketing Stream will allow you to unify and analyze hourly feeds of advertising data in a private, trusted data lake or cloud warehouse allowing you to use tools like Tableau, Power BI, Google Data Studio, and many others.

What Are The Benefits Of Amazon’s Marketing Stream?

Amazon Marketing Stream allows you to understand better how campaigns perform by pushing the delta values instead of aggregates. This helps you see how campaign performance changes over time, allowing you to refine your digital marketing strategy. The new service offers benefits when compared with an API-based reporting:

• Improved data granularity: Traffic and conversion data is summarized hourly, compared with a daily granularity if you’re using the reporting API. The data is streamed automatically to your AWS account, which you’ll provide when you subscribe to the Amazon Marketing Stream data set.
• No throttling: With Amazon Marketing Stream data streaming, you no longer need to make frequent API calls for intra-day updates. This helps to prevent throttling while also increasing data accuracy.
• Near real-time messaging: Get notified about budget consumption, such as when campaigns are running out of budget.
• Deep Dive: Show all dimensions available in a single dataset, such as performance at the target ID, placement, or ad level. This includes granular data such as keyword performance for a given placement.

What Types Of Data Is Available In Amazon Marketing Stream?

Currently, Amazon’s Marketing Stream includes two categories of data: reporting and messaging.

1. Reporting data: Amazon Marketing Stream reporting includes an advertiser’s processed (non-raw, summarized) performance data, including traffic and conversions sent hourly, along with data dimensions necessary for analytics.
2. Messaging data: Amazon sends notifications for state changes and other events in near real-time. Currently, this messaging includes budget consumption and will send a notification whenever your budget allotment changes by 5% or more. In the future, we plan to expand the messaging to include notifications about product eligibility, bid recommendations, and other events.

How Can Amazon Marketing Stream Retail Sales?

The use of AMS allows various digital marketing disciplines to fuse performance data from media investments with orders, returns, inventory, and other Selling Partner feeds.

All the retail, reporting, and messaging data is unified in a private data lake or cloud warehouse technologies like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, Ahana, and Amazon Athena.

Turbocharge reporting, analytics, and insights tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight, SAP, Alteryx, dbt, Azure Data Factory, Qlik Sense, and many others.

With data unified and using your favorite analytic tools, you can start to ask questions like;

• Do we have an effective ecommerce marketing strategy? How can we optimize based on AMS?
• What impact on e-commerce sales are we seeing based on our optimizations?
• Do we need to refine our broader digital strategy? Do we need to adjust messaging or create off Amazon in our social media marketing campaigns?
• Do our marketing goals align with the performance we see in our Amazon business? Any adjustments to the mix in our online marketing channels

What Are The Requirements For Amazon Marketing Streams?

• Status: Beta
• Campaign type: available for Sponsored Products only.
• Region: Available in North America only (CA, MX, US)
• Cadence: Hourly
• Technology: You must have an Amazon Web Services account and a data lake or cloud data warehouse to store all the data
• History: Since this is a real-time data stream, there is NO historical data. Data starts flowing from the point of activation. Amazon does not support replaying events that happened in the past.
• Data volumes: The volume of information is significant. As such, you may have increased storage costs and query costs.

Understanding The Costs Associated With Amazon Marketing Streams

The Amazon Ads team does not charge for the service. However, if you are considering AMS, you must factor in how the scope and frequency of Amazon Marketing Streams data may impact overall costs.

Like any near-realtime data feed, streams mean more data is coming at your more quickly. All that data has to be stored somewhere. A cloud warehouse or data lake is required. The warehouse or the lake will constantly have new information for processing and loads. Near-real time means your system will always be “busy” processing and loading data. This activity has costs.

For example, let’s assume you use Snowflake. Snowflake’s pricing model is based on two consumption-based metrics: usage of computing resources and data storage. The more Snowflake is “active,” your consumption-based costs increase accordingly.

Let’s compare the cost variation between typical Amazon Ads reports and Streams;

1. API Reports: API reports are processed daily and use about 60 minutes of computing time per day. The reports total about 200 GB of data per month. Your Snowflake costs will be about $140 a month.
2. Near-Realtime Streams: Streams are processed every hour, every day, for about 5–10 minutes. The amount of data generated is about 2 TB of data each month. Your Snowflake costs will be about $550 a month.

While this is a hypothetical example, it is meant to highlight choosing to use AMS will have cost implications.

Don’t want to use Snowflake? Even if you decide to use Redshift from Amazon Web Services or BigQuery from Google Cloud, the same concepts of cost and performance considerations apply. They may be slightly different implications, but they exist nonetheless.

The key takeaway is that the Amazon Marketing Stream should not be viewed as a different type of report. The velocity and scale of the data far exceed your regular reports. As a result, even though Amazon Ads does not charge for AMS service, you should be mindful of the broader total cost of ownership when using near-real-time data service.

Amazon Marketing Stream Datasets

Currently, three core datasets are part of streams. They are;

• Sponsored Products traffic (sp-traffic)
• Sponsored Products conversions (sp-conversion)
• Sponsored ads budget usage (budget-usage)

We go into each of these below as currently defined by Amazon. Please note these are subject to change given the service is in beta.

