Business Reports Detail Page Sales & Traffic tables + Uploader Templates & GDS Reporting Templates

Isn't it odd that Amazon fails to include Sessions and Buy Box data in the MWS API? We sure think so. We know how important those data points can be to reporting and understanding Seller Central account performance so we decided to bite the bullet and create our own solution...we have created two new tables you/we can upload the 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic' data to for comprehensive Seller Central reporting directly from your db (instead of having to house the data in a google sheet). 

This v1.0 custom data Business Reports release for dash/DATA STUDIO includes two new tables and two new uploader templates that can be used to populate your db with Seller Central's 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic' (BY DATE) and 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic By Child Item' (BY ASIN) data. If you're unfamiliar, the two reports can be found in Seller Central under Reports > Business Reports.

Click the video below to see how to populate the new Business Reports tables

GDS Templates for Business Reports data: With the availability of this important data, dash has built two reporting templates in Google Data Studio to help you get off to a fast start incorporating the Business Reports information into your reporting. Check out the two new templates here: 

dash/REPORTING Starter Template

dash/REPORTING Pro Template (see #4 in the list)

The two new database tables - These two tables are not connected to any API, but rather can be populated via the uploader templates described below the table definitions (i.e. you can upload the data regularly or have dash do this as a service):

• business_reports_dpst_total: This table is intended to house the 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic' (BY DATE) Seller Central report data. You can consider this table the 'overview' data that is rolled up for an account as a whole. With our uploader template, you are able to upload data on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis, using the TimeSegment field to upload any date ranges you'd like.
• business_reports_dpst_item: This table is intended to house the 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic By Child Item' (BY ASIN) Seller Central report data. With the new table, you can upload your Child ASIN performance data across any time frame. With our uploader template, you are able to upload data on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis, using the TimeSegment field to upload any date ranges you'd like.

The two new uploader templates -  We have created two new uploader templates to populate the two new tables with data on a regular basis. To find the new uploader templates, simply navigate to the Settings > Import Data screen in your dash platform instance and select the template you would like to download. Of note, the templates currently match the exact fields shown in each of the respective Seller Central reports. 

*Pro Tip: Make sure you 'Show' (select) all columns available for each of the Detail Page Sales and Traffic reports to easily line up the export with our uploader template fields.

As mentioned, if you'd like dash to do this regular data upload on your behalf, just ping us at reporting@dashapplications.com and we can talk about your upload needs.

• Seller Central Business Reports - Detail Page Sales and Traffic Total uploader template for BY DATE data : This template, when uploaded through the dash platform, populates the 'business_reports_dpst_total' table and is intended to ingest the 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic' (BY DATE) Seller Central report data. Just download the template, enter the Seller ID of the merchant you're uploading for, set the time range by designating the 'TimeSegment', and add the date of the first day of the period you're uploading for (i.e. 9/1/2021). Then upload the data and it will populate in the table immediately.
• Seller Central Business Reports - Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item uploader template for BY ASIN data: This template, when uploaded through the dash platform, populates the 'business_reports_dpst_item' table and is intended to ingest the 'Detail Page Sales and Traffic By Child Item' (BY ASIN) Seller Central report data. Just download the template, enter the Seller ID of the merchant you're uploading for, set the time range by designating the 'TimeSegment', add the date of the first day of the period you're uploading for (i.e. 9/1/2021), and enter both the Parent ASIN and Child ASIN values for a given item. Then upload the data and it will populate in the table immediately.

Navigate to the Settings > Import Data screen in the dash/PLATFORM, then select the template you'd like to use to upload the corresponding data

Pricing for Business Reports data - since this is static data and relatively small compared to the programmatic data, we are offering this new solution for FREE. Seriously, no strings attached so upload the Detail Page Sales and Traffic data to your heart's content.

Questions or issues? 

Although we always do extensive quality assurance, new data sets may include a bug here and there. Please let us know if you see any issues by posting in the Community Forum or sending a note to support@dashapplications.com.

As always, thank you for being a dash partner. Please let us know how the new tables, uploader templates, and reporting templates are working for you...any feedback you have is appreciated as always!

To closing the Sessions and Buy Box gap,

The dash team

Tired of sending us those screenshots and copied MWS credentials? Same here. With this v1.5 platform release, we have added the ability to enter your own MWS accounts and activate related merchants for MWS data flow directly in the dash platform. No more manual emails, +1 for that! We will continue improving the workflow to add status alerts and error alerts in the near future. If you see something that isn't working correctly or identify an opportunity to improve the workflow, please leave your feedback via the platform or email support@dashapplications.com directly.

