Amazon PPC Glossary

Advertising Cost of Sale - measures ad spend as a percentage of ad revenue.

The container inside a campaign that holds your targeting, the default bid and the ads shown against it.

The money actually charged for ad clicks, which is clicks multiplied by realised CPC, not the bid you set.

Amazon report showing performance per advertised ASIN or SKU, including how much of the return came from the advertised product.

Programmatic advertising platform for display, video, and audio ads on and off Amazon.

Average order value: total sales divided by orders. Not the same as unit price when orders contain several units.

Targeting specific product listings (ASINs) to show your ads on their detail pages.

The period after an ad click in which a purchase is still credited to that ad, and to the click date rather than the purchase date.

The four groups inside an auto campaign: close match, loose match, substitutes and complements, each bid separately.

Any change applied to a base bid, by the seller, by a placement modifier, or by Amazon's dynamic bidding at auction time.

The process of adjusting keyword bids to maximize profitability.

The ACoS at which an advertised sale makes neither profit nor loss: contribution margin divided by price.

The widest keyword match type: the words may appear in any order, alongside synonyms and related queries.

Amazon campaign rules that raise a daily budget automatically on a schedule or when a performance threshold is met.

The campaign setting that decides whether Amazon may lower, raise or leave alone the bid you set, at auction time.

Targeting a browse category, optionally refined by brand, price, rating or Prime, instead of naming ASINs.

The landed cost of a unit: production plus freight. Amazon never supplies it, so the seller has to enter it.

The money a unit leaves behind after Amazon's fees and cost of goods, before advertising is paid for.

Cost Per Click - the amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

Click-Through Rate - percentage of impressions that result in clicks.

Conversion Rate - percentage of clicks that result in purchases.

The daily spend ceiling on a campaign, which controls how long a campaign runs rather than how well it performs.

Adjusting ad bids or budgets based on time of day or day of week.

An Amazon bidding strategy in which Amazon may lower your bid in real time for unlikely conversions, but never raises it.

An Amazon bidding strategy in which Amazon may raise or lower your bid in real time based on conversion likelihood.

The tightest keyword match type: your ad serves only on that term and its close variants.

The per unit charge for Amazon picking, packing and shipping an order, set by size tier and shipping weight.

An Amazon bidding strategy in which your bid is used exactly as set, with no real-time adjustment by Amazon.

The theory that Amazon grants new listings a temporary ranking advantage, and the launch decisions sellers make because of it.

The number of times your ad was displayed to shoppers.

Amazon's score for how efficiently a seller manages FBA inventory, which feeds the storage capacity available in Seller Central.

Finding high-performing search terms from auto campaigns and adding them as targeted keywords.

The share of listing sessions that end in a sale, covering all traffic to the detail page rather than ad clicks alone.

An exclusion that blocks one specific search term and its close variants, leaving neighbouring terms untouched.

Keywords you exclude to prevent your ads from showing on irrelevant searches.

An exclusion that blocks every query containing a word sequence, current and future.

Net profit as a percentage of the sales price, after Amazon's fees, cost of goods, advertising and returns.

Purchase events attributed to an ad click within its attribution window, counted per basket rather than per item.

The position a product holds in Amazon's unpaid search results for a specific search term in a specific marketplace.

A keyword match type that serves when the query contains your words in order, with extra words allowed before or after.

A percentage uplift set per campaign that multiplies the base bid in every auction for one placement group.

Amazon report splitting campaign performance by where the ad appeared: top of search, rest of search, or product pages.

A grouping layer above campaigns that rolls them into one reporting line and can carry a spending cap of its own.

The Sponsored Brands format pairing a brand logo and custom headline with several products in one banner.

The Sponsored Products placement group covering ad slots on product detail pages and other non-search pages.

Targeting individual ASINs so your ad can appear against those products rather than against a search term.

A setting that scales break-even ACoS into a target, deciding how much margin is kept rather than spent on ads.

Amazon report pairing the advertised ASIN with the product actually bought after the click, which is how halo sales become visible.

Amazon's commission on each sale, charged as a category rate on the total sales price with a per item minimum.

The Sponsored Products placement group covering search result ad slots that sit outside the top-of-search block.

The rate at which a listing gains new reviews, usually expressed per week or per hundred units sold.

Return on Ad Spend - measures revenue generated per dollar of ad spend.

The rate at which a product sells, measured as units sold per day or per week over a defined window.

Brand Analytics report showing every stage of the shopper funnel for a search query, with the market total beside your share.

Structuring campaigns and negatives so a search term is served from one place, giving clean data and one bid to control it.

Amazon report showing actual customer search queries that triggered your ads.

The proportion of a search term's visibility or purchases that belongs to you rather than to competitors.

An ad group holding one keyword, used when a term is important enough to deserve its own bid and its own reporting line.

Banner ads featuring your brand logo, headline, and multiple products.

A Sponsored Brands format that plays a short video in search results, muted by default, linking to your product or Store.

Audience-targeted display ads that appear on and off Amazon.

Amazon's keyword-targeted ads that appear in search results and product pages.

A Sponsored Brands format that promotes several pages of your Amazon Store rather than individual products.

Total Advertising Cost of Sale - ad spend as percentage of total revenue.

Amazon report showing performance for the keywords and product targets you bid on, rather than the queries shoppers typed.

The Sponsored Products placement group covering ad slots above the organic results on the first page of search.

The number of individual items sold, which can exceed orders when a single order contains several units.