Sponsored Products traffic (sp-traffic)

The sp-traffic dataset contains click, impression, and cost data related to Sponsored Products campaigns. Initial click data is available within 12 hours of the ad click. As part of the traffic validation process, clicks can be invalidated during the following 72 hours post the initial report. Amazon Marketing Stream will automatically deliver any adjustments to your queue.

The total cost of all clicks. Expressed in local currency.

Sponsored Products conversions (sp-conversion)

The sp-conversion dataset contains conversion data attributed to Sponsored Products campaigns. Conversions for Sponsored Products campaigns are reported based on the hour when the click they are attributed to occurred. Conversion data is reported daily, weekly, and monthly, and you should expect to receive revisions to conversion data up to sixty days after the initial click.

The total number of units ordered within 30 days of ad click where the purchased SKU was the same as the SKU advertised.

Sponsored ads budget usage (budget-usage)

The budget-usage dataset provides the budget status (spend compared to budget) for sponsored ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, or Sponsored Brands) campaigns and portfolios. Advertisers receive notifications at every 5% interval of budget consumption. Amazon Marketing Stream pushes budget usage updates in near real-time. You should receive a notification soon after your budget usage increases by 5%. Due to Amazon’s traffic validation process, it is possible that you may receive the same notification twice. For example, if a click is invalidated, that may reduce your budget usage under the 5% threshold.

Summary

With Amazon Marketing Stream you can access all of the data related to your product ads. Amazon Marketing Stream “pushes” updates rather than the current “pulling” of report snapshots. While Ad reports are still a critical part of understanding performance, streams offer additional views into how well your media investments are impacting marketing plans and broader business outcomes.

If you are interested in participating in a Marketing Stream beta, let us know.

Openbridge is an Amazon Ads verified partner, Amazon Selling Partner, and part of the AWS Partner Network. We support the complete suite of Amazon Sponsered Advertising reports as well as performance data from the Amazon Demand-side Platform (Amazon DSP) and Amazon Attribution.

Get a 30-day free trial so that you can try Openbridge for yourself.

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Amazon Marketing Stream: Near-Realtime Ads Data was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Amazon KPI Metrics For Advertising + Marketing

Amazon KPI examples

Understanding which KPI for Amazon will help provide insights into Seller Performance

Amazon KPI metrics are an essential part of any marketing plan. Without them, there would be no way to determine if your efforts were successful and if your media investments are paying off. Marketing metrics help you see what works and what doesn’t. They also give insight into how your customers perceive your brand and product. You can then adjust your marketing strategy accordingly to avoid wasting your media dollars.

In this article, we will cover KPIs for Amazon that baseline critical metrics for a seller business. We will detail various industry-standard KPIs for Amazon performance vital to understanding your e-commerce strategies’ success.

From sales growth, operating income, net income, and cash flow to operations we will discuss how each of these indicators could be used by investors, brand owners, and sellers to frame strategies while setting goals for future success.

What are Amazon KPI metrics for marketing?

Amazon marketing KPIs are a quantifiable way of measuring the success of an Amazon Advertising campaign. They are also referred to as Marketing or Advertising KPIs. These measurements are usually used to gauge the effectiveness of campaigns and associated creative assets (ads).

The most appropriate marketing KPIs vary greatly depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Some examples include:

• Sales Generated — How many leads/customers did we get?

• Reach — How far did our message travel? Did our product ads reach the target audience?

• Awareness — How are our organic rankings? Where do we sit in our product category in relation to competitors?

• Engagement — How engaged were our users?

• Conversion Rate — What percentage of sales was due to converting visitors into customers? Are we converting a visit to a product listing into a sale?

• Retention — How long did our customers stay with us? Did they leave a positive or negative review?

• Cost per Acquisition — How much did each customer cost us? What is the impact to profit margins? We would consider a profitable campaign a success when factoring in total costs?

Ultimately, what you measure will be linked to your overall campaign goal.

What Are Examples Of Amazon KPI Metrics For Marketing?

There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising efforts. Each metric gives you a unique insight into what you have done well or poorly. Some metrics allow us to see the impact of our efforts, others tell us about our audience, and others let us know whether we’re spending money wisely.

Here are some examples of metrics for various types of campaigns.

• Email Marketing: As emails open, forward, and unsubscribe. Also, link clicks to a product listing and any orders
• Digital Marketing: Click-Through Rate, Cost Per Action, Impressions, and Subscriptions.
• Social Media: Followers, Impressions, Engagement Rate, Tweets, Retweets, Likes, Comments, Shares, and Views. If you have a call-to-action, like ordering a product, you would also use CTR and CPA
• Website: Total Traffic, Bounce Rate, New Customers, Returning Customers, Time Spent on Site, and Traffic Sources.
• Content Marketing: Blogs, Amount of Content Shared, Content Downloads, and Qualified Leads Through Lead Generation Fills.
• Video and Streaming TV Ads: Impressions and Viewing Time.
• SEO: Keyword rankings, search volume, and organic visits.
• Brand: Customer satisfaction, customer retention, and customer lifetime value.

