Amazon advertising has its own vocabulary, and much of it sounds alike. ACoS and TACoS, keywords and search terms, placements and targets. New sellers and new team members lose time decoding reports because nobody defined the words.
This glossary groups the terms by where you meet them: metrics, campaign types, targeting, bidding and budgets, and reports. Each entry says what the term means and why it matters.
Performance metrics
Impressions. The number of times an ad was shown. Useful for spotting campaigns that are not serving at all.
Clicks and CTR. Clicks are the number of times shoppers clicked the ad. Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. A low CTR usually points to weak relevance, a weak main image or an uncompetitive price.
CPC. Cost per click, the average amount paid for each click. Amazon CPC explained covers what drives it up and down.
Conversion rate. Orders divided by clicks. This is the metric most tied to the listing itself, not the ad.
ACoS. Advertising cost of sale: ad spend divided by attributed ad sales. The most common efficiency metric in Amazon PPC.
ROAS. Return on ad spend: ad sales divided by ad spend. The inverse of ACoS.
TACoS. Total advertising cost of sale: ad spend divided by all sales, ad and organic. ACoS vs TACoS explains when each one is the right number to watch.
Break-even ACoS. The ACoS at which an ad sale makes zero profit, roughly equal to your margin before ad costs. Anything below it is profitable on the first order.
New-to-brand. Orders from shoppers who had not bought from your brand in the lookback period. Reported for Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and DSP.
Campaign types
Sponsored Products. Ads for a single product that appear in search results and on product pages. The core ad type for most sellers.
Sponsored Brands. Ads that feature your brand logo, a headline and several products or a video. They require Brand Registry.
Sponsored Display. Ads that target audiences or products, shown on and off Amazon.
Amazon DSP. Amazon's programmatic display and video platform, bought separately from sponsored ads.
Auto campaign. A Sponsored Products campaign where Amazon chooses targets based on your listing. Manual campaign. One where you choose the keywords or products. Auto vs manual campaigns covers how to use them together.
Targeting terms
Keyword. A word or phrase you bid on in a manual campaign.
Search term. The exact text a shopper typed. One keyword can match many search terms.
Match type. How closely a search term must match your keyword. Broad allows the widest variation, phrase requires the phrase in order, and exact requires the same term or close variants. Keyword match types covers each in detail.
Negative keyword. A term you exclude so the ad does not show for it. Negative exact and negative phrase are the two options.
Product targeting. Targeting specific ASINs, usually competitor or complementary products, so your ad shows on their detail pages.
Category targeting. Targeting a whole Amazon category, optionally refined by brand, price or rating.
Auto targeting groups. In auto campaigns, the four groups Amazon uses: close match, loose match, substitutes and complements. Each can be bid or paused separately.
Bidding and budget terms
Bid. The maximum you are willing to pay for a click on a target.
Bidding strategy. A campaign setting that lets Amazon adjust your bid in real time. Dynamic bids down only, dynamic bids up and down, and fixed bids are the three options.
Placement. Where the ad appears: top of search, rest of search or product pages. Placement adjustments raise bids for a specific placement by a percentage.
Daily budget. The amount a campaign can spend on an average day. Campaigns can run out of budget before the day ends, which stops them serving until midnight.
Portfolio. A folder that groups campaigns and can hold a shared budget cap.
Dayparting. Scheduling ads, bids or budgets by hour of the day. What is dayparting covers the basics.
Budget rule. A rule that raises or lowers a campaign budget on a schedule or when a condition is met.
Reports and data terms
Search term report. Shows which shopper search terms triggered your ads and how each performed. The most useful single report for finding waste and new keywords.
Targeting report. Shows performance by keyword or product target.
Placement report. Shows performance by top of search, rest of search and product pages.
Attribution window. The period after a click during which a purchase is credited to the ad. Recent days in any report are incomplete because sales are still being attributed.
Brand Analytics. A set of brand-level reports available through Brand Registry, including the Search Query Performance report.
Amazon Marketing Cloud. A clean-room analytics service for advertisers who want to run custom queries on ad and shopping signals.
Using the vocabulary well
Two habits prevent most confusion. First, always say which number you mean: ad sales or total sales, ACoS or TACoS, last 7 days or last 30. Second, agree on one efficiency metric for the team and stick to it. Half the arguments in PPC reviews come from two people reading the same campaign in different units.
Once the terms are familiar, the next questions are usually practical ones about budgets, bids and when to get help. The Amazon advertising FAQ answers the twenty that come up most.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ACoS and ROAS?
They are the same ratio upside down. ACoS is ad spend divided by ad sales, shown as a percentage. ROAS is ad sales divided by ad spend, shown as a multiple. An ACoS of 25 percent is a ROAS of 4. Use whichever your team reads more easily, but do not mix them in one report.
What does TACoS mean in Amazon advertising?
TACoS is total advertising cost of sale: ad spend divided by total sales, including organic sales. It shows how much the business depends on advertising overall, which ACoS alone cannot show.
What is the difference between a keyword and a search term?
A keyword is what you bid on. A search term is what the shopper typed. With broad or phrase match, one keyword can match many different search terms, and the search term report shows which ones actually triggered your ads.
Off Hours turns these terms into working rules, from dayparting and budget rules to spend alerts, all on a 15-minute cadence with every change logged. Start a free 14-day trial.