I’ll just say it straight: Amazon’s basic advertising reports are slowly losing
By Michael Erickson Facchin · May 29, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I’ll just say it straight: Amazon’s basic advertising reports are slowly losing their power.
For a long time, we all optimized campaigns by looking at the standard dashboards. If a campaign brought in sales, we increased the budget. If it showed zero sales and high spend, we turned it off. It seemed completely logical.
But when we started analyzing data through Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), we realized we were only seeing half the picture all this time.
The thing is, standard reports only show the "last click." If you compare it to soccer, they only show the player who scored the goal. But they don't show you who made the assist.
In AMC, for the first time, we clearly saw the real customer journey.
It turned out that before buying a product through a regular search ad (Sponsored Products), a shopper might have seen our display banner (DSP) twice and watched our video (Sponsored Brands) once.
In the past, we often paused video or brand awareness campaigns because they looked unprofitable in the standard reports. But now we saw the truth: as soon as we turn them off, sales from our main "profitable" campaigns drop sharply too. Because people simply stop discovering us.
My take is this: brands that keep making decisions based solely on basic last-click reports are optimizing blindly and will eventually lose market share. The future belongs to those who see the entire customer journey and understand how different ad formats actually work together.
Do you agree or disagree? How are you currently measuring the performance of your top-of-funnel campaigns?