A lot of different factors affect the success of an ad campaign. Some of them include the ads’ quality, the targeting options available, and the user experience when interacting with the ads. Tracking conversions is essential because it helps you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

You can track those conversions using Amazon Attribution (beta) or Google Analytics. These tools will show you the number of users interacting with your ads and what actions they took next.

Closing The Loop, End-To-End Attribution For The Marketing Funnel

For most advertisers and marketers, their current campaign performance does not directly attribute an action to the outcome of a sale. For example, the email you sent promoting a product on Amazon. You know the sends, the opens, and the CTR to the product, but not how many people orders. It is more of a guess or assumption. However, with Amazon Attribution, you can connect the dots to know how many sales that email drove! For campaign optimization efforts, closing the loop from marketing to sale is critical.

These tools let them test different ad formats, target audiences, and landing pages while measuring the effect on sales and conversions. Amazon Attribution tracks how other channels (like SEO and social media) affect your business. Using this information, you can tell whether a campaign is working and get detailed reports on how each channel contributes to your overall success.

As a result, campaign strategies can be refined by knowing how a specific channel or creative asset, is performing. For example, a display campaign may be great for awareness, but you observe it is not driving sales. With attribution, you now realize that display is driving clicks without conversions. As a result, you decide to adjust your daily ad budget for the display campaign to focus on brand awareness.

Using attribution increases the chances of success, reducing the guesswork out of your campaign strategies. You can start to target high-intent audiences with specific channels and creative, allowing you to optimize costs and focus on a narrow audience that is in-market for your product. You can readily optimize for a real-world target profit margin, assigning larger budgets to strategies that are sales drivers vs brand builders.

Attribution allows marketers to see what works best a key to success in shaping KPIs that impact the bottom line. The key difference between those using Attribution vs those that do not is they have the critical visibility needed to close the e-commerce loop.

Which KPI for amazon will be most important to your brand?

Marketing analytics are critical to any brand. They help you understand what your campaigns are doing to reach your business goals. They give you insight into how your campaigns are impacting your business. And they allow you to make adjustments to improve results. Marketing analytics help you measure success. They also help you understand if your campaigns are working, and if not, why not. You can then adjust them to get the best results possible. Finally, marketing analytics help you justify your budget and staff.

• Advertising Cost of Sales ACoS: Ad spends per conversion (CPA) is calculated similarly, except you need to add the cost of each impression to the sales column. If you have a CPA goal, you should divide your average cost per click (CPC) by the number of conversions to get your expected CPA. For example, if you had a CPC of $0.20 and 100 conversions, you could expect to earn $2.00 in CPA.
• Total Advertising Cost of Sales TACoS: To calculate this metric, you will need to total your ad spend for a fixed period in the same way described above. Then you will need to go to the Detail Page Sales and Traffic Report by ASIN in the Business Reports section of Seller Central. Through the same fixed window, you will want to total up your Ordered Product Sales column; this will be your denominator. Understand how well your ads are performing. You can see if there are any areas for improvement. If your product sales are low compared to your ad spend, you may consider adjusting your strategy.
• ROAS Return on Ad Spend: ROAS is another angle from which to measure profitability. This metric is easily calculated via reports in the Vendor Central and Seller Central ad interfaces. In many of its reports, Amazon has also begun to roll out this metric on a per-ASIN or per-campaign basis.
• Impression share: Impressions are the number of times a user sees something online. Users see ads, videos, images, news articles, etc. Impression share is the measure that shows how well a brand performs on a specific channel compared to its overall potential audience. For example, if you run a Facebook campaign with a $100,000 budget and get 100,000 impressions, your impression share will be 1%. If you run a similar campaign with a $1 million budget, and you get 10 million impressions, then your impression shares will be 0.01%
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Marketers should consider comparing customer lifetime value (CLTV) against customer acquisition cost (COC). CLTV measures how much revenue an average client brings over a specific period. COC measures how much a brand spends on acquiring each new customer. If CLTV is higher than COC, you’re spending money well. If CLTV is lower than COC, you might need to reevaluate your marketing strategies.

Calculating campaign effectiveness on Amazon

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) show how well your campaigns track against your goals. Marketing teams monitor various KPIs, but each campaign should only have about five. They should be specific and measurable, and achievable within your campaign timeline.

Advertising Cost Of Sales (ACOS)

Ad Spend / Ad Sales = ACOS

Advertising cost of sales (ACoS) is the inverse of return on ad spend (ROAS). To find your ACoS, divide your spending by the number of sales you generate from advertising. The number will tell you how much of your sales come from advertising. If you’re wondering why you should care about your ACoS, think of this: What’s the point of buying ads if you can’t measure whether they’re working? You wouldn’t buy a car if you couldn’t see how fast it went. So why would you buy something that doesn’t produce results?

ACS is an excellent indicator of success. However, if you’re using an agency to manage your campaigns, you should consider other metrics like CPA, ROAS, and CTR. These will give you a better idea of what you’re getting from your campaign.

