#120 - How to Build an Amazon Reporting Dashboard in 2026

#120 - How to Build an Amazon Reporting Dashboard in 2026 Speaker 1: How many hours do you spend a week for reporting on Amazon PPC? Speaker 2: If you're spending less than five to ten hours a week creating reports, then let's be honest, you're probably making bad reports. Quality Amazon reporting takes time. Speaker 1: Unless if you do what we're about to show you, which is how to build beautiful and robust reporting dashboards within just minutes. Alexa, play That Amazon Ads Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing That Amazon Ads Podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to That Amazon Ads Podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 1: All right, guys, welcome back to another episode of That Amazon Ads Podcast, where before we begin, we got to tell you a couple of things. Number one, Andrew is going to be having his second baby girl next week. So congratulations, Andrew. Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Stephen. I appreciate it. Looking forward to it. Speaker 1: Yeah, very exciting stuff. And also, You know, by the time this episode comes out, it's going to be like Christmas time. So we're just a couple of weeks away from that. So point being, we're not going to record any more episodes for us this year. So we'll see you guys next time in January. But until then, we will be releasing some masterclass lessons that are going to be going on to our YouTube channel. So make sure you subscribe if you want those masterclass lessons. Our whole masterclass is three components. There's a beginning, a beginner, intermediate and advanced. Modules in total, it's about like 20, 25 hours of content. So we're going to be releasing the beginner and intermediate. We're not going to be putting the advanced up just yet. Maybe we will in the future, but for the time being, the advanced is exclusively available on our master's class website and link in the description below. Announcements are out of the way. Andrew, let's dive into reporting dashboards. So when it comes to reporting for clients, a lot of people get this wrong. So how would you say, if we could break this down to like the main components that are really necessary for good reporting, how would you describe those? Speaker 2: Yeah, reporting is going to be super critical to any Amazon brand, any Amazon agency, and there are certain components to a good high quality report. We've broken it down into three main components, main areas that you need to make sure this report includes. They are one, you need to have a high level performance overview. You need to have multiple date ranges, looking at year to date, month to date, all of that type of stuff, give multiple views of performance over time. You also need to look at the product level, be able to drill into individual product performance and show that. And then you also need to drill into the strategy level, being able to show how your ad spend, how your performance is tracking across brand and non-brand ranking campaigns, any key events and things like that. Speaker 1: Yep. And the advertising console within Amazon is unfortunately pretty weak and you're not going to be able to use the advertising console or seller central for reporting to clients or even for building your own internal business reports because it's too many clicking around, too many tabs, takes too long to filter to different views. There's limitations everywhere in terms of how much data you can see. And lots of times you have to like aggregate stuff. You have to combine the ad sales and the organic sales. You want to see the product view. So the ad console is not going to work. So typically what we end up doing is spending just hours and hours pulling all these different reports from Amazon and then We're building these dashboards in things like, I mean, Excel is pretty common, Excel shoots. But Andrew, you've also done a lot of work with Looker Studio. What was your experience with Looker? Speaker 2: Yeah, people use Excel. People use Looker Studio. Amazon even came out with their own internal like custom dashboarding tool within Seller Central. But like you were saying, everything's really compartmentalized and segmented out. So you can either do like total sales reporting inside of the Seller Central console and build a report around that. Or you can have your ad performance data living in the ad console, but there's no way to really unify it. And so the way you do that is by these external tools. Looker Studio, Excel are two of the main ones. I would say Looker Studio is more on the advanced side, depending on how you set it up. Most agencies that I've seen are still kind of using Excel, but they have some sort of automation or something that's helping kind of craft and build those reports a little bit more efficiently, but ultimately it's still taking a ton of time. I mean, I remember when we were working at that agency together and we would do weekly reporting and it would take days for every aspect of that weekly report to get put together. By multiple team members, multiple departments, all of that type of stuff, all contributing, and it's taking so many man hours to actually piece together this manual report in a PowerPoint and Excel and. Looker Studio even at times. So