Amazon gives sellers a dozen advertising reports and most accounts are run off two of them. This is what each Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display report actually answers, how far back Amazon's data now goes, and the short list a monthly report should contain if it is meant to support a decision rather than prove someone was busy.
Amazon advertising reports: the seven for Sponsored Products
Almost every account is run off two reports: the search term report and whatever the campaign screen shows that day. The rest sit unopened, which is a shame, because each one exists to answer a different question and several of them answer questions the search term report cannot.
Amazon's own reporting guide lists seven for Sponsored Products. The campaign report "shows a summary of your performance by campaign for a selected date range". The targeting report "shows sales and performance metrics for keywords, products, and categories" in campaigns with at least one impression. The search terms report "shows search terms entered by shoppers searching on Amazon that resulted in at least one click". The advertised product report "shows sales and performance metrics for advertised products in campaigns with at least one impression". The placement report "shows performance of your campaigns on top-of-search placements compared to other placements". The performance over time report "summarizes clicks and spend over a specified period of time". And the search term impression share report "shows your share of all ad impressions captured for your Sponsored Products search terms".
Read that list as a list of decisions rather than files. Campaign and performance over time tell you whether spend and cost per click are drifting. Targeting tells you which keyword to move a bid on. Search terms tell you what to negate or harvest, which is where wasted search terms become visible. Advertised product tells you which ASIN is carrying the account. Placement tells you whether top of search is worth its premium. Impression share tells you how much of a term you are not getting: Amazon's own example is that an impression share of 20% for a search term means "you won 20% of all Sponsored Products ad impressions for that search term on that date", and an impression rank of 3 means "you received the third most Sponsored Products ad impressions for the same search term on that date". That report comes from the Report Center in the advertising console, and what impression share is covers how to act on a low number.
The Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display reports nobody opens
Sponsored Brands has its own set, and Amazon's guide lists keyword, keyword placement, campaign, campaign placement, search terms, search term impression share, and attributed purchases, which "shows the specific products sold and attributed to your campaigns". That last one matters more than its name suggests: on a Sponsored Brands campaign pointing at a Store or a multi-ASIN ad, the product that sells is often not the product in the creative, and nothing else in the console will tell you that.
On Sponsored Display, Amazon's reporting guide lists targeting, campaign, advertised product and matched target reports, while Amazon's own Sponsored Display reports announcement describes a campaign report aggregated by campaign, a targeting report, an advertised product report, and a purchased product report available to sellers only, which shows non-advertised products that shoppers bought after clicking your ads. The two Amazon pages do not list quite the same set, so check what your console actually offers before you promise a client a report by name.
The purchased product idea is the most useful of the three for a seller with a catalogue, because it is the only report that points outside the campaign. Amazon's getting-started guide describes the Sponsored Products purchased product report the same way: use it to "find new advertising opportunities and get insight into what audiences are buying". If shoppers who click an ad for one product keep buying a different one, that is either a new campaign or a bundle, and it is invisible in any report keyed on the thing you advertised.
How far back the data goes, and what that changes
The practical limit on reporting used to be the window. That has moved. At unBoxed 2025, in an announcement dated 11 November 2025, Amazon described a unified reporting experience in open beta that "streamlines and consolidates our reporting interfaces and applications across Amazon Ads" and lets advertisers "filter and combine data across ad products, accounts, countries, and supply & targeting combinations", reachable through the report builder interface, the reporting API and Amazon Marketing Stream.
The lookbacks it states are worth writing down, because they decide what questions are answerable at all: two weeks for hourly reporting, 15 months for daily or weekly reporting, and up to six years for monthly, yearly or summary-grain reporting. Managed-service Amazon DSP accounts were not included at launch and Amazon said they would become available in Q1 2026.
Two weeks of hourly data is enough to test a dayparting hypothesis and not enough to confirm one, so pull it when you have a question rather than monthly. Fifteen months of daily data is the real gift: it covers last year's Q4, which means this year's peak can be compared against the same weeks of last year instead of against October. That is a different and much better question than "is ACOS up on last month", and it is the one a seasonal business should be asking.
The metrics in campaign reporting that your ACOS column does not have
Amazon's campaign reporting page separates industry-standard metrics such as click-through rate, return on ad spend and detail page view rate from what it calls e-commerce goals unique to Amazon, and names long-term sales, new-to-brand, brand halo and Subscribe & Save among its proprietary metrics. It also names gross and invalid traffic, reach and frequency, viewability, off-Amazon conversions and conversion path reporting.
Three of those change how an account is judged. New-to-brand metrics are, in Amazon's words, "generated from first-time customers of your brand", which is the difference between buying growth and buying your own existing customers; what new-to-brand means covers how to read it. Long-term sales, Amazon says, include the "projected value from customer engagement over the next 12 months" on top of immediate sales, so a campaign that looks expensive on a 7-day ACOS can look different here. And gross and invalid traffic is the one nobody asks for until a spike in clicks with no orders needs explaining.