Total Available Cost Of Sales (TACOS)

Ad Spend / Total Amazon Sales = TACOS

TACOS stands for Total Available Cost Of Sales. It is a metric used to measure the efficiency of an ad campaign. A lower TACOS means that you are spending less money on advertising compared to what you are bringing in. However, if you have a high TACOS, you may need to increase your spending on advertising.

There are many ways to calculate TACOS, but the most common method is calculating the average cost per click (CPC) multiplied by the total number of clicks received. You can also divide the amount spent on ads by the total revenue generated.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Spend / Clicks = CPC

CPC stands for cost per click. It is a metric used in online advertising. Companies like Google offer Pay-Per-Click options, which means you pay each time someone clicks your ad. CPC is used to determine if the ads are working effectively.

If you spend $20 on an advertisement and get ten clicks, you will pay $2 per click. However, if you get 100 clicks, then you will only pay $1 per click. Therefore, CPC is a metric used to measure the effectiveness of advertisements.

Many factors still influence each keyword’s price, including competition, quality score, and bid strategy. We recommend monitoring these metrics to ensure you get the best return possible.

Click-Thru-Rate (CTR)

Clicks / Impressions = CTR

Clicks/Impressions CTR. Click-Through Rate is an essential metric for any online advertising campaign. A high click-through rate means your ads are getting attention and clicking. And a low CTR means you’re losing money.

For Amazon, during Prime Day, many vendors saw their clicks per impression go down dramatically. This is likely because shoppers were looking at all the great deals and browsing instead of buying. So, if you’re not running a sale, you’ll probably see a considerable decrease in your CTR.

Many factors can influence the click-through rate (CTR) of an item. These include price, availability, shipping time, reviews, and the number of similar items available. Some sellers even change their prices at random intervals to see what effect it has on CTR.

Total Page Views (TPV)

Total Page Views = Organic Clicks + Paid Clicks

The Total Page Views metric shows how well your current strategy is working. If you are not seeing any increase in the number of visitors to your listing, it may mean your listing is not optimized correctly. Before making changes, you should always check the product title, description, images, and keywords.

Please make sure all of them accurately reflect what the product is about. It would help if you also considered adding another photo or two to show different angles of the product. This will allow Amazon’s search engine to understand what the product is and what it looks like.

Cost Per Order (CPO)

CPO = total costs for advertising ÷ number of orders

CPO is an important metric in Amazon Advertising. It shows the average cost of each sale in relation to the total revenue. When optimizing your campaign, you should try to maximize this ratio.

The formula to get this ratio is as follows: Total Costs Incurred / Total Sales Made = CPO.

In other words, your CPO tells you what your average cost per order is. If you’re spending $5 per click, and have made $10 in sales, then your CPO will tell you if your ads are worth it. If you’re spending $1 per click, and have made $100 in sales, then you’ll need to spend at least $100 to get an order.

In general, the higher the CPO, the less effective the ad is.

CPO is an important metric because it tells you exactly what you spend on each sale. You don’t need to worry about bad sales or a temporary drop in sales per order. CPO is also an absolute figure that doesn’t distort anything and shows you the actual cost of each sale.

Organic Search Rankings

Organic search ranking position returned for a search term. According to CPC strategy’s 2018 amazon shopper behavior study, 70% of shoppers never click past the first page of an organic search result on Amazon.

What’s more, the top 3 results get 64% of clicks. These statistics highlight the importance of using search visibility as a KPI for amazon. Search visibility means that when consumers type keywords related to your product, you will appear as close to the TOP of the search results as possible.

Start by gathering keywords that will help your products stand out from the crowd. You may want to focus on broad terms like “travel pillow” or “umbrella” because they are more expansive than the specifics of your product. Then, add brand names and related words to give your listing a unique personality.

Finally, incorporate your keywords throughout your product pages in a natural way. Avoid using them in place of important information about your products, though. For example, if you sell umbrellas, don’t put the word “umbrella’ in every sentence describing your product. That could confuse customers. Instead, explain what an umbrella does and why someone might need one.

Summary

A KPI is an important tool for business management, especially when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategies. To run your business successfully, you must determine which KPIs are relevant and have an effective method of gathering needed data and monitoring those outcomes. That means staying on top of key metrics, keeping a pulse on sales, and ensuring you’re not missing any opportunities.

Amazon sellers need to focus on what matters, driving growth. If your team spends hours looking for the right data, manually downloading reports, and copy-pasting that data on a spreadsheet, that data wrangling work is slow, messy, and expensive.

Supercharge your Amazon Retail Analytics KPIs with data automation. Create a custom Amazon KPI dashboard with Power BI or unite Ads data with Seller performance information like orders, returns, inventory, and fulfillment for a 360 view.

