A weekly PPC report should take fifteen minutes to read and leave you with three or four things to do. Most do neither. They list every metric the console offers, compare them with nothing, and get filed without anyone changing a bid.

This playbook narrows the weekly report to the numbers that change decisions. It covers which figures to track, what to compare them with, the order to read them in, and the short list of actions every weekly report should end with.

What a weekly report is for

A weekly report has two jobs. The first is early warning: catching a campaign that started overspending, a listing that lost its buy box, or a conversion rate that dropped, before a month of spend goes into it. The second is keeping routine work moving: negatives added, bids reviewed, budgets checked.

It is not the place for strategy. Questions about campaign structure, new product launches or annual budget belong in the monthly review. The end-of-month review covers those. Keeping the two separate is what keeps the weekly report short enough to read.

The seven numbers

Total sales. Ad and organic together. This is the number the business cares about, and it is the first check on whether advertising is helping or just claiming credit.

Ad spend. The direct cost. Compare it with the plan for the month, prorated to the week.

Ad sales. Sales attributed to ad clicks. Useful mainly as an input to the next number.

ACoS. Ad spend divided by ad sales. The efficiency of the ads themselves.

TACoS. Ad spend divided by total sales. The efficiency of advertising across the business. If ACoS is stable and TACoS is rising, ads are taking a bigger share of sales that might have happened anyway. ACoS vs TACoS explains the relationship.

Conversion rate. Orders divided by clicks. This is the number that most often explains a change in ACoS, and it usually points to something outside the ads: price, reviews, stock, a competitor.

Cost per click. The other half of ACoS. If ACoS rose and conversion rate held, CPC is the likely cause.

That is the whole list. Impressions, click-through rate and placement data matter, but they are diagnostic. Pull them when one of the seven moves and you need to know why. The metrics that matter covers the full set.

What to compare against

A number on its own says nothing. Every figure in the weekly report needs two comparisons.

The prior week. This catches sudden changes. A jump in spend or a drop in conversion rate from one week to the next is the early warning the report exists for.

The four-week average. This smooths out noise. A single week can be off because of a holiday, a stockout or a slow Monday. If this week is out of line with the four-week average as well as the prior week, it is a trend worth acting on.

Year over year is useful in seasonal categories, but it belongs in the monthly review. Weekly comparisons with last year are noisy because the calendar shifts.

Account for attribution lag

Amazon attributes orders to ad clicks for several days after the click. When you pull the report on Monday, the last few days of the previous week are still incomplete. Their ad sales will rise and their ACoS will fall over the following days.

Two habits deal with this. Report on complete weeks, ending a few days before the pull date if you can, or accept that the latest days are provisional. And never react to a single bad day at the end of the week until the attribution window has closed. How Amazon attribution works goes into the window in more detail.

The order to read them in

Start with total sales and TACoS. If both are on plan, the account is healthy at the top level and the rest of the report is about fine tuning.

Then ACoS. If it moved, split it into its two parts. Did CPC change, or did conversion rate change? A CPC rise usually means more competition or a bid change. A conversion drop usually means something on the listing or in the market.

Then spend against plan. Overspend on a week where ACoS held is often fine; the account found more profitable traffic. Overspend with rising ACoS needs a fix this week.

Finally, go one level down. Which campaigns drove the change? In most weeks, one or two campaigns explain most of any movement. Find them before touching anything else.

The two lists every report ends with

Changes made this week. Bids raised or lowered, negatives added, budgets moved, schedules changed. Without this list, next week's movement has no explanation. A PPC change log makes this list easy to produce.

Actions for next week. Three or four, specific. "Add negatives from the top non-converting search terms in campaign X." "Check stock on the product whose conversion rate fell." "Lower the budget on the campaign that ran ahead of plan." If the report produces no actions, either the account is in good shape or the report is not looking at the right numbers.

Keeping it short

The test of a weekly report is whether it gets read every week. A one-page summary with seven numbers, two comparisons each, and two short lists will be. A forty-tab spreadsheet will not.

If you report to someone else, a client or a manager, the same structure works. Lead with total sales and TACoS, explain any movement in one sentence, and show the actions. Presenting Amazon ads results covers how to frame it for people who do not live in the console.

Frequently asked questions

What should a weekly Amazon PPC report include?

Total sales, ad spend, ad sales, ACoS, TACoS, conversion rate and cost per click, each compared with the prior week and the four-week average. Add a short list of changes made that week and a short list of actions for the next one. Anything beyond that belongs in the monthly review.

Should I report Amazon PPC weekly or monthly?

Both, for different purposes. The weekly report catches problems while they are still small and keeps routine work on track. The monthly review looks at structure, strategy and budget. A weekly report that tries to answer monthly questions gets long and gets skipped.

Why do last week's Amazon ad numbers change after I report them?

Attribution. Amazon credits orders to ad clicks for several days after the click, so the most recent days are still filling in when you pull the report. Compare complete weeks, and treat the last two or three days as provisional.

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