A campaign that is not selling feels like one problem. It is one of three, and they share nothing but the symptom.
An advertising campaign is a chain: Amazon shows your ad, producing impressions; some shoppers click; some clicks become orders. Each link breaks for its own reasons, and repairing one does nothing for the others.
So the mistake to avoid is an undiagnosed decision. A seller with no sales lowers the price, replaces the main image, raises the bid and rewrites the title in one afternoon. Whatever happens next, nothing is learned: four things moved and at most one was the cause.
01What are the links in an advertising campaign, and where do you read them?
Three numbers, in this order.
Impressions are the number of times your ad was displayed, whether or not anyone clicked. Clicks are the number of times a shopper clicked it. An ad-attributed order is an order Amazon credits to an ad click within the attribution window — the period after a click during which Amazon still gives the ad credit.
All three come from Campaign Manager, the advertising console, and only from there, at campaign, ad group, keyword or search term level.
Two ratios connect the links. Click-through rate, or CTR, is clicks divided by impressions. Ad conversion rate is ad-attributed orders divided by clicks. Campaign Manager shows both, but on-screen names change over time, so do the division yourself.
Do not take these ratios from Seller Central Business Reports. Its sessions and unit session percentage columns cover every visit to your listing, organic visits included — the wrong population for judging an ad, because ad clicks and organic visits convert differently.
02Can you see how many shoppers added your product to the cart?
For a Sponsored Products campaign, assume not.
Amazon publishes add-to-cart figures for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display reporting. No such column is documented for Sponsored Products, so your chain has three links rather than four, and clicks-to-orders is one combined link.
Because you cannot separate a shopper who never added the product from one who added it and changed their mind, inspect both halves rather than guessing. Whether the shopper wanted the product is driven by the listing after the click; whether they went through with it is driven mostly by price once they have compared, and by the delivery date.
03What does it mean when a campaign gets no impressions?
It means the chain has not started, and nothing below it can be diagnosed. A conversion rate calculated from zero clicks is not a low number; it is not a number.
Check three things, in this order.
- Is the product eligible to advertise? In the ad group’s list of advertised products, each product carries a status, and one that cannot serve is flagged with a reason. The commonest reason is that your offer is not the Featured Offer — the offer that wins the Buy Box — and a Sponsored Products ad without the Buy Box does not run.
- Has the campaign spent its daily budget? If today’s spend equals the daily budget, serving stopped when the budget ran out, and the rest of the day is missing from your data rather than absent from the market.
- Is the bid too low to enter the auction? Compare your bid with the suggested bid Amazon shows beside the keyword. A new product competing with established ones tends to need more, not less.
Repair impressions first, and change nothing further down while you do. A price change made in a week with no impressions cannot be evaluated: no shopper saw it.
04What does it mean when a campaign gets impressions but almost no clicks?
It means shoppers see your ad and choose something else. The break is between impressions and clicks.
That narrows the search sharply, because only a few things are visible in a search result: your main image, your price beside the prices next to it, the first part of your title, your star rating with its review count, and any badge Amazon has attached. Everything else — the other images, the bullet points, the description, the reviews themselves — is invisible here and cannot be the cause.
Sellers with low clicks very often rework the parts of the listing that appear only after a click. Reordering the secondary images cannot raise CTR, because no shopper has seen them. The result is zero: a week spent and nothing learned.
One other cause belongs here. If the search terms bringing the impressions do not describe your product, a low CTR is correct behaviour rather than a defect. Read the search term report before blaming the image.
05What does it mean when a campaign gets clicks but almost no orders?
It means shoppers arrive at the listing and leave. The cause is something visible only after the click: the remaining images, the bullet points, the content of the reviews rather than the star count, and the delivery date. Price matters here too, but differently — by now the shopper has opened two or three listings and is comparing them properly.
A new product with very few reviews converts worse than an established one at the same price, and no bid changes that. Expect a low ad conversion rate during a launch.
