For seasoned Amazon sellers navigating the platform's competitive landscape, data is the lifeblood of success. Yet many find themselves analyzing performance through a foggy lens—relying on existing reports that offer limited visibility into true market dynamics. Amazon has now introduced two transformative reports designed to sharpen this focus, providing surgical precision in dissecting PPC performance and delivering unprecedented competitive intelligence.
Accessing Amazon's Advertising Reports
Whether you're new to PPC or revisiting campaign analytics after a hiatus, these steps will guide you through accessing these powerful tools:
- Navigate to Advertising Console: Log into Seller Central and select the "Advertising" tab.
- Locate Reports: Find the "Reports" option in the sidebar menu.
- Generate New Report: Click "Create Report" to initiate analysis.
- Select Report Type: Choose between Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaigns, then specify the report variant.
- Execute Analysis: Name your report descriptively and click "Run Report" to generate insights.
Search Term Impression Share Report: Measuring Market Visibility
This report retains familiar metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR), but its revolutionary value lies in two new columns:
1. Search Term Impression Share: Quantifying Exposure Potential
Analogous to Google Ads' impression share, this metric reveals the percentage of total possible impressions your ads captured for specific search terms. For example, if a term generates 1,000 searches and your ad appears 100 times, your impression share is 10%.
This becomes invaluable for optimizing high-margin terms. When a keyword's Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS) significantly underperforms targets, impression share analysis determines whether bid increases could expand market presence and pressure competitors.
The metric also prevents unnecessary bid inflation—if impression share nears 100% while maintaining strong ACOS, additional investment yields diminishing returns. Conversely, shares below 70-80% with healthy ACOS indicate untapped opportunities for growth through strategic bid adjustments.
2. Search Term Impression Rank: Gauging Competitive Position
This metric compares your impression share against all sellers targeting the same terms via Sponsored Brands ads during the analyzed period. The top-ranked seller receives a "1" designation.
While insightful for identifying priority terms where competitors concentrate efforts, interpretation requires context. Unless analyzing highly segmented campaigns with substantial spend, this metric serves best as a comparative benchmark rather than a standalone diagnostic tool.
Brand Category Benchmark Report: Competitive Performance Analysis
Currently rolling out selectively, this report provides groundbreaking competitive context by comparing your metrics against industry percentiles across relevant categories and subcategories.
The percentile system positions your performance against the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile benchmarks for each metric. This reveals whether metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or conversion rates rank favorably within your competitive set—transforming subjective concerns into data-driven decisions.
For instance, an ROAS that seems suboptimal might actually outperform 75% of competitors when viewed through this lens. Conversely, conversion rates below the 25th percentile highlight critical improvement areas requiring strategic attention.
Strategic Implications
These reports collectively empower sellers to:
- Optimize bids based on impression share gaps rather than assumptions
- Identify competitive pressure points in search term targeting
- Benchmark performance against category norms
- Allocate budgets to high-potential, underpenetrated terms
By transforming opaque market dynamics into quantifiable insights, Amazon's new reporting tools equip sellers to navigate the platform's complexities with unprecedented clarity.