To see the new workflow in action, check out this video: 

How to add an MWS Account: To add an MWS account to dash, navigate to the Account Manager view and select the 'MWS Merchants' tab. Then, click the 'Add MWS Auth Token' button and enter the required MWS credentials for a given Seller Central merchant. FYI, the credentials you provide allow MWS access for all marketplaces within a given region. The established regions are America, Europe, and the Far East. If you're not sure which region the credentials allow access to, don't worry, we will figure out the appropriate region even if you select the wrong one. 

How to activate or inactivate an MWS merchant marketplace: Once you've added an MWS account in the step above, you will be able to view the merchant marketplaces related to the auth token provided. Here, you can decide which merchant marketplaces to activate. You can also choose to inactivate + purge any MWS merchant marketplaces you no longer need data for from the same view.

Not sure where to get MWS credentials?: MWS access credentials are provided by the admin of a Seller Central account. For information on how to authorize dash as a developer for a Seller Central merchant, please check out the 'MWS Instructions' tab seen on our training page here:

dash/TRAINING - MWS Instructions

Need help getting started using MWS data?: With MWS data, you can now use our Operations Template in Google Data Studio for free. If you need some extra help, let us know. Our fledgling reporting division is happy to assist so please ping us at reporting@dashapplications.com to find out more!

dash/TRAINING - GDS Operations Report Template

Questions or issues? 

Although we always do extensive quality assurance, new feature releases may include a bug here and there. Please let us know if you see any issues by posting in the Community Forum or sending a note to support@dashapplications.com.

As always, thank you for being a dash partner. Please let us know what you think of the new workflow...any feedback you have is appreciated as always!

To making MWS merchant marketplace activations more manageable,
The dash team

Hi , 

The change is here - we have updated the 'mws_inventory_metric' table to now be named the 'mws_inventory_health' table. This DATA STUDIO announcement concerns your MWS data and any dashboard reports that rely on the mws_inventory_metric table.

Related to our emails sent on February 25th and April 2th, we have now changed the 'mws_inventory_metric' table to be a snapshot rather than a historical record, today, Friday, April 30th, and historical data is no longer present in the table. We have also renamed the 'mws_inventory_metric' table as 'mws_inventory_health', which impacts any reporting dashboards relying on the table, including our GDS Operations template.

How does this change impact me?

Any reporting dashboards, charts, or widgets currently relying on data from the mws_inventory_metric table are impacted. This includes any Google Data Studio (GDS) templates that were copied/created from our 'V1 TEMPLATE - dash/DATA STUDIO Amazon Operations Report', specifically impacting the 'Inventory Health' (formerly 'Inventory Summary') page of the report. The template has been updated to reference the new table name and accommodate for the changes required below as of April 30th at 8am MST. So, you can now copy the template or 'Inventory Health' page/widgets again if you'd like the below changes to be 'already done' for you on or after April 30th. You will then want to make sure to 'point' the copied widgets at your own data source(s), which should be updated to reference the 'mws_inventory_health' table name per the prescribed changes outlined below:

What action do I need to take on any reports that rely on the 'mws_inventory_metric' table?

1) You will need to update the impacted items, specifically your GDS data sources, to reference the table name of "mws_inventory_health" instead of "mws_inventory_metric" today and moving forward. You can also remove the 'DateTime' condition from the query as the table will no longer contain historical data. To make the proper data source reference changes, please check out this example shown in GDS:

How to update the table reference in GDS

2) The 'Inventory Health' (formerly 'Inventory Summary') page of the dash GDS template has been affected in that the data shown no longer contains historical data, but rather only contains data as a snapshot from the current day. In particular, this means that the 'Days Out of Stock' field no longer applies and has been removed from the dash template. You are able to track 'Days out of Stock' via the new 'mws_inventory_history' table, which was released on April 23rd per this release note. We also provided a GDS template page that incorporated the new mws_inventory_history data in the linked release note.