Openbridge offers a type of connector for various Seller services;

• Amazon Inventory: Get FBA Inventory Reports data for the listing, condition, disposition, and quantity to help with day-to-day inventory.
• Amazon Fulfillment: Get complete, product-level detail on inbound shipments, shipped FBA orders, quantity, tracking, and shipping with FBA Fulfillment Reports and Inbound Fulfillment API.
• Amazon Orders: Order and item information for both FBA and seller-fulfilled orders, including order status, fulfillment and sales channel information, and item details with Order API and FBA Orders Reports.
• Amazon Finance: Balances, payouts, estimated and actual selling, storage, and fulfillment fee data with FBA Settlement Reports, FBA Fees, and Finance API
• Detail Sales & Traffic: Business level Sales and Traffic reports offer performance metrics for product sales, revenue, units ordered, and page traffic metrics such as page views and buy box.
• Vendor Central: Manage retail business operations with automated integration so vendors can improve and maintain performance at scale while growing business.
• Retail Analytics: Vendor Retail Analytics delivers ordered revenue, glance views, conversion, replenishable out-of-stock, lost buy box, returns, replacements, and many more.
• Brand Analytics: Brand Analytics offers sellers and vendors market basket analysis, search terms, repeat purchases, alternate purchases, item comparisons, and more.

Unlock Amazon Advertising, Seller Central, and Vendor Central data silos securely into your private data lake or cloud warehouse technologies like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, Ahana, and Amazon Athena.

With your Amazon Advertising, Seller Central, and Amazon Vendor Central data unlocked, you can turbocharge reporting, analytics, and insights tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight, SAP, Alteryx, dbt, Azure Data Factory, Qlik Sense, and many others.

Fuel Amazon KPI analysis with forecasting, reporting, and dashboards using KPIs that matter most to you. Create a new custom dashboard, enhance an existing dashboard, or perform a breakdown of sales; Openbridge data automation will get you what you need.

Get a 30-day free trial, so you can try Amazon KPI metric data automation for yourself.

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Amazon KPI Metrics For Advertising + Marketing was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Amazon KPI For Retail

Amazon KPI Examples For Optimizing Retail Operations On Seller Central

In today’s digital world, online business owners need to use every tool available to them by leveraging multiple channels to connect with targeted audiences. This requires seamless interaction between all channels and a strong understanding of the data analytics behind the success of each channel.

Key Performance Indicators, better know as KPIs, are quantifiable measures that help you understand how well your company is doing in different aspects of its operations within Amazon Seller Central. These indicators can measure almost any part of your business. They allow you to evaluate your business’s success and pinpoint areas that need improvement like customer service and driving sales velocity.

For example, we detailed Why Amazon Brand Analytics Fuels Growth which includes brand-level KPIs. In another article, Understanding Amazon MFN (Merchant Fulfilled Network), we detailed a collection of key metrics that are critical for anyone doing FBM.

As an Amazon Seller, you need to pay close attention to what your Amazon Key Performance Indicators tell you because the success of your business relies on you identifying them and taking action accordingly.

Types Of Amazon KPI

Many different types of metrics form the foundation for Seller KPIs, but three main classes are used for an Amazon business:

• Quantitative: Quantitative KPIs are all about numbers. These metrics tell you how many people placed an order, returned a product, viewed an ad, how many clicked through to your website, how many people bought your product, etc.
• Qualitative: Qualitative KPIs are all about impressions and engagement. They measure how people perceive your brand, how many people interacted with your ads, how long they spent looking at your ads, how often they engaged with your ads, and how likely they are to buy your products.

Both quantitative and qualitative KPIs are important to understand how business objectives are tracking to business goals, including how they should fit within a competitive landscape on Seller Central.

Benchmark Amazon KPIs For Sellers

Amazon KPIs are metrics that measure the performance of your business on Amazon. These seller metrics are essential because they help you understand how well you’re performing on Amazon and allow you to set goals for your business.

We have detailed a collection of Amazon KPIs considered necessary for retail operations. While additional metrics help provide a 360 view of seller performance, the list below is a starting point as you look to kickstart insights efforts needed to help your business grow.

Pick one, use all of them, or none of them. What is essential to any company’s ability to grow is a clear vision of what metrics mean, why to use them, and how they are socialized within the company so that everyone can work together to achieve the best possible results.

Sales Revenue

Sales revenue is the total amount of money Amazon makes from selling products via its online marketplace. Sales revenue includes advertising fees paid to Amazon by third-party sellers who list their products on the platform.

For example, if you sell shoes on Amazon and a customer purchases them for $100, you pay Amazon a percentage of this sale as your commission fee. This fee comes out of your pocket, so when calculating sales revenue for yourself and your team members at work (if applicable), it’s crucial to consider how much money these costs are subtracting from your total revenue numbers.

See Amazon Seller Central Sales Report Automation

Gross Profit

Understanding is vital because it’s the first profit metric you should look at when evaluating your business performance. Gross profit is the difference between revenue and the cost of goods sold. For example, let’s say that you sell books on Amazon. You buy books from publishers for $10 each and then resell them on Amazon for $20 each. Your gross profit is $10 per book.

Product Returns

A product return is when a customer requests to send back an item they purchased. The average number of products returned per 1,000 units sold in a given period. For example, if you sold 100 products and 40 customers requested to send their items back, your return rate would be 40%.