there's a lot of bottlenecks in utilizing those different solutions, but it's what people use. Speaker 1: If only there were something that could be connected to the Amazon API pulling all your reports for all search terms, all keywords, all campaigns, organic data, PPC data, and then just have like Looker Studio or but being way easier and way faster to use than Google Sheets and Google Sheets, Excel, Looker Studio, and just Make better dashboards in faster time that are more user friendly. Man, if that existed. Speaker 2: Only. And then like if you could white label it, put your own logo, your own colors and share it with your clients and they didn't even know it was coming from some other software. They just thought you created this really cool, beautifully branded, super customized dashboard. If only something like that exists. Speaker 1: So let's go into a screen share here, Andrew. What are we looking at? Speaker 2: Oh, that's exactly what we just described. Speaker 1: It exists. Speaker 2: It exists right inside AdLabs. If you hadn't heard, we recently launched our custom dashboarding feature. If you're following us on LinkedIn or anywhere else, you probably already heard it. But today we really wanted to unveil it and show just the true power and capability that this report or this solution is providing to brands, agencies, ourselves even are utilizing this in a lot of ways. So yeah, excited to. Speaker 1: So yeah, this first or this report that we're looking at here. This is an actual report that Andrew is using for client reporting calls. We've just we've taken out a lot of the brand names and stuff and so it's it's anonymized but Andrew, we're gonna walk through here. So we got three components that we're saying are essential for client reporting. The high-level overview, the product-level overview, which even that product-level stuff can get broken into subcomponents. So reviewing your hero ASINs, lots of times there's some brands where it's like one product is doing 80% of sales. You're gonna need a whole separate reporting just on that one product. But then they also launch a bunch of new products. They wanna see those products. Or maybe they have a huge catalog and they wanna break things out into different categories. So you're gonna have to do all that. And then also the third level is the strategy level, which is brand, non-brand, ranking campaigns, any key events or initiatives like Andrew was saying. So, Andrew, why don't you just walk us through this dashboard and where we can find those components? Speaker 2: Yeah, perfect. So starting from a high level, looking at multiple date ranges was kind of number one. So in this first section of the report, I have a historical performance view, basically pulling all the data that we have going back inside AdLabs ever since we connected, showing a quarterly view. This is showing a monthly view of some of our key metrics. So you've got total sales, ad spend, tacos, a cost just over time. So we can see that kind of aggregated on a broader scale, break it down a little bit further into a monthly level. Speaker 1: I'm just going to point out one thing real quick here. The ad spend looks like it's more than the total sales because the y-axis are different. We're going to fix that, right? So just if anyone's wondering that on the call or on the watching right now. So we're going to fix that. Should be going out next week. Keep going. Speaker 2: Yeah, so we just kind of get a little bit more granular with this. This is really the only reason I put this in there is because the CEO was really intrigued to see this historical view of their performance of how things have trended over the last couple of years. So I threw that together just so we could show big picture how things have trended this year and a couple different views for that. And then this just makes for a nice reference point. If ever the big picture comes into conversation on a reporting call and I need to kind of reference like, oh, well, actually around this time last year, we were, you know, we're pacing better or whatever, like using this historical data to reference and inform, you know, conversations happening on calls. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And then from here, I mean, I just break it down into an ad only view. So what we were looking at before was inclusive of total sales, total cost, all that. And this is just looking at ad performance data. So slightly different view there. Speaker 1: And then here's our year to date performance overview, which is, you know, once again, so this is this is a good dashboard for sending out to, you know, the clients that they can just have a home base that they can always review how everything's going. And then year to date is also really good, because We're always trying to see how are we doing this year? How does that compare to last year? So yeah, anything to call it? Speaker 2: I've incorporated some other charts and widgets and things like that into this report. Like up there, you have your scorecards, which are, you know, showing the totals for the year of all those core metrics and showing the year over year comparison. We've got the monthly trend so we can see how things are trending throughout the year. Any questions on that? Speaker 1: Well, I just I think I