3) For those modules and dashboards relying on mws_inventory_metric and including a lookback period such as 'last 30 days', you will want to change the 'Default date range' (i.e. time period of a given widget) to 'Auto' and update any labels or descriptors that describe a lookback period. Additionally, any fields that sum or average numbers over a lookback period can remain, but they will now only reflect one day's worth of data as opposed to a lookback range of data. Here are some examples of the field names that you may want to update:

Detailed Information about the change and why we are doing so (provided on February 25th but including for anyone who missed it):

The MWS report we used to populate our 'mws_inventory_metric' table is a replica of the 'Inventory Health' report you can see in Seller Central under Reports > Fulfillment > Inventory > Inventory Health. However, the Inventory Health report is a "snapshot" and does not allow us to pull historical data. This means we could incur issues of data provision and reliability if MWS happens to be unavailable one day or another....which is highly likely to occur.

If you have grown to enjoy and rely on the inventory data currently seen in the mws_inventory_metric table, fret not as that same data is now shown in the same table under a new name of 'mws_inventory_health'. We have populated the mws_inventory_health table with the same Inventory Health report fields such as Sellable Quantity, Sales Rank, Weeks of Cover, and Inventory Aging to name a few. However, the updated mws_inventory_health table does not track day over day data now that the change has been made; it is rather a snapshot of the current day while historical inventory data is shown in our new inventory history tracking table named 'mws_inventory_history'.

Now that the change is in place, the new inventory history table is populated with information coming from the 'Daily Inventory History' report seen under Reports > Fulfillment > Inventory > Daily Inventory History (this was completed and released as of April 23rd). This allows us to pull historical inventory data not currently available. It also provides us a more consistent and reliable means of tracking day over day inventory amounts, including out of stock instances that we programmatically track (and are not available via any MWS API - out of stock tracking is a dash special).

If you have any questions, please reach out to support@dashapplications.com and we will respond right away.

To a little beta bump,
the dash team

Looking for comprehensive inventory history data and wondering how to track those pesky out of stock instances? We have now released our mws_inventory_history table, which contains daily inventory history data for all items in a given catalog and stores out of stock instances using a little dash deciphering magic.

This dash/DATA STUDIO data release concerns your database and DATA STUDIO subscription with updates for a newly launched table called 'mws_inventory_history'.

Related to our email sent on February 25th, please note that following this release, we will be changing the 'mws_inventory_metric' table to be a snapshot rather than a historical record on Friday, April 30th. At that time, we will rename the 'mws_inventory_metric' table to 'mws_inventory_health', and historical data will no longer be present in the table. We will send a separate heads up email to describe any actions you need to take related to the table name change and snapshot treatment of the data.

What you can now do: With the more reliable inventory history data, you can now track stock levels for each ASIN/SKU in a given seller's catalog, including out of stock instance tracking that cannot be identified without dash's data transformations.

Where the data comes from: Data in the mws_inventory_history table largely ties to the 'Daily Inventory History' report seen in Seller Central under Reports > Fulfillment > Daily Inventory History.

How to use the new data: Dash has created a new page within our GDS Operations Template that displays some of the capabilities of the historical inventory data. The updated template can be copied and used by following the instructions at the link below. Check out the 'GDS operations report' tab of the page to view instructions for copying our template and data sources. As an aside, if you'd just like to copy the new inventory history widgets from the GDS template to your report(s), simply copy and paste the corresponding data sources + widgets from our template to your report. Please note that you'll want to make sure you've copied the underlying data source, pointed it at your db + relevant SellerID value, and then update your widget to use the updated data source 

dash/TRAINING - GDS Operations report

enter password 'dash4you' when prompted

Direct link: GDS Operations Template

What to expect from the new table: We have made a number of enhancements, aggregations, and transformations to the data that materially change how the data is displayed in the dash table vs. the Seller Central report. Generally, the Quantity amounts of inventory shown for each item will tie across the report and the dash table with a few exceptions due to API restrictions and region-specific differences. It is recommended to display/analyze inventory amounts for all marketplaces within a region at once to avoid the API restrictions and display a comprehensive view of your inventory picture. The primary differences and limitations when comparing the Seller Central Daily Inventory History report and the dash mws_inventory_history table data are:

• Dash includes Merchant Fulfilled item records with available inventory amounts as set by the seller in Seller Central. Merchant Fulfilled items are not included in the Daily Inventory History report.
• Dash includes 'Out of Stock' item records, which are not included in the Seller Central report.
• Dash removes the 'fulfillment-center-id' dimension and rather 'rolls up' inventory records by disposition and location. For example, the Seller Central report may return 85 different warehouse locations of inventory for a single item on a given day. To avoid excessive data rows, we have rolled up the inventory amounts to three different 'locations' in our 'InventoryLocation' field of either 'Warehouse', 'In Transfer', or 'MERCHANT_FULFILLED' to designate the amount of inventory in Amazon FBA warehouses, the amount that is in transfer between warehouses, and the amount of merchant fulfilled inventory for a given day, respectively.
• The MWS API report dash relies on to populate the table does not distinguish which marketplace a given item record 'belongs' to within a region when that item is 'In Transfer' or a Country value for the location of the inventory item is not designated. In these cases, dash populates the record with the marketplace information of the 'default' marketplace of a given region where North America = United States, Europe = United Kingdom, and Far East = Japan. It is this limitation of the API that makes it advisable to display the inventory data for the region as a whole to include all inventory quantities.