Before treating a low ad conversion rate as real, check that the keyword or campaign has enough clicks to carry the claim. At a 10% ad conversion rate, 22 clicks with no sale is the first point at which zero stops being an ordinary result. Below that, “no orders” is a gap in the data, not a diagnosis.
06How do you work out which link is broken?
Compare each link against your own account totals. They already carry your category, your price point and your stage of launch.
| What the numbers show | Where the chain breaks | What to inspect first |
|---|---|---|
| Almost no impressions | Nothing has started | Eligibility status, daily budget, bid |
| Impressions, very few clicks | Impressions to clicks | Main image, price, title, star rating, badge, search term relevance |
| Clicks, very few orders | Clicks to orders | Listing body, review content, delivery date, price once the shopper compares |
| Orders arrive, campaign loses money | Not a chain break | Margin against ACOS, a different question |
Take both totals from Campaign Manager over the same 30-day window, ending about a week before today so the attribution window has finished filling in. The figures below are illustrative.
- Account impressions210,000
- Account clicks1,470
- Account CTR, 1,470 divided by 210,0000.70%
- Account ad-attributed orders147
- Account ad conversion rate, 147 divided by 1,47010.0%
- Campaign impressions40,000
- Campaign clicks120
- Campaign CTR, 120 divided by 40,0000.30%
- Campaign ad-attributed orders12
- Campaign ad conversion rate, 12 divided by 12010.0%
The campaign converts at 10.0%, exactly the account rate, on 120 clicks — enough to mean something. Its CTR is 0.30% against an account CTR of 0.70%, less than half. Clicks-to-orders is normal; impressions-to-clicks is not. At 0.70%, those 40,000 impressions would have produced 280 clicks, and 280 clicks at 10.0% would have produced 28 orders instead of 12 — 16 missing orders, all in the click step. Change the main image, the price or the title, one at a time.
Had the same 40,000 impressions instead produced 280 clicks and 7 orders, CTR would be 0.70% (280 divided by 40,000), matching the account, and ad conversion rate 2.5% (7 divided by 280), a quarter of the account’s 10.0%. Opposite verdict, same product.
The broken link is the one furthest from your own normal figures, not from what is theoretically possible. A 10.0% ad conversion rate is not “good”; it is simply yours, so it is not the anomaly. A CTR at less than half your own is.
07What can make this diagnosis point at the wrong link?
Three things, all worth checking before you act.
- Placements and match types are not comparable. A campaign running mostly at the top of search shows a very different CTR from one on product pages. So does match type — how loosely a keyword may match what the shopper typed — because broad and automatic campaigns collect impressions on loosely related search terms. Read the placement report, and compare like with like.
- Your own normal figures might be broken too. If every campaign is equally bad, nothing stands out. A product with hundreds of ad clicks and no orders at all needs no comparison: treat clicks-to-orders as broken.
- Recent days undercount orders. Orders are credited back to an earlier click, so the last days of any window are still filling in, making your ad conversion rate look worse than it is.
Some causes sit outside the chain. A competitor’s deep discount, a stockout, or a lost Buy Box moves your numbers in the exact pattern of a broken link. Before rebuilding a listing, check what changed on the date the numbers changed.
Frequently asked
My campaign gets orders but loses money. Which link is broken?
None. The chain works, and the question is now whether the orders are worth what they cost — a comparison between your ACOS and your margin.
My CTR and ad conversion rate are both fine, but I still have almost no orders.
Both ratios are healthy and the first link is simply too small: too few impressions enter the chain. That sends you back to bid and budget, not to the listing.
Should I diagnose at campaign level or keyword level?
Diagnose where there is enough data, act where the setting lives. A keyword with four clicks is not evidence about anything.
Final thoughts
The value of the chain is not that it tells you what to repair. It is that it tells you what to leave alone.
A seller who knows the break is between impressions and clicks has six things to work through — main image, price, title, star rating, badge, search term relevance — and permission to ignore everything below the click for now. Six things you can work through in a week. Twenty you cannot.
Then write down every change with its date. A change you cannot date is a change you cannot evaluate.