forgot to mention just how this dashboard works. So everything is a drag and drop widget style system. So you can like Rearrange these widgets however you want. So you can put this over here and put this over here or like I'll just put it back to the way it was. And then for each of these scorecards, we have our, you know, over here, you just grab a widget. And then we just have all these widgets that you could throw in here. Everything that you're seeing here is one of these widgets. So there's like, you know, pie charts, bar charts, trend charts, tables, all this type of stuff. And then once you actually like drop a widget in here, then you're going to be able to configure this and say, what metric do I want to actually be looking at? And then you can also filter stuff down. So those filters become really powerful too, because you're going to see like on Andrew's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, this tab is actually pre-filtered for just this period and filtered down for only the, is it filtered for only the products that were on deal? Speaker 2: No, this is just looking at the total business. They actually don't run any deals, so we didn't have to do any sort of segmentation around that. Speaker 1: Gotcha. Yeah, you could. So you can filter down when we start getting into these different tabs that you'll start seeing here with the whey protein. All these widgets are filtered down to just that protein product. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: Hypothetically. Actually, I'm going to be duplicating this year to date ad performance overview. So this is essentially just showing all of the advertising, right? And broken up by different categories and things like that. Let's just say the clients now wanting an ad hoc report and saying, okay, I just want to know how the way protein has been doing year to date. Well, you can just duplicate an entire page, essentially, which is, you know, think of this as Yeah, essentially just a template at this point. And then you can control the filters for everything within here. So then if you've tagged your campaigns and you have your way campaigns, you can filter everything down. So now this is specifically showing just for these way campaigns, how they've been doing year to date. So just super easy to really quickly report on virtually anything that you could imagine. Speaker 2: Yeah, those tab level filters are awesome for just drilling in, taking a report that's super insightful on a total level and then just like drilling it down to an individual product and you get the same level of detail and insights. And you'll notice like on all those widgets, you can do that. On any of them, you can see the little orange calendar sign. I've basically just overridden the date range that's actually set in the top there. So you can kind of customize whatever you want the chart or the widget to show regardless of whatever date range is selected. So you might have pages that are reflective of what's actually in the date range selection. Maybe it's like you just kind of a regular report that you're using to keep tabs on performance, but then you have others that are looking at very specific things that are just geared towards certain date ranges. Yeah, there's a lot of different use cases for those tab filters and being able to drill down into products. But I'd love to show the year-to-date product category performance. So I've basically taken that same concept of Honing in on individual products and showing aggregate trends over time and broken it and basically put it in just one sheet. So you can see here, I've got the title of what the product is. We've got month-to-date performance versus last month versus last year. We've got the year-to-date trend and then we've got the year-to-date total KPIs. So total sales, all that type of stuff versus last year. So you get multiple different date range views at an individual product level shown in a very cohesive way. And then from there, I just broke it down, duplicated all that stuff and just changed the filters to the individual tag or product that I want it to represent. Speaker 1: Yeah. And even just having this like product notes section is really cool because you can just, you know, make some notes like optimizing to make more money. Speaker 2: Yeah, like for this account, they basically push spend really hard in the first half, cut spend in the second half. So you see total late costs getting pulled down in the second half, things like that. So yeah, perhaps there's a little bit of reminding going on in those product notes, like, hey, this is what we're our strategy is around this product. And these are some of the key initiatives that we have around this product and what we're optimizing for. So I like having those little notes in there to just for a talk track on my client reporting calls, I kind of know like, okay, whenever I get here, this is what we were going to cover and all that type of stuff. Speaker 1: And I'm actually just going to like point out one thing here too, because I bet some people are saying like filter test that like when I filter this down, like the ad spending stuff, like didn't actually change here. The reason for that is actually because you have to keep in mind with Amazon, there's different levels of reporting that we