Reporting Overview

Reporting helps you to analyze your sponsored products data. Reports reflect the performance of your campaigns.

Performance reports illustrate the performance measurement of your campaign and its underlying entities. They provide important data insights that can be used to:

  • Monitor traffic

  • Analyze patterns

  • Compile information

  • Forecast budget capacity

  • Formulate strategic decision-making

  • Identify growth opportunities

Reporting API

The reporting API helps you retrieve the analytics of your campaign for the requested time period.

It provides reporting endpoints that aggregate the performance of entity specific results which helps in comprehensive data analysis.

The reporting endpoints help you improve your campaign’s advertising performance by analyzing and refining your keywords, ads, and bids. Additionally, you can also view the performance data related to your impressions, clicks, conversion rates, sales, spends, and other factors for the requested period of time.

The Reporting API offers you performance reports and bulk performance reports

  • Performance reports vs Bulk performance reports

    • Performance reports endpoints provide requested data directly in the response body in JSON format. The amount of data is limited to the specified entity-ids and date range. The response contains aggregated data.

    • Bulk performance reports endpoints provide requested report in async manner via download link. The link contains a file in CSV format with all the performance data available for the requested entity-type and split by the specified time-unit. CSV file format helps to provide more data with high granularity compared to the JSON response body in the performance reports endpoints.

Performance results

Data freshness

The freshness of data in advertising metrics indicates the duration required for data collection, processing, and delivery to reports. It represents the quality of the data set by assessing its up-to-dateness. Data freshness plays a crucial role in establishing reliability on data and facilitates informed decision-making by considering the timeliness of information.

In order to prevent advertisers from incurring unnecessary charges, bol executes the following actions on every advertising metric (impressions, clicks and conversions):

  • Processing - The API provides access to the latest performance data for all entities with updates made available with a 1-hour delay ensuring timely and accurate insights for your campaigns.

  • Validation - Performance metrics are refreshed and validated at daily, weekly, and monthly intervals, and is subject to change for up to 60 days back from the current date in rare cases. We recommend re-retrieving reports monthly to ensure your performance metrics are up to date.

To ensure the utmost data accuracy, we commit to nightly updates for the previous period’s data. This process is carefully managed to ensure that all data will be refreshed and fully updated by 6 AM each day, Amsterdam time (CET/CEST). This approach allows us to maintain high standards of data integrity and reliability.

Sales and conversions

Several reporting endpoints include the following fields when providing you the performance results of your campaign and its underlying objects:

  • sales14d

  • conversions14d

  • directConversions14d

  • indirectConversions14d

It is imperative to understand the relation between these fields to avoid ambiguity related to calculation of total sales and conversions for your products. A conversion lookback window of 14 days is used.

When reporting on actual sales and conversions, the report will take into account an attribution period of 14 days after the visitor viewed the advertisement. This approach acknowledges the time needed for a visitor to make a purchasing decision after being influenced by the ad. It’s important to highlight two key aspects in this process:

  • Attribution Based on Click Time: A conversion is attributed to the exact time a visitor clicks on an advertisement. For example, if a visitor clicks on an ad for some item on Monday and purchases it within the next 14 days, this purchase is attributed as a conversion to that specific click. This model ensures precise tracking of the ad’s effectiveness in prompting a purchasing decision.

  • Multiple Sale Units in a Conversion: It’s also essential to understand that a single conversion might encompass multiple sale units. For instance, if a visitor, influenced by an ad, purchases three items in a single transaction, this is counted as one conversion. The sales14d field will report the total cost of all items sold (in this case, three), whereas the conversions14d will count this transaction as a single conversion.

Reports vs Insights

The metric averageWinningBid is available for certain entities in the Bulk Performance Reporting and Performance Reporting endpoints, as well as in the Insights endpoints.

The calculation of this metric differs between the Reporting and Insights endpoints:

  • In the Reporting endpoints, only days where your campaign had performance are considered.

  • In the Insights endpoints, the entire landscape over the past 14 days is considered.

As a result, if your campaign had days without performance in the last 14 days, the averageWinningBid metric will differ between reports covering this period and the values provided by the Insights endpoints.