Measure traffic and conversion improvements for Amazon ads

Business benefits

Understand campaign performance and drive data-driven decisions.

Build an analytics dashboard with a week-on-week view to document changes and track performance metrics across campaigns.

You can use this template spreadsheet to track analytics or create your own.

It’s important to have a week-on-week breakdown to create a reference point. For example, if you said I spent $100 and made $300 in sales. Is that good? Is that bad? There’s no reference point. When you have a week-on-week view, it allows you to beat the previous week’s results.

So if last week you spent $100, and you made $200 in sales, this week you want to spend $100 and make $300 in sales. Because you have that reference point, you can always compare yourself to the last week’s data or last month’s data focusing on growth and revenue.

Track your PPC Spend, PPC Sales, and Total Sales.

PPC Spend is the ad spend.
PPC Sales are the advertising sale
Total Sales are overall sales, including organic.

It’s important to track both the PPC sales and the Total Sales because your PPC spend will directly affect your organic ranking, which will directly affect your total sales. Also sometimes people see your ads, and then they see the organic result, they click on that, so your PPC could be affecting your organic sales without you even knowing.

Track your sessions to monitor traffic increases as you increase your ad spend.

As you increase your ad spend, the goal is to increase your sessions. Sessions are the unique visitors that are coming into your Amazon listing.

For example, if you have a hundred sessions, it means there are a hundred different people that visited your listing. If you’re spending $100 and have 100 sessions, then go to $200, which is double, you expect to go to 200, if it only goes to 130, you might not be efficient with your spend.

Track your Conversion Rate in the Amazon dashboard under Reports > Business Reports > Detail Page Sales and Traffic.

When you make changes like price testing and creative testing, your conversion rate is going to help you track their effectiveness.

You can add notes to track changes you made, for example, if on January 4th, you added a new image, you can look at the date and go to Unit Session Percentage and then right-click, and add a comment. Add a note like updated image to this with a link to it.

From there you can track and see on that date, the image was updated and the conversion rate was 70% and now it’s 75%. So you can track and say, on average, it was 70, now on average, it’s 75. The main image did make a difference. The same can be done with the click-through rate; The higher the click-through rate means more people are seeing you in the search and clicking on it.

Track your Cost Per Click to keep your ads profitable.

If you have a higher cost per click, you’re spending more money for every single click. Eventually, that will get more and more expensive. Make sure that it’s not slowly inching its way up, for example, if you start at a dollar, it’s not $4 in six to eight months.

Track your TACOS by dividing your PPC Spend by Total Sales, to achieve and maintain a higher net profit when running ads.

TACOS, or total ACOS, is the total advertising cost of sales. It is the percentage of your overall revenue that you are spending on advertising. It’s important to compare that number to your total gross margin.

For example, if you have a 50% gross margin and a 12% total ACOS, that’s fine. But if you have a 15% gross margin and a 12% total ACOS, that leaves you with 3% net profit at the end after advertising. Which isn’t a favorable place to be. If you notice that the percentage is increasing, you might not be utilizing your ads effectively.

Track your overall profit using Gross Profit Margin, Net Profit Margin, and Conversion Rate as good indicators.

Profit is the most important number to track. Whilst gross profit margin percent, net profit margin percent, and conversion rate are good indicators, the real number that matters is the dollar amount in profit.

As you make changes like increasing your ad spend in week one, in week two, it’s double. Then your sales are going up, look at that profit dollar amount. If that number’s going up, you’re on the right track. If it’s going down, then that’s obviously an issue.

Sometimes you have to go down before you go up. If you are investing in ads, you might need to scale your ad spend for a couple of weeks where your profits go down.

Split test your creatives, changing one factor at a time to track CTR and Conversion Rates.

Split testing your main image creatives all the time is important. The main image will attract a lot of people and will improve your CTR. You can use a tool like PickFu for creative split testing.

For example, if you’re showing up for 100 people, 10 will click on you. If you’re showing up for 100 people, 50 will click on you. It’s a higher CTR, from a 10% to a 50% CTR. You want to improve that CTR, as it also increases the chances of people converting. The higher the conversion rate, the more you’re converting.

Only change one factor at a time, one image at a time, tracking it, looking at the CTR and conversion rate. If there’s an improvement, you keep it. If there’s no improvement, you can take it away. Or if it drops, replace it with the old image.

Make note of variables that improve your CTR or conversion rates throughout your campaign.

Continuously improve traffic and conversions by tracking CTR and conversion rate.

Amazon is always changing and you have to constantly adapt, and continuously improve traffic and conversions, which means you have to continuously improve your ads, PPC, images, and listing to convert people more.

Track your conversion rate and your CTR through the analytics dashboard, and constantly test different factors to improve conversions. Remember to add a comment in the analytics dashboard to remind yourself of what that factor that changed was.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:08:38Z

@hesh_fekry just got done with this one, much more challenging than the last course. I am not so confident that the content falls in line with the topic.

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In which way would you feel it deviates? Where where the gaps of information?

Id rather have a list of questions and a skeleton than be reaching?

The topic on the doc was measuring improvements for traffic and conversions specifically. From pulling the info I was just questioning whether all of the metrics I have mentioned fall under traffic and conversions. Probably just self-doubt on the content.

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Alrite, maybe highlight those metrics here and quote where you feel its problematic so we can check. Otherwise its hard to know.

Moving forward any questions you have on a playbook list them and then we can get them answered. Better have a playbook with a bunch of questions attached to it for the community to answer and know where the gaps are than something that is so so.

Similar to how we treated the blogs.

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