amazon agency bi-weekly: why do i need amazon advertising API data?

sam hager, president dash / AMAZON
​​https://www.dashapplications.com/about-us.html#team

This week we assess why Amazon Advertising API data, and a corresponding data storage solution, is crucial for your agency’s, brand’s, or investment firm’s success. No matter how you slice it, API data is crucial to understanding and growing your Amazon business. 
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I’m switching gears a bit this week as this very question came up while I was working with a paid media agency in the Denver area. It went something like, “Can I get by working with the manual advertising report downloads that come out of Amazon directly?”. The short answer —no. Keep reading to avoid the pitfalls of relying on manually downloaded Amazon advertising reports.

​Your manual process won’t scale

If you are just getting started advertising on Amazon, you likely have stumbled across the manual advertising data reports that are available for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands as seen below.

The manual reports available via Amazon’s ad management interfaces.

And although you can cobble together a reporting solution via Excel, Smart Sheets, or another option, you will inevitably run into a number of issues as your data set, client list, and reporting obligations grow. I used the manual method of generating reporting and analysis for my Amazon clients for almost two years. It was painful. I wish I would’ve been on the API so much sooner. The following are the primary issues that occur when working with the manual downloads:

• You have to consistently generate, download, and store each report available because of Amazon’s look back window restrictions. Data is only available for the trailing 60 days for most reports, so you have to pull all 10 advertising reports a minimum of every two months for each account you manage.
• If you are using Excel to store and visualize the data, it will break at some point. The data sets are just too large to store in Excel and eventually you will need some kind of database solution. As most know, databases are set up to work particularly well with API data but not so much so with manual uploads.
• The hours you and your team will rack up making the manual downloads reporting and analysis-ready become significant quickly. Imagine the workflow for generating reports in Amazon and then downloading, appending unique ID’s, adding fields, inserting/uploading to your data storage location, formatting, and quality assuring…now imagine doing that for 10 reports across a portfolio of brands that you are responsible for. If you spend 3 minutes per report to get it into a usable state, that’s 30 minutes per client. At 10 clients managed, that’s 5 hours per month just to be able to use the data. Yuck.
• And once you have the data in a usable state, now you have to actually update your reporting and analytics solution, which is often an Excel template of some sort in the early stages of Amazon operations. When Amazon updates their field structure, which they periodically do, you have to rebuild your entire reporting solution to accommodate the changes. Again, yuck on a monthly basis.

The API has all the available data

If you have suspicions about data gaps in the API then you can breathe easily. V2 of the Amazon Advertising API has all of the data that is currently available in the manually downloaded reports. There are a number of data gaps in V1 of the API, which is why Amazon recommends that you move immediately to V2 of the API. ​

Amazon encourages moving to V2 of the API because V1 does not have all of data.

V2 of the API also happens to be where Amazon first releases access to new data fields. Often, we will notice new data fields flowing through the API before they are available in the Amazon advertising interface. If you want to stay on top of the data, having API access is to ensure you are up on the latest changes.
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Any structural changes that Amazon makes to the data of the API are detailed in release notes that explain the changes and help your developer or data provider adapt the data pulling and storage solution. This is not the case for manual reports which often roll out new fields with no warning. One day you’ll find yourself minding your own business, downloading and uploading the manual reports and all of a sudden your reporting solution breaks at the end of the month for no reason. This can cause extreme stress come reporting time and is easily avoided by moving off of the manual reports.

Your manual reporting and analytics house of cards is subject to collapse at any moment.

​Because Amazon said so

A paid media agency that I work closely with was accepted into Amazon’s Agency Partnership Program in the fall of 2018. You won’t find much about this program as it is in its early stages and does not promote externally —Amazon found me on LinkedIn and made the connection. Only about 100 agencies nationwide were accepted into the program and in speaking with the manager of the division, we came to find that Amazon has specific scoring criteria determining an Agency’s eligibility to become a partner. And you may have guessed it, utilizing the API data for advertising is one of those boxes that should be checked in order to be considered. So if you want to work with Amazon directly as an agency, much like you would a Facebook or Google, it is time to start drawing on the API. ​

​Takeaways

If you read nothing else, here are the headline points for why you should be using Amazon Advertising API data:

• Your manual process won’t scale and API data will facilitate more efficient client management, reporting, and analytics.
• The API often includes data not available in the manual reports and warns you about field structure changes leading to less downtime for you and your team.
• Amazon itself recommends that agencies utilize the API data in order to be considered for their Agency Partnership Program.

​sam hager | president dash / AMAZON
an amazon advertising expert, sam is on the forefront of ecommerce evolution and leads thought for agencies and brands looking to crack the digital commerce code. 
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sam.hager@dashapplications.com