We have audited more than 300 Amazon agency monthly reports in the last two years — brands considering switching, brands wanting a second opinion, brands trying to figure out if they’re being misled. The pattern is consistent enough to call out: most agency monthly reports are designed to look thorough while hiding the numbers that actually matter.
Here are the 8 numbers your Amazon agency’s monthly report must show every single month, and the 6 metrics most agencies lead with specifically because they obscure performance.
Why Most Agency Reports Are Designed To Hide
The default agency monthly deck is 30-60 slides. It opens with year-over-year revenue, a screenshot of brand storefront traffic growth, total ad spend, total impressions, and a “wins” section. By slide 12, the brand is overwhelmed and the meeting is half over.
This is not accidental. It is a reporting structure designed to keep the brand from asking the four questions that matter:
- Is organic improving or am I just buying more traffic?
- Is my ad efficiency declining month over month?
- Where is my catalog leaking revenue?
- What did you actually do this month vs last month?
If you cannot answer those four questions in under 10 minutes from your monthly report, your report is built to hide, not inform. The 8 numbers below answer them.
1. Organic Sessions vs Paid Sessions (Trended 6 Months)
This is the single most important number on Amazon and the one most often buried. Total sessions are useless — paid traffic can mask organic decline for 6-9 months before the brand notices.
You want a 6-month line chart with two lines: organic sessions and paid sessions, by month. If paid is climbing and organic is flat or declining, the agency is renting your growth, not building it. If organic is climbing, the agency is doing real work.
Most reports show “total sessions, +14% YoY.” That number is meaningless without the split.
2. TACoS By Top 10 SKUs (Not Account-Average)
Account-level TACoS hides everything. A 12% TACoS that looks healthy at the top can be made up of one SKU at 4% (your hero) and nine SKUs at 18-26% (your problem catalog).
The report should show TACoS for each of your top 10 SKUs by revenue, trended month over month. This is the only way to see where ad spend is actually paying off and where it’s burning cash. If your agency cannot produce this in under an hour, they are not running your account at SKU level.
3. Branded vs Non-Branded Search Share
Branded search defense looks like ad performance. It is not. Bidding on your own brand name produces 14-22% ROAS that flatters the account but adds zero incremental revenue most of the time.
The report needs to split ad spend and revenue by branded vs non-branded keywords. If 35-50% of your reported ad ROAS is branded defense, your real prospecting performance is 30-40% worse than the headline number. Brands routinely discover, when they finally see this split, that their “8x ROAS” agency is actually running 3.2x on non-branded.
4. New-To-Brand % of Revenue
Amazon’s NTB metric is the closest thing to incrementality available at the brand level. If NTB% is declining, you are losing new customer acquisition even if total revenue is growing.
A healthy mature brand should run 18-32% NTB depending on category. Below 15% trending down for 3 months means the agency is harvesting your existing customer base and not driving new acquisition. This is usually the leading indicator that the brand is 3-6 months from a revenue plateau.
5. Listing Quality Score / Content Health By SKU
Most agencies report ad performance only. They do not report on the listing itself, because the listing is “creative work” and they did not do it. That is the mistake. Listings rot — hero images decay, A+ modules go stale, titles lose relevance to Rufus parsing, bullet points stop matching current keyword intent.
The report should show, for each top SKU: last hero refresh date, last A+ refresh date, current CVR vs 90-day baseline, and any listings with >8% CVR decay. If your agency does not track this, they are managing ads against a deteriorating asset and reporting only the ad half of the equation.
6. Inventory Health (Days Of Cover By SKU)
Inventory mistakes destroy more Amazon brands than ads mistakes. A SKU that goes out of stock for 5+ days loses BSR, loses organic rank, and takes 4-8 weeks to rebuild. A SKU that is over-stocked at 180+ days of cover burns long-term storage fees and capital efficiency.
The report needs days of cover for each top 20 SKU, with risk flags. If your agency is not reporting on inventory health, they are managing a partial picture and the brand is exposed.
7. Hours Worked / Activities Completed By SKU
This is the number agencies hate to report and the one brands most need to see.
A monthly deck full of “wins” and “strategic insights” does not answer the question: what did you actually do? The report should show, by week: campaigns optimized (with names), listings updated, keywords added/removed, bid adjustments made, creative work shipped, audits run. Concrete activities, not strategic narratives.
If your agency cannot produce an activity log, they are not running your account proactively — they are running it on autopilot and producing a story at month-end. We have audited accounts where the entire “monthly activity” consisted of 3 bid changes and a hero image swap that took 40 minutes of real work. The report was 47 slides.
8. Next-Month Plan With Owner and Date
Every report should close with 3-7 specific actions for next month, each with an owner name and a target completion date. Not “continue optimizing PPC.” Not “explore TikTok Shop integration.” Specific: “Refresh hero image on ASIN B0XXX, target April 18, owner Sarah.”
If the next-month plan is vague, the next month will be vague.
The 6 Metrics Agencies Use To Bury Weak Performance
These metrics are not wrong on their own. They are wrong as the headline of a monthly report. If your agency’s deck opens with these, ask why.
- Total impressions — easy to inflate with broad-match auto campaigns, says nothing about quality
- Storefront traffic growth % — usually a tiny base, easy to show 200% lifts
- Year-over-year revenue without month-over-month — hides recent decline behind a strong prior year
- Account-level ROAS only — hides SKU-level losses behind hero SKU wins
- “Number of optimizations made” — counts bid changes as work, even when 14,000 algorithmic bid changes produced 3 meaningful outcomes
- Vanity awards / badges — Amazon Ads Advanced Partner status, agency ranking lists, internal performance awards
Any one of these in the report is fine. All six as the lead story is a tell.
What A Good Monthly Report Looks Like
Around 12-15 slides. Opens with the 8 numbers above on a single dashboard slide. Then 3-4 slides on the biggest opportunity for next month. Then the activity log. That is it.
If your monthly deck is 50+ slides and the brand can’t answer “is this account getting better or worse” in 10 minutes, the deck is the product. The account is not.
FAQ
How often should an Amazon agency report performance?
Monthly written report, weekly 30-minute working call. Monthly reports without weekly tactical work get stale fast; weekly calls without a structured monthly report make trends invisible. Both are required for accounts over $100K/month in revenue.
Should I expect my Amazon agency to report on inventory and listings, or just ads?
If they manage ads only, yes — ads only. If they sell themselves as a “full-service Amazon agency” or “growth partner,” they should report on listings, inventory, creative refresh cadence, and competitive SERP position. Most agencies that claim full-service report on ads only. That gap is where most brands lose money.
What is a healthy TACoS for an Amazon brand in 2026?
It depends on the category and brand maturity, but mature brands in non-commodity categories typically run 8-14% TACoS sustainably. New brands or competitive categories may run 18-25% during scale phases. Anything above 25% sustained for 6+ months without a clear scale plan usually means weak organic and over-reliance on paid.
My agency report shows 5x ROAS but my profit is flat — why?
Two common causes. First, the reported ROAS is heavily weighted by branded search defense, so non-branded prospecting is actually running 2-3x. Second, the report ignores rising Amazon fees, inventory storage costs, returns, and reimbursement issues — all of which sit outside the agency’s ROAS calculation. Ask for a TACoS view (total ad spend ÷ total sales) instead of ROAS — TACoS is harder to flatter.
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If you’re looking for a team that manages every lever — creative, advertising, and operations — Velocity Sellers works with brands doing $100K+/month on Amazon. Contact us for a free account audit.