call entities, right? So there's like the profile level, which the profile level is like your advertising account. You can't filter your advertising account itself for a product, right? If you're filtering for accounts, you filter by the account name, not the individual campaigns. So in this case, like if you are doing individual product reporting, then you would want all the entities within that table to be either at the product level, is going to be pretty clean or at the campaign level is probably preferable because if you're doing single product campaigns, then you can at least filter down just all the campaigns about product, but then you can further segment into different campaign tactics. So brand versus non-brand and those types of things. So yeah, something that I love doing, Andrew, and I think you do as well is pie charts. We are phenomenal for getting an understanding of where you're like your brand non-brand like spend is going or like virtually anything. So like tagging stuff is probably the most important feature that you can do in any of your reporting. So Andrew, what are the different things that you're generally tagging so we can you can then like aggregate all that stuff? Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm tagging on a ton of different levels. I mean, On the product level, it's normal stuff, category, actual product. If there's any unique classification, sizing, things like that for the product level. At the campaign level, I'm tagging non-brand, brand, tactic, single keyword campaigns, like making sure I have those things. And if actually, if you switch to the month to date ad performance tab here and you scroll down, I have a tactic performance section where I show the ad types, but then I also have And I'm Andrew. And we're here to talk to you about how to get started with your podcast. So, let's get started. Unknown Speaker: So, let's get started. Speaker 1: So, let's get started. So, let's get started. You need to either tag your campaigns in these ways and then you would be like grouping by campaign and going by your tags or you can tag your keywords or you can tag your search terms. You just have to be mindful of whatever you're tagging and filtering an entity. So like, for example, if you tag all of your search terms as brand versus non-brand, okay, well then you can't use a campaign level reporting on the search terms, but you can do it the other way around. So if you tag all your campaigns, When you go deeper and deeper and deeper, you can then look at individual search terms and you can filter for certain campaign tags. You can't go the other way around. If you're tagging your search terms, you can't filter for search terms when looking at a campaign level. So hopefully that kind of makes sense. You know, you have to think of just like the natural data structure of like Amazon PPC and how it works. And you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and you can always filter from a higher level. But when you're operating a higher level, you can't filter from components that are at a deeper level. So hopefully that makes sense. Speaker 2: Just to illustrate that, because it could have confused some people, go to the SKW tracking, the single keyword tracking, and go down to where you can see the search terms. If you click on the configuration settings of that one, you can see that I have a couple different filters set. So you can click on the filters. You'll see that I have a campaign tag set up that I wanted to filter for like just my energy campaigns where the search term is tagged as single keyword or SKW. And that's set at the search term entity level because I wanted to see actual search terms for those campaigns. Speaker 1: Yep. Just wanted to illustrate that. And something else that's also, yeah, really good too is like, we're also grouping by search terms. So this is like aggregating these search terms across, you know, all of your campaigns, as opposed to showing them like all on their own individual rows. So you could do that too. Like you could just download a search report, but lots of times you're going to have the same exact search term appearing multiple times in multiple campaigns for multiple products. So being able to group that data, so aggregate your search terms, aggregate your, your keywords and everything like that is going to be really, really helpful. But this is like, this is a cool chart seeing all these trends. So yeah, so these are some keyword campaigns. So yeah, you see, you see this bend picking up here. And yeah, anything else to say on this Andrew? Speaker 2: No, I think that's it. Speaker 1: Yeah, so this whole report is really just to give you guys a bunch of ideas so you can kind of see how Andrew and I do reporting. But like we were saying, you usually want to separate between like your different product classifications, your categories, your hero aces, your new product launches. Within your campaigns, your keywords, you want to be breaking things out by different tactics, your brand, non-brand competitors. And I mean, this is this is really endless for all of the options that you could do. So, I mean, you could you could just do a search from it's like high cost keywords and just filter for all the high cost keywords. And you can repurpose these reports for ways