Backorders

Backorders are a good indicator of the demand for your product. Orders that haven’t been fulfilled yet can be used to predict future demand, revenue, and profit.

Let’s take the example of an online clothing retailer. If you’re selling shirts, back orders will tell you how many people want shirts like yours — it’s just a matter of fulfilling their orders. Once you’ve fulfilled all your back orders, though — and maybe even before — you’ll know how many shirts are going out into the world every month and what that means for your profits.

Amazon AOV (Average Order Value)

Amazon Average Order Value KPI (AOV) is a key performance indicator that measures the average amount of money spent by each customer.

The calculation for AOV is simply total revenue divided by the number of orders. It can estimate how much a company’s customers spend, purchasing habits, and loyalty.

Your Amazon AOV KPI will often reflect the types of products you are selling. The more varied the inventory class, the more you may need to stratify this by Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) and product category.

Late Shipment Rate

LSR stands for Lost Shipments Rate. You could lose money if you have a high LSR because you will not get paid on time for your shipments. To reduce your LSR, try to ship on time.

Days In Inventory

Inventory days refer to the number of days your inventory lasts before you need to restock it. Turnover refers to the years your inventory will sell at its current rate.

Amazon Inventory Performance (Inventory Performance Index or IPI)

Inventory Performance Index measures your ability to keep items in stock, maintain healthy inventories, and fix listing issues. Your score will help you understand whether you’re excelling at maintaining inventory or if any areas need improvement.

Invoice Defect Rate

If you don’t send an invoice (or receipt) to your business customer within 24 hours, you’ll receive a penalty against your Invoice Defect Rate.

To comply with this newly announced Amazon Business invoicing policies, what you need to do now is to enroll in either the VAT Calculation Service or the Automatic Receipt Generation service. If you don’t send an invoice (or receipt) to your business customer within 24 hours after placing their order, you’ll receive one point against your Invoice Defection Rate.

A-Z Guarantee

The following customer feedback scenarios can prove disastrous if left unchecked:

• A-Z Guarantee claims;
• Customer chargeback;
• Negative reviews;
• Late shipment (for FBM sellers);
• Rate (response 24 hours after a customer leaves a message).

If the percentage meter for any of these factors starts going up, Amazon will quickly hand out notices and might even end up suspending the account. A-Z reflects both perceived and actual customer experience people are having with your brand.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that measures the revenue generated by a customer throughout their relationship with the business. CLV is calculated by multiplying the average revenue generated by a customer by the number of periods they will remain a customer. This metric informs how you turn first-time customers into repeat purchasers.

A customer may purchase from your consistently as standalone purchases or a customer purchase based on various types of subscription models you have. For example, if your customers are paying each month for an Amazon Subscribe & Save product for access to your product. Customers would be considered active each month after signing up until they cancel their subscription or stop using your product altogether.

A component of CLV is customer satisfaction metrics. These reflect a customer experience with your company. They measure how happy your customers are with your service, how easy it was for them to get in touch with you, how satisfied they are with the quality of your services, and how willing they are to recommend your brand.

Percentage Of Revenue Retained Over Time

The percentage of revenue retained over time is calculated by dividing the revenue at the end of a period by the revenue at the beginning of that same period, then multiplying by 100.

For example, if you have a business that generates $10 million in sales in Year 1, then $5 million in Year 2 and $20 million in Year 3, your retained revenue is 50%.

Search Terms

The Amazon Search Terms Report shows the most popular search terms in the Amazon store during the specified period, the search frequency rank, sales rank for a keyword, and the number of times customers clicked on the top Amazon product ranking related to those performing searches. For each of the three leading products, the report also provides details of their click share and conversion share for each of the top three countries.

This data can provide metrics that fuel KPIs related to how your current inventory relates to search product rankings. You may identify opportunities for additional products, optimize organic sales through listing improvements, or identify potential customers in adjacent verticals.

See How to download the Amazon Search Terms report?

Sales Conversion Rates

One way to measure KPI is by measuring conversion rates — the percentage of visitors who purchase or sign up for an offer after visiting your product detail page. A common formula for calculating conversion rate is:

• Number of total customers/number of total orders = conversion rate
• Total number of visitors/number of conversions = conversion rate
• Total Page Visits / Total # of Sales = Sales Conversion Rate

Amazon’s search algorithm isn’t just looking for pages that get lots of views. It’s also looking for pages that convert well. That means getting people to view your listing is only half the fight in performing well on Amazon — the other half is making sure that when they click through to your listing, they end up buying something.

To achieve this, your listing needs to allow them to research the product and determine if it’s right for them. If there is nothing on your listing that helps potential buyers understand what the item is, why it’s great, or how it works, they will never buy it.

A typical Amazon seller performance metrics report for sales conversions is the Detail Page Sales and Traffic Business Reports. The Traffic Report summarizes your product sales, including sessions, average conversion rate, sales ranks, click-through rate, and other performance metrics to help you get insights into sales velocity (or lack thereof).

