Amazon advertising glossary

How much of your ad-attributed sales went back into the ads. Lower means the ads paid for themselves more easily. Calculation: ad spend ÷ ad sales, shown as a percentage. A campaign that spent $20 and produced $100 in sales has an ACoS of 20%.

A folder inside a campaign that holds a set of keywords or product targets, the products being advertised with them, and their bids. A campaign can have several ad groups; most sellers use one per campaign.

Sales Amazon attributes to your ads: a shopper clicked your ad and then bought, within Amazon's attribution window. Also shown simply as "Sales" on advertising screens. It is not your total sales; organic sales are counted separately.

A campaign, keyword or target that has been retired. It no longer serves and cannot be switched back on; Amazon keeps its history for reporting.

Amazon Standard Identification Number, the ten-character code Amazon assigns to every product page. One ASIN is one listing. Your own product has one; so does every competitor's.

A campaign where Amazon chooses the searches and product pages your ads appear on, based on your listing. You do not pick keywords. Auto campaigns are where new search terms are discovered.

The most you are willing to pay for one click on a keyword or target. Amazon runs an auction for each ad slot; a higher bid wins more often but costs more per click. You are charged for the click, not for the impression.

A keyword match type. Your ad can show for searches that contain your words in any order, plus close variations, plurals and related terms. Widest reach, least control.

The daily budget is the most a campaign may spend in a day; Amazon stops serving it once that is reached. Pulse Pilot also shows a weekly budget for a managed product, which is the amount you want its campaigns to spend over a week.

The "Add to Cart" box on a product page. When several sellers offer the same product, one of them holds the Buy Box at any moment. Ads for a product only serve when your offer is eligible for it, which is why a listing with no active offer stops getting ad traffic.

The top-level container for advertising. It carries the daily budget, the start and end dates, and one or more ad groups. Everything you see about spend and sales rolls up to a campaign.

How many times shoppers clicked your ad. Each click costs you the winning auction price.

What you paid in ads, on average, for each order. Calculation: ad spend ÷ orders. A $50 spend that produced 5 orders is a $10 CPA.

What you paid, on average, for each click. Calculation: ad spend ÷ clicks. Amazon also shows a suggested bid for a keyword, which is its estimate of the bid range that is currently winning clicks.

Of the shoppers who saw your ad, how many clicked it. Calculation: clicks ÷ impressions, shown as a percentage. A low CTR usually means the ad is showing to the wrong searches or the listing image and title are not winning the click.

Of the shoppers who clicked, how many bought. Calculation: orders ÷ clicks, shown as a percentage. Amazon credits orders to a click for a period after the click, so a day's CVR can rise for a couple of days after it happens, and in a short window it can even exceed 100%.

A campaign, keyword or target that is switched on and eligible to serve.

A keyword match type. Your ad shows only for searches that are the keyword itself or a very close variant such as the plural. Narrowest reach, most control.

How many times your ad was shown. You are not charged for impressions, only for clicks.

Of all the times your ad was eligible to show for a keyword in a placement, the share of impressions you actually won. Amazon reports it for the top-of-search placement. Impression rank is your position among advertisers competing for those impressions.

A word or phrase you choose to bid on. Amazon matches shoppers' searches against your keywords using the match type. Compare with search term below.

The rule Amazon uses to decide whether a search is close enough to your keyword to show your ad: exact, phrase or broad. Auto campaigns have no keywords and use Amazon's own matching.

A word or phrase you tell Amazon never to show your ad for, even when a keyword or auto targeting would otherwise match it. Negative exact blocks that search only; negative phrase blocks every search containing it. Negatives are how you stop paying for searches that do not buy.

The product-targeting version of a negative keyword: a product page or ASIN your ad should never appear on.

Orders, sales and the share of orders that came from shoppers who had not bought from your brand in the previous twelve months, as Amazon reports it. A measure of how much of your ad sales is new customers rather than repeat buyers.

The number of orders Amazon attributes to your ads. One order can contain several units.

Where your product appears in Amazon's search results for a search, counting only the unpaid listings. Position 1 is the first organic result. Pulse Pilot shows the latest observed position and a seven-day average.

Switched off but not retired. A paused campaign, keyword or target stops serving and can be switched back on at any time with its history intact.

A keyword match type. Your ad shows for searches that contain your keyword's words in the same order, with other words allowed before or after.

Where on the page your ad appeared. Amazon reports three: top of search, the first row of results; rest of search, further down the results; and product pages, on other products' detail pages. Amazon lets you raise your bid by a percentage for each placement, which is what the modifier columns show.

Instead of a keyword, you target a specific product or a category, and your ad appears on those product pages or beside them in search. Targets can be an ASIN or a category, and you bid on them the same way as keywords.

How many dollars of ad-attributed sales each dollar of ad spend produced. Calculation: ad sales ÷ ad spend. It is the inverse of ACoS: a 25% ACoS is a 4.0 ROAS.

On advertising screens, ad-attributed sales in dollars. On the Products page and in TACoS, sales means total sales of the product, ads and organic together, as reported by Amazon's seller economics.

What a shopper actually typed. A keyword is what you bid on; a search term is what matched it. One keyword can collect many search terms, and the search-term report is where you find new keywords and new negatives.

How much of the visible space for a search is yours: your share of the results, sponsored and organic, a shopper sees for that term.

Stock keeping unit, the identifier you gave the product in your own inventory. Amazon creates product ads by SKU; one SKU maps to one ASIN.

What you paid Amazon for ads in the period, the sum of every click's cost.

Where your ad appeared among the paid results for a search, from a single observation. Paid positions move with every auction, so this figure is noisier than organic rank.

Ad spend measured against all your sales, not just the ad-attributed ones. Calculation: ad spend ÷ total sales, shown as a percentage. A falling TACoS means organic sales are growing faster than ad spend. Per product it is approximate: ads for one product can sell another.

The general word for the thing a bid is attached to: a keyword in a keyword campaign, a product or category in a product-targeting campaign, or one of Amazon's matching clauses in an auto campaign.

The number of items sold, as opposed to orders. An order for three of the same product is one order and three units.