Track, Track, Track

Hey,

Before I scrape the boys out of their cots to go to nursery this morning, I wanted to send you today's edition of The Morning ACOS, which is all about tracking your Amazon Ads.

Tracking may not be that exciting (unless you're like me and love data and numbers), but if you truly want to succeed with Amazon Ads, tracking their performance is vital.

We'll dive into the practicalities of tracking shortly, but first let's look at some of the benefits of tracking your Amazon Ads:

- Identify trends and patterns within the data
- See where your money is being spent (i.e. which countries) and which is your best performer
- Compare your Amazon Ads Spend to Total Royalties
- Compare your Amazon Ads Orders to Total Orders
- Compare your Amazon Ads KENP Read to Total KENP Read
- Notice any increase or decrease in CPC (Cost-Per-Click) and/or CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and adjust accordingly, if necessary
- If you're scaling up your Amazon Ads, you'll be able to see at a glance whether you are increasing the traffic to your books
- If your goal is brand awareness, you'll be able to see at a glance whether your impressions of your Amazon Ads are increasing

I could go on and on about the benefits and uses of tracking your Amazon Ads, but I think the above will give you a good idea of why you should be tracking.

It's all about the big picture and not looking at Amazon Ads in a vacuum.

Now you understand why tracking is so important, let's move onto the how of tracking your Amazon Ads.

There are 3 different tracking timeframes you can choose from:

- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly

I've done all three of these and they each have their pros and cons, so there's no right or wrong way to track your Amazon Ads; only what's right for you.

Daily tracking is something I recommend you do if you're brand new to Amazon Ads and my suggestion would be to track daily for 3-6 months. You will be able to see the daily fluctuations of your Amazon Ads performance and get a real understanding of the platform. You'll also come to realize that your spend, sales, CPCs, CTRs, etc change every single day - it's not just you, it happens to every advertiser and is perfectly normal.

Weekly tracking is more manageable than daily tracking and you'll see weekly trends rather than daily trends, which, once you become fairly seasoned with Amazon Ads, will be more useful. The daily fluctuations are neither here nor there; it's data over an extended period of time that is more relevant and beneficial to you.

Monthly tracking takes the least amount of time and also offers the benefit of seeing how your Amazon Ads are performing over that extended period of time I mentioned above. You can of course see data over an extended period of time with daily and weekly tracking; there's just more data in there to sift through.

In the beginning, I started with daily tracking, then moved to weekly tracking, before landing on monthly tracking, which is what I work with today.

And regarding what to track, here's a list of what I like tracking, whether daily, weekly or monthly:

- Ad Spend
- Sales
- Orders
- KENP Royalties
- KENP Read
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Blended ACOS (Ad Spend / Sales + KENP Royalties)
- Total ACOS/TACOS (Ad Spend/Total Royalties)

All of the data listed above (and more) is included in the Amazon Ads Tracking Tool, part of the Amazon Ads Toolkit, and I've setup the tool for monthly tracking, though you could, with some spreadsheet skills, adjust it to daily or weekly tracking.

If you haven't started tracking your Amazon Ads yet, the best time to start was yesterday; the second best time is today.

To Your Success
- Matt