If you are not getting enough conversions, it may mean that your product content does not match what customers need to know about your product. Ensure your content provides everything the consumer needs to know to purchase. Answer any common questions or concerns customers might have, and explain how your product compares to its competitors in price, features, and quality.

Optimizing KPIs for product listings often will fall under the topic of Amazon Search Engine Optimization or “Amazon SEO.” If you are working with an Amazon SEO Consultant or do it yourself, establishing basic metrics for your digital storefront performance can leverage the Sales and Traffic reports for the foundation of your KPIs.

What happens if you ignore KPIs?

Amazon has a system of penalties for sellers who fail to meet the company’s performance standards. If a seller falls below the minimum requirements, Amazon might restrict or prohibit that seller from selling certain products or even close their account outright. You now have a choice: monitor Amazon’s KPIs or face the consequences later.

This can be very serious if you depend on Amazon for your income. Account suspension can even lead to account cancellations. Therefore, you must take every step possible to ensure you never get suspended.

Sellers who ignore Amazon KPI risk losing access to the platform. Anyone who has ever worked on an action plan understands that missing Amazon KPIs can significantly impact your business and only wastes your time and money that can be better spent driving business growth and profit. If you aren’t monitoring your Amazon KPIs regularly, you could lose access to the platform entirely. And if you are running a business that relies heavily on Amazon, that would be disastrous.

Getting Started with Amazon KPIs

Your team spends hours looking for the right data, downloading it, and copy-pasting that data on a spreadsheet. That type of manual data wrangling is slow, messy, and expensive.

There is no need to hire a Seller Partner API developer or register as a developer to build a custom application. If you do not have the technical knowledge or desire to construct custom data workflows, Openbridge can help with code-free Amazon data automation.

Openbridge offers a type of connector for various Seller services;

• Amazon Inventory: Get FBA Inventory Reports data for the listing, condition, disposition, and quantity to help with day-to-day inventory.
• Amazon Fulfillment: Get complete, product-level detail on inbound shipments, shipped FBA orders, quantity, tracking, and shipping with FBA Fulfillment Reports and Inbound Fulfillment API.
• Amazon Orders: Order and item information for both FBA and seller-fulfilled orders, including order status, fulfillment and sales channel information, and item details with Order API and FBA Orders Reports.
• Amazon Finance: Balances, payouts, estimated and actual selling, storage, and fulfillment fee data with FBA Settlement Reports, FBA Fees, and Finance API
• Detail Sales & Traffic: Business level Sales and Traffic reports offer performance metrics for product sales, revenue, units ordered, and page traffic metrics such as page views and buy box.
• Vendor Central: Manage retail business operations with automated integration so vendors can improve and maintain performance at scale while growing business.
• Retail Analytics: Vendor Retail Analytics delivers ordered revenue, glance views, conversion, replenishable out-of-stock, lost buy box, returns, replacements, and many more.
• Brand Analytics: Brand Analytics offers sellers and vendors market basket analysis, search terms, repeat purchases, alternate purchases, item comparisons, and more.

Unlock Amazon Seller Central and Vendor Central data silos securely into your private data lake or cloud warehouse technologies like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, Ahana, and Amazon Athena.

With your Amazon Seller Central and Amazon Vendor Central data unlocked, you can turbocharge reporting, analytics, and insights tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight, SAP, Alteryx, dbt, Azure Data Factory, Qlik Sense, and many others.

Fuel forecasting, analysis, reporting, and marketing efforts using KPIs that matter most to you. Create a new custom dashboard, enhance an existing dashboard, or perform a breakdown of sales; data automation will get you what you need.

Get a 30-day free trial, so you can try Amazon SP-API automation for yourself.

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Amazon KPI For Retail was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Google Data Studio + Amazon Seller Central

We are excited to announce Google Data Studio users can now leverage our Amazon Seller Central (SP-API) partner connectors. The SP-API, formerly known as Amazon MWS, delivers a new type of seller tool that gives business and marketing teams new analytics capabilities.

Google Data Studio paired with Amazon Seller Central data is a powerful combination for sellers who want to create a simple dashboard or in-depth comprehensive reports and visualizations.

What is Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a free web-based reporting tool that allows you to create data visualizations, dashboards, and reports. It’s easy to use and can be accessed from any device with an internet connection. You can insert charts, tables, maps, and more into your sales or marketing dashboard. Once you have created your report, you can share it with others or publish it on the web so that all of your team members can see the latest changes.

Data Studio is the perfect option for sellers that want to graduate from using Excel or Google Sheets without the additional cost of other business intelligence tools.

Why Amazon Seller Central and Data Studio? Powerful Combo

As a data source, Amazon Seller Central offers a default dashboard that allows you to manage your products, inventory, and orders. The Seller dashboard offers up key metrics on units ordered, total sales, and others.

What if you want to do a different type of analysis, report, or visualization? While the default Seller Central UI is sufficient, leveraging your own reporting tools, like Data Studio, allows you to undertake an in-depth analysis of organic sales, wasteful ad spending, and search history.

