What is a Targeting Report?

The targeting report shows performance for the things you actually bid on. Each row is a target: a keyword with a match type, a product target, a category target, or one of the automatic targeting groups. It is the companion to the search term report, and confusing the two is the most common reporting mistake in Amazon PPC.

Bids attach only to targets, so every bid decision has to be made on a targeting report row. The same customer query can appear beneath several targets at different bids and different match types, and those rows can deserve opposite moves.

What sits in the rows

Keyword rows carry a match type of broad, phrase or exact. Product targeting rows carry an ASIN, or a category with its refinements. Automatic campaigns report against four groups instead of keywords: close match, loose match, complements and substitutes. Those four behave like separate strategies sharing a budget, and reading them separately is usually the first useful thing an auto campaign tells you.

Turning a row into a bid

The conversion from a goal to a bid is one identity:

Target CPC = RPC × Target ACoS

where RPC is revenue per click, that is sales divided by clicks for the row.

A hypothetical worked example

The figures are invented. Suppose a keyword produced 40 pounds of sales from 20 clicks, so RPC is 2.00 pounds. At a 25 per cent target ACoS the target CPC is 0.50 pounds. If the row's actual CPC is 0.55 pounds you are roughly 10 per cent above target, which our house view leaves alone. Restraint is part of the method: a grace band of about 10 per cent around target stops an account being churned by noise.

Reading rows honestly

• Compute from CPC, never from the current bid. CPC is what happened, the bid is only what you asked for.
• Low click rows are unjudged, not bad. Below roughly ten clicks there is no conversion rate worth reading.
• Step, do not jump. Repeated large cuts compound across a day of automated runs and can strip a keyword out of the auction entirely.
• Zero orders with real spend deserves a decaying bid rather than an immediate pause. In our doctrine a pause is earned only by proven dead spend.