Data Nuances & Limitations

This page pertains to Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Video.

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Historical Data Constraints

Amazon imposes specific limitations on the historical advertising data available through their APIs. The Amazon Ads v3 API provides historical reporting of up to 95 days. This means that historical advertising data beyond this time window is not accessible through Amazon’s API (or their reporting interfaces).

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Data Freshness

Amazon makes conversion data available within a day, but it’s subject to changes through a restatement process. This process happens at three points: 1 day, 7 days, and 28 days after a conversion occurs. The restatements affect all dates within your chosen attribution window. For instance, if you’re using a 14-day attribution window, the data for a particular day could be updated for up to 42 days after that date. This is because the 28-day restatement could affect conversions that happened on the last day of your 14-day window.

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API Versioning and Data Source Consolidation

Amazon is in the process of releasing a new version (v3) of their reporting API for Sponsored Advertising campaigns, including Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Video. However, the rollout of this new API version has been phased. While Amazon deprecated the v2 Ads API for Sponsored Products on March 30th 2023, the v2 API for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display reports remains operational.

Over the last year, we’ve munged together Sponsored Products data from the v3 Ads API with Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Video, and Sponsored Display data from the v2 API.

However, we’ve started to notice that the v2 reporting APIs for Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Video, and Sponsored Display are producing stale data. For example, even though Amazon isn’t planning on shutting down the v2 API for Sponsored Display until October 31, 2024, we’ve observed inaccurate reporting from Amazon’s v2 API relative to the data reported in the Amazon Ads UI, particularly for modeled conversion and revenue attribution.

Because of this, we conducted a thorough QA process to understand the differences between the v2 and v3 APIs across our customer base and made the decision to fully migrate all Sponsored Advertising campaign types to the v3 reporting API (as of July 10, 2024).

Our team is closely monitoring Amazon’s API updates and roadmap to stay ahead of any changes. As Amazon introduces new features or modifies existing APIs, we will adapt our data integration processes accordingly.

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Validating Amazon Ads data from SourceMedium vs. the Amazon Ads UI

Follow the steps below to download the Amazon Ads reports that we aim to replicate through our data transformation process.

1. Login into your Amazon Ads account
2. Select the relevant account in the top right corner
3. Navigate to Measurements & Reporting > Sponsored ads reports
4. Click “Create report”
5. For each report category (“Sponsored Products”, “Sponsored Brands”, and “Sponsored Display”) do the following:
   • Select “Report type” = “Campaign”
   • Select “Time unit” = “Daily”
   • Select “Currency conversion” = “True”
   • Select the relevant time period (or default to the last full month of data if you’re doing a general QA)
   • Enter a unique value for “Report name”
   • Leave “Recipients” blank
   • Select “Request time” = “Now”
   • Click “Run report” in the top right corner
6. The campaign-level data returned in these reports should match the data you see in SourceMedium, with the following caveats:
   • Amazon’s v3 Ads API standardizes Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display sales around a 14-day attribution window. To maintain consistency, when we unify Amazon Ads data across ad formats, we persist 14-day sales attribution for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display (the default), along with 14-day revenue for Sponsored Products, and report the final value as the platform-reported conversions and revenue.
   • Note that when generating reports via the Amazon Ads UI, Amazon only reports on 7-day attribution windows for Sponsored Products. Because of this, when comparing attributed Sponsored Product conversions and revenue between SourceMedium and Amazon Ads, our reported conversions and revenue numbers should be higher.