Discover the optimised articles performance report

Up until now the articles performance report in the Campaigns breakdown on zDirect captured the broader impact of your Sponsored Product ads by tracking all sales that occur after an ad click, even if the purchased item wasn’t the one directly advertised.

Moving forward, the report will focus exclusively on sales of the directly advertised articles. The updated articles performance report gives you clean, accurate data to efficiently optimise your campaigns and calculate profitability. This enhances article-level reporting for all Conversion (Sponsored Products) campaigns in Ad Manager.

The updated report introduces several improvements to help you analyse your campaign performance more effectively. 

• Advertised-only articles: to give you clearer data, the report now only shows articles you're actively advertising with Sponsored Product ads. We've removed articles that were bought after an ad click but weren't advertised. This ensures you're analysing data only for your sponsored products.

• New optimisation metrics: to provide more actionable insights to optimise your campaigns we've added Direct Sales vs. Total Sales to the metrics.

Although the new report lists only your advertised articles, any sales they help generate for other products are still included in your Total Sales metric. This provides a complete view of your ad’s overall impact.

The new report breaks down performance using several key metrics or key performance indicators, in short KPIs. First, let's define the core terms.

A direct sale is the primary measure of an ad's effectiveness. When a customer clicks on an ad of a specific article and purchases that exact same article in the advertised model and colour.

Understand the broader influence ads have on your brand. They include all sales from your brand that occurred after a click on this article's ad, including sales of other advertised items or non-advertised items, referred to as halo reporting.

Definition

The total sales include cross-sells between your advertised products, such as sales of other colours, as well as sales for non advertised products.

The total sales KPIs in the By articles report of the Campaigns breakdown reflect the same overall performance numbers you see at the main campaign level.

You have two distinct views of your performance in direct sales and total sales. Think of them as separate tools for two different tasks and decision to make about: 

Halo or spillover sale refers to any sale that occurs after an ad was clicked, but the sold article is not the exact article¹ that was clicked. These sales fall into two categories.

An advertised article is counted as a halo sale if a customer buys it after clicking an ad for a different item from the same campaign.

This is based on last-click attribution. A sale is credited to the last ad the customer clicked before making any purchase within the 14-day attribution window.

For example, a customer clicks your ad for black jeans but ends up buying blue jeans instead. The sale of the blue jeans is credited to the black jeans' ad as a halo sale and is calculated in the items sold.

This can happen if the customer:

• Sees the blue jeans as a different colour option on the same product page.

• Navigates from the ad to their cart and purchases the blue jeans which were already there.

• Navigates to the blue jeans product page from the black jeans’ page.

We’ve streamlined the report to focus solely on actively promoted articles. Previously, it included all articles, both promoted and non-promoted halo articles.

For example, you could be advertising 200 articles, but see +4,000 articles listed in your report. The new view exclusively shows data for the articles you are actively advertising to give you a clearer view of campaign performance.

Our attribution model follows a strict rule: a sale is only attributed to your campaign if a customer first clicks on one of your ads within 14 days. Organic sales, which have no associated ad click, are never included in your campaign performance metrics. 

Neither direct ROAS nor total ROAS is more important, they have different meanings. 

• Use Direct ROAS for optimisations, such as deciding if a specific article is profitable enough to keep in your campaign. 

• Use ROAS total for strategic insights and understand the overall impact of an ad on your brand.

This means the ad is highly effective at generating sales across your overall assortment, rather than just for the specific article advertised. 

It also shows that the advertised articles are powerful products, also called gateway products, which serve as an entry point to your other assortment. They are very effective at bringing customers to your brand, even if they don't buy that specific item. Recognise their strategic value for customer acquisition and judge their success by their high ROAS total.