*Data delays: At the time of this release, the API has sometimes (not all times) been unable to deliver the previous one or two days' worth of data, returning an error response for the Daily Inventory History report. This means that you may see data up through two days prior to the current date, but missing the inventory history data for the previous one or two days. The data 'catches up' as each day passes but will sometimes exhibit the one or two day gap. We have an open case with Amazon concerning this and will make any updates possible, but this may simply be a limitation or bug in the API.

To view the complete list of updates and related release notes (which we recommend checking out), things you can now do, and items to watch out for concerning the update, just click here: dash/RELEASE NOTES

And don't forget to check out the dash Community Forum for additional info, access to the release notes, the current product roadmap, and a place to ask any questions you have about the update. Community Forum: dash/community forum 

Questions or issues? 

Although we always do extensive quality assurance, new data sets may include a bug here and there. Please let us know if you see any issues by posting in the Community Forum or sending a note to support@dashapplications.com.

As always, thank you for being a dash partner. Please let us know how the table is working for you and any questions/issues you come across...any feedback you have is appreciated as always!

To out of stock optics and inventory insights,
The dash team

Wishing you could do away with those bulkfile templates you have to recreate every time you want to do search term negations? Wish no longer because search term negations have come to stay in the dash platform.

With our main goal of providing the critical levers you need to manage your Amazon advertising accounts, we just launched the ability to pause/enable/archive keywords and targets, negate search terms, and manage your negated keywords and targets right from the dash platform. To see the full release notes, please check out this link as it contains additional information related to this Advertising Studio release: dash/RELEASE NOTES

Combined with the ability to push bulk bid changes to Amazon from the dash platform (v1.1 release), you can now manage your keyword and target statuses, negate search terms including the newly released Auto campaign product targets, and see all of your negated keywords and targets in one simple view.

Keyword status changes - find poor performing keywords via the custom performance filters in the Keywords & Targets view and pause keywords that are no longer up to snuff. If you're sure you don't want to target a given keyword or product target moving forward, you can also archive records in bulk. Conversely, if you're coming back into a solid seasonal period, you can enable paused keywords so they begin spending and generating sales for you once again.

*Pro tip: to see paused keywords or product targets, just toggle on the "Include paused" filter for Targets seen above the data table.

To see a video showing the status change functionality, check out this link: dash Keyword & Target Status changes

Search Term negations - ready to rid your accounts of the tiny little holes that lead to a leaky ACOS? Quickly negate search terms across your entire account by applying custom filters showing you search terms that are not performing the way you'd like in the Keywords & Targets (Search Terms tab) or Tasks & Workflows (Search Terms tab) views. As an example, you can see all search terms that have at least 15 clicks and no sales by applying the pre-built "Non-converting" Optimization filter on the Search Terms tab of either view. If you want to ratchet down your criteria, just click the already applied filters or add your own custom filters across any time range to negate search terms that are not performing up to your standards.

To see videos showing the search term negation functionality in each view, check out this link: dash Search Term Negations

Negative keywords and targets - see all of your negative keywords and targets in one simple view. Just navigate to the "Negative Targeting" tab of the Keywords & Targets view to see and manage your negative keywords and targets, including the ability to archive negatives that no longer apply. With the Negation Type, Status, and Date Negated (available for SP ads only) contextual fields, you'll never have to guess which negatives you have applied to a campaign or ad group again.

To see a video showing the Negative Targeting tab and functionality, check out this link: dash Negative Targeting view

Questions or issues? 

Although we always do extensive quality assurance, these are new views that may include a bug here and there. Please let us know if you see any issues via the blue "Feedback" tab hovering along the right side of each platform view. Alternatively, please send support@dashapplications.com a note if you are experiencing any issues or have questions about the platform updates.

As always, thank you for being a dash partner. We can't wait to hear what you think of the new features!

To quicker optimizations and personalized search term analysis,
The dash team