You can connect to data directly from Amazon Seller Central via API and use this data directly within Google Data Studio. With this connection, you can create more comprehensive reports for yourself quickly and easily.

What is possible with Data Studio and Seller Central?

For data-driven Amazon merchants, the Amazon Selling Partner API (SP-API) connector will supply key business Insights so you can measure the impact of retail operations. The SP-API connector allows direct, code-free access to daily or real time Seller Central data through Google Data Studio.

Openbridge offers a type of connector for various Seller services;

• Amazon Inventory: Get FBA Inventory Reports data for the listing, condition, disposition, and quantity to help with day-to-day inventory.
• Amazon Fulfillment: Get comprehensive, product-level detail on inbound shipments, shipped FBA orders, quantity, tracking, and shipping with FBA Fulfillment Reports and Inbound Fulfillment API.
• Amazon Orders: Order and item information for both FBA and seller-fulfilled orders including order status, fulfillment and sales channel information, and item details with Order API, and FBA Orders Reports.
• Amazon Finance: Balances, payouts, estimated and actual selling, storage, and fulfillment fee data with FBA Settlement Reports, FBA Fees, and Finance API
• Detail Sales & Traffic: Business level Sales and Traffic reports offer performance metrics for product sales, revenue, units ordered, and page traffic metrics such as page views and buy box.
• Vendor Central: Manage retail business operations with automated integration so vendors can improve and maintain performance at scale while growing business.
• Retail Analytics: Vendor Retail Analytics delivers ordered revenue, glance views, conversion, replenishable out-of-stock, lost buy box, returns, replacements, and many more.
• Brand Analytics: Brand Analytics offers sellers and vendors market basket analysis, search terms, repeat purchases, alternate purchases, item comparisons, and much more.

Google Data Studio and BigQuery

Unfortunately, given the scope, scale, and size of Seller retail data, using Excel or Google Sheets is not an option. For the Seller Central connection type, Amazon requires a system like Google BigQuery to store comprehensive reports data and complex data types supplied by the Amazon SP-API.

Google Data Studio works best when paired with a native connector to Google BigQuery.

If you don’t already have a Google Cloud account for this tool (and if not, I highly recommend signing up), doing so only takes a couple of minutes. Plus, we can offer an additional $200 in free credits!

The Google Cloud Platform Free Trial + additional credits from our partners provide you with hundreds of dollars to try the Cloud Platform. Whether you are building software or automobiles, looking to create the next big thing, or wanting to put your company on the same infrastructure that powers Google, Google Cloud Platform has the technology and the partners to help grow your business on our Cloud.

The process of connecting Data Studio to BigQuery is simple and ready-built by Google. Now, you can use BigQuery and Google Data Studio to create your own dashboards for Amazon Seller Central. This is a great way to make a dashboard in Data Studio that is more flexible and powerful than the one that Amazon provides.

Get Started Now

Openbridge has developed the automated API connector code, which means there is nothing for your to program. We are official connector providers for Amazon Selling Partner and Amazon Advertising API. Openbridge is an Amazon Advertising Partner tools provider and is an approved PII data supplier for Seller Central.

Google Data Studio is a powerful tool for business users and marketers to create compelling reports based on data from the Amazon Seller Central APIs. You can also pair retail data with Amazon Advertising data from the Amazon Demand-side Platform (Amazon DSP) and Amazon Attribution.

Fuel financial forecasting, marketing analysis, sales reporting, and marketing optimization. Create a new custom dashboard, enhance an existing dashboard, or perform a breakdown of sales with Data Studio.

Get a 30-day free trial so that you can try Openbridge for yourself.

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Google Data Studio + Amazon Seller Central was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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How to download the Amazon Search Terms report?

 Keep using manual file downloads or start using SP-API data automation?

Amazon search data can be a great way for Amazon Seller Central merchants to understand what customers are looking for and how they interact with your products. By utilizing the search term report, you get valuable data that helps you gain insight into search performance. You can then use this data in a variety of ways to increase sales and improve your competitive edge.

Thankfully Amazon makes this data directly available for download. There are two primary methods of downloading the search term report;

1. The traditional approach of manually logging into Seller Central and downloading files.
2. Leveraging the Amazon Selling Partner API for code-free, automated search term downloads to a unified data lake or cloud data warehouse.
   

Read more about this @ How to download the Amazon Search Terms report?

Amazon Advertising + Google Data Studio

 

Amazon Advertising reporting data supercharged comprehensive reporting tools like Data Studio

We are excited to announce Google Data Studio users can now leverage our Amazon Advertising API data integration.

Google Data Studio is a free Google analytics tool that allows you to create interactive and shareable dashboard-style reports, which can be incredibly useful for marketers that need to move beyond the advertising console.

As an Amazon Advertising Partner, Openbridge will connect Amazon Advertising with a code-free, fully automated data integration. that unlocks critical seller central performance data within the Google Reporting software ecosystem that supports the complete analysis of your ad spend.

Here’s what you need to know about getting started with Data Studio, including how to set up your Amazon account in the new interface.

Read more about this @ Amazon Advertising + Google Data Studio