How to access Amazon Ads historical data?

“I want to compare Prime Day data with last year’s Prime Day data. But Amazon doesn’t allow me to”

How many times have you come across this situation?

Unless you are living under a rock, you would know that Amazon deletes historical data from its Advertising console in 2 months. So if you want to look at day on day data for 3 months back, you will not be able to assess it. 

This makes it hard for brands to make the right decisions. Amazon advertising is all about experimenting and learning from previous experiments. It takes continuous data-driven optimization and decision-making to manage profitable Amazon PPC campaigns. And “data harvesting” or availability of data for longer durations is a crucial (and less talked about) component of Ad operations. 

Limited data availability is a real challenge when it comes to time series and long time data analysis (ex. Year on year data analysis for Amazon ad campaigns). In order to help you maximize the potential of your advertising campaigns, we will talk about challenges in data availability, and ways to overcome the same. This poses difficulties for in-depth analysis and year-over-year comparisons. 

Understanding Amazon's Lookback Window

If not actively downloaded and preserved, the majority of PPC reports disappear after 2-3 months. This means that depending on the Advertising console to obtain historical data is not sufficient. To explain in detail, let’s take a breakdown of the situation: 

Amazon Ads historical data is available in 3 ways: 

• Amazon Ad Console: Amazon Ad console provides a dashboard to look at data.It also provides multiple reports. Each report has a different lookback period. The difference in look back period in different reports happens because each report is owned by a different advertising team within Amazon. Hence there is non-uniformity in length of data storage. Ex.:

1. Targeting Report (90 days)

2. Search Term Report (60 days)

3. Advertised Products Report (90 days)

4. Purchased Products Report (60 days)

   
   

   

Having said that, the Amazon Ad console is hardly a comfortable platform to access historical data. Reason is that (a) data is fragmented across multiple reports., and (b) it is hard to bring data from multiple reports together as identifiers are not common in most reports. For ex. While bulk sheets use Campaign and keyword IDs as unique identifiers, other reports only go by campaign names as identifiers.  

• APIs: If you connect to a data warehouse to download your data, then Amazon APIs have recently increased their data aggregation to 95 days (vs. 60 days earlier). However, that is only for Sponsored Products data reports. Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display reports are still available only for 60 days.
  
  

• Software: If you use software for data analytics or ad automation, then most softwares will provide you at least 6 months of data lookback.

  
  Common Approaches to harvesting Amazon PPC data: 

Now that we know the sources of historical data, it is time to learn how can data be harvested from each of the platforms. 

• Harvesting data from Amazon Ad console: The only way to harvest historical data from Amazon Ad console is Manual Downloads.It is as simple and as cumbersome as it sounds. You should download monthly reports and aggregate them in a folder that you can access in future.  

Pros: The pros to this approach is that it is completely free. No cost whatsoever

Cons: The cons to this approach are that it is cumbersome. Someone has to manually keep track of downloading reports and then actually download it and store it in the right folder every month. Ofcourse, there are challenges in data privacy and longevity. 

You could either do the downloads yourself or you could rely on an agency to do it for you. The problem with relying on an agency to save your data is that the data is lost if you change your agency. 

• Harvesting data from API’s: API or data warehouses can provide you access to much longer data - in fact you can save as much data as you want. The APIs automatically download the reports at the given cadence and you can use it as and when required. 
  
  

Pros: The pros to this approach is that it automatically downloads data without human intervention. 

Cons: The cons to this approach is that it requires a high degree of technical know-how. It is resource intensive. And any changes in the APIs (which are very common) need to be handled with tech expertise. 

• Harvesting data on a software: If you use software for Amazon ad automation and analytics, then the software automatically harvests data for you. Most tools will harvest data for up to 6 months. 

With Amazon ad automation software, atom11, you can save data up to 1 year. 

How atom11 helps you look back into Amazon data and make better decisions: 

Atom11 helps you harvest data up to 1 year back. Hence, serving as a perfect co-pilot in helping you drive decisions for advertising. 

This helps you in following ways: 

1. Automated data harvesting: Atom11 automatically retrieves data from APIs, saves it in its database, combines it with multiple reports and allows you to visualize the same on its dashboard. No efforts required. 

2. Unified data: Bringing multiple reports together means that you do not have to do the grunt work of combining reports using vlookups. Saves time and resources

3. Better data comparison: Having up to 1 year of data means you can make comparisons, observe trends, benchmark performance and make better decisions. 

Simplifying next steps after data harvesting: 

With atom11, you can expect insights along with data. We provide recommendations basis long term and short term data. You can use search term performance data to identify harvesting and negating opportunities. You can use data to figure out experiments done over time and their results. 

If you are interested in getting more control over your data, using that data to get insights and driving actions, book a call with us here. 

About atom11: 

Atom11 is an Amazon PPC automation software. We bring retail data from seller central and advertising data from Ad console together to provide better insights and actionability. You can set up table stakes automations like bid and budget automations, but also combine inventory data with ads and set up automations around the same.