to audit your accounts that we also do and lots of our agency partners are doing as well. And you can also we have a bunch of prebuilt templates. So, you know, we have our audit episode that a lot of you guys loved. We built an audit template. So you can just like you connect a new client that you're auditing and you just use that template. It's going to, you know, automatically prebuild a beautiful Report for you so you can go in and close that client. Speaker 2: And I, one thing I really want to emphasize too and show that we haven't yet is just the white label sharing, like how you can take this report and then just send it via a link to your client every week, every month, whenever you're meeting with them, it's such a good followup. Like after you have the meeting with them and you use this to kind of show all the data, then you can kind of link them like, Hey, here's everything we went over. Here's the notes, you know, sending that. But let's just show what that looks like, Stephen, because it does live as its own web page to where the client can come to it anytime, change date ranges. It basically is there to answer client questions before they ask them. So they have this resource to go and reference to answer their own questions, and hopefully it saves you some time as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, so the white labels you'll see here. There's there's white label sharing settings, which is going to allow you to control the the logos the colors and even change the domain so you can completely remove this whole ad lab section and use your own complete custom domain and then you'll link that out to the client. So when you send it to the client. This is ultimately what they're going to see. They get this link, and then they're going to have this beautiful, fanciful dashboard. They can also come in and, you know, change the color. So it looks like Andrew's using, are these your Nebula PPC colors, Andrew? Speaker 2: No, they're not. They're just some things I thought looked decent together. Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah, now the client can come through here and have all these tabs that you built for them. This logo would obviously be replaced with your logo once you add it in there. But the reason why this is so powerful and also so important is because at the end of the day, you want the client to be so dependent on this dashboard that they cannot fire you because they will not be able to run their business without you. Because this dashboard answers all of their strategic business questions before they even ask them. So the whole purpose of why reporting is so powerful is so important for agencies is because you want to make yourself sticky to the client. A lot of clients leave because they just don't have good reporting or maybe like it's you know, maybe the reporting is okay, but it's not answering their questions. And so they just they put the blame on you if things aren't working your reporting is not answering that question of why things aren't working and that's creating the problem. So in this case now the client come through here and you know, Basically, they don't need Amazon anymore. They do not need to go into the ad console. They don't need to go into Seller Central. They have all the information that they need right here and that's because you've given that to them. So if they lose you, they lose this dashboard and they're basically, they can't fire you. You become unfireable at that point. Speaker 2: And that's the exact language a client used with me just the other day about these dashboards, said, I don't even go into Amazon anymore. This is way better than even going into Amazon, way more detail. I don't even log in anymore. I just look at this. So that's what you want. That's what you're trying to create. You want that stickiness. You want that adherence to you as an agency, as a service provider. And this definitely helps create that. Speaker 1: And it's so incredible, too, because, for example, Black Friday, Cyber Monday just ended. Normally, it's going to take you like a week or two weeks to put the reports together. But with AdLabs, you literally just like, you know, create a new template and just change the date range on it and then just throw a few filters on and you're like done. Like within 30 seconds. Speaker 2: I threw that report together in 10 minutes, like just copying some other tables and charts from other pages and changing the date range was all it was. So, I mean, it's not the most robust report ever or anything like that, but all I really needed was just kind of the numbers like I just needed to see how things perform year over year on that, for that four day period. But yeah, it's, it's very simple and you can throw together ad hoc reports in just a few minutes to answer any questions your clients have. Speaker 1: So absolute game changer. And we're thinking about doing a competition of who can build the best dashboard. So if you guys think that's a good idea, leave a comment saying like dashboard competition or something, and we'll try to figure something out to set up, giving away perhaps a big, big cash prize or something for The winner. But thank you guys for listening to that Amazon ads podcast for yet another week. And we'll see you guys in 2026. See you next year.