Ecommerce & Digital
How to Read Your Amazon Analytics: What the Numbers Actually Mean
1 September 2025
Amazon provides a significant volume of data to sellers. Most of it gets reviewed superficially. Orders are up or down. ACOS is improving or not. Sessions are higher than last month. These observations are correct but they do not tell you why, and without the why, the data cannot drive decisions.
Understanding what Amazon’s analytics are actually measuring, and what drives each metric, turns a reporting exercise into a management tool. It also reveals what metrics are not telling you when taken at face value.
The metrics that matter and what they are telling you
Sessions and page views. Sessions measure unique visits to your listing. Page views measure total views, which will be higher if the same visitor views the listing multiple times. The ratio between sessions and orders is your conversion rate, the most important single metric in Amazon analytics.
A high sessions number with a low conversion rate means you are getting traffic but losing customers at the listing. The problem is the listing: price, images, copy, reviews, or product-market fit. More advertising will not fix a conversion problem.
A low sessions number with a healthy conversion rate means the listing converts well but is not visible enough. The problem is discoverability: keyword ranking, advertising coverage, or insufficient review volume to appear in top results.
Unit session percentage (conversion rate). The percentage of sessions that result in a purchase. Category benchmarks vary, but anything below 5% on a mature listing warrants examination. Above 15% on a well-trafficked listing is strong.
ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale). The percentage of attributed sales revenue spent on advertising. Lower is better, but the target ACOS is determined by your margin, not by an absolute standard. A 30% ACOS on a product with 60% gross margin leaves meaningful contribution. A 30% ACOS on a product with 35% gross margin does not.
Understanding how to set ACOS targets requires breaking the number down by campaign type, by product, and by keyword to reveal where the advertising spend is working and where it is not.
TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale). ACOS as a percentage of total sales, including organic. This is the more useful number for understanding the true cost of your Amazon presence because it accounts for the organic revenue that advertising helps to generate.
Buy Box percentage. For private label products, this should be close to 100%. If it is not, there is an unauthorised reseller problem or a pricing issue that needs investigation.
Return rate by ASIN. Available in the Returns report. High return rates on specific products point to listing accuracy problems, quality issues, or customer expectation gaps. Review the return reasons alongside the rate.
What the search term report tells you
The search term report shows which customer search queries triggered your ads and which resulted in purchases. It is one of the most valuable and most underused reports in Amazon Seller Central.
Queries with high impressions and no purchases are costing you money and delivering nothing. Negative match them.
Queries with purchases that are not in your campaign targets are organic demand you are not capturing fully. Add them as exact match keywords.
Queries that reveal how customers are actually searching for your product, as opposed to how you thought they would search, are the basis for optimising your listing copy and backend keywords.
The inventory metrics you cannot afford to ignore
Amazon’s Inventory Health report shows sell-through rate, days of supply, and excess inventory flags. These are not just operational metrics. They are margin metrics, and understanding what Amazon data shows by market adds further context.
Excess inventory on Amazon incurs storage fees that compound over time, particularly for aged stock. Amazon’s long-term storage fee structure makes slow-moving stock expensive to hold. Regular inventory health reviews and clearance decisions for slow-moving lines protect margin as directly as pricing decisions.
Low stock warnings on fast-moving lines need to be acted on before the stockout, not after. A period of unavailability suppresses ranking in ways that recover slowly.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) with twenty years of operational experience as a founder and senior finance leader, including Amazon marketplace strategy and ecommerce analytics across European markets.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.