None of this replaces ACOS, it just stops ACOS being the only lens. The pairing that matters for a seller is ACOS against total advertising cost of sale, because the first is about the ads and the second is about the business; ACOS vs TACOS is the short version. Deciding which of these metrics an account should actually be steered by is most of what good Amazon advertising management consists of, long before anyone touches a bid.
What a monthly agency report should show
This part is method, not Amazon policy, and it is where most reports fail. A monthly report exists to answer three questions: what happened, why, and what changes next month. Anything that does not serve one of those three is decoration. A twelve-page deck of screenshots serves none of them.
So: one page of numbers, comparing the month to the same month last year as well as to last month, with spend, ad sales, ACOS, total advertising cost of sale, new-to-brand share and organic versus ad-attributed sales. Then a page of what changed and why, written in sentences, naming the campaigns touched and the reason. Then a page of what is planned next month, with the one thing that would most improve the account and the one risk being watched. Then, at the back, the exports so the client can check the claims: search terms, targeting, placement and impression share for the period.
Two things distinguish a report that is read from one that is filed. First, every number has a comparison attached; a bare "ACOS 28%" is not information. Second, the report says what was wrong as plainly as what went well, because a report that is always good news is a report nobody can act on. That standard is what our Amazon ads management services hold themselves to, and it is also a fair thing to demand of an incumbent agency before deciding whether to replace them.
Automate the pull, not the reading
Most of the fetching can be scheduled. Amazon's Sponsored Display reports announcement puts it plainly: "Scheduling any report gives you the ease of getting your Sponsored Display performance delivered to your email on a regular basis." Set the recurring reports you actually read to land the morning you do the weekly pass, and stop opening the console to download them by hand.
What cannot be automated is the judgment about which number is the cause and which is the symptom. A rising ACOS with a flat conversion rate and a rising cost per click is a market problem. A rising ACOS with a falling conversion rate and a flat cost per click is a listing problem, and no bid change fixes it. The reports give you both halves; reading them against each other is the work.
If you want a second opinion on what your current reporting is telling you, without handing over the account, Amazon consulting is the shape that fits, and the three exports we read for a free audit are listed in what reports an audit needs.
The number no advertising report contains
Every report above is drawn from your own advertising. None of them knows how big the search was. For that you need Brand Analytics in Seller Central rather than the advertising console: Amazon describes the Search Query Performance dashboard as listing "keywords customers use to find your brand", with query volume, impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases. It is not open to everyone, though. Amazon states you need a Professional selling account, and to be a Brand Representative for a brand enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.
The reason to care is that a term can look fine in the search term report and still be a failure. Spending $200 on a query and getting six orders is either good or terrible depending on whether the query sold sixty units that month or six thousand, and only the Brand Analytics side of the house knows which. Search Term Report vs Search Query Performance sets out which report answers which question and why their numbers will never quite agree.
On Monday morning, then: open the two reports you have been ignoring. Pull placement and impression share for the last 30 days, and pull the purchased product report if you sell more than one thing. Those three will usually surface something no amount of staring at the campaign screen would have, and they take ten minutes between them.
Sources
- Amazon Ads — Creating and using reports (source for the seven Sponsored Products report types and their descriptions, the Sponsored Brands report list including the attributed purchases report, and the Sponsored Display targeting, campaign, advertised product and matched target reports)
- Amazon Ads — Getting started guide for sponsored ads (source for the purchased product report being used to find new advertising opportunities and see what audiences are buying, and for the performance over time report showing average cost-per-click and total spend change)
- Amazon Ads — Streamline campaign analysis with the new unified reporting (unBoxed 2025, 11 November 2025: source for the unified reporting open beta, filtering and combining data across ad products, accounts and countries, the report builder, reporting API and Amazon Marketing Stream access points, the two-week hourly, 15-month daily and weekly, and six-year monthly, yearly or summary lookbacks, and managed-service Amazon DSP accounts arriving in Q1 2026)
- Amazon Ads — Campaign reporting (source for click-through rate, return on ad spend and detail page view rate as industry-standard metrics, for long-term sales, new-to-brand, brand halo and Subscribe & Save as Amazon's proprietary metrics, for gross and invalid traffic, reach and frequency, viewability, off-Amazon conversions and conversion path reporting, for new-to-brand metrics being generated from first-time customers of your brand, and for long-term sales including projected value from customer engagement over the next 12 months)
- Amazon Ads — Sponsored Display downloadable reports (source for the campaign, targeting, advertised product and sellers-only purchased product reports, the purchased product report showing non-advertised products bought after clicking an ad, and for scheduling any report to be delivered to your email on a regular basis)
- Amazon Ads — Search term impression share report for Sponsored Products (source for impression share of 20% meaning you won 20% of all Sponsored Products ad impressions for that search term on that date, impression rank of 3 meaning the third most impressions, and the report being downloaded from the Report Center in the advertising console)
- Amazon — Amazon Brand Analytics (source for the Search Query Performance dashboard listing keywords customers use to find your brand with query volume, impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases, and for needing a Professional selling account and the Brand Representative role for a brand enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry)