@comchatx/cx-sponsored-ads-playbook 0.0.0-stage → 0.1.0

package/research/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,616 @@
+# Amazon advertising playbook: research
+
+This directory is the research base for a skill pack that sits over `cx-amazon-ads`, ComChatX's open door to the Amazon Ads API (`cx raw amazon-ads`). The pack's name is not yet ruled; the candidates are below. Eighteen research files, each written by a research seat and then checked by a verifier seat, cover a senior Amazon advertising lead's work in three directories: the areas of the work itself (`areas/`), what lies past opening and tuning campaigns (`beyond/`, Jack's "more than running ads"), and how cx reaches, reads and judges an account through the door (`method/`). Every page was read on 2026-11-09. Sources rank in one order: Amazon's own pages, models and staff statements **[official]**, then named practitioners, vendors and trade press **[opinion]**, then published research **[research]**; a news report the vendor file keeps apart from opinion is tagged **[press]**. A **[seat]** line in a file is the writing seat's own reading; it is never a position here. What was kept out, by rule: no Ads API host (`advertising-api*.amazon.com`), no Login with Amazon (`api.amazon.com/auth`), no Amazon Ads MCP endpoint, no Selling Partner API host, no Seller Central help-hub `GetHelpTopic` content call and no page needing sign-in was called, and no seller's data appears anywhere in the files.
+
+## How to read this
+
+- **This page is the entry point.** It says what each file covers, what the pack would hold, every position the skills will take, where the files disagreed, what is still open, and what the door package lacks. The files hold the evidence: quotes, paths, field names, figures and the pages behind them.
+- **Positions are facts, not instructions.** Each one states what Amazon, a practitioner or a study says or does, with the P-ids it merges and the pages it rests on, Amazon's first. Under decision D233 none of them tells cx when to ask the seller, in what order to work, what number to treat as a rule, what not to do, or how to talk: the model judges those from the facts. A practitioner's threshold appears as that practitioner's practice. Writes to a seller's ads carry no switch of ours; their risk is the seller's.
+- **P-ids** are the files' own: `P-launch-4` is position 4 of `areas/launch.md`. The source names after each position are copied, shortened, from those position lines; the full citation, the URL and the read date sit in the file.
+- **Figures that move** (limits, fees, dates, benchmark values) are stated as they read on 2026-11-09. The live value is read at run time from the operation or page each file's run-time section names; a figure here is for knowing what to look for.
+- **What this synthesis read.** Every file's *Positions*, *Open questions*, verification record and *Pages read* in full, plus the run-time, door and report-reader sections of `method/`. It did not reopen any page. No position was removed by a verifier; corrections were made in place, and the positions below are the corrected ones.
+
+## Files
+
+### `areas/`: the work itself
+
+| File | What it covers | Feeds |
+|---|---|---|
+| `areas/launch.md` | An ASIN, a seller or a product new to advertising: the Featured Offer and stock gates, Brand Registry, eligibility reads, new-seller credits, Vine, coupons, the first campaigns and their create order through the API, suggested bids and budgets for no history, the "honeymoon" claims, cold-start research | L, with A, B, C, P |
+| `areas/campaign-structure.md` | The object model from profile to target for SP, SB, SD and v1; which setting lives at which level; fields fixed at creation; archive; portfolios; limits; names and tags; global campaigns and localization; SB v4 and the Product Collection retirement; bulksheets and exports; practitioner structures and their disagreements | T, with B, C |
+| `areas/keyword-and-product-targeting.md` | Match types and what Amazon says each matches, in English, German and Japanese; auto groups; product, category and expanded targets; theme targets and keyword groups; recommendation surfaces; SD contextual and audience targets; relevance and restricted targets; keyword research sources | T, with S, B |
+| `areas/search-terms-and-negatives.md` | Reading the search term report in each surface; harvesting into exact, phrase and ASIN targets; negatives at each level and in each ad product; the statistics of a term with clicks and no orders; practitioner thresholds as theirs | S, with T, R |
+| `areas/bids-and-placements.md` | The auction and its reserves; bidding strategies; placement, audience and video adjustments and how they multiply; rule-based bidding and schedule bid rules; suggested bids; top-of-search share; SB and display bidding; bid write paths; the 2026 FTC case | B, with T, A |
+| `areas/budgets-and-pacing.md` | Daily, monthly and lifetime budgets; over-delivery; detecting out-of-budget; budget usage and recommendations; budget rules; portfolios and unspent sharing; the account cap; billing, invoices and invalid traffic; budget writes per ad product | B, with A, P |
+| `areas/seasons-and-deals.md` | Prime Day, Prime Big Deal Days, BFCM, holiday and regional events; event machinery in the API; CPC at peaks; deals, coupons, Prime Exclusive Discounts and their fees and deadlines; deal claims in ads; post-event tails; Brand Tailored Promotions; the EU 30-day price rule | E, with B, M |
+| `areas/ads-organic-and-total.md` | Ad-attributed against total sales; TACoS; halo; new-to-brand; SQP; whether ad sales move organic rank; incrementality and the tools Amazon offers for it; what a total-account series can and cannot conclude | G, with M, C |
+| `areas/diagnosis.md` | Tracing a move in spend or sales to its cause: the identities, the serving gates and their status values, data that moves after the fact, time zones and currency, the Featured Offer and price checks through SP-API, practitioner root-cause chains, decomposition and change-detection methods | A, with M, B, R |
+
+### `beyond/`: past opening and tuning campaigns
+
+| File | What it covers | Feeds |
+|---|---|---|
+| `beyond/ad-products-and-eligibility.md` | What a seller can buy and who may buy it: SP, SB formats, display, STV, Stores, Review Requests, prompts, Sponsored Services; eligibility APIs; ad policy and moderation; billing; Alexa for Shopping and Rufus; Creator Connections and creator placements | P, with L, T, E |
+| `beyond/automation-and-amazon-tools.md` | What Amazon automates (strategies, rules, recommendations, self-refreshing targets, auto-assembled video, Seller Assistant and auto-optimization), Amazon Ads Agent, the MCP server, and what third-party tools automate and how | B, with R, C |
+| `beyond/brand-defense-and-competition.md` | Bidding on one's own brand, defending one's own pages, conquesting, share metrics, reserve share of voice, the Featured Offer when a reseller holds it, competitor stock-outs, the field experiments on brand keywords, trademark law | T, with A, G |
+| `beyond/goals-and-economics.md` | Break-even ACOS and ROAS; margin from Amazon's fees and the seller's costs; targets; TACoS; the economics of a click and the reserve facts; marginal against average returns; new-to-brand, long-term sales and Subscribe & Save; stock limits; returns; price against advertising in research | G, with B, M |
+| `beyond/metrics-and-attribution.md` | Every ad metric and its definition; the attribution rules (windows, click against view, one credit per conversion); dating and settling; name changes in unified reporting; MRC accreditation; multi-touch and long-term sales; attribution research | M, with G, C |
+| `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md` | The vendor (1P) advertiser and the hybrid brand with both a 1P and a 3P offer: the vendor profile and how a vendor reaches the console; ASIN against SKU, custom landing pages, duplicate names; vendor attribution; why a vendor ASIN stops serving (stock from Amazon's purchase orders, the Featured Offer, product cost and CRaP); Net PPM; the Vendor Orders API and the supply fields; Vendor Retail Analytics and its manufacturing and sourcing views as the total-sales side; Brand Analytics for vendors; vendor-funded promotions and their reports; vendor payment; research on reseller against marketplace and on co-op and pass-through | A, G, E, with L, T, M, P, B, C |
+
+### `method/`: reaching, reading and judging through the door
+
+| File | What it covers | Feeds |
+|---|---|---|
+| `method/ads-api-surface.md` | The Ads API as the door reaches it: hosts, tokens, scopes, profiles and global accounts; v1 and per-product APIs; write replies; rate limits; reads (exports, history, budget usage, eligibility, recommendations); Stream; AMC; the MCP server and skills; audiences, assets, localization, reserve share of voice; deprecations; the licence and policies; what the door does not name | R, A, C, P, and the follow-ups for `cx-amazon-ads` |
+| `method/change-measurement.md` | The change record and what Amazon keeps of it; windows and settling; confounders including Amazon's own changes; the experiment tools Amazon offers and does not; pause tests; small-sample statistics; designs (switchbacks, staggered adoption, synthetic control); the *held / not held / cannot tell* verdicts | C, with M, G |
+| `method/reporting.md` | Reporting v3, Reporting v1, Stream v1 and v2, exports, bulksheets and console-only reports: create, poll, download, failure and warning codes, limits, retention, nulls, time zones; the v3-to-v1 field map; SP-API seller-side reports; the report reader script and how v3 and v1 change it | R, with S, M, A |
+
+## The pack this research proposes
+
+Eight skills, each a directory holding a `SKILL.md` of at most 371 words and a `references/` directory where the facts below land; seven templates in `prompts/`, one line each; and one script, because `method/reporting.md` shows that `cx-amazon-ads` names no way to land a report. The parts carry one letter each: **A** review, **L** launch, **T** structure and targets, **S** search terms, **B** bids and budgets, **E** seasons, **G** economics, **C** changes, **M** metrics, **P** products and policy, **R** reports and the surface. A, L, T, S, B, E, G and C are skills; M and P are shared references that live in one skill and are linked from the others; R is the script with its reference.
+
+### Skills
+
+- **`ads-review` (A).** Reading an account as it stands: which profiles and global accounts the grant reaches, whether each product can serve (Featured Offer, stock, listing state, price checks), the serving status and delivery reasons that name every stop, payment and billing stops, Amazon's status page, and the identities and methods that split a move in spend or sales into its parts. Its references hold the serving enums, the SP-API reads for the Featured Offer and price, and the decomposition and change-detection methods. Fed by `areas/diagnosis.md`, `method/ads-api-surface.md`, `beyond/brand-defense-and-competition.md` (the Featured Offer held by another seller) and `areas/budgets-and-pacing.md` (money stops) and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md` (a vendor's profile, purchase orders, supply fields and product-cost stops, and the rule that binds each of a hybrid brand's ads to its own offer).
+- **`ads-launch` (L).** A product, a seller or a brand new to advertising: the gates, the programs and credits for new sellers, Vine and coupons around a launch, Amazon's own guidance for a first campaign, what newness does and does not do in Amazon's words and in research, and the create order of a campaign through the API, and which vendors may advertise and how a Vendor Central account is linked. Fed by `areas/launch.md`, `beyond/ad-products-and-eligibility.md`, `method/ads-api-surface.md` and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md`.
+- **`ads-structure-and-targets` (T).** The shape of the account and what each target matches: levels and the settings that live on them, what is fixed at creation, archive, portfolios, limits, global campaigns and localization, SB v4; match types, auto groups, product, category, theme and audience targets; share metrics; brand defence, conquesting and reserve share of voice; a vendor's ASIN-keyed ads and custom landing pages. Fed by `areas/campaign-structure.md`, `areas/keyword-and-product-targeting.md`, `beyond/brand-defense-and-competition.md` and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md`.
+- **`ads-search-terms` (S).** What the search term report is in each surface, harvesting through targets or Amazon's target promotion groups, negatives at each level and in each ad product, and the statistics and practitioner practice for judging a term. Fed by `areas/search-terms-and-negatives.md`, with `areas/keyword-and-product-targeting.md` and `method/reporting.md`.
+- **`ads-bids-and-budgets` (B).** The auction and its reserves; strategies, placements, audiences and the order they multiply; rule-based bidding, schedule rules and budget rules; budgets, pacing, out-of-budget and usage; portfolios; what Amazon automates on its own switches; third-party bid tools; the write paths for bids and budgets. Fed by `areas/bids-and-placements.md`, `areas/budgets-and-pacing.md` and `beyond/automation-and-amazon-tools.md`, with `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md` for vendors' 14-day rule windows.
+- **`ads-seasons` (E).** Amazon's retail calendar on ads: event dates by region, the event machinery in budget rules, bid themes and keyword themes, CPC and conversion at peaks, deals and coupons and their rules, deal claims in creative, post-event tails, Brand Tailored Promotions and the EU price rule; vendor-funded promotions, their reports and their funding. Fed by `areas/seasons-and-deals.md` and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md`.
+- **`ads-economics` (G).** What an ad sale is worth: break-even ACOS and ROAS, margin from fees and costs, TACoS, new-to-brand, long-term sales, Subscribe & Save, stock limits, returns; ads against organic and the total account; what research measured about incrementality and price; for a vendor, Net PPM, the retail-analytics total-sales side and its two views, vendor TACoS, Brand Analytics for vendors, the hybrid brand's two sides and the research on reseller against marketplace selling. Fed by `beyond/goals-and-economics.md`, `areas/ads-organic-and-total.md` and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md`.
+- **`ads-change` (C).** A change through the door and its effect: what a write answers, what Amazon's history keeps, what nothing keeps, the experiment tools Amazon offers for ads and their limits, and the designs and statistics for telling whether a change held. Fed by `method/change-measurement.md`, `method/ads-api-surface.md` (write replies), `beyond/automation-and-amazon-tools.md` (lift figures) and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md` (vendors' duplicate names).
+
+### Shared references
+
+- **Metrics and attribution (M)**, in `ads-review/references/`, linked from every skill: definitions, windows, dating, settling, invalid traffic, time zones and currency, multi-touch and long-term sales, MRC, attribution research, and the vendor windows and the merchant-against-brand rule. Fed by `beyond/metrics-and-attribution.md`, with `areas/diagnosis.md`, `method/reporting.md` and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md`.
+- **Products, eligibility and policy (P)**, in `ads-launch/references/`, linked from T, E and A: eligibility APIs, ad products and formats, ad policy and moderation, billing, Alexa for Shopping and Rufus, creators, assets and Stores, and the terms that bind the client application, and vendor payment. Fed by `beyond/ad-products-and-eligibility.md`, `method/ads-api-surface.md` and `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md`.
+
+### The report reader script (R)
+
+`scripts/ads-report.sh`, with `references/reports.md` beside it, takes the shape of `cx-listing-playbook`'s `scripts/report.sh` and maps it to Ads v3 and Ads v1, as `method/reporting.md` sets out: an ask lands in `<tree>/reports/<reportType>/<ask>/<n>/` with a `receipt.json`; a second run carries on an unlanded ask instead of filing a new one; `--wait` sets a ceiling and `--every` the poll interval; the pre-signed link is used once and stripped from the receipt; there is no limiter and no retry; exit codes 0, 1, 2 and 3 keep report.sh's meanings. What v3 and v1 change: v3 asks are named by their report id and v1 asks by a checksum of the request; v1 lands up to 100 parts; v1's retrieve is a `POST`, which the door reads as a change, so a lost reply reads "sent, outcome unknown"; receipts keep v1 warnings; and a landed report is a vintage, since Amazon restates figures after it. The download is the box's own fetch of Amazon's link, outside the door. The reference also carries the surface facts the script and the skills need: deprecation dates, report types, the v3-to-v1 map, Stream, the MCP server. Fed by `method/reporting.md` and `method/ads-api-surface.md`.
+
+### Templates
+
+One line each in `prompts/`. They overlap with the door's own three (`spend-this-week`, `wasted-keywords`, `out-of-budget`), which rest on Reporting v3; see the follow-ups below.
+
+- `/ads-review`: read this account's sponsored ads over the last weeks and say what moved and why.
+- `/ads-launch`: get this new ASIN advertising, from whether it can serve to its first campaigns.
+- `/ads-harvest`: work through the search terms since the last pass and move or negate what the figures support.
+- `/ads-season`: get this account ready for the next Amazon event in its marketplaces.
+- `/ads-margin`: work out what an ad sale is worth on these SKUs and what that makes the account's targets.
+- `/ads-brand`: show who advertises on this brand's searches and pages and what holding them costs.
+- `/ads-change-review`: tell whether the ad changes made on a given day held.
+
+### Names
+
+1. **`cx-ads-playbook`** (recommended). It pairs with the sibling `cx-listing-playbook` word for word, and "ads" is the word the door package uses (`cx-amazon-ads`, skill `amazon-ads`), so the method and the door read as a pair without repeating "amazon".
+2. `cx-amazon-ads-playbook`. Clearest on its own, but it repeats the door's name in full and is longer than the sibling's.
+3. `cx-ppc-playbook`. The sellers' word, but narrower than the research: vCPM display, Streaming TV, reserve share of voice and Brand Tailored Promotions are not pay-per-click.
+
+## The package, and the positions that left with the split
+
+On 2026-11-10 Jack passed the 333 positions and named the package `@comchatx/cx-sponsored-ads-playbook`, the first of five ads playbooks. It holds the eight skills above and the seven templates; the report reader went to `cx-amazon-ads`, so R's facts live in `ads-review/references/reports.md` and the door's own skill says how a report is asked for and landed.
+
+Ten positions left with the split and no skill of this package cites them: S16, E17, G13, G29, C11, M18 and R25 (AMC, to `cx-amc-playbook`); G24 (its Amazon Attribution clause to `cx-brand-measurement`, its Events API clause to `cx-dva-playbook`); P5 and P18 (Stores and the asset library, to `cx-brand-creative`). G10 enters without its last clause, on AMC's new-to-brand columns, which went to `cx-amc-playbook`. Their text below is unchanged. `test/citations.test.ts` holds this.
+
+## Positions the skills will take
+
+Letters as above; numbers run within each letter. Source lists are grouped by tag, Amazon's first; "and N more" means the file names further pages for the same position.
+
+### A. Reading the account (`ads-review`)
+
+- **A1.** The Ads API is served from three regional hosts, NA (`advertising-api.amazon.com`), EU (`-eu`) and FE (`-fe`), each with its own marketplace list; Ireland is a country code that the Profiles model tables under region EU, while Amazon's endpoint tables omit it. — `P-ads-api-surface-1`, `P-ads-api-surface-2`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-13`. [official] *API overview*; *Well-Architected Framework: Fundamental component*; *Profiles* model; *Limits, constraints, and quotas*; Release notes index. [opinion] `salton4`, issue 391.
+- **A2.** Login with Amazon tokens are valid in every region; an access token lives 60 minutes, and a refresh token for advertising scopes issued on or after 2026-07-30 expires 365 days after the advertiser's consent. — `P-ads-api-surface-3`, `P-ads-api-surface-4`. [official] *Authorization grants*; *Access tokens*; *Refresh tokens*; *Release notes* (2026-05-26). [opinion] Airbyte.
+- **A3.** The `advertising::campaign_management` scope lets an application act with whatever advertising permissions the authorising user holds; each operation names the permissions it requires, and too little permission answers 401. — `P-ads-api-surface-5`, `P-ads-api-surface-6`. [official] *Permissions*; *Authorization grants*; *Sponsored Products* model; *Manager accounts*. [opinion] `jerirose` (Amazon Ads docs contributor), issue 406.
+- **A4.** A profile is one advertiser account in one marketplace; `GET /v2/profiles` takes no Scope header, lists only the calling region's profiles, returns nothing for an account that has never created a campaign, and types each as `seller`, `vendor` or `agency` (with `KDP_AUTHOR` as a sub-type). — `P-campaign-structure-1`, `P-ads-api-surface-7`, `P-ads-api-surface-8`, `P-ads-api-surface-9`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-5`. [official] *Profiles*; *Profiles* model; Profiles contract; Profiles guide.
+- **A5.** Ads API v1 reporting, v1 recommendations and Stream v2 identify the advertiser by a global account id (`amzn1.ads-account.g.*`), not by profile, and `POST /adsApi/v1/query/advertiserAccounts` maps each global account to its per-marketplace `profileId`s, paging by `nextToken` with pages that can be empty while a `nextToken` remains; Amazon names it the replacement for the legacy `/adsAccounts*` endpoints, which answer `Warning: 299` from July 2026, block new client integrations (existing callers continue "through an allowlist") and answer `404` from July 2027. Stream v2 takes no manager account id, Vendor Group id or Seller Central merchant id. — `P-campaign-structure-2`, `P-ads-api-surface-10`, `P-ads-api-surface-11`, `P-ads-api-surface-66`, `P-reporting-46`, `P-campaign-structure-49`, `P-ads-api-surface-41`, `P-reporting-45`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-60`. [official] *Global campaigns for Sponsored Products*; *QueryAdvertiserAccount API developer guide*; *Query advertiser accounts*; *Stream v2: Create a subscription*; *Recommendations API: How to*; and 5 more.
+- **A6.** The United Kingdom is `UK` in the Profiles model and `GB` in the v1 `Marketplace` and `CountryCode` enums. — `P-ads-api-surface-67`. [official] *Profiles* model; *Amazon Ads API v1* model.
+- **A7.** Amazon defines click-through rate as clicks over impressions and cost per click as cost over clicks, so on a cost-per-click row spend equals impressions × CTR × CPC; Optmyzr describes the metrics as a chain from impressions through CTR, clicks, conversion rate and orders to sales and ACoS, names three root causes of an ACoS rise (traffic, conversion rate, demand or market shift) and calls a conversion-rate drop "the most misdiagnosed cause of ACoS spikes"; Chuck Kessler (Canopy) orders a conversion drop's causes from the Featured Offer first, and Bob Norberg (eComEngine) puts availability first and ads last. — `P-diagnosis-1`, `P-diagnosis-40`, `P-diagnosis-41`, `P-diagnosis-80`. [official] v1 "Clicks (Delivery)" metric page; "Placement report for Sponsored Products". [opinion] Optmyzr, "Why Amazon Performance Drops Feel Random"; Optmyzr, "Your Amazon ACoS Spiked"; Canopy, "Amazon Conversion Rate"; eComEngine, "'Why Are Sales Down?'".
+- **A8.** A Sponsored Products or display ad serves only while the advertised product holds the Featured Offer and is in stock, judged at the moment the shopper views it; an advertised product that goes out of stock is paused within its campaign, and a product without the Featured Offer gets zero impressions even when the campaign runs. — `P-launch-1`, `P-diagnosis-4`, `P-diagnosis-5`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-6`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-40`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-41`, `P-goals-and-economics-30`, `P-change-measurement-15`, `P-diagnosis-62`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-15`. [official] *New advertiser success guide*; *How to improve your product detail page for advertising*; API *Sponsored Products product ads*; Amazon Ads "FAQs"; Seller Forums "Sponsored Products and Buy Box"; and 9 more. [opinion] Rel.ai.
+- **A9.** When another seller holds the Featured Offer on a brand's own ASIN, the brand's SP and display ads for that ASIN serve no impressions while its Sponsored Brands ads keep serving and send shoppers to a page whose default offer is the other seller's, and Amazon routes the case to Seller Support ("Advertising Support can't directly restore Featured Offer eligibility"); Canopy Management, Pattern UK and a seller in the Seller Forums describe spend reaching the other seller's offer; Trellis's page says SP ads "keep running" after a Buy Box loss, against Amazon's page; and Rel.ai names Buy Box loss as the most common cause of a sudden SP impression drop, with the console showing a campaign as delivering while its ads are skipped. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-42`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-46`, `P-diagnosis-45`. [official] *Understand Featured Offer eligibility*. [opinion] Canopy Management (Chuck Kessler), Pattern UK and a seller in the Seller Forums (Europe), on spend reaching the other seller's offer; Trellis, *Stop paying for a lost buy box*; Rel.ai, "Your Ads Stopped Showing and It's Not Your Bid".
+- **A10.** Amazon announced on 2026-07-06 that "Starting in July 2026, we'll begin removing seller eligibility requirements for the Featured Offer", rolling out gradually and completing by the end of 2026, and that "We're not changing how the Featured Offer is selected"; Seller Central's *Featured Offer eligibility* page as captured on 2026-10-14 reads "As of September 2026, Amazon no longer maintains a seller eligibility requirement", while the ads guides read on 2026-11-09 still say an advertised product "must be eligible to be the featured offer". — `P-diagnosis-66`, `P-launch-6`. [official] "Updates to Featured Offer eligibility requirements" (Seller Forums, News_Amazon); Susie_Amazon reply (2026-07-16); G200418100 (listing-playbook capture); *How to improve your product detail page for advertising*.
+- **A11.** Amazon states that an offer whose price plus shipping is above the Competitive External Price, where one exists, or above recent prices is ineligible to be the Featured Offer at that price "regardless of changes to price or stock of competitors"; SP-API exposes the reference prices (`PRICING_HEALTH`), the price at or below which an offer can expect to win, which Amazon says "is not guaranteed" (`getFeaturedOfferExpectedPriceBatch`, up to 40 SKUs), and the winner per customer segment (`getCompetitiveSummary`); landed price subtracts points, a program that exists only in Japan; and Repricer.com and AMALYZE hold that price moves Featured Offer status and conversion, without publishing data or a method. — `P-diagnosis-60`, `P-diagnosis-61`, `P-diagnosis-63`, `P-diagnosis-64`, `P-diagnosis-65`, `P-goals-and-economics-61`, `P-goals-and-economics-70`. [official] "Product Pricing API and Notifications FAQ"; Seller Support email quoted in Seller Forums (2025-03-30); Kai_Amazon reply in Seller Forums (2026-08-07); "Notification Type Values"; `PricingHealthNotification.json`; and 6 more. [opinion] Repricer.com (Colin Palin); AMALYZE.
+- **A12.** The Buy Box holder over time is in Keepa's histories (`-1` when no offer or seller qualified) and the current holder in SP-API `getItemOffers` (`IsBuyBoxWinner`); Sales and Traffic's `buyBoxPercentage` is the share of page views with a buy box, and that report's `refundRate` description reads inverted. — `P-diagnosis-79`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-43`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-44`, `P-diagnosis-34`. [official] Product Pricing v0 and 2022-05-01 models (amzn/selling-partner-api-models); `sellerSalesAndTrafficReport.json`. [opinion] Keepa `Product.java`; Keepa `Product.java`, `Stats.java`, `Offer.java` (github.com/keepacom/api_backend).
+- **A13.** A listing can be hidden from search by the Listings Items enforcement action `SEARCH_SUPPRESSED`; Catalog Items returns variation relationships; between 2026-02-12 and 2026-05-31, by category, Amazon stopped sharing reviews between variations "with significant differences", which it says "may affect your products' overall star ratings and review counts"; and PPC Land's Luis Rijo states that the star rating under a sponsored product comes from the same shared or non-shared review pool, so a variation that loses shared reviews shows a lower rating in its ad unit. — `P-diagnosis-57`, `P-diagnosis-72`, `P-diagnosis-71`, `P-diagnosis-81`. [official] Listings Items API model 2021-08-01; Catalog Items 2022-04-01 model; Listings Items 2021-08-01 model; "Notification Type Values" (`LISTINGS_ITEM_ISSUES_CHANGE`); "Changes to review sharing across product variations starting Feb 12" (News_Amazon); and 1 more. [opinion] PPC Land, "Amazon's Seller Assistant now checks review sharing eligibility per variation".
+- **A14.** SP-API notifications (`ANY_OFFER_CHANGED`, `PRICING_HEALTH`, `FBA_INVENTORY_AVAILABILITY_CHANGES`, listing issues) need an SQS or EventBridge destination; the same facts can be polled from documented reads. — `P-diagnosis-74`, `P-diagnosis-75`. [official] Notifications API v1 model; "Notification Type Values"; "Amazon Marketing Stream overview"; Stream v2 GA release note; Product Pricing v2022-05-01 and v0 models; and 4 more.
+- **A15.** Sponsored Products v3 returns the serving status of every entity in `extendedData` when `includeExtendedDataFields` is set, with values such as `AD_NOT_IN_BUYBOX`, `AD_OUT_OF_STOCK` and `AD_NO_PURCHASABLE_OFFER`; SB and SD keep their own, largely shared enums; the flag's request description and the response schema name the fields differently, and extended-data list calls weigh five times a standard call against the rate limit. — `P-diagnosis-6`, `P-diagnosis-7`, `P-diagnosis-10`, `P-ads-api-surface-63`, `P-diagnosis-78`, `P-change-measurement-46`, `P-ads-api-surface-24`. [official] Sponsored Products v3 OpenAPI; Sponsored Brands v4 OpenAPI; Sponsored Display OpenAPI; *Sponsored Products* model; SponsoredProducts_prod_3p.json; and 1 more.
+- **A16.** In Ads API v1 an entity carries a user-set `state` (`DRAFT`, `PROPOSED`, `ENABLED`, `PAUSED`, `ARCHIVED`) and a separate `status.deliveryStatus` (`DELIVERING`, `LIMITED`, `NOT_DELIVERING`, `UNAVAILABLE`) with `deliveryReasons`; SP v1 writes accept `ENABLED` and `PAUSED` only. — `P-diagnosis-8`, `P-ads-api-surface-23`, `P-ads-api-surface-21`. [official] Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads API v1* model; *Sponsored Products* model; *Amazon Ads API v1, Sponsored Products* model.
+- **A17.** Every money stop has a name: SP serving statuses and v1 delivery reasons distinguish campaign, portfolio and account out of budget, payment failure and prepay balance, and a portfolio's state shows in its campaigns' reasons; Sponsored Brands v4 lists `PORTFOLIO_OUT_OF_BUDGET` although the common enums page does not. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-11`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-12`, `P-diagnosis-9`, `P-campaign-structure-17`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-55`. [official] *Computed status and campaign status*; *Sponsored Products v3* OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads API v1* OpenAPI; *Common models: enums*; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; and 2 more.
+- **A18.** When Amazon cannot charge the default payment method the account's campaigns pause, while a backup method, if one is set, is charged without pausing them; Amazon retries at a fixed frequency and reactivates when a payment succeeds; seller-account charges come from Funds Available, not Total Balance; billing notifications carry an impact (`CAMPAIGNS_SUSPENDED` or `NO_IMPACT`), a severity and a suspension date, and the billing API reports each account's billing state. — `P-diagnosis-13`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-32`, `P-diagnosis-14`, `P-diagnosis-59`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-44`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-35`. [official] "Resolve a payment failure"; help GPGZ28EK9WM4LZ2E; Advertising Billing OpenAPI; Advertising Billing contract; *Billing profiles*; and 2 more.
+- **A19.** Amazon Ads Status publishes six months of incidents by region and category (ad delivery, campaign management, reports, Marketing Stream) as a page and a `history.json`. — `P-diagnosis-27`, `P-change-measurement-18`. [official] Amazon Ads status page, `history.json`, `history.schema.json`; Amazon Ads Status; history.schema.json.
+- **A20.** Amazon's benchmark metrics give the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles of unnamed peer brands in a category; third-party quarterly benchmarks (Tinuiti, as summarized by Karooya) report spend and CPC moves across their clients. — `P-change-measurement-25`, `P-diagnosis-48`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-36`. [official] All releases, "Benchmark metrics and dimensions now available in Unified Reporting" and "Benchmarks reporting now generally available worldwide"; Brand Store insight metrics guide; Brand Metrics overview; Benchmarks report guide. [opinion] Karooya, "Digital Ads Benchmark Report by Tinuiti | Q2 2026".
+- **A21.** The log-mean Divisia index splits the change in a product of factors exactly into one term per factor, and an aggregated rate can show a pattern none of its units shows (Simpson's paradox). — `P-diagnosis-50`, `P-campaign-structure-59`. [research] Ang (2005), *Energy Policy* 33: 867–871; Ang (2015), *Energy Policy* 86: 233–238; *Science* 187(4175), 1975; *JRSS B* 13(2), 1951; *Energy Policy* 33(7), 2005.
+- **A22.** Root-cause methods exist for advertising revenue and derived measures (Adtributor) and, given an analyst-supplied causal graph, for attributing a distribution change or an outlier to its mechanisms (Budhathoki et al., Amazon researchers, implemented in DoWhy's `gcm` module). — `P-diagnosis-51`, `P-diagnosis-55`, `P-diagnosis-85`. [research] Bhagwan et al., NSDI 2014; Budhathoki et al., AISTATS 2021 (arXiv:2102.13384); Budhathoki et al., ICML 2022 (PMLR 162); Amazon Science publication page and blogs (2022-05-31, 2022-07-19); AWS Open Source Blog (2023-01-11); and 2 more.
+- **A23.** For Poisson counts the k-sigma limits are c ± k√c, and when an indicator varies more than chance alone, ignoring the over-dispersion classifies too many units as abnormal; CUSUM charts detect sustained mean shifts of 2 sigma or less more efficiently than Shewhart charts, and EWMA charts weight past data so a small or gradual drift can be detected; PELT finds changepoints in time linear in the series length. — `P-diagnosis-82`, `P-diagnosis-83`, `P-diagnosis-84`. [research] NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook; Spiegelhalter (2005), *Qual Saf Health Care* 14: 347–351; Spiegelhalter (2005), *Stat Med* 24: 1185–1202; Page (1954), *Biometrika* 41: 100–115; Roberts (1959), *Technometrics* 1: 239–250; and 4 more.
+- **A24.** A vendor profile's `accountInfo.type` is `vendor`, and Amazon says vendor accounts are used with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display only; in the Profiles 3.0 model `validPaymentMethod` is present only for vendors, the profile `dailyBudget` and `PUT /v2/profiles` are for sellers only, and `accountInfo.id` is not unique and may repeat across marketplaces. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-5`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-6`. [official] Profiles guide; *Profiles 3.0* model.
+- **A25.** Amazon's ad rules bind each ad to its own advertiser's offer: the Eligibility API answers only for products sold by the profile's merchant; vendor SP attribution counts only products sold by Amazon; SP and Display serve only for the advertised ASIN or SKU that holds the Featured Offer, and the previous holder's impressions stop immediately when it shifts; and for books, SP ads from an author ads account show only when Amazon itself (not a third-party seller) is the Featured Offer, and a seller's ads only when the seller's own offer is. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-57`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-16`. [official] *Eligibility* model; help GX7KDKHMWQYMJ385; *Understand Featured Offer eligibility* (help GYVDGT5WNNW23LJ5); *Sponsored Products eligibility requirements* (help GMJYF5GN8RNYB6HD).
+- **A26.** Amazon's Japanese seller page states that Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display require Featured Offer eligibility, while Sponsored Brands ads are shown even when the advertiser's product is not the Featured Offer; Amazon's AMS-era agency toolkit (August 2017) stated that "ASINs must meet retail financial thresholds to be eligible for promotion through Amazon Marketing Services", that an SP ad paused when the vendor lost the buy box or the ASIN went out of stock and resumed automatically, that Headline Search and Product Display ads continued to serve when the buy box was lost (for Display, superseded by the current Featured Offer page, A8), and that Headline Search needed at least three ASINs in stock and one past the financial threshold. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-17`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-18`. [official] sell.amazon.co.jp *Amazon 広告*; *AMS Agency Toolkit: A Reference Guide for Agency Partners* (August 2017).
+- **A27.** The Eligibility API's `POST /eligibility/product/list` takes ASINs (SKU optional) and an ad type (`sp` by default, `sb`, `sd` or `dsp`) and returns per-product statuses, each `INELIGIBLE` or `ELIGIBLE_WITH_WARNING`, that include `NOT_IN_BUYBOX`, `OUT_OF_STOCK` and `INELIGIBLE_PRODUCT_COST`; the SP 3.0 serving-status reasons include `CP_INELIGIBLE`, `CP_INELIGIBLE_ASIN`, `CP_INELIGIBLE_UNKNOWN` and `CP_INELIGIBLE_VENDOR`, which Amazon's model does not describe; CNBC reported in 2019 that Amazon emailed vendors that products "no longer qualif[y] for advertising" because their sale "currently results in a loss to Amazon", glossing the practice as CRaP ("Can't Realize a Profit"), a term no Amazon page read in 2026 uses; Flywheel (Gabe Fishbein, 2024) reports a rise in ASINs becoming ineligible for Sponsored Products after Amazon re-evaluated "safe-listed" unprofitable ASINs, in their account only SP placements being affected and some ASINs restored through Amazon reps; and MerchantSpring (Rachel Seiton) and SellerApp (Brij Purohit) state that a CRaP-flagged product loses Sponsored Products or advertising eligibility and that Amazon may then stop issuing purchase orders for it. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-19`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-20`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-21`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-22`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-23`. [official] *Eligibility* model; `SponsoredProducts_prod_3p.json`. [opinion] Flywheel (Gabe Fishbein, 2024-10-23); MerchantSpring (Rachel Seiton, 2026); SellerApp (Brij Purohit, 2025-12-13, modified 2026-10-10). [press] CNBC, Eugene Kim, 2019-03-20.
+- **A28.** Amazon places purchase orders with vendors through the Vendor Orders API: its PO types are RegularOrder, ConsignedOrder, NewProductIntroduction and RushOrder, an order's state is New, Acknowledged or Closed while the status call reports OPEN or CLOSED, and a vendor acknowledges each line as Accepted, Backordered or Rejected, with rejection reasons TemporarilyUnavailable, InvalidProductIdentifier or ObsoleteProduct; Amazon Science states that Amazon's buying systems determine how much of each product to purchase from different suppliers and that vendor lead times vary with manufacturing capacity, transport and weather; and Amazon defines procurability as "whether Amazon is able to fulfill a customer delivery promise, considering the ability of known vendors to supply the ASIN in the foreseeable future." — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-27`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-28`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-30`. [official] *Vendor Retail Procurement Orders API*; `vendorOrders.json`; Amazon Science, *The evolution of Amazon's inventory planning system*; Data Kiosk vendor schema.
+- **A29.** The vendor inventory report and Data Kiosk report the supply behind a vendor's availability: procurable out-of-stock rate (out-of-stock glance views on procurable ASINs over total glance views), vendor confirmation rate (confirmed over submitted units), receive fill rate (received over confirmed units), open PO units, average vendor lead time, units in the most recent POs of the week, and sellable on-hand units, in which backorders count as negative units; the real-time inventory report gives hourly highly-available inventory per ASIN, can be requested five minutes after each hour closes, looks back 30 days and spans 7, and is also offered as the `ITEM_INVENTORY_EVENT_CHANGE` notification; the forecasting report gives mean, P70, P80 and P90 weekly demand forecasts per ASIN for the latest forecast only, one store per request, the schema defining P80 as the units with which there is an 80% probability the ASIN will not run out of stock during the period and the Analytics page as an 80% probability that customer demand will not exceed the weekly forecast. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-29`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-31`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-33`. [official] `vendorInventoryReport.json`; Data Kiosk vendor schema; *Analytics Reports*; `vendorForecastingReport.json`.
+- **A30.** Intentwise (Michael Waters, 2023) states that Vendor Central takes about 48 hours to refresh inventory data, and that Amazon auto-pauses Sponsored Products for out-of-stock products but not Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display or DSP, a line the vendor file's verifier sets against Amazon's current Featured Offer page for Display (A8). — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-32`. [opinion] Intentwise, Michael Waters (2023-07-10), on pausing ad spend when inventory is low.
+
+### L. Launch (`ads-launch`)
+
+- **L1.** Sponsored Products needs a Professional plan or a vendor account and an eligible category; adult, used, refurbished and closed-category products are excluded, variation parents and suppressed listings cannot be advertised, and only the child variation is eligible. — `P-launch-2`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-1`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-7`, `P-campaign-structure-50`. [official] *New advertiser success guide*; Sponsored Products | Amazon Ads; Sponsored Products eligibility requirements; *How to improve your products for advertising*.
+- **L2.** Sponsored Brands, display ads, Streaming TV and Stores need Brand Registry (or a vendor account), and Streaming TV is not open to Health and Personal Care advertisers; Brand Registry needs the brand name on the product or packaging and, in one Amazon page's words, a pending or registered trademark, in another's an active registered trademark. — `P-launch-3`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-2`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-3`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-4`. [official] *Advertising | Sell on Amazon*; *Amazon Brand Registry | Sell on Amazon*; Eligibility OpenAPI (NOT_BRAND_REPRESENTATIVE, NO_BRAND_RELATIONS); Understand Sponsored Brands; Understand brands on Amazon Ads; and 5 more.
+- **L3.** Amazon's advice that an advertised product have five or more reviews at 3.5 stars is guidance: no eligibility reason reads reviews. — `P-launch-5`, `P-diagnosis-68`. [official] *New advertiser success guide*; Eligibility OpenAPI; "How to improve your product detail page for advertising"; "Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads".
+- **L4.** Product Selector's `POST /product/metadata` returns `createdDate`, the date the item was first available on Amazon, and the recommendation API groups unadvertised, recently added ASINs as `NEW_ASIN`. — `P-launch-7`, `P-launch-8`. [official] Product Selector OpenAPI; Recommendations OpenAPI.
+- **L5.** A seller new to Amazon earns Sponsored Products credits by creating a first SP campaign within 90 days of listing the first buyable ASIN and spending within 30 days of that campaign's launch; under the 2024 terms the credit is issued within 14 days after that window, is valid 30 days and cannot pay for the spend that earned it. — `P-launch-9`, `P-launch-10`. [official] *New Seller Incentives | Sell on Amazon*; *New Seller Sponsored Products Promotion (2024)* terms.
+- **L6.** The beta `POST /adsApi/v1/query/promotionOffers` and `query/promotionRewards` list an account's promotion offers and rewards; promotional credits apply only to future costs, may be limited to one ad product and expire under their terms. — `P-launch-11`, `P-ads-api-surface-54`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-43`. [official] Amazon Ads API v1 BETA OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads API v1 betas* model; Understand advertising promotions.
+- **L7.** Vine needs a Professional plan, FBA offers and a Brand Representative or Reseller role on a Brand Registry brand or generic products; it gives up to 30 reviews per parent and takes an existing product only with fewer than 30 reviews; and Amazon advises enrolling with stock at least three weeks before the planned launch. — `P-launch-12`, `P-launch-13`. [official] *Amazon Vine | Sell on Amazon*; *New product success* full guide PDF.
+- **L8.** Under the coupon rules as captured, a product with no reviews is not barred by the rating rule, whose floors apply to products with 1–4 reviews (2.5 stars) and 5 or more reviews (3 stars), and Amazon's full guide says "Coupon quality validation rules do not apply to new products". — `P-launch-14`. [official] *Coupon eligibility criteria* GJHCPEFJ5JJQD52D v14; *New product success* full guide PDF.
+- **L9.** Amazon's 30-day roadmap puts active listings with stock, Sponsored Products campaigns and coupons on day one. — `P-launch-16`. [official] *New 30-day roadmap helps you launch products successfully* (Seller Forums, 2025-08-28); *30 days to new product success* quick guide.
+- **L10.** Amazon recommends that a new advertiser start with automatic Sponsored Products and use its search term report to find manual targets; its guides differ on when to add manual targeting, about two weeks in one and at the start in another. — `P-launch-17`, `P-campaign-structure-10`, `P-launch-18`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-20`. [official] *New advertiser success guide*; *Getting started guide for sponsored ads*; API *Sponsored Products auto campaigns*; *Sponsored Products campaign structure*; *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; and 3 more.
+- **L11.** For a campaign that does not exist yet, the API returns keyword suggestions for ASINs, bids for a new ad group and an initial budget recommendation (`-1` when there is not enough information, with up to five special-event budgets); Amazon suggests $10 a day, above the API minimum. — `P-launch-22`, `P-launch-23`, `P-seasons-and-deals-13`. [official] Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; API *Sponsored Products keyword recommendations*; *Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads*; *Getting started guide for sponsored ads*; Ads API *Limits*; and 1 more.
+- **L12.** Amazon's guides set time marks for a new campaign: in the first week monitor metrics at least twice a week, test match types for at least one to two weeks before pausing keywords, evaluate a keyword after at least 20 clicks before adding it as a negative, and let negatives run for two weeks or more before changing strategy. — `P-launch-26`. [official] *Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads*; *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*.
+- **L13.** No Amazon page claims a "honeymoon" ranking boost for new products in Amazon's own voice; Amazon's cold-start patents give example durations such as ninety days, not operating figures; and practitioners disagree, from My Amazon Guy's "Typically 15 – 30 days" and m19's "a couple of weeks… not a hardcoded duration" to Best at Amazon's "myth", Code3's "debunks" and Canopy's "Amazon has never confirmed one". — `P-launch-27`, `P-launch-31`, `P-launch-32`. [official] *Tips for new product success*. [opinion] My Amazon Guy (Steven Pope, 2021); m19; Best at Amazon; Code3; Canopy (Chuck Kessler). [research] US20230367818A1 / US12346379B2; US11269898B1.
+- **L14.** Amazon researchers report that new items "typically cross the cold start barrier through very specific queries" and that a prior from similar items with early stopping raised new-product impressions and purchases in an online A/B test; Amazon-affiliated researchers report that a ranking model lending new items behavioural signals borrowed from their substitutes has served customers since 2025, on a platform the paper names only as "a large E-commerce platform". — `P-launch-29`, `P-launch-30`. [research] Han et al., CIKM 2022; Dong et al., arXiv 2602.14502.
+- **L15.** Review Requests (US beta) is a Sponsored Products campaign with goal `ENGAGEMENT`, fixed once set, billed per rating or review left on the ad card, serving products with fewer than 1,000 reviews and pausing at 1,000; Amazon frames it as an answer to new products' cold-start problem. — `P-launch-28`, `P-launch-37`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-21`. [official] Ads API *Review requests overview*; Ads API *Review requests* guides; v1 `Goal`; Review Requests overview and FAQ; Accelerate authentic reviews with Review Requests.
+- **L16.** Amazon's Seller Code of Conduct, as clarified on the Seller Forums, prohibits search-rank manipulation by any name, including search-find-buy and two-step URLs. — `P-launch-33`. [official] *Clarification of Amazon's Policy on Rebates, Coupons, and other Marketing Incentives*.
+- **L17.** Amazon's launch multiples (for example 36× and 231×) compare groups of new and not-new advertised products on ad-attributed outcomes, from internal data; Amazon links launch advertising to organic visibility only in hedged terms. — `P-launch-34`, `P-launch-35`. [official] *A product advertising strategy*; *Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads*; *Intermediate and advanced new ASIN playbook*; *How to create your new product launch strategy*.
+- **L18.** New & Notable marks products new to market in the last 12 months, subject to eligibility; Amazon reports at least 22% higher click-through for ads that message newness; FBA New Selection, on Amazon's page dated Jan 14, 2026, enrols a new seller automatically when the first shipment is created within 90 days of listing the first buyable product, and PPC Land reports revised terms from July 30, 2026 that no Amazon page read confirms. — `P-launch-38`, `P-launch-40`. [official] *Amazon Ads introduces New Product Campaigns*; *How to create your new product launch strategy*; *What is the FBA New Selection program?*. [opinion] PPC Land.
+- **L19.** Canopy Management structures a launch as exploration, intent capture and brand presence and opens bids above Amazon's suggestion, Ad Badger opens manual bids conservatively, and ecomcrew starts narrow with exact match and high bids and widens later; Canopy Management, EightX and My Amazon Guy each publish launch-stage ACoS or TACoS bands above their mature bands, which do not agree with one another and which each firm calls starting points or guidelines. — `P-launch-39`, `P-goals-and-economics-38`. [opinion] Canopy; Ad Badger; ecomcrew; Canopy Management; EightX; and 1 more.
+- **L20.** Amazon's guides build a campaign by separate creates in order (campaign, ad group, product ad by SKU for sellers or ASIN for vendors, then targets); an auto campaign is complete and serves once it has an active campaign, ad group and product ad, before any negative exists; both create APIs accept `PAUSED` as the first state. — `P-launch-41`, `P-launch-42`, `P-launch-45`. [official] API guides *Sponsored Products campaign structure*, *Get started with manual campaigns*, *Get started with auto campaigns*, *Sponsored Products ad groups*, *Sponsored Products product ads* and *Negative keyword targeting*; SP v1 and SP 3.0 models; SP v1 `SPCreateState`; SP 3.0 `SponsoredProductsCreateOrUpdateEntityState` and `SponsoredProductsEntityState`.
+- **L21.** In field research, advertising raised Yelp businesses' purchase-intention outcomes by 7–19% and reviews by 5%, effects that disappeared once the ads stopped; labelling a paid listing as an ad on Zomato raised calls to the restaurant by 77% against the same listing unlabelled, and on that platform the ads' incremental conversions came mostly through the advertiser's organic listing; and on Amazon, products that bought fake reviews saw a short-lived rise in rating and sales, with keyword search position not reversing within two months, while their sellers raised sponsored listings and cut prices. — `P-launch-36`, `P-launch-47`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-30`, `P-launch-48`, `P-launch-49`. [research] Dai, Kim and Luca, NBER WP 30925; Sahni and Nair, Review of Economic Studies 87(3), 2020; He, Hollenbeck and Proserpio, Marketing Science 41(5), 2022 (published abstract; August 2021 working paper).
+- **L22.** Amazon defines a vendor as a business that sells its items directly to Amazon, which then sells them to customers; its FAQ lists the vendors eligible for Sponsored Products, any one criterion sufficing, as Hardlines, Softlines, Supplier Express (Vendor Express) vendors with a confirmed purchase order or direct fulfillment order, Media, Books and Consumables vendors, requires SP listings to be eligible for the Featured Offer, and lists Hardlines, Softlines, Media, Books and Consumables (non-Pantry/Fresh) vendors for Sponsored Brands; Amazon states that only sellers must enroll in Brand Registry to advertise and vendors need not, while the SP-API Brand Analytics reports require Brand Registry for vendors and sellers alike. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-1`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-2`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-3`. [official] *FAQs - Advertising questions and resources*; *Well-Architected framework, fundamental component* guide; *Analytics Reports*.
+- **L23.** An advertising account can be linked to only one Vendor Central account, through Access and Settings > Selling Accounts; the vendor approves a link request by signing in with Vendor Central credentials, and a user not eligible to approve forwards it to someone with admin privileges on the Vendor Central account; vendor permissions in the advertising console come in three default tiers, Viewer, Editor and Admin, while seller permissions are managed in Seller Central. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-4`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-61`. [official] *Link a Vendor Central account to your advertising account* (help G2P4Y4LNP84V8DST); *Permissions* guide.
+
+### T. Structure and targets (`ads-structure-and-targets`)
+
+- **T1.** In Sponsored Products the hierarchy is campaign, ad group, then product ads and targets, with negatives at campaign or ad-group level; products in one ad group share its bids and targeting, ad group names are unique within a campaign, and one ad group cannot hold both keyword and product targets. — `P-campaign-structure-3`, `P-campaign-structure-4`, `P-campaign-structure-5`. [official] *Sponsored Products campaign structure*; *Creating Sponsored Products ad groups*; *Get started with bulksheets for Sponsored Products*.
+- **T2.** A Sponsored Brands ad group holds one type of ad and targets either keywords or products; automatic collections take keyword targets only. — `P-campaign-structure-6`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-62`. [official] *Campaign structure for Sponsored Brands*; Help *Migrate from Product collections to Sponsored Brands collections* (GV7N6KZTH4HF4T2P).
+- **T3.** In SP the budget, bidding strategy with its placement adjustments, dates, portfolio, site restriction, off-Amazon setting and tags live on the campaign, and an ad group has no budget. — `P-campaign-structure-7`. [official] SP v3 OpenAPI; *Campaign*.
+- **T4.** Fixed at creation: whether an SP campaign is auto or manual (`targetingType`), a keyword's match type, a Sponsored Brands campaign's goal and several other fields listed per product; changing one means archiving and recreating, and a keyword in another match type can be added beside the old one. — `P-campaign-structure-8`, `P-campaign-structure-14`, `P-launch-19`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-6`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-7`. [official] SP v3 OpenAPI; merged OpenAPI; *Understand which fields can be updated*; *Getting started with campaigns* (SB); *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; and 6 more.
+- **T5.** An SP auto campaign targets through four groups, close match and loose match (search queries) and substitutes and complements (detail pages), which can be paused or bid but not archived; Amazon says auto reads the product's titles and descriptions, ClearAds says bullets and backend terms too, Ad Badger says close match takes most of an unsegmented auto campaign's traffic, and v1 names these groups `THEME` targets. — `P-campaign-structure-9`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-14`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-15`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-16`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-17`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-43`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-26`. [official] *How to create Sponsored Products campaigns with bulksheets*; SP v3 OpenAPI; *Global campaigns for Sponsored Products*; Help GHTRFDZRJPW6764R; SP 3.0 model; and 7 more. [opinion] ClearAds Agency; Ad Badger (2021-07-09).
+- **T6.** `ARCHIVED` is terminal ("permanently stopped and cannot be reactivated"); every API reaches it through a delete, an archived parent refuses updates and creations of its children, and a bulksheet archive cascades. — `P-campaign-structure-12`, `P-campaign-structure-13`, `P-ads-api-surface-20`. [official] merged OpenAPI; Seller Forums staff reply; SP v3 OpenAPI; *Global campaigns for Sponsored Products*; *How to update Sponsored Products campaigns with bulksheets*; and 3 more.
+- **T7.** A campaign belongs to at most one portfolio, portfolios do not compete with each other, they are managed per profile in that marketplace's currency, and Amazon suggests organising them by brand, category or season. — `P-campaign-structure-15`, `P-campaign-structure-26`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-54`. [official] *Get started with Portfolios*; *Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads*; *New advertiser success guide*; *Portfolios v3* OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads API v1* OpenAPI.
+- **T8.** Entity limits are published on Amazon's *Sponsored ads campaign limits* page, which says Amazon raises limits as an account nears them; a write past a quota is refused with `QUOTA_EXCEEDED` or `NON_ARCHIVED_QUOTA_EXCEEDED`, and third-party limit tables disagree with each other and with Amazon. — `P-campaign-structure-18`, `P-campaign-structure-42`, `P-campaign-structure-38`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-42`. [official] SP v3 OpenAPI; *Sponsored ads campaign limits* (help G86H2227323T8T4Q); Sponsored ads campaign limits, G86H2227323T8T4Q; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI, `CreateTargetRequest`. [opinion] Perpetua, campaign, ad group and target limits; Karooya, Amazon Ads campaign limits; AMALYZE, PPC bid and keyword limits.
+- **T9.** Campaign names are limited to 128 characters for sellers and 116 for vendors, ad group names to 255, and an entity takes up to 50 tags. — `P-campaign-structure-19`. [official] *Limits, constraints, and quotas*; SP v3 OpenAPI; merged OpenAPI.
+- **T10.** Ads API v1 models campaigns, ad groups, ads, targets and ad associations across SP, SB, SD, Sponsored TV and DSP in one schema. — `P-campaign-structure-20`. [official] *Campaign management in the Amazon Ads API*; *Amazon Ads API v1 overview*; merged OpenAPI.
+- **T11.** A global SP campaign (`marketplaceScope` `GLOBAL`) holds one budget per marketplace in local currency, a top-level delivery status with a per-marketplace one, and targets with a `marketplaces` list, where a child's marketplaces are a subset of its parent's; only the `spCampaigns` report surfaces such campaigns. — `P-campaign-structure-21`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-52`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-53`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-63`. [official] *Global campaigns for Sponsored Products*; *Sponsored Products v3* OpenAPI (`SponsoredProductsMarketplaceBudgetAllocation`); *Amazon Ads API v1* OpenAPI; *Global campaigns for Sponsored Products* (*Delivery status*).
+- **T12.** The Localization API maps keywords, products, targeting expressions and currencies between marketplaces; Amazon's keyword translation combines machine translation, linguists and closest local terms; valid scripts and symbols differ by marketplace, and the API accepts hiragana, katakana, kanji and both widths in keywords; Amazon publishes an international checklist. — `P-campaign-structure-22`, `P-ads-api-surface-52`, `P-campaign-structure-23`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-36`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-37`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-56`. [official] Localization OpenAPI; *Localization* model; *Checklist for new international ad campaigns*; Help *Keyword translation* (GHPTCVTGNFZ2KTSP); Ads API guide *Keyword targeting overview*; and 3 more.
+- **T13.** Sponsored Brands goal-based campaigns have two goals, drive page visits (CPC, the default when neither goal nor cost type is sent) and grow brand impression share (vCPM, measured by top-of-search impression share); earlier SB campaigns are tagged "Drive page visits", and goal-based campaigns are not supported in Ireland. — `P-campaign-structure-24`, `P-goals-and-economics-18`. [official] *Getting started with campaigns* (SB); *Sponsored Brands goal-based campaigns*; *Amazon Ads API for Sponsored Display overview*.
+- **T14.** Amazon reports that ad groups of similar products sold 6% more units on average. — `P-campaign-structure-25`. [official] *Product strategy*; *Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads*.
+- **T15.** A bulksheet row carries product, entity and operation over the same entities as the API; an export from the Exports API is a snapshot of current metadata with no history, with five jobs per endpoint and a download link valid one hour. — `P-campaign-structure-27`, `P-campaign-structure-28`, `P-ads-api-surface-29`, `P-reporting-28`. [official] *Get started with bulksheets: Part 1*; *Understand which fields can be updated*; *How to update Sponsored Products campaigns with bulksheets*; *Exports overview*; *Get started with exports*; and 2 more.
+- **T16.** Amazon marks a campaign it manages with `autoManageCampaign`. — `P-campaign-structure-29`. [official] merged OpenAPI; SP v3 OpenAPI.
+- **T17.** Practitioner structures differ: Perpetua isolates search terms per ASIN across auto, manual and exact campaigns; Helium 10 names four SP campaigns; Seller Labs lists signs of over- and under-structure; single-keyword campaigns have advocates (Scale Insights, Quartile, JumpFly) and critics; Mina Elias keeps one ad group per campaign against "keyword bullying"; Ad Badger segments by targeting type; naming conventions put ad product, product, targeting and goal in the name; AMZ Pathfinder names scattered ASINs the most visible audit problem. — `P-campaign-structure-30`, `P-campaign-structure-31`, `P-campaign-structure-32`, `P-campaign-structure-33`, `P-campaign-structure-34`, `P-campaign-structure-35`, `P-campaign-structure-37`, `P-campaign-structure-39`. [opinion] Perpetua; Helium 10, life-cycle template strategy; Seller Labs, Campaign structure diagnostics; Scale Insights; Quartile; and 5 more.
+- **T18.** Ad Badger calls a branded/non-branded campaign split "more of a reporting strategy than a performance strategy". — `P-campaign-structure-36`. [opinion] Ad Badger, How to segment branded keywords in Amazon ads.
+- **T19.** Sponsored Brands Product Collection ads are being retired: since August 2026 a create makes a Manual Collection ad; Amazon's pages give January 2027 for creates to error and February 2027 for the end of support, and `POST /sb/v4/migrations/list` returns recommended replacements. — `P-campaign-structure-43`, `P-diagnosis-76`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-17`, `P-ads-api-surface-42`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-47`. [official] *Deprecations*; *Ads API release notes*; *Product Collection Migration Guide*; *Migrate from Product collections to Sponsored Brands collections*; Amazon Ads API "Deprecations"; and 7 more.
+- **T20.** A Sponsored Brands v4 campaign holds several ad groups with several ads each; its ad groups carry no bid; moderation rejects an ad, not the campaign; legacy v3 campaigns hold read-only ad groups; and a migrated campaign gets a new id, with the old one kept as `legacyCampaignId`. — `P-campaign-structure-44`, `P-campaign-structure-45`, `P-campaign-structure-46`, `P-campaign-structure-47`, `P-campaign-structure-48`. [official] *Getting started with campaigns* (SB); *Migrating to version 4 Sponsored Brands campaigns*; *Sponsored Brands version 4 features and benefits*; SB v4 OpenAPI; SB v3 OpenAPI (`/sb/keywords`); and 3 more.
+- **T21.** Amazon labels products "suggested" on the create page, sorts ASINs by life cycle and sales in its ASIN matrix guide, and advises distinct complementary products, not variations, in a collection; m19 advises advertising "only the top-performing children" of a family, and Canopy's Chuck Kessler gives "the 20% of products driving 80% of revenue" a defensive budget. — `P-campaign-structure-51`, `P-campaign-structure-52`, `P-campaign-structure-53`. [official] *Product strategy*; Product selector OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads ASIN selection and promotion strategies*; *Migrate from Product collections to Sponsored Brands collections*. [opinion] m19; Canopy Management.
+- **T22.** When one keyword is set in several match types with different bids, the match type with the highest bid is used and "you won't be bidding against yourself"; Amazon's pages read do not say whether this reaches across ad groups or campaigns, to same-match-type copies, or to different keywords and targets of one advertiser matching one query, while its targeting guide says bids set by product priority give the top-priority product "the best opportunity to get top ad placements"; practitioners disagree on how a seller's own campaigns meet on one query, and none cites an Amazon page or measured data. — `P-campaign-structure-56`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-7`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-49`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-8`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-57`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-58`, `P-change-measurement-52`. [official] *Understand keyword match types*; *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; Help GHTRFDZRJPW6764R; Help *Understand keyword match types* (GHTRFDZRJPW6764R); Help *Understand Amazon Ads auctions* (GEXGZNBBWPZZK7P8); and 1 more. [opinion] AMALYZE, *Duplicate Keywords in Amazon PPC*; Ad Badger, *Amazon PPC Keyword Cannibalization*; Ad Badger, 2023-05-03; Sermondo; Pare, 2026-05-11; and 1 more.
+- **T23.** Broad, phrase and exact all account for plurals, misspellings and translations; broad matches the terms in any order with synonyms and related terms; Amazon's own exact example matches "outside lights" to "outdoor lights", its guides disagree on whether exact tolerates reordering, and no match type is a literal string match. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-1`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-2`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-3`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-7`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-4`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-5`. [official] Help *Understand keyword match types* (GHTRFDZRJPW6764R); Help *Set up keyword targeting* (GK3MNACNTXG659J9); v1 model `KeywordMatchType`; Help GHTRFDZRJPW6764R; Understand keyword match types, GHTRFDZRJPW6764R; and 2 more. [opinion] AMALYZE, *Close Variant* glossary; AMALYZE, *Broad, phrase, exact* and *Close Variant* glossary.
+- **T24.** Where no search term exists, Amazon infers one from context and serves keywords there, and the report shows such inferred terms unmarked beside typed ones. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-8`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-5`. [official] Help GHTRFDZRJPW6764R; Help *Understand targeting* (G3XAU5G7C2JTNQTM); Help *Understand Sponsored Products off-Amazon advertising* (GYTD2Z3SYMAAMVXA); Search term report for Sponsored Products.
+- **T25.** Sponsored Brands keywords add semantic matching on the same meaning or intent, even in phrase match, accept a `+` modifier in broad, and take negatives in exact and phrase only, with limits of 10 words per keyword and 4 per negative phrase. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-9`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-10`. [official] Help G3XAU5G7C2JTNQTM; Help GK3MNACNTXG659J9; Help GHTRFDZRJPW6764R; SB v3 model `NegativeMatchType`.
+- **T26.** Amazon's Japanese guides show phrase match finding a keyword inside unspaced text, and its German guide shows phrase „Laufschuhe" serving „Laufschuhe für Damen" but not „Schuhe zum Laufen", which SB semantic matching can reach; no Amazon page read states whether SP broad or exact bridges a compound and its split or hyphenated form, which AMALYZE lists as a close variant; and Amazon researchers report that Amazon's Japanese query reformulation normalises script variants and tokenises unspaced queries, in a paper that does not describe advertiser match types or negatives. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-57`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-58`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-59`. [official] ja-jp library guide *What is keyword targeting?* (Japanese edition); ja-jp library guide *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products* (Japanese edition); de-de library guide *Was ist Keyword-Targeting?*; de-de library guide *Ein Leitfaden zum Targeting mit Sponsored Products*. [opinion] AMALYZE, *Close Variant* glossary. [research] Zhang et al., *Towards Scalability and Extensibility of Query Reformulation Modeling in E-commerce Search* (CIKM 2024, arXiv 2402.11202).
+- **T27.** An SP product target holds one ASIN and is exact or expanded ("similar"), expanded being the console default and adding "a limited number of additional products with the highest performance potential" that Amazon chooses; Amazon says a product target appears on the targeted product's detail page and on search result pages where that product ranks among the top results, and in one seller's 2020 placement data published by Perpetua, 85–92% of category, ASIN and brand targeting fell on detail pages. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-18`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-19`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-15`. [official] Help *Set up product targeting* (GB2JECV9CJK6R6AL); Ads API guide *Sponsored Products product targeting overview*; What's new *Sponsored Products launches expanded product targeting*; SP 3.0 `ASIN_EXPANDED_FROM`; *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; and 1 more. [opinion] Perpetua, Angela Yuan (2020-11-18).
+- **T28.** Category targets refine by brand, price range and star rating in SP, SB and SD, and by Prime shipping, age range and genre in SP and SD; Sponsored Brands has no expanded-ASIN target. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-20`. [official] Help GB2JECV9CJK6R6AL; Ads API guide *Sponsored Products product targeting overview*; SP 3.0, SB v3 and SD v3 models.
+- **T29.** Sponsored Brands theme targets are keywords related to the brand or to the landing pages, which Amazon generates "based on historical performance and brand interactions" and a goal-based campaign creates by default; SP keyword groups (beta, US only on 2026-11-09) are Amazon-maintained keyword sets built from the advertised ASINs and refreshed over time; the v1 theme for peer brands' category searches picks the peer brands automatically, and the pages read do not say which ad product accepts it. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-24`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-25`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-20`. [official] SB v3 model; Ads API guide *Get started with Sponsored Brands campaigns*; Ads API *Release notes* (2023-08-17, 2025-04-17); Ads API guide *Sponsored Product keyword groups targeting*; SP 3.0 model; and 2 more. [opinion] Perpetua help, Andrea Mamone; JumpFly, Jennifer Gebhart.
+- **T30.** SP keyword recommendations rank by `CLICKS`, `CONVERSIONS` or `DEFAULT` and carry no search volume; Amazon says they draw on past performance and similar products; product recommendations come in themes; the v2 suggested-keyword endpoints were shut off in June 2026. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-27`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-28`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-29`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-30`. [official] SP 3.0 model, `getRankedKeywordRecommendation`; Ads API guide *Sponsored Products keyword recommendations*; *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; SP 3.0 model; SP 3.0 model, `/sp/targets/products/recommendations`; and 1 more.
+- **T31.** Search term impression share is the account's share of one ad product's impressions on a term, account-wide, not splittable by campaign, and in windows that differ by surface; top-of-search impression share divides a campaign's top-of-search impressions by those it was eligible for; v3's columns page lists it for `spCampaigns`, `sbCampaigns` and `sbTargeting` and the type pages add `spTargeting`, while v1 offers it with campaign-level dimensions only; SB v2's search-term share fields stop on 2026-11-10; and no API was found for the console's brand impression share dashboard. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-32`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-9`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-10`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-11`, `P-diagnosis-32`, `P-bids-and-placements-25`, `P-bids-and-placements-26`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-29`, `P-reporting-37`, `P-reporting-38`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-56`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-25`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-26`, `P-reporting-34`. [official] Help *SIS report* (G7AQQUSFVZPAAXEU); SP 3.0 model; SB v3 model; Ads API guide *Search (Impression share)*; v1 impression-share metric pages; and 22 more. [opinion] Trellis; Intentwise.
+- **T32.** None of Amazon's share metrics names a competitor; Brand Analytics Top Search Terms names the three most-clicked products per term and needs Brand Registry. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-12`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-34`. [official] `sellingPartnerSearchTermsReport` schema; v1 impression-share metric pages; SB negative product targeting guide; sell.amazon.com *What is Amazon Brand Analytics?*; SP-API docs *Analytics Reports*; and 1 more. [opinion] Trellis.
+- **T33.** Third-party keyword volumes are estimates, and Helium 10 and Jungle Scout each published a test favouring itself; reverse-ASIN tools list the queries an ASIN ranks for; Product Opportunity Explorer groups search terms into niches, the Customer Feedback API returns an ASIN's top review topics, and practitioners disagree on POE's access terms. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-35`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-54`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-52`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-53`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-55`, `P-diagnosis-73`. [official] seller guide *Product Opportunity Explorer overview*; sell.amazon.com *Product Opportunity Explorer*; sell.amazon.com blog *Get product ideas with Product Opportunity Explorer*; SP-API *Customer Feedback v2024-06-01* reference and changelog; `customerFeedback_2024-06-01.json`; and 3 more. [opinion] Helium 10, Bradley Sutton (2024-08-23); Jungle Scout, Brian Connolly (2024-03-21); Helium 10, *Cerebro*; Jungle Scout, *Keyword Scout*; SellerSprite, *SellerSprite vs DataDive 2026*; and 5 more.
+- **T34.** Keywords and product targets must be relevant to the advertised product, Amazon lists restricted targets, and its auctions weigh the ad's expected relevance to the shopper. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-39`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-45`. [official] Help G3XAU5G7C2JTNQTM; *A complete guide to Sponsored Brands and display ads moderation*; Help *Understand Amazon Ads auctions* (GEXGZNBBWPZZK7P8).
+- **T35.** Any advertiser may target any brand's name as a keyword and any ASIN as a product target, which Amazon calls Protect and Conquest; Amazon suggests bidding on one's own branded keywords and own product pages; ad creative may not name or disparage a competitor and may say "a leading brand". — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-40`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-1`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-2`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-3`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-14`. [official] moderation guide; Help GTEEH3E3J2BDELBA; Help *Branded keyword guidelines and keyword suspension* (G2QZJUGUT4RGLJ6N); *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; *What is keyword targeting?*; and 6 more.
+- **T36.** Reserve share of voice sells Sponsored Brands top-of-search placement on the advertiser's own exact branded keywords at a fixed upfront price through v1 operations; keywords, flight and budget are fixed once it starts; Amazon's own pages state different flight lengths, minimums and marketplaces; and Amazon reports its beta raised top-of-search share from 62.7% to 99.3% (a before/after comparison). — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-41`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-4`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-5`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-6`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-8`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-39`, `P-bids-and-placements-33`, `P-ads-api-surface-53`. [official] Help *Reserve keywords in a Sponsored Brands campaign* (G86SD7HK6NHHRB9B); Help G2QZJUGUT4RGLJ6N; Help *Create a Sponsored Brands campaign* (GF86HBCNDJUAC5WN); Help *Campaign goals for Sponsored Brands* (GXXPFXLSVX9VD3U9); Ads API guide *Reserve share of voice*; and 18 more.
+- **T37.** Sponsored Display contextual targets with refinements, and single products, serve on Amazon only, while unrefined categories and "similar to advertised products" also serve off Amazon (the console adds the latter on its own, the API does not); audience campaigns exclude shoppers who bought the advertised or similar products in the past 30 days; view audiences reach back up to 90 days and purchase audiences up to 365, including viewers or buyers of a given brand; audience ids come from `POST /audiences/list`; on the unified console contextual targeting is part of multi-signal targeting. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-42`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-43`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-44`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-19`, `P-seasons-and-deals-39`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-50`, `P-ads-api-surface-46`. [official] Help *Understand contextual targeting in Display* (GNTK7LTYZS3KSTAN); Ads API guide *Sponsored Display dynamic segments overview*; Help *Understand targeting in Display campaigns* (GPKPWTLW6B8T683N); Help *Understand remarketing audience segments* (G82GQS569JWSVNRB); SD v3 model; and 11 more.
+- **T38.** Sponsored Brands formats are manual and automatic collections (3–10 products, type fixed once the ad group exists), store spotlight and video; under drive page visits every format can serve on search, detail pages and the home page; SB video has its own placement and auction; video creative follows chapters 1 to 5 of Amazon's moderation guide; and `GET /pageAsins` returns only ASINs placed directly on a Store page. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-48`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-16`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-48`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-49`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-50`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-18`. [official] Ads API guide *Sponsored Brands overview*; Help *Create a Sponsored Brands campaign* (GF86HBCNDJUAC5WN); Ads API *Release notes* (2026-09-18, 2026-09-23); *Deprecations*; Ads API *Product Collection Migration Guide*; and 11 more.
+- **T39.** Amazon publishes Sponsored Brands targeting across three model files: the SB 3.0 YAML holds `/sb/keywords`, `/sb/negativeKeywords`, `/sb/targets`, `/sb/negativeTargets` and `/sb/themes`, while the JSON file titled "Sponsored Brands 3.0" and the SB 4.0 JSON hold `/sb/targets/categories`, `/sb/targets/products/count` and `/sb/negativeTargets/brands/recommendations`, and neither of those two carries `/sb/negativeKeywords`. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-61`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-55`, `P-ads-api-surface-64`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-55`. [official] OpenAPI models *Amazon Ads API - Sponsored Brands* 3.0 (YAML), *Sponsored Brands 3.0* (JSON) and *Sponsored Brands campaign management 4.0*.
+- **T40.** Amazon's published research describes organic product search matching as behaviour-trained semantic matching, motivated by lexical matching's failures on synonyms, morphological variants and misspellings, and does not describe the ads matcher; Amaldoss, Jerath and Sayedi model broad match as the platform bidding on the advertiser's behalf, helping advertisers when its accuracy is high and a prisoner's dilemma at moderate accuracy, in a theory of web search ads, not an Amazon measurement. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-46`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-47`. [research] Nigam et al., *Semantic Product Search* (KDD 2019); Chang et al. (KDD 2021); Reddy et al., ESCI (2022); *Marketing Science* 35(2), 2016.
+- **T41.** Randomised experiments outside Amazon found retargeting incremental for the advertisers studied, and showing the exact product a shopper viewed was not always the better ad. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-63`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-64`. [research] Sahni, Narayanan & Kalyanam, *JMR* 2019; Johnson, Lewis & Nubbemeyer, *JMR* 2017; Lambrecht & Tucker, *JMR* 2013; Bleier & Eisenbeiss, *Marketing Science* 2015.
+- **T42.** Branded-search metrics (searches for the brand after an ad interaction) exist for Sponsored Brands, display, TV and DSP but not Sponsored Products, and no Amazon field flags a search term as branded; keyword recommendations carry a `keywordTheme` label. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-21`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-22`. [official] *Branded searches metric enhancements*; v1 branded-searches metric pages; Recommendation types guide. [opinion] Ad Badger, *How to Segment Branded Keywords*.
+- **T43.** On a brand's own query, field experiments on search engines, not Amazon's store, found the brand's own ad added little when no competitor advertised (Bing, about 1–4% of clicks; eBay, no measurable short-term benefit, with organic clicks capturing 99.5% of the forgone paid clicks) and more when competitors did (brands not advertising lost 18–42% of clicks); competitors' ads took 1–2% of a brand query's traffic on Bing; at Edmunds.com shutting off paid links lost more than half the paid traffic; and a firm pausing Google search ads in random US markets lost customers, but only 63% as many as a non-experimental estimate implied. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-25`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-26`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-27`, `P-campaign-structure-40`, `P-campaign-structure-41`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-40`, `P-change-measurement-28`, `P-change-measurement-29`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-28`, `P-change-measurement-70`. [research] Simonov, Nosko & Rao (2018); Blake, Nosko & Tadelis (2015); Coviello, Gneezy & Goette (2017); Simonov & Hill (2021); Simonov, Nosko and Rao, *Marketing Science* 37(2), 2018; and 7 more.
+- **T44.** Game-theory models find mutual bidding on each other's brand names can be a prisoner's dilemma that profits the platform, and competing bids can cycle (Edgeworth cycles). — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-29`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-30`. [research] Desai, Shin & Staelin (2014); Sayedi, Jerath & Srinivasan (2014); Zhang & Feng (2011).
+- **T45.** When Google opened trademarks to rivals' keyword bidding in continental Europe in 2010, navigational searches became less likely to reach the trademark owner, more so for lesser-known marks; the Ninth Circuit held in 2015 that Amazon showing other brands' watches for a search of "mtm special ops" was not likely to confuse shoppers, because Amazon labels each result with its name, manufacturer and photo; and the Second Circuit in 2021 vacated the FTC's order against 1-800 Contacts' settlement agreements requiring rivals to refrain from search advertising on its trademarks and to use them as negative keywords. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-32`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-33`. [official] FTC matter page. [legal] FindLaw summary of *Multi Time Machine v. Amazon.com*; AIPLA summary of *1-800 Contacts v. FTC*. [research] Bechtold & Tucker (2014).
+- **T46.** Perpetua's rule of thumb is that branded spend above 40% of ad spend likely buys traffic the brand would get anyway; Haus reports, from Google branded-search tests, significant lift for 82% of brands facing high competition on their brand terms against 35% facing low competition. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-34`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-35`. [opinion] Perpetua, *How to use branded traffic*; Haus, *When is branded search worth the investment?*.
+- **T47.** Perpetua's Competitor Signals raises bids when a competitor goes out of stock and normalises them on restock; Jarvio and Netpeak advise product-targeting a rival's page during its stock-outs; Eva calls a rival's stock-out a window of "typically 2 to 6 weeks" and warns that conquest-driven sales can stock out the conquering ASIN; none of the four publishes a measured effect; and stock-out studies outside advertising find that a model accounting for availability predicts significantly larger stock-out effects on profitability than one ignoring it. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-45`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-58`. [opinion] Perpetua (Brendan Smith, 2026-07-28); Jarvio (Connor Mulholland, 2026-02-28); Netpeak (Aliaksandr Vlasenka, 2025-03-31); Eva (Hai Mag, modified 2026-11-03). [research] Conlon & Mortimer, *AEJ: Microeconomics* 2013; Musalem et al., *Management Science* 2010.
+- **T48.** Amazon's 2023 goal-based campaigns page states that, from Amazon data of 6,000 advertisers (June 2023), on average 60% of shoppers who searched for a brand bought from a competitor brand within 30 days; practitioner figures on Sponsored Brands video against competitors (Skale Strategy, ATTN Agency, BTR Media) are published without a stated method; and no Amazon page read states whether Store pages carry other brands' ads, which Perpetua's 2021 guide says they cannot. — `P-brand-defense-and-competition-51`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-52`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-53`. [official] *Sponsored Brands goal-based campaigns* (what's new, 2023-10-25). [opinion] PPC Land, repeating it; Skale Strategy (2025-10-01); ATTN Agency (2026-03-12); Destaney Wishon, BTR Media, *Ad Intel* (2025-08-26); Perpetua, *Amazon Sponsored Brands – Ultimate Guide*.
+- **T49.** Vendors identify a Sponsored Products product ad by ASIN and sellers by SKU; in Sponsored Display vendors use the `asin` field where sellers use `sku`; the v3 advertised-SKU column is not available for vendors, and Review Requests take an ASIN from both; only vendors may give a Sponsored Brands campaign a custom landing page URL, which must include the ASINs of at least three products advertised in the campaign and cannot be combined with an `asins` list (the merged model's `CUSTOM_URL` landing-page type is "Available for vendors only"); and Amazon's SP model defines custom text ads only for KDP authors and book vendors in the US, and its brand negative-target recommendations are "Only available for Sellers and Vendors". — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-7`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-9`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-10`. [official] *Product ads* guide; *Sponsored Products 2.0* model; *SD audience targeting* guide; *v3 columns* guide; *Review Requests FAQ*; and 3 more.
+
+### S. Search terms and negatives (`ads-search-terms`)
+
+- **S1.** The Ads API search term report (v3 and v1) holds only terms with at least one ad click, so a term with impressions and no click has no row; Amazon's console help says the same of the console report, while its v3 FAQ says the console report also holds impressions, and the two have not been reconciled. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-1`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-2`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-33`, `P-reporting-8`, `P-diagnosis-35`. [official] Search term reports; Search term report for Sponsored Products, G3HEFZYWZF84NPS9; Sponsored ads reporting FAQ (version 3); Ads API guide *Search term reports* (v3); *A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products*; and 3 more. [opinion] issue 476.
+- **S2.** A search term of `*` is a detail-page placement with no keyword, and ASIN-shaped terms are the detail pages the ad appeared on, shown only for auto and product-targeting rows. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-3`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-4`. [official] Search term reports; Search term reports in bulksheets; Search term report for Sponsored Products.
+- **S3.** The SP search term report carries the keyword or targeting expression, match type and ids of keyword, ad group and campaign, but no advertised-ASIN column. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-6`, `P-campaign-structure-58`. [official] Search term reports; Reporting columns (version 3); *Analytics reports*.
+- **S4.** The matched target dimension, the detail pages an ad appeared on that drew at least one click (v3 `matchedTargetAsin`), exists for Sponsored Display only; one developer reports that since mid-July 2026 it carries no customer search terms, also for past dates re-requested, and Amazon has not answered the report. — `P-reporting-9`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-18`. [official] Matched target dimension; *Downloadable reports in sponsored ads*; v1 *Matched target* dimension page; v3 *Search term reports*. [opinion] issue 476 (mtsanko, 2026-07-22).
+- **S5.** Negative keywords stop ads on search pages for matching queries; negative ASIN and brand targets stop ads on those detail pages and act only on product-attribute and automatic targets, in the ad group or, at campaign level, in every ad group; they can name the advertiser's own pages or a competitor's. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-9`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-10`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-21`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-16`. [official] Add negative keywords or negative products targeting, G8W49VU65XQ4T2NS; All releases, entry of May 22, 2025; Add negative keywords or negative products targeting; Help GTEHPEG5BXY9UX5W; SP 3.0 model; and 1 more.
+- **S6.** Negatives exist at two levels only, ad group and campaign (`TargetLevel` `AD_GROUP`, `CAMPAIGN`): in Sponsored Products a campaign negative keyword applies to every ad group of the campaign and an ad-group one to that ad group only, while Sponsored Brands has "no campaign-level negative targeting" and Sponsored Display negatives are ad-group level; each SP bulksheet negative row carries its campaign id and, at ad-group level, its ad group id, with match type `negativeExact` or `negativePhrase`, and a row with a blank Operation is ignored on upload. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-11`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-46`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-47`. [official] Negative keyword targeting; Sponsored Brands negative keyword targeting; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI incl. beta; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; Sponsored Brands 3.0 YAML; and 5 more.
+- **S7.** Negative phrase blocks queries containing "the complete phrase or close variations" and negative exact "the exact phrase or close variation"; negative phrase is limited to 4 words and negative exact to 10, each at most 80 characters (figures read from Amazon's help and API limits pages on 2026-11-09), and the match type of an existing negative keyword cannot be changed. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-11`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-12`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-13`. [official] Help GTEHPEG5BXY9UX5W; Help *Sponsored ads campaign limits* (G86H2227323T8T4Q); Ads API *Limits*; Add negative keywords or negative products targeting; Limits, constraints, and quotas, "Keyword character constraints".
+- **S8.** Amazon states a buffer before a negative takes effect, up to 72 hours for negative keywords and 96 hours for negative products. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-13`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-14`. [official] Help GTEHPEG5BXY9UX5W; Add negative keywords or negative products targeting.
+- **S9.** The console help and bulksheets offer negative exact and phrase only, while the SP 3.0 and v1 models also accept a broad negative match type and one keyword guide mentions "exact, phrase, or broad". — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-12`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-15`. [official] Help GTEHPEG5BXY9UX5W; SP 3.0 model; *What is keyword targeting?*; Add negative keywords or negative products targeting; How to create Sponsored Products campaigns in bulksheets; and 2 more. [opinion] AMALYZE ("There is no negative broad").
+- **S10.** In v1 a negative keyword, ASIN or brand is a target created with `negative: true` through `POST /adsApi/v1/create/targets`, and `query/targets` filters by `negativeFilter`. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-16`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-45`. [official] Negative keyword targeting; Sponsored Products negative product and brand targeting overview; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI, `QueryTargetRequest`; Get started with auto campaigns.
+- **S11.** Three Amazon texts conflict on campaign-level negative product targets in a seller's manual SP campaign: the API guide says vendors only, the 2025-05-22 release note says every US campaign and ad group has the same negative options, and the SP 3.0 model says campaign negative targeting clauses are for auto campaigns only. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-23`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-17`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-17`. [official] Ads API guide *Sponsored Products negative product and brand targeting overview*; Ads API *Release notes*; Sponsored Products negative product and brand targeting overview; All releases, entry of May 22, 2025; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; and 2 more.
+- **S12.** Amazon's brand-negative recommender for SP and SB includes the advertiser's own brands, "because targeting your own brands usually results in lower performance than targeting competitors' brands"; the statement names no metric and shows no data. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-22`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-18`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-37`. [official] SP 3.0 model, `/sp/negativeTargets/brands/recommendations`; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI, `GET /sp/negativeTargets/brands/recommendations`; SB v4 OpenAPI, `GET /sb/negativeTargets/brands/recommendations`.
+- **S13.** Amazon's targeting guide puts a minimum click count before judging a keyword for a negative and a period before judging a negative, and recommends phrase or exact for negatives. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-19`. [official] A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products.
+- **S14.** Target promotion groups (`/sp/targetPromotionGroups`) are Amazon's own harvest: they link an auto ad group to manual destination ad groups and move converting search terms and ASINs into them on recommendations "based on performance heuristics" that the specification does not state; the Target Promotion guide does not describe adding negatives in the source. — `P-launch-20`, `P-campaign-structure-11`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-21`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-9`. [official] Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI (`/sp/targetPromotionGroups`, `/sp/targetPromotionGroups/recommendations`, `/sp/targetPromotionGroups/targets`); *Target Promotion*; *Partner Opportunities - Campaign Optimization*.
+- **S15.** The bulksheet search term tab always uses a 7-day lookback whatever the file's range, carries the source campaign, ad group, keyword and target ids, and its page defines CTR and conversion rate inverted. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-27`, `P-reporting-29`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-10`. [official] Search term reports in bulksheets; Reporting columns (version 3); Bulksheets search term report; Clicks (Delivery); Conversion metrics.
+- **S16.** AMC's `sponsored_ads_traffic` holds `customer_search_term`, the text the shopper typed, released only for rows with at least two distinct users. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-28`. [official] Sponsored ads traffic; Data aggregation thresholds in AMC.
+- **S17.** Practitioners judge a term with clicks and no orders at different points and tie the count to price, margin or conversion rate: Ad Badger (Michael Erickson Facchin) negates at 2,500 impressions with CTR under 0.18% and no conversions, more than $35 spend with no conversions, or more than 34 clicks without one, calls these "starting points" and exempts competitor brand terms; Jungle Scout (Galeana) at 10 clicks; Seller Labs at 20–30; Canopy at 20–30 for $30–100 products and 40–50 above $100; Scale Insights' default "Unique Word with 0 Sales" filter at 25 clicks per word, not per term; Ad Badger's PPC Den page says branded terms may convert every couple of clicks where competitor terms may need fifty, and that one rule across the board kills keywords "that were slow, not bad"; and Scale Insights' word rule aggregates single words across search terms per product and adds non-performing words as ad-group negative phrase, skipping singular and plural forms of words in the product title. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-30`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-31`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-34`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-35`. [opinion] Ad Badger, "Amazon PPC Negative Keywords: Cut Wasted Ad Spend (2026)", 2025-03-06, modified 2026-10-28; Jungle Scout (Galeana); Seller Labs; Canopy; Ad Badger, 2026-01-30; Scale Insights docs.
+- **S18.** Several practitioners add a term moved to exact as a negative where it came from: Seller Labs as negative exact in the auto campaign, Canopy in auto and broad, Adbrew in every auto, broad and phrase campaign of the product group, Ad Badger in broad and auto for a term kept in exact at a lower bid, and Helium 10's Prestozon rule as negative exact in the broad ad group and negative phrase in the auto campaign; Adbrew (Ayush Chaudhary) moves a term to phrase at one order in 30 days within 1.5× target ACoS and to exact at two orders at or under target, excludes the last 7 days, and calls these "practitioner defaults … not Amazon rules". — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-32`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-33`. [opinion] Seller Labs; Canopy; Ad Badger; Helium 10 (Prestozon rule); Adbrew, 2026-10-27.
+- **S19.** Practitioners disagree on whether negative phrase is order-sensitive: Ad Badger and Scale Insights say it blocks the words in sequence, JumpFly says in any order. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-36`. [opinion] Ad Badger; Scale Insights; JumpFly.
+- **S20.** With zero conversions in n clicks, the 95% upper bound on the conversion rate is about 3/n (the rule of three, a good approximation when n is greater than 30); at single-keyword sample sizes the normal-approximation interval for a conversion rate has poor coverage and the Wilson and Jeffreys intervals perform better, and ratio metrics such as CPC and ACOS need delta-method variance. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-37`, `P-change-measurement-36`. [research] Hanley & Lippman-Hand, JAMA 1983; Rule of three (statistics); Brown, Cai & DasGupta 2001; Deng, Knoblich & Lu 2018; Wikipedia reference pages.
+- **S21.** Conversions can arrive long after the ad interaction, and delayed-feedback models treat not-yet-converted recent clicks as uncertain rather than negative; in paid search keyword conversion data are sparse and position is endogenous, and a keyword list built on estimated conversion rates outperformed lists built on observed conversion and click-through rates. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-38`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-39`. [research] Chapelle, KDD 2014; Rutz, Bucklin & Sonnier, JMR 2012.
+- **S22.** Amazon's ESCI dataset labels query-product pairs Exact, Substitute, Complement or Irrelevant. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-41`. [research] Reddy et al., arXiv 2206.06588.
+- **S23.** No Amazon model, help page or bulksheet tab read on 2026-11-09 carries a shared negative keyword list or portfolio-level negatives; Karooya wrote in 2019 that "the shared negative keyword list has been missing from Amazon Ads" and its tool adds each list entry as campaign-level negative keywords in every associated campaign; RedHen Labs keeps 69 campaign-level exact negatives across 43 campaigns; Adbrew negates a term that reaches exact in every auto, broad and phrase campaign of its product group; and SellerSprite writes that Amazon allows reusable negative keyword lists and that portfolios can carry negatives across campaigns. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-48`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-49`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-46`. [official] Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI incl. beta; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; Sponsored Brands 3.0 YAML; Sponsored Display 3.0 YAML; Portfolio budgets, GU7E77PGF96FMW3X; and 1 more. [opinion] Karooya, 2019-02-12; RedHen Labs, 2026-08-27; Adbrew, 2026-10-27; SellerSprite, 2026-06-16.
+- **S24.** Negatives are written per product: SP 3.0 `/sp/negativeKeywords`, `/sp/campaignNegativeKeywords` and the negative target paths, where campaign negative targeting clauses are "only available for AUTO campaigns"; SB `POST /sb/negativeKeywords` and `/sb/negativeTargets`, at most 100 per call; SD ad-group negative targeting clauses on `POST /sd/negativeTargets`, with no negative keyword path in the SD 3.0 model; and the v1 target tables have no Sponsored Display column, while the v1 `AdProduct` enum and the campaign-management overview include it and no 2026 release note read announces it in v1 campaign management. — `P-search-terms-and-negatives-50`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-51`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-52`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-53`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-54`. [official] Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; Sponsored Brands 3.0 YAML; Sponsored Brands negative keyword targeting; Sponsored Display 3.0 YAML; Sponsored Display contextual targeting guide; and 5 more.
+
+### B. Bids, budgets and Amazon's automation (`ads-bids-and-budgets`)
+
+- **B1.** A bid is the maximum an advertiser authorises per click (or per 1,000 viewable impressions); Amazon describes "a form of generalized “second-price” auction" with a hard reserve a bid must exceed to enter and soft reserves set in real time, a winner above both paying the soft reserve and a winner above the hard reserve but below the soft one still winning and paying its own bid; it states that "the price charged to you may exceed the runner-up bid", that reserves move with factors including predicted sale likelihood, predicted return on ad spend, competing bids, placement, context and peak periods and "aren't predictable in advance by anyone, including Amazon or the advertiser", and that it never charges more than the maximum effective bid, which includes bid adjustments and the bidding strategy; Chuck Kessler (Canopy Management) quotes Amazon's wording that the final CPC "will never exceed your maximum adjusted bid" and holds that the gap between bid and average CPC is the advertiser's only account-specific read on the price cushion. — `P-bids-and-placements-1`, `P-bids-and-placements-2`, `P-bids-and-placements-3`, `P-diagnosis-30`, `P-seasons-and-deals-18`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-23`, `P-goals-and-economics-12`, `P-change-measurement-53`, `P-diagnosis-47`. [official] *Understand Amazon Ads auctions* (help GEXGZNBBWPZZK7P8); *Understand bidding on Sponsored ads* (help GDS2E64R9GQ35768); *What is cost per click (CPC)?*; *Amazon's response to the FTC's lawsuit regarding Sponsored Ads* (aboutamazon.com); *Understand auctions for Sponsored Products ads across retailers* (help GW3CP75ZUTET4QEF); and 2 more. [opinion] Canopy Management, "Amazon CPC: What Your Cost Per Click Actually Means".
+- **B2.** Amazon ranks ads by relevance and bid and states that ads with lower bids and higher relevance "can and do win". — `P-bids-and-placements-4`. [official] *Understand Amazon Ads auctions*; *Amazon's response to the FTC's lawsuit*.
+- **B3.** The FTC and 22 states allege (complaint of 2026-08-31, untested, trial set for 2027-03-29) that an undisclosed soft reserve "beginning in 2019" made Sponsored Products advertisers pay their own bid 30–40% of the time in 2021, 70% in 2022 and about 80% in 2024, that Amazon raised reserve-price surcharges during Prime Day and other high-velocity events, and that Amazon more than doubled top-of-page desktop ads in one year although an internal study found higher ad loads "decreases purchase rates and increases search abandonment"; Texas, suing separately the same day, alleges soft reserves lift the winner's cost by roughly 17% on ordinary days and more than 25% at peak events; Amazon disputes the characterisation, and states that inflation-adjusted SP search CPC was flat from 2019 to 2024 while conversion rates rose 24% from 2021 to 2025, that about 92% of selected SP ads in 2024 were not the highest bid, and that competitors' average bids on keywords fell about 83% in one study when one advertiser stopped bidding. — `P-bids-and-placements-5`, `P-diagnosis-39`, `P-seasons-and-deals-19`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-24`, `P-goals-and-economics-13`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-33`, `P-diagnosis-31`. [official] *Amazon's response to the FTC's lawsuit regarding Sponsored Ads* (aboutamazon.com). [opinion] *FTC, States Sue Amazon Over Secret Ad Surcharge Scheme* (FTC press release of 2026-08-31); FTC press release of 2026-11-05; FTC et al. v. Amazon complaint ¶¶68–72, 219–226 (filed 2026-08-31); FTC v. Amazon, Document 114, ¶¶230–238; Texas Attorney General press release, Aug 31, 2026; PYMNTS, 2026-10-11.
+- **B4.** In auction research, reserve prices raised a search engine's revenues "substantially" in a large field experiment; in the generalized second-price auction a bidder's price per click depends on the bids and quality of the advertiser ranked below it; researchers at Amazon Ads and Outreach describe a soft floor under which a bidder still wins and pays its own bid, and find in simulation that soft floors barely change revenue with symmetric single-query bidders but can change it when bidders choose which queries to target; Ad Badger holds that an advertiser can infer its auction pricing only from its own account, as average CPC over the current bid per target, with ratios near 0.90–1.00 meaning effectively first-price. — `P-diagnosis-53`, `P-diagnosis-54`, `P-bids-and-placements-40`, `P-goals-and-economics-14`. [opinion] Ad Badger, *Amazon Says Its Ad Auction Was Second-Price. The FTC Says You Paid Your Own Bid Anyway.* (2026-09-10). [research] Ostrovsky & Schwarz (2023), *JPE* 131(12): 3352–3376; Edelman, Ostrovsky & Schwarz (2007), *AER* 97(1); Varian (2007), *IJIO* 25(6); Chen (Outreach Inc.), Nabi & Siniscalchi (Amazon Ads), *Advancing Ad Auction Realism*, AdKDD 2023; Zeithammer, *Management Science* 2019.
+- **B5.** Sponsored Products has four bidding strategies, in the 3.0 API `LEGACY_FOR_SALES` (dynamic down only, which an API-created campaign with no strategy gets), `AUTO_FOR_SALES` (up and down), `MANUAL` (fixed) and `RULE_BASED`; down only may lower a bid by up to 100% for clicks Amazon judges less likely to convert and never raises it, and fixed uses the exact bid plus placement adjustments with no dynamic bidding, which Amazon says may give more impressions but fewer conversions for the spend. — `P-bids-and-placements-6`, `P-bids-and-placements-7`, `P-bids-and-placements-9`. [official] Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; *Bidding strategies for Sponsored Products* (help GCU2BUWJH2W3A8Z7).
+- **B6.** Under dynamic bids up and down, Amazon's current help, library guide and SP 3.0 and v1 models say Amazon may raise or lower a bid by up to 100% for all placements, while the author-facing guide still gives 100% for top of search and 50% elsewhere; no page dates a change. — `P-bids-and-placements-8`, `P-launch-24`, `P-diagnosis-37`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-2`, `P-change-measurement-12`. [official] *Bidding strategies for Sponsored Products* (help GCU2BUWJH2W3A8Z7); *Dynamic bidding for Sponsored Products*; *Guide to dynamic bidding - up and down with Sponsored Products*; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; and 3 more.
+- **B7.** SP placement adjustments raise a bid 0–900% for top of search (up to the first five positions of the top row on desktop, four on mobile), rest of search, product pages and Amazon Business, and apply only when the ad competes for that placement; dynamic bidding then works on the placement-adjusted bid, so a $1 bid with +50% top of search can reach $3 under up and down. — `P-bids-and-placements-10`, `P-bids-and-placements-11`, `P-campaign-structure-54`. [official] *Understand bid adjustments in Sponsored ads* (help GQ4R4FR4H56JL6V8); *Adjust Sponsored Products bids* (help GYYZVM7LGSRYGWV5); Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; *Understand bid adjustments in Sponsored ads*; *Adjust Sponsored Products bids*; and 1 more.
+- **B8.** In Sponsored Products adjustments of different kinds multiply (placement × audience × video); an SP 3.0 campaign may boost up to 10 audiences (Amazon or AMC audiences; one outside the US), each 0–900%, and when a shopper is in several only the highest boost applies, ties going to one audience at random; in v1 the field `bidAdjustments.audienceBidAdjustments[]` takes at most one per campaign; audience ids come from `POST /targetableEntities/list`, and "Only the audiences retrieved using these filters are usable"; a Sponsored Brands campaign takes one audience group (Amazon-built or AMC, not both). — `P-bids-and-placements-12`, `P-bids-and-placements-13`, `P-ads-api-surface-47`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-51`, `P-ads-api-surface-45`, `P-ads-api-surface-48`, `P-bids-and-placements-32`. [official] *Adjust Sponsored Products bids*; *Understand bid adjustments in Sponsored ads*; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI (`shopperCohortBidding`); *Bidding strategies for Sponsored Products*; *Set bids in a Sponsored Products campaign* (help GTMXQWASBRZTHLF2); and 14 more.
+- **B9.** SP off-Amazon placements are on by default, use the campaign's own bid and budget, take no top-of-search, rest-of-search or product-page adjustments while dynamic and rule-based bidding still apply, are bid by Amazon on third-party sites by predicted click-through and conversion and submitted to the publisher, who decides which ads show, are governed by `offAmazonBudgetControlStrategy` (`MAXIMIZE_REACH`, the console default, or `MINIMIZE_SPEND`), and show their cost in the placement report and, since 2026-06-08, in a US bulksheet column, not in Campaign Manager; PPC Land's Luis Rijo reports that from 2026-08-10 SP ads may also serve through Amazon Influencer Program creators, enrolled by default at existing bids and budgets. — `P-bids-and-placements-14`, `P-bids-and-placements-15`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-15`, `P-diagnosis-16`, `P-diagnosis-58`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-38`, `P-change-measurement-44`. [official] *Understand Sponsored Products off-Amazon advertising* (help GYTD2Z3SYMAAMVXA); Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; "Troubleshoot your campaign status"; "Placement report for Sponsored Products"; Amazon Ads API "Release notes"; and 3 more. [opinion] PPC Land, Rijo 2026.
+- **B10.** A site restriction (Amazon Business only, or Amazon Haul in the US) is set at creation and cannot be changed, has its own program-eligibility reason, and leaves the campaign without audience (shopper-cohort) bid adjustments or the Amazon Business placement adjustment. — `P-bids-and-placements-16`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-22`. [official] *Sites selection for Sponsored Ads campaigns* (help GDLQ5D2BNFCAU3TW); Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; v1 merged contract; Eligibility contract.
+- **B11.** Rule-based bidding adjusts base bids per impression toward a ROAS guardrail that Amazon bases on the previous 21 days and does not guarantee, can raise a bid up to five times the adjusted bid, sets a goal itself when none is given, and, Amazon warns, can reduce conversions under an aggressive guardrail; it needs a campaign running at least 10 days with at least 10 conversions in the last 30, at or above a marketplace minimum daily budget, so a newly launched campaign is not eligible and a comparison with ineligible campaigns mixes the rule's effect with that gate; Amazon switches it off when 20-day ROAS falls below 30% of the prior 20-to-40-day ROAS, restoring the earlier strategy and bids. — `P-bids-and-placements-17`, `P-bids-and-placements-18`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-4`, `P-goals-and-economics-19`, `P-change-measurement-13`, `P-launch-25`, `P-campaign-structure-57`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-28`. [official] *Bidding rules for Sponsored Products* (help GDLQ5D2BNFCAU3TW); *Sponsored Products Rule-based bidding overview*; *Getting started with the Sponsored Products rule-based bidding API*.
+- **B12.** Schedule bid rules are SP only and only raise bids, by an integer 1–100% of the base bid, for an hour window, weekday, date range or event ("Recurring Events" in JP only, "Individual Events" worldwide); several rules add together and the total adds to the placement adjustment (Amazon's example: $1.00, top of search +10%, Monday rule +20% gives $1.30); a change takes effect within 24 hours, a campaign carries at most 20, and they cannot be applied to a campaign with rule-based bidding active and go on hold if it switches to rule-based bidding. — `P-bids-and-placements-19`, `P-bids-and-placements-20`, `P-bids-and-placements-21`, `P-seasons-and-deals-10`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-5`. [official] *Bidding rules for Sponsored Products*; *Scheduled bid rules* (API guide); SP 3.0 OpenAPI (`/sp/rules/optimization`); Amazon Ads "Events for schedule bid rules, now available for Sponsored Products advertisers in the advertising console"; *Schedule Bid Rules*; *Budget rule evaluation*.
+- **B13.** Suggested bids and ranges are calculated from bids of similar ads that won impressions over the past 7 days, offered as low, median and high and updated daily, so they exist for an ASIN with no history of its own, with a separate console suggestion for events in the next 45 days; `POST /sp/targets/bid/recommendations` returns up to three values per target by theme, and its v5 content type adds impression estimates, with a per-placement analysis currently available only for existing ad group requests in the US; Performance Estimate figures and the old theme-based impact metrics are not a forecast and do not consider budget constraints; the v2 `/v2/sp/targets/bidRecommendations` endpoint and the v3 theme-based content type were announced for shutoff on 2025-05-15, though the SP v3 model read on 2026-11-09 still lists the v3 content type. — `P-bids-and-placements-22`, `P-launch-21`, `P-bids-and-placements-23`, `P-bids-and-placements-24`, `P-diagnosis-38`. [official] *Understand bidding on Sponsored ads*; *Set bids in a Sponsored Products campaign*; Sponsored Display 3.0 OpenAPI; Ads API *Theme-based bid suggestions quickstart guide*; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; and 5 more.
+- **B14.** Amazon publishes minimum and maximum SP, SB and SD bids per marketplace and currency on the API limits page (on 2026-11-09 the SP minimum was 0.02 in USD, CAD, GBP, EUR, AUD and SGD, 2 in JPY and 1 in INR), and the page contains at least one apparent error (EG SP maximum 5.50); a refused SP 3.0 bid carries a `biddingError` with its reason and the marketplace's `lowerLimit` and `upperLimit`. — `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-38`, `P-bids-and-placements-45`. [official] Ads API *Limits*; Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI.
+- **B15.** In Sponsored Brands only top of search and rest of search can be adjusted, positive adjustments going up to 900% for both (announced 2025-06-19; rest of search was limited to 99% before); automated bidding lets Amazon optimize placements below top of search, and in the 4.0 API `bidOptimization: true` makes Amazon ignore `bidAdjustmentsByPlacement`; new negative SB placement adjustments are not accepted from 2026-06-15, while existing ones keep running with their current settings; under the goal "drive page visits" Amazon may raise a bid by up to 300% for an auction and lower it where conversion looks less likely. — `P-bids-and-placements-28`, `P-bids-and-placements-29`, `P-bids-and-placements-30`. [official] *Understand bid adjustments in Sponsored ads*; *Create a Sponsored Brands campaign* (help GF86HBCNDJUAC5WN); Sponsored Brands 4.0 OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads advanced tools release notes* (2025-06-19, 2025-12-01, 2026-01-27); *Understand bidding on Sponsored ads*; and 1 more.
+- **B16.** Sponsored Brands and display cost control set a target average CPC, not a maximum: the average may be higher than entered, and with placement or audience adjustments the highest possible CPC exceeds the target; in Sponsored Brands cost control is on automatically, and only available, for the goal "drive page visits", and in display bids are set automatically, cannot be edited by hand and come with no suggested bids. — `P-bids-and-placements-31`. [official] *Understand Cost controls for sponsored ads* (help GNJDAT6AEYD3XJA8); *Sponsored Brands bids by placement and audiences* (help GC8K522SMNCPH99Z).
+- **B17.** Display may raise a bid up to 300% under any optimization strategy, whose choice (reach on vCPM; page visits, conversions or leads on CPC) is fixed at creation; vCPM charges per 1,000 viewable impressions under the MRC definition. — `P-bids-and-placements-34`, `P-bids-and-placements-35`. [official] *Optimization strategies for Display* (help GDRFG6U7TRD72EFW); *Amazon Ads API for Sponsored Display overview* (API guide); *Understand bidding on Sponsored ads*; *Limits, constraints, and quotas*.
+- **B18.** Placement isolation, the same exact keyword in a campaign with a low base bid and a high top-of-search adjustment beside a campaign for the other placements, is argued for by the Helium 10 Team (2019), Feedvisor, Perpetua and Ad Badger (2020, 2023); Ad Badger (2023) also says a very low base bid may not enter the auction ("Amazon doesn't quite play along with that idea"), m19 (2026) advises against one-keyword top-of-search campaigns (minimum budgets, cost, management load), and Pacvue's moderate-base-bid argument is known only from search summaries. — `P-campaign-structure-55`. [opinion] Helium 10, *amazon-dynamic-bidding* blog; Feedvisor, *Optimizing your Amazon ad placement*; Perpetua, *Maximizing the impact of top-of-search Amazon ad placements*; Ad Badger, placement bid adjustment posts; m19, Stop bidding on top of search.
+- **B19.** Practitioner data on strategies and hours: BidX (Lena Einschütz) found, in observational data on about 130,000 campaigns in February 2024, down-only campaigns with the lowest ACOS and better conversion than up and down despite higher CPCs, and the worst ACOS where down-only campaigns carried a product-page adjustment above 0%; Perpetua (Stephen Bench-Capon), from six weeks of US SP data in spring 2022, found CPC falling from $1.13 early in the day to $0.84 by its end, which it attributes to advertisers exhausting budgets, conversion around 20% at a 6–10 am Pacific peak against 6–8% at night, and ACOS of 20–23% by day against 41% in the 11 pm hour; Clear Ads Agency (George Meressa, 2026) holds that most sellers should not daypart and treats a 2× best-to-worst-hour conversion gap, 30 days of hourly data and about $20,000 a month in spend as minimums; practitioners disagree on the best hours (Perpetua 6–10 am Pacific, Clear Ads 6–10 pm, Kepler's apparel client 4 pm to midnight). — `P-bids-and-placements-37`, `P-bids-and-placements-38`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-47`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-48`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-40`. [opinion] BidX, *Case study on the dynamic bidding strategies of Amazon 2024*; Perpetua, *Study: Intraday Optimization - Hourly Amazon Ad Performance Data and Strategies*; Clear Ads Agency, *Does Amazon Dayparting Save Money or Destroy Campaigns?*; Kepler Group, *How to Spend the Right Amount at the Right Time on Amazon Search*.
+- **B20.** Bids are written in SP 3.0 with `PUT /sp/keywords`, `/sp/targets` and `/sp/adGroups`, and strategy, placement and audience adjustments with `PUT /sp/campaigns`, each under its own versioned media type, up to 1,000 per call, answering 207 with per-index errors, a refused bid carrying its reason and the marketplace's `lowerLimit` and `upperLimit`; in v1 with `update/targets`, `update/adGroups` and `update/campaigns`, under per-product ceilings (SP 1,000; SB 10 campaigns or ad groups and 1,000 targets; SD 100 campaigns or ad groups and 1,000 targets); in SB with `PUT /sb/keywords` and `/sb/targets`, 100 per call, and placement and audience adjustments with `PUT /sb/v4/campaigns`, 10 per call, a keyword or target bid being mutable only when its campaign has no enabled optimization rule; in SD with `PUT /sd/targets` and `/sd/adGroups`, where an optimization rule on the ad group overrides manual target bids and under display cost control "Bids can’t be manually edited"; Amazon's v1 overview lists SD as supported and publishes an SD v1 model with update operations, with no dated GA note. — `P-bids-and-placements-44`, `P-bids-and-placements-45`, `P-bids-and-placements-46`, `P-bids-and-placements-47`, `P-bids-and-placements-48`, `P-bids-and-placements-49`. [official] Sponsored Products 3.0 OpenAPI; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads API v1, Sponsored Products / Sponsored Brands / Sponsored Display* models; Sponsored Brands 3.0 OpenAPI; Sponsored Brands 4.0 OpenAPI; and 5 more.
+- **B21.** Published web-search studies disagree on how conversion rate moves with ad position (highest at the top, Ghose & Yang; raised by higher positions, Rutz, Bucklin & Sonnier; rising lower down, Agarwal, Hosanagar & Smith, who also find profit can be higher below the top), and none of the four is on Amazon; Narayanan & Kalyanam's regression-discontinuity design finds naive position comparisons biased by auction selection and causal effects much smaller, present only at some positions, larger for smaller advertisers and less experienced consumers, and weaker for brand- or product-specific keywords and exact match; click-model research finds click probability depends on position apart from relevance, and a field experiment found more rival ads above the organic results raised the top sponsored listing's click-through rate; Walmart's and Amazon researchers' sponsored-products systems treat position as a confounder and de-bias for it. — `P-bids-and-placements-51`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-65`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-62`, `P-bids-and-placements-52`, `P-bids-and-placements-53`, `P-bids-and-placements-39`. [research] Ghose & Yang, *Management Science* 2009; Rutz, Bucklin & Sonnier, *JMR* 2012; Agarwal, Hosanagar & Smith, *JMR* 2011; Narayanan & Kalyanam, *Marketing Science* 2015; Craswell, Zoeter, Taylor & Ramsey, WSDM 2008; and 5 more.
+- **B22.** A daily budget is averaged over the calendar month: the month's spend stays within daily budget × days and the invoice is adjusted for any over-delivery, a single day may spend up to 100% more (25% if the profile opted out, read as `isOptedOutForAverageDailyBudgetIncrease` on `GET /accountBudgets/featureFlags`), a mid-month change caps the rest of the month at the new budget × days left, when a budget changes several times in a day the highest applies that day and the last from the next day, and a cut below what has been spent today stops spend for the rest of the day; Amazon's library guide still prints 25%. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-1`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-2`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-3`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-6`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-7`. [official] *Understand budgets in Sponsored ads* (help GTGPQGUXNCTHE2DS); *Average daily budget user guide*; release notes 2023-03-28 and 2023-06-20; *Sponsored Products budget basics and best practices*; *Edit your Sponsored ads campaign budget* (help GVYUKBJQFPH7ZQ2L).
+- **B23.** Sponsored-ads budgets "are spent as quickly as possible and not paced", while Display, Video and Audio campaigns are paced to daily and minute-level targets with bids adjusted every few minutes; an out-of-budget campaign is not eligible to serve until the budget resets at midnight, portfolio caps and the SP daily budget cap in Advertising Settings also stop campaigns, a budget raise "typically" takes 1–2 hours to show as Delivering, and Amazon advises against frequent budget changes within one day; a campaign that exhausts its budget on an event day pauses until midnight, and Amazon names budget increases and budget rules set in advance as the means to keep it running. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-4`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-5`, `P-diagnosis-15`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-8`, `P-seasons-and-deals-14`. [official] *Understand budgets in Sponsored ads*; *Troubleshoot your campaign status* (help GEC8BVH43CU9UNYH); *Understand delivery and pacing* (help GCELVBWV7S8S9AJA); *Amazon Ads API v1* OpenAPI (`deliveryProfile`); "Portfolio budgets"; and 3 more.
+- **B24.** Sponsored Brands takes a daily or a lifetime budget, a lifetime budget requires start and end dates, a live campaign cannot switch from daily to lifetime (Amazon's route is to copy it into a new campaign), and a live lifetime budget can only rise; SP takes daily budgets only; an SD campaign created through the API without a budget gets a regional default in local currency (for example 100 in the US and 10,000 in Japan on 2026-11-09). — `P-budgets-and-pacing-9`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-10`. [official] *Edit your Sponsored ads campaign budget*; *Sponsored Brands v4* OpenAPI; *Sponsored Products v3* OpenAPI; *Sponsored Display v3* OpenAPI; *Limits, constraints, and quotas* (Default budgets).
+- **B25.** Budget usage percent is the day's spend over the day's effective budget, which includes budget-rule increases and the average-daily-budget lift, read as `budgetUsagePercent` with `usageUpdatedTimestamp` through `POST /{sp,sb,sd}/campaigns/budget/usage` and `/portfolios/budget/usage` for up to 100 ids; Stream v1's `budget-usage` feed (every 5% consumed) needs an SQS or Firehose destination, stops on 2027-06-30 and is "not carried forward in Stream v2", Amazon pointing to the Campaign Management API instead. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-13`, `P-diagnosis-17`, `P-ads-api-surface-31`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-14`. [official] *Budget usage overview*; SP, SB, SD and Portfolios OpenAPI specs; *Sponsored ads budget usage dataset*; *Stream v2 datasets overview*; *Deprecations* (September 2026 entry); *Reporting overview*.
+- **B26.** The SP budget recommendation returns a suggested daily budget, the share of the last 7 days in budget (0 to 1) and lower and upper estimates of missed impressions, clicks and sales that are "not a guarantee", Amazon suggesting waiting until a campaign has been active nine days; SB and SD have their own, and at their launch Amazon said roughly ten percent of SB campaigns went out of budget daily (2023); the recommended budget is estimated missed clicks × an estimated CPC, the missed clicks coming from a model of similar campaigns that stayed in budget combined with the campaign's own CTR and sales, and the missed sales are click-attributed sales, not sales caused by the ad; field experiments on paid search found non-experimental returns overstated; no published validation against what raised campaigns then did was found, and Amazon's pages do not say whether the model accounts for the hour of the missed traffic. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-15`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-16`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-17`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-44`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-45`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-46`, `P-seasons-and-deals-15`. [official] *Budget recommendations and missed opportunities*; *Sponsored Products v3* OpenAPI; *Sponsored Brands v4* and *Sponsored Display v3* OpenAPI specs; release notes 2023-01-31 and 2023-07-20; *Sponsored Products budget basics and best practices*; and 4 more. [research] Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, NBER w20171, 2014; *Econometrica* 2015.
+- **B27.** Budget rules only raise a daily budget, by a percentage, on a schedule (date range, recommended event, weekly days, hours in US, CA, UK, IN and JP) or on performance (ACOS, CTR, CVR, ROAS on SP and SD; ROAS, top-of-search share and new-to-brand on SB) over 7 days for sellers and 14 for vendors; several rules add (+40% and +100% apply as +140%), and a campaign can carry up to 250; the API guide says rules are evaluated at the start of the day and again when a rule is created or updated or the daily budget changes, while the help page describes a daily review that sets the next day's budget; a performance rule does not apply below a $10 daily budget (no figure in another currency found); and a raised budget reads back as SP `budget.effectiveBudget`, SB and SD `ruleBasedBudget.value` or v1 `monetaryBudget.ruleValue`, Amazon warning that `applicableRuleId` can be incomplete when several rules are active and the campaign's rule list is the full record. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-18`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-19`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-20`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-21`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-22`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-23`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-3`, `P-change-measurement-14`, `P-seasons-and-deals-8`, `P-seasons-and-deals-9`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-13`. [official] *Create budget rules for sponsored ads campaigns* (help G3HZWVWYE23DBR2V); *Understand budget rules in Sponsored ads* (help GNSMLANWNF344YBE); *Budget Rules overview*; *Performance-based rules*; *Budget rule evaluation*; and 18 more.
+- **B28.** A portfolio cap is a date range (`DATE_RANGE`), a monthly recurring amount (`MONTHLY_RECURRING`) or none (`NO_CAP`), a campaign belongs to at most one portfolio, and reaching the cap stops the portfolio's campaigns with `PORTFOLIO_OUT_OF_BUDGET`; with unspent sharing on (`budgetControls.campaignUnspentBudgetSharing`), a campaign that has spent its own daily budget can use other campaigns' leftovers from earlier days in the month, "up to 100% more than their average daily budget on any given day", while the portfolio's month stays within the sum of daily budgets × days; sharing is set per portfolio and on by default for portfolios created after 2025-06-20. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-25`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-26`, `P-campaign-structure-16`, `P-diagnosis-18`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-6`. [official] *Get started with Portfolios*; *Portfolios v3* OpenAPI; *Computed status and campaign status*; *Sharing leftover budget in a portfolio*; Amazon Ads API release notes 2025-07-07 and 2025-07-19.
+- **B29.** The SP account daily budget cap is a seller-only console setting over all SP campaigns, with no API operation found. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-27`. [official] *Edit your Sponsored ads campaign budget*; *Troubleshoot your campaign status*; *Computed status and campaign status*.
+- **B30.** In v1 a campaign's budgets are `budgets[]` of `MONETARY` budgets with `recurrenceTimePeriod` `DAILY`, `LIFETIME` or `MONTHLY`, and a global SP campaign carries a separate budget per marketplace in local currency in `marketplaceSettings`; budgets are in the marketplace's currency, and Amazon refuses a budget outside the marketplace's range, below the campaign's bids or in a mismatched currency, naming the reason in the error. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-28`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-29`. [official] *Amazon Ads API v1* OpenAPI; *Global campaigns for Sponsored Products*; *Sponsored Products v3* and *Portfolios v3* OpenAPI specs; *Limits, constraints, and quotas*.
+- **B31.** Hourly cost per campaign comes from v1 reports with the `hour.value` dimension, kept 14 days with a 14-day maximum range. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-37`. [official] *Dates and historical data retention*; *Hour (Time)*; *Helpful concepts* (reporting v1).
+- **B32.** Budget amounts are written in SB with `PUT /sb/v4/campaigns` (1–10 per call), where `budgetType` is accepted at create only; in SD v3 with `PUT /sd/campaigns` (at most 100), where `budgetType` is `daily` only and the 207 reply does not carry the new budget; the SD v1 update-budget schema lacks the `recurrenceTimePeriod` the read model requires; developers report an SD v1 budget update without it returning 207 with no error while the budget is unchanged (issue 475, open with no Amazon reply on 2026-11-09), an SP prompt-extension pause reverting by the next day, and a required `statusMessage` missing from `query/advertiserAccounts`. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-49`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-50`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-51`, `P-ads-api-surface-43`. [official] *Edit your Sponsored ads campaign budget* (help GVYUKBJQFPH7ZQ2L); *Sponsored Brands v4* OpenAPI; *Sponsored Display v3* OpenAPI; *Amazon Ads API v1, Sponsored Display* OpenAPI. [opinion] `zhangwg4apollo`, issue 475 on `amzn/ads-advanced-tools-docs`; `AlexUnitix`, issue 524; `vudathayajushi`, issue 525.
+- **B33.** Practitioners and tools manage budgets in their own ways: Trellis (Mike Lepine) advises recording the time each campaign ran out of budget, and its Monthly Spend Pacer projects from month-to-date plus a 7-day run rate and acts only outside a 10% band; Intentwise (Michael Waters) observes that advertisers commonly exhaust budgets by the evening and that CPCs are lower at night; m19 rewrites campaign and portfolio caps daily, spends up to 2× its daily target on a day and 1.1× its monthly target, and asks sellers not to edit budgets in the console; Helium 10's Budget Manager adjusts daily budgets toward monthly and annual plans, pauses campaigns at the plan's cap and does not consider portfolio caps; SmartScout describes Pacvue's as taking monthly caps for a fiscal year; Skai moves budget between a portfolio's campaigns to a budget and KPI plan; Perpetua's Monthly Budget Tracker projects month-end spend and enforces nothing; and Kepler reports one apparel client's daily serving rising from 8.5 to 16.5 hours, with ROAS up 95% and CPC down 58%, after early-day bid cuts with Pacvue, a single-client before/after without a control. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-39`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-41`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-56`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-57`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-58`. [opinion] Trellis, *Amazon Ads Budget Pacing SOP*; Intentwise, *Amazon PPC Dayparting: The Expert's Guide*; m19 help, *Average daily budget*; Helium 10, *Budget Manager: Smarter Ad Budget Planning and Management*; SmartScout, *Pacvue vs. Perpetua*; and 4 more.
+- **B34.** Research on budget-constrained bidding finds adaptive pacing, which adjusts bids to the advertiser's own spend path, asymptotically optimal and serving greedily until the budget ends suboptimal when budgets are finite, and finds that each budget-management method used market-wide leads to a different equilibrium; it notes that a budget that runs out ends a campaign's observed path, so "what if it had not run out" is a counterfactual simulation, and that spend-response estimates become more uncertain for reallocations far outside the spend levels in the history. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-42`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-43`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-59`. [research] Balseiro and Gur (2019); Balseiro, Kim, Mahdian and Mirrokni (2021); Agarwal, Ghosh, Wei and You (KDD 2014); Xu et al. (KDD 2015); Hajiaghayi and Springer (2022); and 2 more.
+- **B35.** Amazon changes a seller's bids, budgets, targets and creative without a seller write, through its own switches on the campaign, portfolio or ad extension and, for Alexa for Shopping, Alexa+ and prompts, through automatic eligibility with no documented campaign switch: auto targeting, keyword groups, SB theme targeting, SB cost-control rules and the v1 `autoCreateTargets` flag choose and refresh targets; every US SP campaign is opted in to auto-assembled videos (opt-out `optOuts.videoExtension`, which leaves videos already delivering running until paused through the ad extension); campaigns were "automatically enrolled in prompts"; SB headlines can be rewritten under DCO consent; and Full-Funnel, DVA+ and Amazon's creative tools hand planning, targeting or creative to Amazon. — `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-1`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-10`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-11`, `P-diagnosis-56`, `P-change-measurement-16`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-14`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-15`, `P-goals-and-economics-20`. [official] SP 3.0 OpenAPI; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; *Sponsored Products auto targeting*; *Auto-assembled videos*; *Managing Sponsored Brands optimization rules*; and 14 more.
+- **B36.** Amazon's bid, budget and targeting recommendations are dated estimates refreshed about daily, and applying one is the same write to the named campaign, keyword or placement that any other change uses; the cross-product v1 Recommendations API (August 2026) serves the types its *Recommendation types* page lists (four on 2026-11-09), Amazon adds types over time, and its guide tells readers to tolerate `recommendationType` values they do not recognise; a v1 recommendation carries a `state` (`ACTIVE`, `APPLIED`, `DEFERRED`, `DISMISSED`, `EXPIRED`, `INACTIVE`) and `potentialImpacts`, "Estimated customer benefits if recommendation is followed"; and the three recommendation surfaces (product-specific recommendations, `/recommendations/list` and `/recommendations/apply`, and `/adsApi/v1/query/recommendations`) have different shapes. — `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-7`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-8`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-31`, `P-change-measurement-17`, `P-ads-api-surface-33`. [official] SP 3.0 OpenAPI Consolidated Recommendations and budget recommendation descriptions; *Recommendations API overview*; *Recommendation types*; *Partner Opportunities - Campaign Optimization*; *How to call the API*; and 4 more.
+- **B37.** Amazon Ads Agent is, from 2026-09-29, the name of Amazon's unified ad platform holding sponsored ads, Display, Video and Audio and Full-Funnel Campaigns; inside it a closed-beta chat proposes keyword, bid and budget changes and applies them after the advertiser approves, with no public API; the help centre's "formerly known as Amazon DSP" is the same platform name written into DSP passages. — `P-budgets-and-pacing-60`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-13`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-45`. [official] *Amazon Ads introduces Full-Funnel Campaigns, DVA+, and enhanced chat experience in AI-powered ad platform, Amazon Ads Agent*; *Introducing Amazon Ads Agent*; *Ads Agent: An AI marketing assistant from Amazon Ads*; *Understand delivery alerts and recommendations* (help GR6VEAG2EQWG56RD); *Understand Advertiser Accounts* (help GXKXR56ZCMJ3WCS4); and 3 more.
+- **B38.** Seller Central's Seller Assistant (Project Amelia in its 2024 beta, agentic from September 2025) checks whether each product's listing and inventory are ready to advertise and drafts SP and SB campaigns the seller approves; Amazon describes an SP auto-optimization, switched on in campaign settings and dated to January 2027 in the US, that expands product targeting, adds relevant keywords and pauses underperforming ones, and holds every bid under a seller-set maximum, with actions the advertiser can edit or reverse at any time; no page states its thresholds or anything on source negatives, on 2026-11-09 no Ads API release note or model field documents it or Seller Assistant, and the change history API does not record who made a change; Seller Assistant workflows run "even when the seller isn't logged in", the seller choosing per workflow whether it surfaces recommendations or takes actions, which are reviewed and approved before they are carried out and logged in an audit trail, and Amazon's examples are pricing, restocking, listings and account health, not ads. — `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-23`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-24`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-25`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-26`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-44`. [official] *At Accelerate 2026, Amazon shares new AI tools as a force multiplier for independent sellers*; *Amazon Ads introduces new sponsored ads tools to help small businesses achieve their goals*; *Amazon launches a powerful new generative AI-based selling assistant codenamed Project Amelia*; *Amazon introduces agentic AI across the seller experience*; *Amazon gives sellers an even smarter Seller Assistant and a new plugin for Amazon Quick and Anthropic's Claude*; and 3 more.
+- **B39.** Third-party bid tools set each target's bid from its value per click times a target ACoS (Ad Badger and AdLabs: revenue per click, order value × conversion rate) on a daily or hourly schedule and write it through the same Ads API endpoints; they state that they add negatives from wasted spend, cut bids and pause by hour, pause and revive targets and tie bids to organic rank, none of which Amazon's documented rules do, while auto-to-manual harvesting is offered both by these tools and by Amazon's target promotion groups; Helium 10, Intentwise, Ad Badger and Adbrew now sell MCP connections or Claude skills, alongside Amazon's own MCP server; Pacvue describes "approval-based execution with defined guardrails" and dayparting from Marketing Stream data and 14-day hourly patterns, and Skai daily bid and budget optimizations, negatives and harvesting automated on user conditions, and outside agents' bid and budget changes each subject to human approval. — `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-18`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-19`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-20`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-32`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-33`, `P-goals-and-economics-39`. [official] SP 3.0 OpenAPI optimization-rule schemas; *Target Promotion*; *Overview* (Amazon Ads MCP Server). [opinion] Scale Insights documentation; Teikametrics help; Perpetua help; Helium 10 *Helium 10 Ads*; Ad Badger; and 13 more.
+- **B40.** Amazon's published lift figures for its own automation are vendor-reported comparisons from beta or internal data with no randomised holdout described: the Ads Agent figures are "Based on beta estimates", Sponsored Brands DCO's "up to 1.6% CTR lift" is "Based on internal testing", Full-Funnel's "67% higher Long-Term ROAS" is "against the blended average of other campaign performance across beta advertisers", the creative-tool gains are "versus their results before adopting the suite", and the auto-optimization, ads data manager and prompt figures compare adopters or clickers with those who did not; Improvado's Ivo Petrovic reads the Full-Funnel figure as "not a holdout test on your account"; in an auction a gain measured on a few early adopters can overstate the gain once many use the same automation: Baidu's AiAds authors expected its advantage to "gradually abate", and Blake and Coey found naive estimates ignoring test-control interference "exaggerate the treatment's effectiveness by about a factor of 2". — `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-27`, `P-change-measurement-42`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-30`. [official] *Ads Agent: An AI marketing assistant from Amazon Ads*; *Grow total sales with Full-Funnel Campaigns*; *The 11 biggest takeaways from unBoxed 2026*; *Amazon Ads introduces new sponsored ads tools to help small businesses achieve their goals*; release notes 2025-04-17; and 1 more. [opinion] Improvado, Ivo Petrovic 2026. [research] Yang et al., *AiAds*, KDD 2019; Blake and Coey, ACM EC 2014, as summarised by Holtz and Aral 2020.
+
+### E. Seasons and deals (`ads-seasons`)
+
+- **E1.** Prime Day 2026 ran June 23–26 (12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. PDT) in the 23 countries aboutamazon lists, and on Amazon Business in eight of them, while Australia, Brazil, India and Japan shopped Prime Day later in the summer; since 2019 its start has ranged from June 21 (2021) to October 13 (2020), and it changed from 48 to 96 hours in 2025; Prime Big Deal Days 2026 ran 48 hours on October 6–7; Black Friday 2026 is November 27 and Cyber Monday November 30; Amazon had not published the US Black Friday Week dates on 2026-11-09, and Amazon Japan said it would announce its dates on November 19. — `P-seasons-and-deals-1`, `P-seasons-and-deals-2`, `P-seasons-and-deals-3`, `P-seasons-and-deals-4`. [official] aboutamazon "Prime Day 2026 date"; Amazon Ads "Prime Day" events page; aboutamazon "The history of Prime Day"; "What makes Prime Day 2025 different"; aboutamazon "Prime Big Deal Days FAQ"; and 3 more.
+- **E2.** Regional calendars differ: Amazon's 2026 spring event ran March 10–16 in 13 European countries, against March 25–31 for the US Big Spring Sale; Prime Big Deal Days 2026 ran October 6–7 in 22 countries, starting at 12:01 a.m. BST in the UK and 12:01 a.m. CET on the EU page against 12:01 a.m. PDT in the US, and the German release says dates may vary by country; Black Friday Week 2025 ran November 20 to December 1 in the UK and Germany, with no 2026 UK or German dates published by 2026-11-09; India's Great Indian Festival runs for weeks, through November 10 in 2026. — `P-seasons-and-deals-47`, `P-seasons-and-deals-50`, `P-seasons-and-deals-51`, `P-seasons-and-deals-52`. [official] aboutamazon.in "Amazon Great Indian Festival"; "Seller growth during Great Indian Festival 2026"; About Amazon UK "Amazon Spring Deal Days returns with seven days of savings"; Amazon Press Center DE "Kräftig sparen zum Saisonstart: Amazons Frühlingsangebote kehren am 10. März zurück"; aboutamazon "Big Spring Sale FAQ"; and 7 more.
+- **E3.** `POST /sp/v1/events` returns individual and grouped special events with suggested date ranges in the advertiser's marketplace, each with an `eventId`; budget-rule event recommendations (`EVENTS_FOR_EXISTING_CAMPAIGN`) return, per campaign, the events Amazon recommends with a `suggestedBudgetIncreasePercent`, chosen from the campaign's products and changing when the products change; recommended events exist for SP and SB only, and a rule tied to an unannounced event is created with empty dates that Amazon fills in when the dates are announced. — `P-seasons-and-deals-5`, `P-seasons-and-deals-6`, `P-seasons-and-deals-7`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-24`. [official] Ads API SP 3.0 OpenAPI; SP 3.0 OpenAPI; Amazon Ads "Budget rules now available in Amazon advertising console globally"; Ads API "Schedule-based budget rules"; *Schedule-based rules*; and 2 more.
+- **E4.** Event themes run through the API: theme-based bid recommendations offer `PRIME_DAY`, `FALL_PRIME_DEAL_EVENT` and `BFCM_HOLIDAY` beside `CONVERSION_OPPORTUNITIES`, computed from recent winning bids for similar products, with impact estimates that assume the campaign does not run out of budget, and v1's `Bid.theme` carries the same four values; keyword recommendations offer a `SPECIAL_DAYS` theme for high sales events such as Prime Day; the v1 target model offers theme targets `KEYWORDS_RELATED_TO_PRIME_DAY`, which match queries only through the end of Prime Day, and `KEYWORDS_RELATED_TO_GIFTS`, and the SP 3.0, SB 3.0 and SB 4.0 specs read do not carry the Prime Day theme. — `P-seasons-and-deals-11`, `P-seasons-and-deals-12`, `P-seasons-and-deals-49`. [official] SP 3.0 OpenAPI; "Theme-based bid suggestions quickstart guide"; Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI (`themeTarget.matchType`).
+- **E5.** For the 2025–2026 holiday Amazon advises launching SP campaigns by early October and raising daily budgets 20–30% around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, starting three to five days ahead of each peak, as guidance figures, not limits; it describes the season in three phases, build (October), peak (November through Cyber Monday) and extend (December and beyond), the last defined by last-minute gift shoppers and post-holiday deal seekers, visitors who browsed but did not buy during peak events, and seasonal buyers to turn into repeat customers, with its New Year guide adding January resolution shoppers; no Amazon page read uses the term "Q5" or describes CPC after December 25; in Amazon's post-event teaching scenario, "Extend holiday deals into January and maintain Sponsored Brands investment" is the answer marked incorrect, and the one marked correct moves budget to high-performing branded terms and repositions seasonal stock with non-holiday messaging. — `P-seasons-and-deals-16`, `P-seasons-and-deals-17`, `P-seasons-and-deals-54`, `P-seasons-and-deals-55`. [official] Amazon Ads "Holiday advertising guide"; "New Year's Ads: 5 Marketing Campaign Ideas to Inspire in 2024"; Amazon Ads "Post-event advertising strategy" (hypothetical scenarios).
+- **E6.** Marketplace Ad Pros measured Prime Day 2026 median SP CPC up 10% ($1.19 to $1.31) and SB up 2% against matched pre-event days across several hundred US advertisers; in its data 51% of advertisers cut SP budgets and 13.7% raised them by 20% or more, and raisers and holders showed the same 1.30x ad-sales lift, which the authors call correlational; Skai measured Prime Day 2025 CPC at $1.80, down 10.4% from 2024, in a same-store cohort; Ad Badger recommends 1.5–2.5× budgets in the two days before a Prime event and 2–3× on event days, where Amazon's holiday guide and Florian Nottorf (Adference) give +20–30% starting 3–5 days ahead. — `P-seasons-and-deals-20`, `P-seasons-and-deals-21`, `P-seasons-and-deals-22`. [official] Amazon Ads "Holiday advertising guide"; "Prime Day 2026: Advanced advertising strategies" (Nottorf quote). [opinion] Marketplace Ad Pros "Prime Day 2026 Ad Benchmarks"; Skai "Prime Day 2026 Preview"; Ad Badger "Prime Big Deal Days 2026 PPC Playbook: Bids & Budgets".
+- **E7.** Amazon's holiday "myths" page says conversion rates often drop during major sales events while shoppers browse, and that a temporary ACOS spike is read against TACOS, which "reveals whether your total sales (organic and paid) are growing in relation to your ad spend"; Ad Badger reports impressions rising while clicks and conversions stay flat in the 48 hours before a Prime event. — `P-seasons-and-deals-23`. [official] Amazon Ads "Holiday advertising myths: What experts want you to know". [opinion] Ad Badger.
+- **E8.** Sponsored Products attributes seller conversions over 7 days and vendor conversions over 14, SB and SD over 14 days, click or view; conversions are dated to the ad interaction and restated 1, 7 and 28 days after the conversion; Amazon advises checking 7–14-day attribution before changing campaigns after a peak, because peak-event sales often occur days after the click; Marketplace Ad Pros found the clicks of June 26, the last day of Prime Day 2026, fully mature around July 10. — `P-seasons-and-deals-24`, `P-seasons-and-deals-25`. [official] Ads API "Purchases (Amazon retail conversions)"; "Reporting v3 columns"; "Reporting v3 FAQ"; "Ads API v1 reporting overview"; Amazon Ads "Holiday advertising myths: What experts want you to know". [opinion] Marketplace Ad Pros.
+- **E9.** A Lightning Deal runs 4–12 hours, as Amazon determines, and a Best Deal several days; both need a Professional plan and can carry a Deals badge; for deals, "Seller promotions" names a four-star seller rating and the Sell on Amazon guide an overall rating of at least four stars, while *Amazon deals* requires a sales history on Amazon, a product rating of at least four stars and a seller rating of at least 3.5, and makes deals invite-only; coupons need a 3.5-star rating, hold up to 200 ASINs, expire after 90 days and show a coupon badge with the discount in shopping results; price discounts run up to 30 days on limited units; Amazon's Prime Day coupon criteria are a discount above 5%, dates coinciding with Prime Day and the audience set to Prime members. — `P-seasons-and-deals-27`, `P-seasons-and-deals-28`, `P-launch-15`, `P-diagnosis-69`. [official] sell.amazon.com "Seller promotions" (May 27, 2026); sell.amazon.com "Prime Day tips"; *Amazon deals* G202111490 v25; "Guide to running Amazon seller promotions, coupons, and deals" (Sell on Amazon).
+- **E10.** For holiday 2026 Amazon accepted US Prime Big Deal Days deals July 8–September 8 and Black Friday Week/Cyber Monday deals July 8–October 20, with Best Deals, Lightning Deals and Prime Exclusive Price Discounts at $100 per promotion plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000; in the UK and EU it accepted PBDD deals until September 23 and Black Friday Week deals until November 18, with 30% off the upfront fee for early submission, at £12 plus 0.75% (cap £600) in the UK, €16 plus 0.75% (cap €1,000) in Germany and €10 plus 0.5% (cap €300) in France, Italy and Spain, and Prime Exclusive Discounts there need a 3.5-star rating. — `P-seasons-and-deals-29`, `P-seasons-and-deals-53`. [official] Seller Forums News_Amazon "Holiday 2026: Same fees, same eligibility, earlier deadlines"; Seller Forums UK, News_Amazon "Peak season 2026: Inventory dates, peak fees, deal cutoffs and promotions".
+- **E11.** PBDD 2026 promotional prices are excluded from the 30- and 60-day lookbacks that set the maximum BFCM deal price. — `P-seasons-and-deals-30`. [official] Seller Forums "Holiday 2026: Same fees, same eligibility, earlier deadlines".
+- **E12.** Responsive eCommerce Creative renders a deal badge automatically when the product qualifies for Deal of the Day, a Lightning Deal or a Best Deal, and a BFCM badge at BFCM, only on the "Shop now" variation, and its custom headline may not contain a price or deal; a Sponsored Brands product collection featuring products on deal automatically shows a deals call-to-action and a seasonal lifestyle image; since August 2026 a Product Collection create makes a Manual Collection ad, and Amazon dates the format's end twice (create errors after January 2027; "Beginning February 2027" in a release note). — `P-seasons-and-deals-31`, `P-seasons-and-deals-32`. [official] Amazon Ads "Holiday shopping season performance-boosting tips"; "Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertising tips"; Amazon Ads "Key events store prep"; Ads API "Deprecations"; "Migration Guide for Product Collection to Collections Ad Type"; and 1 more.
+- **E13.** Ad policy on deals: an advertised deal must be live whenever the ad is (no deal teasing); the price or saving appears in the same format on ad and landing page and promotional claims match the landing page for the whole campaign; numeric prices or savings are allowed only where Amazon renders them dynamically, and pricing superlatives are prohibited; "up to X%" needs at least 10% of the promoted ASINs at or above X%, and a claim made inaccurate by dynamic pricing requires pausing the creative and changing it to a qualified claim; event names are bounded by duration ("available on Black Friday only" means 24 hours, "Black Friday Week" about 8 days); sponsored ads may not mention Prime Day except through dynamically pulled detail-page information such as deal badges, and may not use "Prime" outside "Prime Day"; in a Brand Store, promotional messaging is allowed only with the Featured Deals widget (at least four ASINs), sales-event content may start no more than seven days before the event and is removed within 24 hours after, a Store version is submitted at least 48 hours ahead, and Store pages may not name Amazon events or numerical discounts. — `P-seasons-and-deals-33`, `P-seasons-and-deals-34`, `P-seasons-and-deals-35`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-23`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-24`. [official] Amazon Ads "Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertising tips"; Amazon Ads "Holiday shopping season performance-boosting tips"; "Key events store prep"; Pricing and Promotions; Event days.
+- **E14.** The SP-API Promotions API (2025-12-01), for sellers, lists coupons, deals, price discounts and basket-building promotions with status, schedule (`startDate`, `endDate`, `eventId`, for example "Prime Day") and validation issues, plus Prime-exclusive and brand-tailored customer segments, badge display, a stacking flag and a fee snapshot; it is read-only, has no Brand Tailored Promotions type, and no operation read creates or reports BTP or Customer Engagement. — `P-seasons-and-deals-36`, `P-seasons-and-deals-62`, `P-diagnosis-70`. [official] amzn/selling-partner-api-models `promotions_2025-12-01.json`; SP-API "Promotions API"; Promotions 2025-12-01 model.
+- **E15.** Data Kiosk's week-level `yearOverYear` benchmark compares the same ISO week number a year earlier and its month-level benchmark the same calendar month, with no benchmark at day level, so a moving event such as Prime Day lands in different benchmark weeks; Search Query Performance runs on Sunday–Saturday weeks, calendar months or quarters, and a request cannot span periods. — `P-seasons-and-deals-37`, `P-seasons-and-deals-38`. [official] SP-API "Seller analytics dataset guide"; aboutamazon "The history of Prime Day"; SP-API "Report type values – Analytics"; sell.amazon.com "Brand Analytics".
+- **E16.** Practitioners disagree on post-event spend: Pare holds ad velocity for 48–72 hours and retargets detail-page viewers at 20–30 days, Ad Badger returns bids to normal the next day and runs SD retargeting for days 1–7, and Acadia finds "consistently thin post-event lift" in its going-dark tests and trims lead-out media; Acadia reports brands running no deals lifting 46% over their 30-day baseline at Prime Day 2025 and 116% at Prime Day 2024, calls non-participation "a penalty" in 2026, and treats YoY growth rather than period-over-period lift as comparable across events because 2025's baseline week was unusually low; Amazon's 137% (Prime Day 2025) and 145% (holiday 2025) "increase in sales" figures compare advertisers with average category growth over tentpole windows against the adjacent preceding weeks. — `P-seasons-and-deals-40`, `P-seasons-and-deals-41`, `P-seasons-and-deals-42`, `P-seasons-and-deals-43`. [official] Amazon Ads "Prime Day 2026: Advanced advertising strategies"; "Holiday advertising guide". [opinion] Pare; Ad Badger; Acadia; Acadia "Amazon Prime Day 2026 – The Results".
+- **E17.** Since 2026-10-20 AMC's Amazon Retail Purchases carries coupon, point-of-sale and price-discount columns (with Best Deal, Deal of the Day and Lightning Deal types), with history since 2024-09-24, covering only vendor- or seller-funded promotions (not Subscribe & Save, Amazon-funded promotions or loyalty points); `price_discount_amt` is measured against the product's average selling price over the 90 days before the promotion; Amazon says the columns let advertisers "separate the effect of their media from the effect of their deals"; the dataset is free to query from June 1 to December 31, 2026. — `P-seasons-and-deals-44`, `P-seasons-and-deals-68`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-41`. [official] Ads API "Ads API v1 release notes"; "AMC Amazon Retail Purchases (paid)"; Ads API "AMC Amazon Retail Purchases (paid)"; "Ads API v1 release notes".
+- **E18.** Store-level scanner research puts the post-promotion dip at 4–25% of the promotion's current sales effect, usually missed by simple models and visual inspection; panel research found consumers growing more price- and promotion-sensitive as promotions increase and advertising falls, and Amazon's own guide says regular promotions "can condition customers to wait for deals"; a review found price advertising raising price sensitivity and non-price advertising lowering it; across 70 French brands the total sales elasticity of discounting was .04 and of advertising .13, discounting's long-term effect one third of its short-term effect; and advertising raised marginal consumers' willingness to pay for 17 of 18 brands in four categories. — `P-seasons-and-deals-45`, `P-seasons-and-deals-46`, `P-seasons-and-deals-69`, `P-seasons-and-deals-70`, `P-seasons-and-deals-71`. [official] Amazon Ads "Sales promotion guide". [research] Van Heerde, Leeflang and Wittink (2000), *JMR* 37(3), abstract; Mela, Gupta and Lehmann (1997), *JMR* 34(2), abstract; Kaul and Wittink (1995), *Marketing Science* 14(3), G151–G160, abstract; Ataman, van Heerde and Mela (2010), *JMR* 47(5), 866–882, abstract; Erdem, Keane and Sun (2007), SSRN 965468, abstract.
+- **E19.** On Amazon Business the business-shopper bid adjustment goes up to 900%, and Amazon suggests 20–120% for Prime Day and 20–50% for about two weeks around the holidays. — `P-seasons-and-deals-48`. [official] Amazon Ads "Prime Day 2026: Advanced advertising strategies"; "Holiday advertising guide".
+- **E20.** Practitioners call December 26 to mid-January "Q5" and disagree on it: Evolve AMZ says CPMs "commonly fall 28% or more against the Q4 peak" as seasonal advertisers exit and gift-card redemption concentrates there, and Pattern says CPCs go down, while Ad Badger's app data puts January 2026 at the year's highest ACOS (32.5%, against 28% in October 2025) and Intentwise's data has conversion falling from 13.4% in the week ending December 23 to 11.03% the week after; Teikametrics reported, across more than 700 sellers in 2019, ad conversion rising and cost per conversion falling from Cyber Monday to the December 22 shipping cutoff, which it attributed to brands having spent their seasonal budgets. — `P-seasons-and-deals-56`, `P-seasons-and-deals-57`. [opinion] Evolve AMZ "Amazon Q5 Explained"; Pattern "Amazon Advertising Post-Holiday"; Ad Badger "Amazon Advertising Benchmarks 2026"; Intentwise "Guide: Ad tactics for the week after Christmas"; MarTech "Amazon ad spend rises over Cyber 5, but most efficient sales days still ahead".
+- **E21.** Brand Tailored Promotions, for Brand Representatives in Brand Registry in the US, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan, give 10–50% off to an audience of at least 1,000 shoppers chosen by goal (acquisition, re-engagement, retention, cross-sell), each eligible customer redeeming once; one starts at least 48 hours after creation and within 60 days and ends within 90 days of its start, a brand holds up to 20 at once, once live only its budget can change and only upward, it shows a badge only to the audience and stacks with coupons, and its fees are stated only on a Seller Central help page; the SP-API Promotions API has no BTP type and no operation read creates or reports BTP; practitioners disagree on the best audience (Desert Cactus reports recent customers, Intentwise says many agencies favour cart abandoners), and none publishes a holdout test. — `P-seasons-and-deals-58`, `P-seasons-and-deals-59`, `P-seasons-and-deals-60`, `P-seasons-and-deals-62`, `P-seasons-and-deals-63`. [official] sell.amazon.com "What are Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions?" (Jan 20, 2026); sell.amazon.com "What are Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions?"; sell.amazon.com "Brand Tailored Promotions: Offer exclusive discounts for loyal customers" (Aug 1, 2023); amzn/selling-partner-api-models `promotions_2025-12-01.json`; SP-API "Promotions API". [opinion] Intentwise "Explained: What is Brand Tailored Promotions?"; Acadia "Amazon Prime Day 2026 – The Results".
+- **E22.** The Customer Engagement tool sends free marketing emails, delivered by Amazon, to a Brand Registry brand's followers and, since 2022, its repeat, recent and high-spend customers; it reports open rate, click-through, delivered emails, opt-outs, sales and conversion, and Amazon says brands with 1,000 or more followers "will have the best experience". — `P-seasons-and-deals-61`. [official] Amazon Press Center "Amazon Launches Free Email Marketing Capabilities for Sellers to Reach Their Repeat, Recent, and High-Spend Amazon Customers" (Sep 14, 2022); Seller Forums News_Amazon "Create engaging email campaigns with themed templates in 'Customer Engagement' (beta) tool".
+- **E23.** German law requires an announced price reduction to state the lowest price of the prior 30 days, and the EU Court of Justice held that a reduction announced as a percentage or as an advantageous price must be computed from that 30-day low; Amazon's French, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Swedish and Polish stores display that 30-day low for price-reduction announcements and give the "Was Price" as a 90-day median excluding promotional prices, and Amazon.co.uk shows "Lowest price in 30 Days" when the price is at or below the past 30 days' lowest featured-offer price; Amazon.de's page says event badges such as Black Friday can be added to an already active deal and carries no 30-day sentence; and the Munich I Regional Court ruled Amazon's October 2024 "Prime Deal Days" price advertising unlawful where discounts were computed from the RRP or a customer average price, which Amazon said it would appeal. — `P-seasons-and-deals-64`, `P-seasons-and-deals-65`, `P-seasons-and-deals-66`, `P-seasons-and-deals-67`. [law] PAngV § 11; CJEU Press Release No 152/24 (Case C-330/23 Aldi Süd, 26 September 2024). [official] Amazon customer help "Reference Pricing and Savings" on amazon.fr, .es, .it, .com.be, .se, .pl and .co.uk; Amazon.de "Referenzpreise und Ersparnisse" / "Reference Pricing and Savings". [opinion] heise online "Court: Amazon must label special offers more transparently" (July 16, 2025), a press report of the ruling.
+- **E24.** Amazon's promotion performance report covers vendor promotions, with types including Best Deal, Deal of the Day, Lightning Deal, Price Discount, Sales Discount, Coupon and Promo Code, statuses including `NEEDS_YOUR_ATTENTION`, creation channels self-service, full-service (account managers), automated (for example Deal-O-Matic) and manual (Vendisto), the vendor-only funding agreement id and funding amount spent, times in UTC and two years of start dates; the vendor coupon report gives clips, gross redemptions, total discount and the vendor's budget spent, including clip and redemption fees, per coupon and campaign, in UTC; and the SP-API Promotions API (2025-12-01) is available to sellers, vendor promotions being reported through the promotion performance and coupon reports. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-48`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-49`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-50`. [official] `promotionReport.json`; `vendorCouponReport.json`; *Promotions API*; *SP-API Vendor Use Cases*.
+- **E25.** Amazon's March 2017 vendor self-service promotions guide listed Price Discount up to 12 months, submitted at least 24 hours ahead; Best Deal up to 2 weeks, at least 10% off, submitted 4 or more weeks ahead; Lightning Deal up to 6 hours, at least 15% off, with a maximum unit quantity, submitted 4 or more weeks ahead; and Promo Code up to 30 days, at least 15% off, submitted at least 24 hours ahead; it recommended 4 weeks for all, "or Amazon may not have time to buy inventory", said minimum discounts may rise for Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and stated that Amazon often buys more product to prepare for an approved promotion, sets prices independently, generally aims to pass promotional funding on to customers and may not pass it on if the product does not meet financial thresholds; Amazon's August 2017 AMS toolkit stated that "Product Display Ads are the only ad unit that supports VPCs" (vendor-powered coupons), that Subscribe & Save VPCs were not eligible, and that a Product Display ad whose VPC is no longer valid reverts to the normal format. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-51`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-52`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-53`. [official] *Amazon Promotions: Vendor Self-Service Program* (March 2017); *AMS Agency Toolkit: A Reference Guide for Agency Partners* (August 2017).
+- **E26.** Amazon's Prime Day 2026 staff post for sellers (2026-05-26) extended the Prime-Exclusive Best Deal and Lightning Deal deadline to 2026-06-09, required inventory in the network or in transit, and stated that deals are suppressed if ASINs are not buyable at event time. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-54`. [official] Seller Forums, Indy_Amazon, "Prime Day 2026: Your Deals Deadline Extended!".
+- **E27.** Amazon's purchase-order model carries a `dealCode`, a promotional or deal number used to obtain a price discount on items on the order; AMALYTIX (Trutz Fries, October 2026) states that vendors fund Lightning Deal discounts per unit, in local currency and excluding tax, and names no separate vendor deal fee; and Wake Commerce (James Wakefield, 2024) describes co-op, also called ContraCoGS, as deducted through PO invoices. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-55`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-56`. [official] `vendorOrders.json`. [opinion] AMALYTIX, Fries, on Lightning Deals; Wake Commerce, James Wakefield (2024-07-11), on vendor co-op agreements.
+
+### G. Goals, economics, ads and organic (`ads-economics`)
+
+- **G1.** Amazon defines ACOS as ad spend over ad-attributed sales (× 100) and ROAS as its inverse; to keep a profit ACOS must sit below the profit margin, which Amazon calls break-even ACOS; its Ads Math gives margin as (revenue − cost of goods) ÷ revenue and break-even ROAS as 1 ÷ that margin. — `P-goals-and-economics-1`, `P-goals-and-economics-2`, `P-goals-and-economics-3`. [official] *What is advertising cost of sales (ACOS)?*; *Advertising budget*; *Ads Math*.
+- **G2.** Amazon states there is no general threshold for a good ACOS or ROAS, that a good ROAS is one profitable for the advertiser and is read with margin, lifetime value and lift, and that new campaigns tend to run a high ACOS without failing; one Amazon FBA guide still prints $2–4 per $1. — `P-goals-and-economics-4`, `P-goals-and-economics-7`. [official] *What is advertising cost of sales (ACOS)?*; *Ads Math*; *How to Help Increase Sales with FBA and Advertising*.
+- **G3.** Amazon's click chain gives CPA = CPC ÷ conversion rate, profit per sale = average order value × gross profit margin and net profit per sale = profit per sale − CPA, and Amazon says this calculator is for one-off purchases and ignores repeat customers; it defines customer LTV as average order value × average orders and affordable CPA as LTV × profit margin, the upper limit of ad spend per new customer to break even over the customer's lifetime. — `P-goals-and-economics-5`, `P-goals-and-economics-6`. [official] *Ads Math*.
+- **G4.** The margin before ads rests on Amazon's fees: a referral fee of a category-specific percentage of the total price or a minimum, whichever is greater (the fee category may differ from the one shoppers see, and media adds a closing fee), FBA fulfilment by price, weight and dimensions, monthly storage, aged inventory past 181 days, returns processing, removal, disposal, liquidation and inbound placement; the SP-API Product Fees API estimates fees per SKU or ASIN at a supplied price, estimates Amazon states are not guaranteed, the FBA Fee Preview report holds per-SKU estimates updated at least every 72 hours, and the Finances API's `listTransactions` returns the actual charges and may omit the last 48 hours. — `P-goals-and-economics-8`, `P-goals-and-economics-9`, `P-goals-and-economics-10`, `P-goals-and-economics-11`. [official] *Selling on Amazon fees*; *Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)*; *Product Fees API*; *productFeesV0.json*; *Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Reports*; and 1 more.
+- **G5.** Fees move: the 2026 US letter raised FBA fees by $0.08 a unit on average from 2026-01-15; the 2027 letter raises fulfilment by $0.19 a unit on average (about 0.8% of average selling price), mostly from 2027-01-15, and from 2027-02-01 drops the storage utilization surcharge, folds aged inventory into an age-based storage rate that Amazon says is flat or lower for inventory turning in under six months and higher for aged inventory, and applies the low-inventory-level fee only below 28 days of supply; a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on the fulfilment fee (about $0.17 per US FBA unit) applies from 2026-04-17 in the US and Canada, to Buy with Prime and MCF from 2026-05-02 and on top of peak fees; holiday peak fees, about $0.32 a unit over non-peak, run 2026-10-15 to 2027-01-14; the Data Kiosk economics dataset itemises the fee types, shows a fee separately on each side of a change date and previews fees up to 120 days ahead. — `P-goals-and-economics-49`, `P-goals-and-economics-50`, `P-goals-and-economics-51`, `P-goals-and-economics-52`, `P-goals-and-economics-53`. [official] *Update to U.S. Referral and Fulfillment by Amazon fees for 2026*; *Update to US Referral and Fulfillment by Amazon fees for 2027*; `News_Amazon`, *Fuel and logistics-related surcharge: FBA, MCF, and BWP in US and CA*; *Holiday 2026: Same fees, same eligibility, earlier deadlines*; *analytics_economics_2024_03_15.graphql*.
+- **G6.** Multi-Channel Fulfillment fulfils orders placed on the seller's own website or other sales channels, not Amazon-store orders; Seller Fulfilled Prime commits the seller to fast free delivery and free returns for domestic Prime customers. — `P-goals-and-economics-54`. [official] *Costs for optional selling services | Sell on Amazon*; *Seller Fulfilled Prime | Sell on Amazon*.
+- **G7.** Attributed sales do not reflect cart discounts and deduct payment failures and purchases cancelled within 72 hours (deductions taking up to 7 days), returns not among the listed deductions; Data Kiosk's net product sales subtract refunds by refund request time and net proceeds subtract fees, ad charges and seller-entered unit costs; per-ASIN returns sit in Data Kiosk's `returns` group, mapped to ship day and computed about 45 days late, FBA returns in `GET_FBA_FULFILLMENT_CUSTOMER_RETURNS_DATA` and seller-fulfilled returns in the returns reports, and Sales and Traffic carries refunds only by date, not by ASIN; Nova Analytics, FiveX and My Amazon Guy put a returns allowance into the margin before ads, and none of their pages computes ACoS or TACoS on revenue net of returns. — `P-goals-and-economics-55`, `P-goals-and-economics-56`, `P-goals-and-economics-57`, `P-goals-and-economics-58`, `P-goals-and-economics-59`. [official] *Ad campaign attribution*; *analytics_economics_2024_03_15.graphql*; *analytics_sellerAnalytics_2025_03_31.graphql*; *Seller Analytics Dataset Use Case Guide*; *Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Reports*; and 2 more. [opinion] Nova Analytics; FiveX; My Amazon Guy.
+- **G8.** On Amazon.co.jp points are granted at a rate set by Amazon or the seller, in Points Central up to 50% per listing, with a default 1% auto-applied from November 1, 2021 to listings the seller had not set; one point is used as one yen and the seller bears one yen per point; in Amazon's Product Pricing model landed price is listing price plus shipping minus points, and an offer may be ineligible for the Buy Box when that exceeds the competitive price threshold; the Product Fees estimate accepts points, a program that exists only in Japan. — `P-goals-and-economics-60`, `P-goals-and-economics-61`. [official] *Amazonポイント規約* (amazon.co.jp); `News_Amazon`, Points Central announcement; *productPricingV0.json*; *productFeesV0.json*.
+- **G9.** Amazon's SP guidance names objectives to set before a campaign (brand exposure, new product, inventory clearance, peak season); v1 `goalSettings` is not available for SP, while an SB goal is read-only with a required KPI; the v1 model's `Goal`, `KPI` and `BidStrategy` enums name the options. — `P-goals-and-economics-15`, `P-goals-and-economics-16`, `P-goals-and-economics-17`. [official] *Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads*; *How to measure and improve your campaigns*; *The campaign entity in the Amazon Ads API*; *Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI*.
+- **G10.** A new-to-brand purchase is one by a shopper with no purchase from the brand in the previous 12 months, judged on all shopping within the brand on Amazon, not only attributed purchases; Amazon's new-to-brand help page says the metrics are for Sponsored Brands and Display and the data "isn't available for Sponsored Products", and Reporting v3 carries NTB columns in no SP report type, while v1 names SP in the eligibility of 90 of its 102 NTB fields (purchases and sales, not NTB ROAS), view-attributed fields included, although Amazon reports 0 view conversions for SP; AMC's new-to-brand columns include modeled conversions from 2026-11-02. — `P-goals-and-economics-21`, `P-goals-and-economics-22`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-9`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-16`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-35`. [official] *Purchases (new to brand)*; *Reporting columns (version 3)*; Ad campaign attribution; Sponsored ads new-to-brand metrics; All releases, November 2, 2026; and 2 more.
+- **G11.** Long-term sales is attributed sales plus the estimated 365-day value of new-to-brand shopper engagements, modelled from the brand's historical shopping patterns, and is offered with long-term ROAS for SB, Display, TV, DSP and Full-Funnel, not SP; Amazon calls it an ad-attributed measure that estimates incremental sales value, and no Amazon page read describes a holdout or unexposed comparison in its calculation; since 2026-09-25 its US estimates use machine-learning models in place of heuristics, with 30-, 60-, 90- and 180-day horizons beside 365 days and cohort fields (`metric.cohortAccumulatedSales*`) that Amazon presents for checking estimates against actual cohort sales, which require `campaign.id` and "aren't summable across cohorts". — `P-goals-and-economics-23`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-10`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-37`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-38`, `P-change-measurement-24`. [official] *Long-term sales*; *Campaign reporting: Analyze advertising performance*; Long-term sales (Amazon retail conversions); All releases, June 5, 2025 and September 25, 2026; Amazon Ads advanced tools release notes, September 25, 2026; and 5 more.
+- **G12.** Subscribe & Save subscriptions attributed to ads are reported for SB, display, TV, DSP and Full-Funnel, not SP; the Repeat Purchase report and the Replenishment API report repeat and subscriber value; S&S needs Brand Registry, starts at a 0% seller-funded discount and can block one-time purchases under `REPLENISHMENT_ONLY_ORDERING`. — `P-goals-and-economics-24`, `P-goals-and-economics-25`, `P-goals-and-economics-26`, `P-goals-and-economics-27`, `P-goals-and-economics-34`. [official] *Subscribe & Save subscriptions*; *Analytics Reports*; *Replenishment API*; *replenishment-2022-11-07.json*; *Subscribe & Save, Sell on Amazon*.
+- **G13.** AMC's Amazon Retail Purchases covers up to 60 months of a brand's purchase activity in the Amazon store regardless of advertising, matches Business Reports "By ASIN Detail" for sellers and Retail Analytics Sales in the Manufacturing view for vendors, and is free to query from 2026-06-01 to 2026-12-31 where available; for the advertiser's own instance AMC also holds ad traffic events with search term and placement and ad-exposed and non-exposed conversions, in UTC by default, with output limited to aggregates above a distinct-user floor. — `P-goals-and-economics-28`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-23`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-12`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-41`. [official] *Amazon Retail Purchases in AMC*; *AMC paid features overview*; Sponsored ads traffic; Conversions all table; AMC data sources overview; and 1 more.
+- **G14.** Amazon names TACOS on two Amazon Ads pages, as ad spend as a percentage of total sales and as total sales "(organic and paid)" set against ad spend; neither page names the sales field, the ad products counted or the window, and no Ads API metric, report column or help page read defines it; the benchmark ranges read (Helium 10) cite no data source, a point PPC Land makes in general. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-6`, `P-goals-and-economics-29`, `P-seasons-and-deals-72`. [official] The author's guide to Sponsored Products; Holiday advertising myths: What experts want you to know; Reporting columns (version 3). [opinion] Helium 10; PPC Land.
+- **G15.** Amazon staff state that FBA capacity for established accounts rests on IPI score and sales, that IPI runs 0–1,000, and Amazon's inventory planning report gives per-SKU days of supply and excess. — `P-goals-and-economics-31`, `P-goals-and-economics-32`, `P-goals-and-economics-33`. [official] Amazon staff post, *Refresher: FBA Capacity Limits & How They Work*; Amazon staff post, *IPI Score Dropping?*; *Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Reports*.
+- **G16.** Practitioners compute targets from margin: My Amazon Guy's "true" break-even ACoS, EightX's break-even TACoS as pre-ad margin, Perpetua's initial target from 30 days' ACoS, and Helium 10's spend that follows stock. — `P-goals-and-economics-35`, `P-goals-and-economics-36`, `P-goals-and-economics-37`, `P-goals-and-economics-40`. [opinion] My Amazon Guy (Ken Zhou), *How to Find the Ideal True ACoS on Amazon PPC and Set Campaign Targets*; EightX, *Average Amazon TACOS Benchmarks by Category (2026)*; Perpetua, *Sponsored Products Goal Setup*; Helium 10, *Sync Ad Spend with Stock Levels Across Marketplaces*.
+- **G17.** In economics the Dorfman–Steiner condition sets the profit-maximising advertising-to-sales ratio at the price-cost margin times the advertising elasticity of demand, a firm raising sales by price or by advertising; meta-analyses put brand advertising elasticity at about 0.12 short term and 0.24 long term, and price elasticity at −2.62; TV advertising showed negative marginal ROI for more than 80% of 288 brands; click curves against bid are concave beyond a point. — `P-goals-and-economics-41`, `P-goals-and-economics-62`, `P-goals-and-economics-42`, `P-goals-and-economics-43`, `P-goals-and-economics-48`, `P-goals-and-economics-63`. [research] Dorfman and Steiner (1954), *American Economic Review* 44, as stated in *Dorfman–Steiner theorem*; *Dorfman–Steiner theorem*; Sethuraman, Tellis and Briesch (2011), *Journal of Marketing Research* 48(3); Shapiro, Hitsch and Tuchman (2021), *Econometrica* 89(4); Kong, Shmakov and Yang, arXiv 2212.13923; and 1 more.
+- **G18.** From sales ranks of about 20,000 books in 2001, Chevalier and Goolsbee estimated Amazon's own-price elasticity around −0.6, against close to −4 at Barnes and Noble's site; Bach et al. find strong product-level heterogeneity in price elasticity among toy cars on Amazon.com. — `P-goals-and-economics-64`. [research] NBER w9085; arXiv 2501.00382.
+- **G19.** In published field experiments, observational or attributed estimates of advertising returns exceeded the experimental ones: eBay's paid-search returns were a fraction of non-experimental estimates, with no measurable short-term benefit from brand-keyword ads and effects only on new and infrequent users; a geographic Google-ads shutoff lost only 63% as many customers as a non-experimental estimate implied; on Meta, observational methods often failed to reproduce experimental lifts even with over 5,000 user features (29% experimental against 83% DML and 173% SPSM), and 7-day last-click attribution predicted experimental incrementality with R² 0.19 against 0.88 for a model trained on experiments; advertising is not randomly assigned in observational data, and with an identification strategy Shapiro, Hitsch and Tuchman found mean and median long-run TV elasticities of 0.023 and 0.014; customers acquired through Google search ads at one firm were worth more than first-purchase measures showed. — `P-goals-and-economics-44`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-16`, `P-goals-and-economics-65`, `P-goals-and-economics-66`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-31`, `P-goals-and-economics-46`. [research] Blake, Nosko and Tadelis (2015), *Econometrica* 83, NBER w20171; Blake, Nosko & Tadelis 2015; Golden & Horton 2021; Gordon et al. 2019, 2023; *Econometrica* 89(4), public PDF copy; and 4 more.
+- **G20.** Amazon dates an ad-attributed purchase to the ad interaction in the campaign's time zone, without tax or cart discounts and net of cancellations within 72 hours, while Sales and Traffic counts ordered product sales as price × units for the period's date; for a seller's SP, attributed sales include the advertised product and any other product the same merchant sells, split in v3 by `SameSku`/`OtherSku` and `purchasedAsin` and in v1 by the Promoted and Halo qualifiers; v1's base conversion metrics include halo, the promoted-only figure carries the `Promoted` qualifier, and SP and SB CPC campaigns report 0 for conversions from views. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-1`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-2`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-3`, `P-change-measurement-11`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; Overview of the Reporting v1 API; Dates and historical data retention; sellerSalesAndTrafficReport.json; Reporting columns (version 3); and 3 more.
+- **G21.** No Amazon help page, API document, policy or staff reply states whether ad-attributed sales feed organic rank; Amazon's words stop at Sponsored Products helping offers "rise through search results". — `P-ads-organic-and-total-7`. [official] Amazon SEO: 7 ways to improve your product's search rankings; Sponsored Products product page; Seller Forums threads.
+- **G22.** Search Query Performance gives, per query, an ASIN's and the brand's impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases on the search results page beside the query's totals and shares, by Sunday–Saturday week, month or quarter, for brand-registered sellers with the Brand Analytics role (through SP-API with an `asin` list of at most 200 characters); neither it nor Search Catalog Performance has a field separating paid from organic, Search Catalog Performance's impressions "include sponsored search results", and Trellis reads SQP's counts as organic and paid combined. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-8`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-59`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-13`, `P-diagnosis-33`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-25`. [official] sellingPartnerSearchQueryPerformanceReport.json; Analytics Reports; `sellingPartnerSearchQueryPerformanceReport` schema; SP-API report type values (analytics); sell.amazon.com *Amazon Brand Analytics*; and 1 more. [opinion] Trellis.
+- **G23.** `getOrderMetrics` takes an IANA time zone for the day boundary, so seller-side daily ordered sales can be cut on the ads profile's time zone, while no Amazon page read states the time zone of a Sales and Traffic report day; Data Kiosk Economics returns, per MSKU and day, ad charges by ad type beside ordered and net product sales, and those charges are spend, not attributed sales. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-13`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-14`. [official] sales.json; sellerSalesAndTrafficReport.json; analytics_economics_2024_03_15.graphql.
+- **G24.** Off-Amazon traffic to Amazon listings is measured by Amazon Attribution tags, which report events on the date they occurred under a 14-day last-click model, restate at 1, 7 and 28 days taking returns and refunds into account, and mask rows below 10 lifetime clicks; the Brand Referral Bonus is paid on Attribution-tagged sales, not on Amazon advertising; the Events API (`POST /adsApi/v1/create/events`, GA 2026-10-15) takes off-Amazon conversion events server to server, announced for self-serve Amazon DSP advertisers with conversions managed in the DSP console's Events Manager. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-15`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-19`, `P-ads-api-surface-55`. [official] Amazon Attribution API overview; Brand Referral Bonus; Amazon Attribution OpenAPI model; Amazon Attribution how-to; *Release notes* (2025-09-26, 2026-10-15); and 1 more.
+- **G25.** On marketplaces and app stores, field experiments found sponsored listings' effect on organic outcomes negative in some settings and positive in others, and none measures a seller's Sponsored Products against its Amazon organic sales; on a brand search the brand's own ad added little without competitors and more with them; on Amazon one position up raised sales quantity by about a third of a percent; and a mobile game's app-install ad shutoff cut organic installs by 20–30%. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-17`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-18`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-19`, `P-goals-and-economics-47`, `P-launch-51`. [research] Moshary 2025; Abhishek, Jerath & Sharma 2025; Ju, Zhao & Aral 2025; Simonov, Nosko & Rao 2018; Simonov & Hill 2021; and 4 more.
+- **G26.** A total-account series (ad spend, attributed sales, ordered sales, their ratio) shows how the quantities moved together over the dates read; price, deals, stock, Featured Offer share, reviews, seasonality and competitors' actions move ordered sales over the same dates, and the series alone does not separate their effect from the ads'. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-20`. [official] Amazon SEO: 7 ways to improve your product's search rankings, on price and listing quality moving rank. [opinion] PPC Land, on TACoS moving with price cuts, stock-outs and seasonality. [research] Gordon et al. 2019, 2023 and Lewis & Rao 2015, on observational estimates.
+- **G27.** A vendor's total-sales side is Vendor Retail Analytics, by `MANUFACTURING` or `SOURCING` view, reported in Pacific Standard Time whatever the marketplace. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-21`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-22`. [official] Analytics Reports; vendorSalesReport.json; vendorTrafficReport.json; vendorInventoryReport.json.
+- **G28.** No Amazon API or report read returns a product's organic search position: Catalog Items returns Best Sellers Rank, the Ads API an advertiser's paid impression share and rank per search term and Brand Analytics search-funnel counts and shares, and the console's Search Term Impression Share report is listed as not available in the API; every organic-rank series is a third-party sample (Helium 10, SmartScout, DataDive, Jungle Scout), none read validated against Amazon data; BSR is relative to the category, and its mapping to quantity is modelled as a power law (Chevalier & Goolsbee's slope 0.9 to 1.3 on 2001 book data); Keepa's `monthlySold` ("bought in past month") is a variation-specific floor bucket most ASINs lack, moving only at bucket boundaries. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-24`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-26`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-31`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-32`. [official] catalogItems_2022-04-01.json; Search (Impression share); Advertising console vs. API reports; the Brand Analytics report models; Keepa `Product.java` (vendor doc). [opinion] Helium 10 Keyword Tracker blog and masterclass; SmartScout Keyword Ranking Map; DataDive and Jungle Scout help pages; PMG; Marketplace Pulse. [research] Chevalier & Goolsbee 2003; Yu, Appendix B.2.
+- **G29.** AMC's instructional-query library sits in the AMC console's Use Cases tab, behind sign-in; the IQ names Amazon publishes outside it include "Path to conversion by campaign group", "Customer Value - Average Spending by Exposure Group", "Tentpole Phase Overlap" and "How to query Sponsored Display traffic", and none read is named for Sponsored Products overlap with organic purchases. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-27`. [official] Manage a workflow; Working with AMC sandbox; Customer journey analytics and Customer long-term value playbooks; Traffic events API data sources.
+- **G30.** On 2023 Amazon.com first pages the median ad appeared 17 ranks above the same product's organic listing, with 48.3% of ads having an organic duplicate there, and on a shopper panel being sponsored moved a product up 7 positions on average; over 4,800 simulated searches in four stores, items beyond organic rank 100 appeared as sponsored above the top organic results, top sponsored results mostly costlier and of poorer quality than top organic ones; on the Kindle Daily Deal page Amazon-published ebooks ranked 23.6% better conditional on observables and sold 50% less conditional on rank, quantities inferred from sales ranks. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-28`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-29`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-31`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-46`. [research] Rock, Strauss, O'Reilly & Mazzucato 2024; Farronato, Fradkin & MacKay 2023; Reimers & Waldfogel 2023; Dash et al. (2024); Sponsored is the New Organic, arXiv:2407.19099.
+- **G31.** Amazon Ads' Qin (2023), on 15 US brands that asked for a carry-over study (weekly 2021–22 data, a seven-week VARMAX impulse response), found that "SP does not show significant carry-over effects beyond three weeks for any brand" and that lower-funnel products realise 60–90% of their effect within two weeks, against about 40% of DSP display and about 30% of Sponsored Display effect in week 5 and beyond; the paper states the sample is "only … brands that asked for a long-term effects assessment" and that the estimate nets out company feedback effects and competitive response. — `P-ads-organic-and-total-34`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-30`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-51`, `P-change-measurement-56`. [research] Qin 2023, Amazon Ads author; Qin 2023, Applied Marketing Analytics; Qin 2023, Table 1; Qin 2023.
+- **G32.** Pauwels and co-authors' Amazon-authored Sponsored Brands video estimates rest on brands' own adoption choices, adjusted by matching and causal Gaussian processes over 25,364 advertisers for one month and by propensity score stratification on 50+ observed features for one year; nothing was randomised, and the authors did not analyse ROAS. — `P-goals-and-economics-67`, `P-change-measurement-75`. [research] the paper's PDF; Pauwels, Peran, Shah, Schnaidt & Vercamer 2023.
+- **G33.** A vendor's attributed sales are retail sales, which Amazon states "don't reflect any discounts applied in the cart" and "don't include tax"; Amazon defines the vendor's own receipts separately, as shipped COGS, "the price Amazon paid to a vendor for item procurement". — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-14`. [official] *Ad campaign attribution* (help GX7KDKHMWQYMJ385); Data Kiosk vendor schema.
+- **G34.** Amazon gives two current definitions of Net PPM, its own margin on a vendor's product: the Net PPM report schema's "(Product Revenue – Product COGS – Vendor Funded Coop) / Product Revenue", a fraction from 0 to 1 measuring Amazon's profitability, in a vendor-only report that takes only `reportPeriod` and is in Pacific time, and Data Kiosk's "(Shipped Revenue - Shipped CCOGS + CCOGS - Sales Discount) / Shipped Revenue", where contra-COGS is "the dollars realized by customer outbound shipments minus Display Ads Contra COGS"; MerchantSpring (Seiton) and SellerApp (Purohit) state that a vendor's advertising spend is not part of Net PPM, and Seiton gives approximate Net PPM targets of about 40–45% for hardlines, 30–37% for softlines and 27–35% for consumables, which she says vary by sub-category and over time. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-24`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-25`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-26`. [official] `vendorNetPureProductMarginReport.json`; *Analytics Reports*; Data Kiosk vendor schema. [opinion] MerchantSpring; SellerApp.
+- **G35.** The Vendor Sales report requires `reportPeriod`, `distributorView` (`MANUFACTURING` or `SOURCING`) and `sellingProgram` (`RETAIL`, `BUSINESS` or `FRESH`): the manufacturing view covers ASINs the vendor manufactures, whoever sourced them to Amazon, and the sourcing view ASINs sourced directly from the vendor group; `orderedRevenue` and `orderedUnits` are populated only in the manufacturing view, while shipped revenue, shipped COGS and shipped units are in both; Amazon's SLA is end of day Monday (48 hours) for a weekly period and 72 hours for a non-Saturday daily period, a report requested before its period is available ends with `processingStatus` `FATAL`, and DAY data looks back 1,460 days with a 15-day maximum span; in the Data Kiosk vendor dataset the view a vendor sees follows the role assigned to it, the sourcing view is the distributor view and has no glance views, a vendor group that manufactures nothing gets an error for the manufacturing view, and several manufacturing metrics cannot be grouped by `vendorCode`. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-34`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-35`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-36`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-40`. [official] *Analytics Reports*; `vendorSalesReport.json`; *Vendor Analytics Dataset Use Case Guide*.
+- **G36.** Amazon counts vendor glance views only when Amazon retail is the featured merchant: Data Kiosk's `glanceViews` are "Glance views where Retail is the featured offer", and its `lostFeaturedOffer` is the share of glance views where the vendor's offer does not win the Featured Offer; the real-time traffic report's glance views differ from the Vendor Central dashboard's, are less accurate for concluded days and arrive about 65 to 115 minutes after the hour; the real-time sales report gives hourly ordered units and revenue five minutes after the hour, with cancellations shown at their own time as negative units, and Amazon's tip computes conversion as ordered units over glance views; Reason Automation (Andrew Hamada, 2025) reports that Vendor Central renamed glance views to "featured offer page views", which in their account count only when a 1P offer is featured, appear only in the manufacturing view and come with no sessions for 1P vendors. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-37`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-38`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-39`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-47`. [official] *Analytics Reports*; Data Kiosk vendor schema. [opinion] Reason Automation, Hamada, on traffic data in Vendor Central (2025-09-25).
+- **G37.** No Amazon page read on 2026-11-09 defines TACoS for a vendor or names its total-sales denominator; m19 offers three vendor TACoS variants, spend over manufacturing ordered sales, over manufacturing shipped sales and over sourcing shipped sales, and says manufacturing metrics may include products sourced from distributors and wholesalers; Pare.so (George Reid, 2026) states that a hybrid brand's two TACoS denominators come from Vendor Central and Seller Central and that blending them without correction produces a meaningless metric. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-42`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-43`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-44`. [official] by absence, the Amazon pages in the vendor file's *Pages read*. [opinion] m19 help, vendor manufacturing and sourcing metrics; Pare.so.
+- **G38.** Search Query Performance and Search Catalog Performance are available through the SP-API to sellers only; Repeat Purchase (18 stores), Market Basket and Search Terms are available to sellers and vendors with the Brand Analytics role and Brand Registry, Search Terms also requiring a brand representative; and AMALYTIX (Trutz Fries, October 2026) reports that Vendor Central offers vendors Top Search Terms, Repeat Purchase Behavior and Market Basket Analysis, but not Search Query Performance or Search Catalog Performance, as checked in a vendor account in October 2026. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-45`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-46`. [official] *Analytics Reports*; *SP-API Vendor Use Cases*. [opinion] AMALYTIX, Fries, on Search Query Performance (updated 2026-10-20).
+- **G39.** MerchantSpring (Seiton, "The Hybrid Playbook", 2026-08-13) advises two advertising strategies for a hybrid brand, 1P products on the upper funnel and broad category terms and 3P on the lower funnel, retargeting, branded defence and conversion promotions, warns that a budget too small for both underperforms on both, and states, citing ChannelEngine, that Amazon has terminated smaller vendor relationships in waves since late 2024, the latest with a termination date of 2 August 2026, which no Amazon page read states. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-59`. [opinion] MerchantSpring, Rachel Seiton, "The Hybrid Playbook" (2026-08-13).
+- **G40.** Hagiu and Wright (2015) model a platform's choice between marketplace and reseller as a choice of who holds control over a noncontractible marketing activity, spillovers across products shifting the choice toward reselling; Abhishek, Jerath and Zhang (2016) find in a stylised model that agency selling is more efficient than reselling and gives the manufacturer control of retail prices, reselling being preferred when the e-tailer gains from sales of associated products; Zhu and Liu (2018) find that Amazon is more likely to enter successful third-party product spaces and less likely where products need greater seller effort to grow, its entry discouraging affected sellers from pursuing growth on the platform; and Farronato, Fradkin and MacKay (2023) find that Amazon-branded products rank higher than observably similar products in search, with a prominence 30–60% of that given to sponsored products. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-62`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-63`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-64`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-65`. [research] Hagiu and Wright, *Management Science* 61(1), 2015; Abhishek, Jerath and Zhang, *Management Science* 62(8), 2016; Zhu and Liu, *Strategic Management Journal* 39(10), 2018; Farronato, Fradkin and MacKay, NBER Working Paper 30894.
+- **G41.** Bergen and John (1997) model co-op advertising and find that more generous manufacturer participation rates are called for with less targetable media, less differentiated retailers, more differentiated brands and more upscale products; Besanko, Dubé and Gupta (2005) measure a retailer's pass-through of wholesale price changes and find it varies widely across products and categories, averages above 60% own-brand in 9 of 11 categories, and includes cross-brand effects. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-66`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-67`. [research] Bergen and John, *Journal of Marketing Research* 34(3), 1997; Besanko, Dubé and Gupta, *Marketing Science* 24(1), 2005.
+
+### C. Changes and their effect (`ads-change`)
+
+- **C1.** Amazon's change history (`POST /history`) returns up to 90 days of Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaign changes, each with previous value, new value and Unix timestamp, campaign types including STATUS, IN_BUDGET, BUDGET_AMOUNT, END_DATE, SMART_BIDDING_STRATEGY and PLACEMENT_GROUP; "Changes for Sponsored Display campaigns are not returned", and it "doesn't return information about who made the change". — `P-change-measurement-1`, `P-diagnosis-19`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-36`, `P-ads-api-surface-30`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-22`. [official] Changehistory_prod_3p.json; Change history OpenAPI; *Change history* model.
+- **C2.** A history event carries `entityType`, `entityId`, `changeType`, string `previousValue` and `newValue`, a UTC epoch `timestamp` and `metadata`; `fromDate` reaches back as far as the model states (90 days on 2026-11-09); `THEME` events need `Accept: application/vnd.historyresponse.v1.1+json` or the call answers 400; its bidding-strategy and placement enums differ from SP 3.0's; and it has no event type for negative product targets, audience or shopper bid adjustments, ad creative or budget-rule associations. — `P-change-measurement-2`, `P-change-measurement-3`. [official] Changehistory_prod_3p.json; SponsoredProducts_prod_3p.json.
+- **C3.** Writes answer HTTP 207, and "Applications must parse the response body to determine the status of each individual operation": v1 returns `success`, `partialSuccess` (written with some fields refused, with its errors) and `error` keyed by request index, a success carrying `lastUpdatedDateTime`, and SP 3.0 returns per-item `success` and `error` matched by `index`, its objects carrying `extendedData.lastUpdateDateTime`; no create, update or delete in v1, SP v3, SB v3, SB v4, SD v3 or Portfolios takes an idempotency key (Amazon's models carry them only for DSP audiences, AMC custom models and billing), and creates share no transaction, so a chain can stop part-way and leave a campaign with no ad group or an ad group with no ad, which the API reports as `CAMPAIGN_INCOMPLETE` and `AD_GROUP_INCOMPLETE`. — `P-change-measurement-4`, `P-ads-api-surface-16`, `P-ads-api-surface-17`, `P-launch-43`, `P-ads-api-surface-18`. [official] AmazonAdsAPIALLMerged_prod_3p.json; SponsoredProducts_prod_3p.json; *Well-Architected Framework: Fundamental component*; *Amazon Ads API v1* model; *Sponsored Products* model; and 2 more.
+- **C4.** "Sellers aren't allowed to have duplicate campaign names, but vendors can", so a seller's repeated campaign create with the same name is refused, with `NAME_NOT_UNIQUE` in SP 3.0 and `FIELD_VALUE_NOT_UNIQUE` in v1; ad group names are unique only within a campaign. — `P-launch-44`, `P-ads-api-surface-19`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-8`. [official] SP v2 and SB v3 models; *Sponsored Products ad groups*; SP 3.0 and SP v1 models; *Sponsored Products v2* model; *Sponsored Brands v3* model.
+- **C5.** Entities Amazon created automatically, such as an auto campaign's targeting clauses, are refused for some edits, with `AUTOCREATED_ENTITY_CANNOT_EDIT` (v1) and `AUTO_TARGETING_CLAUSE_CANNOT_BE_ARCHIVED_MANUALLY` (SP v3). — `P-ads-api-surface-22`. [official] *Amazon Ads API v1* model; *Sponsored Products* model.
+- **C6.** No field in Amazon's change history, write replies or report rows records a change's reason, expected effect, judging metric or windows. — `P-change-measurement-5`. [official] Changehistory_prod_3p.json; AmazonAdsAPIALLMerged_prod_3p.json; Reporting columns (version 3).
+- **C7.** Amazon's derived metrics are computed by aggregating numerator and denominator across rows at the chosen grain and then dividing. — `P-change-measurement-10`. [official] Ads performance.
+- **C8.** In the v1 model SP and SB targets are keyword, product, category and theme targets, with no location, daypart, device or audience target, which are DSP-only. — `P-change-measurement-26`. [official] Target entity guide.
+- **C9.** Amazon recommends limiting changes while testing bidding strategies "so that you can attribute the difference in performance to a specific change", reviewing bids "about once every two weeks", and judging a negative keyword "after it has received at least 20 clicks" and after "two weeks or more"; no Amazon page read states a statistical test or confidence level for an ad change. — `P-change-measurement-27`. [official] Guide to dynamic bidding - up and down; The author's guide to Sponsored Products; A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products.
+- **C10.** No Amazon page or model read offers a randomized test for sponsored ads: Manage Your Experiments covers listing content (images, titles, bullets, descriptions, A+) only; Brand Lift surveys exposed and unexposed groups, excludes SP, and its API paths sit under DSP, the launch page's `/measurementStudies/brandLift` paths in no model; Creative Testing is a pre-launch DSP panel survey; SB v4 lets several ads share an ad group with no stated split; DSP alone has ten 10% customer holdout groups, on a page that advises against before/after comparison of bid adjustments; multi-touch attribution divides credit and is beta in the US, AMC's exposed against non-exposed conversions are an observational split, and MMM feeds a model the advertiser runs; no Ads API model or release note read has an experiment, split or holdout operation, and no page read offers sellers a self-serve SP incrementality measurement. — `P-change-measurement-19`, `P-change-measurement-20`, `P-change-measurement-21`, `P-change-measurement-22`, `P-change-measurement-49`, `P-change-measurement-50`, `P-change-measurement-51`, `P-ads-api-surface-57`, `P-ads-api-surface-56`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-11`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-35`. [official] Test listing content with Manage Your Experiments; Brand Lift: Study the impact of your advertising; Measure brand marketing impact using Amazon Brand Lift; Identify the right creative for an upcoming brand campaign with Creative Testing; Sponsored Brands v4 features; and 16 more. [opinion] SalesDuo, Borle 2026 (agreeing on Creative Testing).
+- **C11.** AMC returns only aggregates under per-column thresholds (at least 100 distinct users per row for medium- and high-threshold columns), is open to sponsored ads accounts by self-service, and since 2026-10-20 separates promotional purchases through 13 Paid Features columns; no AMC page read documents a randomized holdout for Sponsored Products; AdExchanger reports that Amazon's ad platform "only recently began enabling incrementality tests" and, from unnamed sources, that AMC incrementality test groups are in beta, a program no Amazon page read documents. — `P-change-measurement-23`, `P-change-measurement-74`. [official] How AMC works; Data aggregation thresholds in AMC; All releases. [opinion] AdExchanger, 2025-04-25.
+- **C12.** A platform experiment that blocked sponsored search for 3% of an e-commerce site's visitors found that sponsored search "steals business from organic listings" and reduced total transactions, and a marketplace study found shoppers preferring top-ranked organic listings to sponsored listings of the same product and position. — `P-change-measurement-30`. [research] Moshary 2025; Joo, Shi & Abhishek 2024.
+- **C13.** Across 25 large ad field experiments the median confidence interval on ROI was over 100 percentage points wide, because individual sales are highly variable relative to advertising's effect; across 15 Facebook experiments observational methods "often fail to produce the same effects as the randomized experiments". — `P-change-measurement-31`, `P-diagnosis-52`, `P-goals-and-economics-45`. [research] Lewis & Rao 2015; Gordon, Zettelmeyer, Bhargava & Chapsky 2019; Lewis & Rao (2015), *QJE* 130(4): 1941–1973; Lewis and Rao (2015), *Quarterly Journal of Economics* 130(4).
+- **C14.** Outcome differences between ad positions won by bidding are biased by selection, which "cannot be eliminated by randomizing the bids for the focal advertiser" because competitors bid too; Narayanan and Kalyanam's regression discontinuity finds naive estimates overstate position effects, which are "much smaller", "exist only in some of the positions", are weaker when the phrase carries brand or product information and larger for smaller advertisers and less experienced consumers; Agarwal, Hosanagar and Smith find profit can be higher below the top position; and the four studies of conversion by position disagree. — `P-change-measurement-32`, `P-bids-and-placements-39`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-57`. [research] Narayanan & Kalyanam 2015; Narayanan & Kalyanam, *Marketing Science* 2015; Agarwal, Hosanagar & Smith, *JMR* 2011; Ghose & Yang, *Management Science* 2009; Rutz, Bucklin & Sonnier, *JMR* 2012.
+- **C15.** When test and control arms share budgets or auctions, a measured bid effect can be "severely biased" unless each arm keeps a separate budget; in an Airbnb pricing meta-experiment at least 20% of the individual-randomized estimate was interference bias, which cluster randomization removed, and in simulation blocked cluster randomization cut the naive bias by as much as 62% at the cost of higher variance; Wager and Xu estimate marginal responses with ±1 randomized shocks per unit while staying at a fixed market equilibrium. — `P-change-measurement-33`, `P-change-measurement-65`, `P-change-measurement-66`. [research] Basse, Soufiani & Lambert 2016; Liu, Mao & Kang 2020; Holtz, Lobel, Lobel, Liskovich & Aral 2024; Holtz & Aral 2020; Wager & Xu 2021.
+- **C16.** Ordinary p-values and intervals are unreliable when a test is stopped on watching its results. — `P-change-measurement-34`. [research] Johari, Pekelis & Walsh 2015.
+- **C17.** Short-term ad effects are "not always predictive of the long-term effect": user learning about ads took months to develop on Google search, and an ad shutoff for a mobile game reduced organic installs by 20–30% through store rankings. — `P-change-measurement-35`. [research] Hohnhold, O'Brien & Tang 2015; Ju, Zhao & Aral 2025.
+- **C18.** Units picked because their last measurement was extreme tend to move back toward their mean with no intervention, so a campaign handed to automation after an unusually good or bad period shows a change that is partly regression to the mean. — `P-change-measurement-37`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-29`. [research] Barnett, van der Pols & Dobson 2005; Barnett, van der Pols and Dobson, *Regression to the mean: what it is and how to deal with it*, International Journal of Epidemiology (2005).
+- **C19.** In `cx-listing-playbook`'s effect review, *held* means the targeted metric moved, after the control's movement is taken out, in the expected direction by at least the smallest move logged before the change, with orders not falling and no confounder or event explaining it; *not held* means the window held enough data to have seen that move and did not, or the metric moved the wrong way; *cannot tell* is every other case. — `P-change-measurement-38`. [research, via cx-listing-playbook] the sources that package's `research/method/effect-measurement.md` gives for the three verdicts (its position 18): Lakens 2017, *Equivalence Tests*; Greenland et al. 2016, *Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power*; Kohavi, Longbotham, Sommerfield & Henne 2009.
+- **C20.** Practitioners disagree on how long to wait after a bid change (Ad Badger's automated bidder typically a 24-hour window, Ad Badger's blog at least seven days, Pare's George Reid 7–14 days, BidX's Selina Krüger the seventh day after the observation period when the gap to target ACoS is small), and Ad Badger's August 2026 attribution article states a 14-day SP window and order-date reporting, which Amazon's v1 overview contradicts; Eva Commerce's Hai Mag proposes a geo holdout for branded SP (the v1 model gives SP no location target) and says 80–90% of branded-ad traffic and sales return organically when the ad is removed, without a source, and Perpetua measures category-term incrementality with Total ACoS; Seller Labs says conversion "swings on single orders" below a few hundred sessions a month and uses 60- or 90-day windows or skips such ASINs, where Amazon's targeting guide gives 20 clicks for judging a negative. — `P-change-measurement-39`, `P-change-measurement-40`, `P-change-measurement-41`. [official] Overview of the Reporting v1 API; Target entity guide; A guide to targeting with Sponsored Products. [opinion] Ad Badger 2026; Pare, Reid 2026; BidX, Krüger 2021; Eva Commerce, Mag 2026; Perpetua, Ashok Kumar 2024; Seller Labs, Denis D 2026.
+- **C21.** Vendors describe their own methods: Skai calls holdout testing the "gold standard" and computes iROAS as incrementality score × ROAS, Pacvue's iROAS uses "multiple advanced linear regression data models", Intentwise calls its What Changed comparison "the starting point", Teikametrics updates Amazon bids "Hourly", and Helium 10's change log labels a change's source, including "In Seller Central or 3rd party". — `P-change-measurement-73`. [opinion] Skai, Weiss 2023 and 2024; Pacvue press release 2024-09-17; Intentwise, Waters 2024; Teikametrics help centre; Helium 10 knowledge base.
+- **C22.** Amazon states it is "continually experimenting to refine and improve our ad auctions", including "introducing, removing, or modifying the data points or factors used in the auction process", and Amazon-authored product-search papers report online A/B tests on 50 million and 140 million queries and a ranking change serving customers since 2025; Amazon reports that 80% of bid changes on clicked SP search ads came within one day of a prior change (2019–2024), and that in one study competitors' average bids on keywords an advertiser stopped bidding on dropped about 83%, from $15.96 to $2.74. — `P-change-measurement-54`, `P-change-measurement-55`. [official] Understand Amazon Ads auctions; Amazon's response to the FTC's lawsuit regarding Sponsored Ads. [research] Han et al. 2022; Gupta et al. 2020; Dong et al. 2026.
+- **C23.** Amazon's pricing scientists, unable to split shoppers for a price test, run switchbacks over time, report that random-days switchbacks cut standard error by 60%, and name carryover through recommendations; Amazon-authored work on advertiser experiments states that auction competition between treated and control advertisers biases simple advertiser randomisation; Bojinov, Simchi-Levi and Zhao set optimal switchback assignment under carryover of order *m*, with the Horvitz-Thompson estimator unbiased for lag *p* ≥ *m*, and suggest periods shorter than the carryover; a seller's month-long daily ad on/off switchback gave an incremental ROAS of 1.25 on total sales against platform ROAS near 2.35, rising to 1.54 with an MMM-estimated adstock, and he calls 1.25 a floor because a daily switchback assumes no carryover. — `P-change-measurement-59`, `P-change-measurement-60`, `P-goals-and-economics-68`, `P-goals-and-economics-69`, `P-change-measurement-58`. [opinion] *Estimating Amazon Ad Incrementality for Sellers*; Hershaff, Substack, 2026-02-13. [research] Bojinov, Simchi-Levi & Zhao 2023; Cooprider & Nassiri, amazon.science, 2023-04-14; Cooprider and Nassiri; Jain, Hut, Islam and Pan (2023).
+- **C24.** With treatment at different times the two-way fixed-effects estimator equals a weighted average of all two-group/two-period comparisons with weights that may be negative, so its coefficient can be negative while every effect is positive, and in event studies apparent pretrends can arise solely from effect heterogeneity; a staggered difference-in-differences is unbiased for a weighted average effect under random assignment of the adoption date, and with a treatment of varying dose parallel trends does not rule out selection bias across doses. — `P-change-measurement-61`, `P-launch-50`. [research] Goodman-Bacon 2021; de Chaisemartin & D'Haultfœuille 2020; Sun & Abraham 2021; Athey and Imbens, arXiv 1808.05293; Callaway, Goodman-Bacon and Sant'Anna, arXiv 2107.02637.
+- **C25.** Abadie's conditions for a synthetic control are an effect large against the outcome's volatility, donors that did not adopt similar changes, no anticipation, no interference and a close pre-period fit, with inference by placebo reassignment. — `P-change-measurement-62`. [research] Abadie 2021.
+- **C26.** CUPED cuts the variance of a treatment-control difference to var(Y)(1−ρ²) with a pre-period covariate (about 50% on Bing), the same metric over 1–2 pre-period weeks "works well", and "Never use covariates that could be affected by the treatment"; a sample ratio mismatch between arms, detected by a chi-square test, implies a selection bias that invalidates the results most of the time; carryover from earlier experiments on the same units lasted more than three weeks at Bing and was detected with A/A tests. — `P-change-measurement-63`, `P-change-measurement-64`. [research] Deng, Xu, Kohavi & Walker 2013; Dmitriev, Gupta, Kim & Vaz 2017; Kohavi et al. 2012.
+- **C27.** A report shows what happened at the bid that ran, never what a target would have done at another bid; Amazon's AuctionGym authors state that "an advertiser does not observe counterfactual outcomes of bid amounts that were not submitted" and that competitors' adaptation complicates evaluating bidding strategies from logged data alone. — `P-change-measurement-67`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-21`. [research] Jeunen, Murphy & Allison, AuctionGym; Jeunen, Murphy and Allison, *Learning to bid with AuctionGym*.
+- **C28.** Across many tests, a step-up procedure controls the false discovery rate (the expected share of falsely rejected hypotheses) for independent tests, multilevel models instead shrink estimates toward each other, winners chosen from a group of experiments carry a selection bias for which Lee and Shen give a correction, an objective Bayesian prior needs historical A/B data (Bing's built from thousands of experiments), and with fat-tailed effects a lean strategy of more ideas on smaller samples is preferred. — `P-change-measurement-68`, `P-change-measurement-69`. [research] Benjamini & Hochberg 1995; Gelman, Hill & Yajima 2012; Lee & Shen 2018; Deng 2015; Azevedo, Deng, Montiel Olea, Rao & Weyl 2020.
+- **C29.** Intent-to-treat compares whole groups and stays valid but less precise, and public-service-ad control experiments are invalid when delivery algorithms optimise for performance. — `P-change-measurement-71`. [research] Johnson, Lewis & Nubbemeyer 2016; Johnson 2023.
+
+### M. Metrics and attribution (shared reference)
+
+- **M1.** Sponsored ads report a conversion on the date of the ad interaction (the traffic date), which may differ from the conversion date; legacy Sponsored Brands and Display, Video and Audio campaigns reported on the conversion date before unified reporting and now report on the traffic date, which moves conversions earlier without changing their total. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-1`, `P-change-measurement-6`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-27`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; Overview of the Reporting v1 API; Understand unified reporting; Reporting columns (version 3).
+- **M2.** Amazon attributes each conversion to at most one ad interaction across all campaigns and all advertisers, ranked promoted-product clicks, brand-halo clicks, promoted-product views, brand-halo views, then last touch with the last click before the last view. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-2`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-4`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-56`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; Ad campaign attribution, GX7KDKHMWQYMJ385.
+- **M3.** Lookback and credited products differ by ad product and advertiser: SP for sellers is 7 days on clicks, crediting the advertised product and anything else the merchant sells; SP for vendors and authors is 14 days on clicks, crediting the advertised and same-brand products sold by Amazon; SB, display, Streaming TV and DSP are 14 days and credit the brand halo; unified reporting and v1 drop window suffixes, so an SP base metric is 7-day for sellers and 14-day for vendors and other campaign types are 14-day; Ad Badger's description of SP and SB as 14-day click attribution, with reports built by order date, contradicts Amazon's attribution page. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-3`, `P-seasons-and-deals-24`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-24`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-11`, `P-reporting-17`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-34`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-11`, `P-vendors-and-hybrid-13`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; Understand unified reporting; Overview of the Reporting v1 API; Conversion metrics; Ads API "Purchases (Amazon retail conversions)"; and 4 more. [opinion] Ad Badger, Attribution Window Blind Spots.
+- **M4.** SP and CPC Sponsored Brands attribute to clicks only; vCPM Sponsored Brands, display, Streaming TV and DSP also credit views meeting the MRC standard; from 2026-01-01 vCPM SB and display use a shopping-signal enhanced view model with a shorter window, keeping the old 14-day model as "all views" metrics, and Amazon publishes no incrementality figure for the new model. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-4`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-5`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-54`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; Overview of the Reporting v1 API; Performance metrics; View attribution updates for Amazon Store ads; Purchases (all views); and 1 more.
+- **M5.** Impressions and clicks are net of invalid traffic, with gross and invalid counts reported separately; Amazon filters before the bid and after the impression, monitors for up to 30 days, bills net of what it finds, can change console cost for 72 hours, and names a fall in invalid-traffic rate with a rise in CTR or clicks and a fall in CVR as a signal of undetected invalid traffic, while an IVR level alone is not. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-6`, `P-diagnosis-3`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-30`, `P-diagnosis-21`, `P-diagnosis-22`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-31`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-23`, `P-change-measurement-45`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-40`. [official] Traffic metrics; Impressions (Delivery); Clicks (Delivery); v1 "Clicks (Delivery)" and "Impressions (Delivery)" metric pages; v3 "Gross and invalid traffic reports"; and 9 more.
+- **M6.** CTR is clicks ÷ impressions, CPC cost ÷ clicks, CPM cost ÷ impressions × 1,000, vCPM cost ÷ viewable impressions × 1,000; unified reporting and v1 have no ACOS field, while v3 has `acosClicks7d` and `acosClicks14d` on targeting, search-term, advertised-product and ad-extension types but not `spCampaigns`. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-7`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-8`. [official] Clicks (Delivery); Impressions (Delivery); Viewability (Delivery); Purchases (v1); What is ACOS; and 2 more.
+- **M7.** In unified reporting and v1 "purchase rate" (`metric.purchaseRate`) is purchases ÷ impressions, and the per-click rate is "purchase rate over clicks" (`metric.purchaseRateOverClicks`, v3 "14 Day Conversion Rate"); Amazon's Sponsored Products search-term help page (modified 2026-05-18) still calls the per-click rate "Purchase rate". — `P-metrics-and-attribution-9`, `P-diagnosis-2`. [official] Conversion metrics; Purchases (v1); Search term report for Sponsored Products; v1 "Purchases" metric page.
+- **M8.** Reporting v3 carries SP 1-, 7-, 14- and 30-day click-attributed purchases, sales and units with same-SKU and other-SKU variants; Sponsored Brands `purchases` and `sales` count 14 days after a click or a view, and `sales14d` includes view-attributed sales for vCPM campaigns; v1 has no day-count variant. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-12`, `P-reporting-10`. [official] Reporting columns (version 3); Purchases (v1); Amazon Ads reporting overview.
+- **M9.** A purchase is an order event that can hold several units; attributed sales exclude tax and cart discounts, can include items sold by Amazon or other sellers and used items, and lose payment failures and cancellations within 72 hours, deducted over up to 7 days. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-13`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-14`, `P-diagnosis-44`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; Purchases (v1). [opinion] Openbridge, "Amazon Advertising Attribution, Definitions, and Timing"; Optmyzr, "Why Your Amazon Ads Report Is Lying to You".
+- **M10.** Amazon reports no impressions, clicks or other traffic at the converted-product level, because one interaction can lead to several products. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-15`. [official] Data availability in unified reporting.
+- **M11.** Detail page views, add to cart, viewable impressions and vCPM are not offered for SP in v1; detail page views are not unique per customer and include halo in unified reporting. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-17`. [official] Detail page views (v1); Add to cart (v1); Viewability (Delivery); Performance metrics; Understand unified reporting.
+- **M12.** KENP read is attributed to reading up to 14 days after an ad click and reported on the day the pages were read. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-18`. [official] KENP metrics; Ad campaign attribution.
+- **M13.** v1 aggregates days in each campaign's time zone (`timeZone.value`) and money in the campaign budget currency, needing `budgetCurrency.value` with money metrics and `convertedCurrency.value` for converted figures; v2 and v3 reports use the profile's time zone; change history timestamps are UTC; console downloads use the account's registered zone. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-20`, `P-diagnosis-25`, `P-diagnosis-26`, `P-reporting-19`, `P-change-measurement-9`, `P-seasons-and-deals-26`. [official] Dates and historical data retention (v1); Helpful concepts (v1); Downloadable reports in sponsored ads; AMC data sources; v1 "Dates"; and 11 more.
+- **M14.** Amazon's settling schedule: data within about 12 hours, impressions and clicks changing for up to three days, conversions first within 24 hours and restated at 1, 7 and 28 days, up to 42 days for a 14-day window, "subject to change for up to 60 days" on another page and a 70-day window for Stream v2; Amazon advises waiting at least five days for accurate clicks; the console's sales take up to 48 hours; no report marks a day final; Amazon's P99 target from impression to availability is 12 hours. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-21`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-22`, `P-diagnosis-20`, `P-bids-and-placements-36`, `P-reporting-21`, `P-reporting-22`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-22`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-23`, `P-change-measurement-7`, `P-change-measurement-8`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-5`, `P-reporting-23`, `P-ads-api-surface-44`. [official] Reporting v3 FAQ; Amazon Ads reporting overview; Adjustments to invalid spend; Traffic validation; Performance metrics; and 14 more. [opinion] Optmyzr; Openbridge; Helium 10. [research] Ktena et al. 2019; Yasui et al. 2020.
+- **M15.** The MRC accreditation renewed on 2026-07-08 covers Sponsored Products gross clicks and clicks net of SIVT on Amazon placements, in total only; impressions and conversions are not accredited, and Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display are not on the MRC list. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-24`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-44`. [official] MRC accredited data for Sponsored Products campaigns; MRC accreditation letter (third party); MRC Accredited Services — Digital (third party); MRC letters to Amazon Ads, 2026-05-29 and 2026-07-08 (third party).
+- **M16.** Amazon's multi-touch attribution (US beta) splits credit across ad touches in proportion to their value and is published as Reporting v1's 56 `metric.multiTouch*` fields beside last-touch ones, each requiring its last-touch counterpart; Amazon's launch page places it in "most report types for version 3", but the v3 column pages show no multi-touch column and every v1 multi-touch field gives its v3 name as "N/A". — `P-metrics-and-attribution-25`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-36`, `P-ads-organic-and-total-36`, `P-change-measurement-43`, `P-change-measurement-48`. [official] Uncover ad value across the funnel with multi-touch attribution (beta); Purchases (v1); Purchases (Amazon retail conversions); Reporting columns (version 3). [research] Lewis, Zettelmeyer, Gordon et al. 2025 (Amazon-authored).
+- **M17.** Unified reporting renames metrics and widens some definitions, and the console's legacy report centres shut on 2026-12-31, with saved reports, schedules and history deleted and new legacy reports and edits stopping on 2026-12-17; Amazon says these dates are subject to change. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-26`, `P-diagnosis-36`. [official] Migrate your scheduled reports to unified reporting; Understand unified reporting.
+- **M18.** AMC cannot change a campaign's attribution window; its `conversions` table marks a conversion ad-attributed when the user had a traffic event in the prior 28 days, and traffic-time output can change for up to 30 days. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-28`. [official] AMC conversions table; Amazon attributed events by conversion time.
+- **M19.** Lily Tong, a director of measurement at Amazon Ads, quoted by Digiday, said roughly 20% of a brand's sales value shows up after the attribution window, from an Amazon analysis of more than 2 million campaigns in June across all ad products, not split out for Sponsored Products; Digiday reports agencies split on long-term sales, some treating it as "a forecast that shifts whenever the campaign mix changes". — `P-metrics-and-attribution-32`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-52`, `P-diagnosis-49`, `P-change-measurement-57`. [opinion] Digiday, Seb Joseph, 2026-10-01; Relevant Audience, Antonio Fernandez, 2026-10-02, "Amazon Ads: about 20% of brand sales land after the attribution window".
+- **M20.** Optmyzr pulled 14,991 campaigns' 14-day figures daily over 17 days and found attributed sales in the top 5% growing at least 18.75% after the first read. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-33`, `P-diagnosis-42`, `P-change-measurement-72`. [opinion] Optmyzr blog; Optmyzr, "Why Your Amazon Ads Report Is Lying to You"; Optmyzr, Vallaeys, 2025-06-11.
+- **M21.** A surrogate index of short-term outcomes recovers a long-term effect only under the surrogacy assumption that the long-term outcome is independent of treatment given the surrogates. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-39`. [research] Athey, Chetty, Imbens & Kang, NBER w26463, 2019, rev. 2024.
+- **M22.** The IAB/MRC Retail Media Measurement Guidelines (January 2024) require attribution windows that are empirically supported and disclosed before the campaign, encourage day-level lag data, require viewable impressions for attributing outcomes to exposure (a click can stand in), require a disclosed basis for 12-month forecasts, and highly recommend RCTs for incrementality; Amazon's attribution page says viewability is inferred from historical data and placement characteristics where it is not measured directly; the IAB and IAB Europe guidelines of November 2025 grade new-to-brand percentage, platform-reported incrementality and simple multi-touch attribution as "Weak" causal evidence and experiments as "Strong". — `P-metrics-and-attribution-40`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-41`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-42`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-43`. [official] Ad campaign attribution; IAB/MRC Retail Media Measurement Guidelines, pp. 25, 27, 32 (third party); IAB and IAB Europe, Guidelines for Incremental Measurement in Commerce Media, November 2025 (third party).
+- **M23.** Attribution research finds last-click credit differs substantially from model-based credit, attribution weights follow exposure counts where profitable allocation does not, game-theoretic credit is variable importance unless causal assumptions hold, single-campaign effects measured by holdout are imprecise, 78% of a display campaign's purchase lift came from people who never clicked, and ghost ads compare the exposed with their randomized would-have-been-exposed counterparts. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-45`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-46`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-47`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-48`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-49`, `P-metrics-and-attribution-50`. [research] Danaher & van Heerde 2018; Li & Kannan 2014; Anderl, Becker, von Wangenheim & Schumann 2016; Dalessandro, Perlich, Stitelman & Provost 2012; Zantedeschi, Feit & Bradlow 2017; and 2 more.
+- **M24.** Persistence modelling separates temporary from permanent effects, and Qin found every Amazon brand KPI she studied stationary, so no marketing effect lasted forever. — `P-metrics-and-attribution-53`. [research] Dekimpe & Hanssens 1995; Qin 2023.
+- **M25.** Amazon attributes a conversion to at most one ad interaction across all campaigns and advertisers, and states that Sponsored Products for sellers is merchant-based and does not normally compete for attribution with brands, except that where the same advertiser wins as both merchant and brand, the more relevant ad is chosen; the page does not say whether "the same advertiser" is the advertising account, the global account or the brand. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-12`. [official] *Ad campaign attribution* (help GX7KDKHMWQYMJ385).
+
+### P. Products, eligibility and policy (shared reference)
+
+- **P1.** `POST /eligibility/product/list` (up to 50 products, only products sold by the profile's merchant) returns per product and ad type an overall status, `ELIGIBLE`, `ELIGIBLE_WITH_WARNING` ("may not receive impressions") or `INELIGIBLE` ("cannot be included in an advertisement"), inheriting the highest severity among named reasons such as `NOT_IN_BUYBOX`, `OUT_OF_STOCK`, `LISTING_SUPRESSED`, `MISSING_IMAGE`, `RESTRICTED_CATEGORY` and `VARIATION_PARENT`; `POST /product/metadata` returns availability, price, best seller rank and eligibility for up to 300. — `P-launch-4`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-9`, `P-diagnosis-11`, `P-ads-api-surface-32`. [official] Eligibility OpenAPI; Eligibility contract; *Eligibility* model; *Product selector* model.
+- **P2.** `POST /eligibility/programs` returns per marketplace and program (`SB`, `SD`, `SPOT`, `DTC`, `MAAS`) whether the account may use it, with reasons covering standing, terms, brand relation, business verification, tax, billing and payment; most advertisers are verified automatically, otherwise through verification tasks. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-10`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-11`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-12`. [official] Eligibility contract; Complete your business verification task.
+- **P3.** Sponsored Brands does not support adult, used or refurbished products and is limited to a listed set of categories; Streaming TV needs a professional seller with Brand Registry or a vendor account, is not available to Health and Personal Care advertisers and is in open API beta in BR, CA, MX, UK and US. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-8`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-4`. [official] Sponsored Brands eligibility requirements; Streaming TV eligibility requirements; Sponsored TV overview.
+- **P4.** SP video is US only, not for Books, billed per click from the campaign budget and approved in 48–72 hours; it can be auto-assembled from existing detail-page or uploaded video with no new video generated, which the help page calls "an opt-in feature" while the API guide says "All campaigns are opted in to auto-assembled videos by default". — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-14`. [official] Understand Sponsored Products video; Auto-assembled videos.
+- **P5.** Brand Stores are free, need Brand Registry or a vendor account, are reviewed in 24 hours to 3 business days and cannot be edited in review; the Posts API was shut off on 2025-07-31; Amazon Live is a US beta for select advertisers. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-19`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-20`. [official] Stores; Stores moderation; Release notes index; Live Shopping (beta).
+- **P6.** On Amazon O&O supply ads may not use all capitals (except in Japan), scare tactics, unsubstantiated warranty claims, calls to action in custom images, deal teasers, social links, contact details or disparagement of competitors, and seasonal or holiday promotions "should start no earlier than 8 weeks leading up to the event"; claims must be accurate and substantiated; tobacco and nicotine, weapons (some knives excepted), THC or CBD, political ads, religious services, fundraising or proselytizing (religious books and merchandise excepted) and adult sexual products are prohibited across all supply; consumer healthcare products are tiered by sensitivity, tiers 2 and 3 being prohibited on Fire TV, Fire tablet, Alexa and the store homepage and barred from audience building. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-25`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-26`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-27`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-28`. [official] Prohibited content and products for Amazon O&O supply; Claims and substantiation; Pre-moderation guide; Prohibited products and services across all supply; Healthcare products and services.
+- **P7.** Ad text must be in a language the marketplace's shoppers understand, and Amazon translates SB and display text automatically within 24 hours in AE, CA, DE, IN, JP, SA and US. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-29`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-30`. [official] Ad specifications overview; Pre-moderation guide; Sponsored ads translation.
+- **P8.** Creative may not reference Amazon products or services or use Amazon branded elements. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-31`. [official] Pre-moderation guide; Amazon brand usage guidelines.
+- **P9.** Moderation combines automated and human review, usually within 24 hours and up to 3 business days, emails only rejections since February 2026, takes appeals through the rejection link, and can lead to suspension after repeat violations; `POST /preModeration` checks one entity's components before submission, `POST /moderation/results` reports SP, SB and display status (`APPROVED`, `IN_PROGRESS`, `REJECTED`, `FAILED`) with reasons and an expected time, the legacy SB moderation endpoint shut off on 2025-12-15, and the asset library runs no eligibility check on images. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-32`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-33`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-34`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-35`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-36`, `P-diagnosis-12`, `P-ads-api-surface-51`. [official] Ads content moderation; Pre-moderation guide; Pre-moderation contract; Moderation contract; Deprecations; and 3 more.
+- **P10.** A Sponsored Products ad includes the product's title, image and price, the list price when the offer is below it, and the Prime badge when the offer has Prime shipping; Amazon's responsive display creatives add live deal, coupon and Subscribe & Save badges and star ratings from the listing, showing the highest discount when several are active. — `P-diagnosis-67`. [official] "How to improve your product detail page for advertising"; "Responsive eCommerce creatives".
+- **P11.** Prompts are an AI-generated extension of US SP and SB campaigns, built from detail-page, Brand Store and campaign data, auto-enrolled, billed per click from the campaign budget, pausable per prompt, able to open a Rufus dialog and not available to authors and publishers; they have been generally available since 2026-03-25 and are reported in the `spPromptAdExtension` and `sbPromptAdExtension` v3 types, whose data delivery ends with v3 on 2027-06-30; prompts can show in shopping results and on product pages. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-37`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-38`, `P-diagnosis-28`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-38`. [official] Understand prompts on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands; Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts; Prompt ad extension report; Deprecations; v3 "Prompt ad extension reports"; and 1 more. [opinion] Ad Badger (agreeing on the date).
+- **P12.** In May 2026 (announced 2026-05-13) Amazon brought Rufus and Alexa+ together as Alexa for Shopping for US shoppers on the Amazon Shopping app, website and Echo Show, with Alexa+ continuing on Alexa-enabled devices; existing sponsored ads campaigns are automatically eligible to serve there without additional setup; outside the US the assistant is Rufus; advertisers with sponsored ads campaigns are automatically enrolled in Alexa+ Conversational Ads; no Ads API release note, guide or contract names Alexa for Shopping and no report field or placement value separates Alexa for Shopping or Alexa+ traffic (the v1 inventory type `ALEXA_DEVICES` aside); Amazon said in 2024 that reports would not carry Rufus metrics and in 2025 that Alexa+ metrics would be consolidated in existing reporting; no page says which bid adjustments apply there; Branded Conversations has no API or date. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-39`, `P-diagnosis-29`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-48`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-49`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-50`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-51`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-52`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-53`, `P-bids-and-placements-41`, `P-bids-and-placements-42`, `P-bids-and-placements-43`, `P-keyword-and-product-targeting-60`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-60`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-12`. [official] Release notes index, entry 2024-09-05; Meet Alexa for Shopping; Amazon Ads API "Release notes"; Meet Alexa for Shopping, your personalized, agentic AI assistant on Amazon, 2026-05-13; What agentic shopping means for advertising, 2026-06-11; and 23 more.
+- **P13.** Sponsored ads are billed at most once per click; sellers pay by card, seller account funds or invoice, vendors by card, deduction from payments or invoice, and KDP authors by card or invoice, and a payment failure pauses campaigns; invoices come each time accumulated cost reaches the credit limit and at least monthly, on the second day of the next month, and differ from campaign cost by invalid-traffic adjustments, over-delivery and promotional credits, taxes, regulatory advertising fees and charges carried across a month boundary; some countries add a regulatory advertising fee, and Amazon stopped charging the Canadian one after 2025-07-31 and began refunding it on 2026-04-15. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-40`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-41`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-42`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-33`, `P-budgets-and-pacing-34`. [official] Understand campaign spend; Payment methods (Sponsored ads); Regulatory Advertising Fees; *Understand Amazon Ads billing cycles* (help GY3YNTWRZYVPLADL); *View and understand your invoice*; and 1 more.
+- **P14.** Sponsored Services, announced at unBoxed 2026, is a US campaign type for local and online service providers bought with Cost Per Outcome bidding, available only through the Amazon Ads Unified API from Q4 2026, with console access in 2027. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-47`. [official] Sponsored Services: Capture demand now.
+- **P15.** Creator Connections lets a brand offer creators a commission on net price for sales within 24 hours of a click; it needs a US-advertising account based in the US, China or Hong Kong and a Brand Registry role; its results are reported only in its own portal at campaign level and its charges appear on the advertising invoice; in India the same name will cover SP creator content. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-54`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-55`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-56`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-57`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-61`. [official] Understand Amazon Creator Connections; Create and manage a Creator Connections campaign; Creator Connections Brand Guide; Understand campaign spend; Advertising Billing contract; and 1 more.
+- **P16.** SP creator placements are part of off-Amazon reach, with the CPC set from the maximum bid, expected performance and sales and clicks drawing the same campaign budget; reporting splits creator content as "Off Amazon" and creator storefronts as "Other – On Amazon"; "Limit reach to Amazon" keeps ads on Amazon properties, creator storefronts included; a creator tag on the account deny list excludes that creator from all active SP and Display campaigns; creators earn affiliate commission besides; PPC Land and Ad Badger report the start as 2026-08-10 with campaigns enrolled by default, and Ad Badger notes creator clicks can lower on-Amazon impression share while spend holds. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-58`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-59`, `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-60`, `P-diagnosis-46`. [official] Understand Sponsored Products off-Amazon advertising; Manage deny lists; Amazon Influencer and Associate Programs. [opinion] PPC Land, Luis Rijo, 2026-08-04; Ad Badger, 2026-08-21; Ad Badger, "Your Sponsored Products Ads Are Now Running Inside Creator Reviews"; PPC Land, "Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns gain creator placements on August 10".
+- **P17.** An invite-only Sponsored Content Requests program inside Creator Connections is described by trade press only. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-62`. [opinion] Modern Retail; Paragon; Intentwise, Michael Waters, 2025-09-08.
+- **P18.** `/v2/stores` was deprecated in January 2026 and shut off on 2026-06-01, replaced by `/brand/stores/v1/storePages/list`, though the API's Brand Store overview guide still documents `GET /v2/stores`; a brand's `brandEntityId` comes from `POST /brand/stores/v1/stores/list` or, for sellers, SB v3 `GET /brands`; new images and videos for SB, display, Stores and DSP enter the asset library in three calls: `POST /assets/upload` returns a URL that "expires in 15 minutes" and "only supports PUT" (an S3 host in Amazon's examples), the file is `PUT` to it, and `POST /assets/register` returns an `assetId`, usable once `ACTIVE`, which can take up to 30 minutes; sellers register assets with their brand entity id. — `P-ad-products-and-eligibility-63`, `P-brand-defense-and-competition-54`, `P-ads-api-surface-49`, `P-ads-api-surface-50`. [official] *Deprecations*; Brand Home model; Brand Store overview guide; Sponsored Brands 3.0 YAML; *Creating assets*; and 2 more.
+- **P19.** The Amazon Advertising API License Agreement limits confidential information to the advertising participant it relates to and to use on behalf of the participant who authorised it, and forbids generating repetitive or invalid interactions; the Partner Network Policies forbid combining Amazon data with other third-party sources without Amazon's written approval and require deletion when no longer needed; the Ads API is offered only to companies that do not operate a significant e-commerce business, a demand-side ad platform or an ad network; for SP-API data Amazon requires incident notice within 24 hours, deletion within 30 days of the triggering event and stored data kept separate or tagged by origin, and its Acceptable Use Policy forbids aggregating data across authorised users' businesses to provide to others and requires being explicit about calculations and the use of AI models, their accuracy and data freshness, with data integrity and validation checks on AI analysis that materially affects a business. — `P-ads-api-surface-58`, `P-ads-api-surface-59`, `P-ads-api-surface-60`, `P-ads-api-surface-61`, `P-ads-api-surface-62`. [official] *Amazon Advertising API License Agreement*; *Amazon Ads Partner Network Policies*; *Amazon Ads API Policies*; *SP-API Data Protection Policy*; *SP-API Acceptable Use Policy*.
+- **P20.** Amazon's vendor payment methods for sponsored ads are card (charged at each credit limit), deduction from retail proceeds by vendor code (which fails if that code's available funds are short) and monthly invoice due in 30 days; invoicing is invite-only; deduction from payments is not available to third parties managing payments, or to accounts without retail activity in the last 6 months; and a failed payment pauses campaigns. — `P-vendors-and-hybrid-58`. [official] *Payment methods (Sponsored ads)* (help GMELNQQNEEVLX456); *Advertising solutions for Amazon vendors*; *FAQs - Advertising questions and resources*.
+
+### R. Reports and the surface (`scripts/ads-report.sh` and its reference)
+
+- **R1.** Reporting v3, Sponsored Ads v2 reporting and Marketing Stream v1 stop delivering data on 2027-06-30; Reporting v1 and Stream v2 have been generally available since 2026-09-30. — `P-reporting-1`, `P-ads-api-surface-35`. [official] Deprecations; Amazon Ads API v1 release notes; Amazon Ads reporting overview; *Release notes* (2026-09-30); *Stream: Sponsored ads campaign management datasets*.
+- **R2.** A v3 report is created with `POST /reporting/reports` (content type `application/vnd.createasyncreportrequest.v3+json`, profile in the Scope header), read with `GET /reporting/reports/{reportId}` and cancelled while pending with `DELETE`; a completed report carries a pre-signed S3 `url` expiring at `urlExpiresAt` (3600 seconds by default, "may vary") to gzip-compressed JSON rows, and a failed one a `failureReason`. — `P-reporting-2`, `P-reporting-3`. [official] OfflineReport_prod_3p.json; Get started with version 3 reports.
+- **R3.** A v3 create identical to a report still processing is answered `425`, and Amazon's direction is to wait for the existing report and keep report ids. — `P-reporting-4`. [official] Get started with version 3 reports; OfflineReport_prod_3p.json; Reporting and analytics component.
+- **R4.** A throttled call answers `429` with `Retry-After` in seconds; limits move with system load and, for reports, with the region's queue; Amazon's guidance is exponential backoff on 429 and 5xx, longer for report generation, and investigating other 4xx first; field reports show 429s without `Retry-After`, one persisting over 24 hours on change history and one from the MCP gateway as HTML. — `P-reporting-5`, `P-ads-api-surface-25`, `P-ads-api-surface-26`, `P-ads-api-surface-27`. [official] Rate limiting; Get started with version 3 reports; *Well-Architected Framework: Fundamental component*. [opinion] Airbyte; `RianKoja`, issue 422; `ciocca-dev`, issue 436. [research] Brooker 2015.
+- **R5.** v3 report types are per ad product, each with its own `groupBy`, filters, maximum range and retention (a filter applies only when every `groupBy` supports it): SP has campaign, targeting, search term, advertised product, purchased product, gross and invalid, prompt and video extension types, with ad-group and placement data from `spCampaigns` grouped by `adGroup` or `campaignPlacement`; SB adds ad, ad group and placement; SD has ad group but no search term; audience boosts have `spAudiences` and `sbAudiences` (31 days per request, 95 days kept), though the v3 columns page names the SP type `spGlobalAudiences` and the availability table lists Audience for DSP only; Amazon maps no v1 or Stream v2 equivalent, and v1's `audienceSegment.id` covers SP but not SB. — `P-reporting-6`, `P-reporting-7`, `P-bids-and-placements-27`, `P-reporting-35`, `P-reporting-36`. [official] Sponsored ads report types (version 3); Campaign reports; Ad group reports; Placement reports; v3 type pages; and 10 more.
+- **R6.** A v1 report is created, retrieved and deleted with `POST /adsApi/v1/create/reports`, `/retrieve/reports` and `/delete/reports`, each answering 207 with one result, naming the advertiser by global account id in `accessRequestedAccounts` with no scope header, one report and one period per request; its status is `PENDING`, `PROCESSING`, `COMPLETED` or `FAILED`, polled about once a minute; a completed report lists up to 100 parts, each with its own pre-signed URL and expiry, partitioned formats splitting into chunks of up to 1 GB uncompressed; create has no `425` and no idempotency key, and no Amazon page says what an identical create does while its twin runs; neither API lists reports, so a report is found again only by the id returned at creation. — `P-reporting-11`, `P-reporting-12`, `P-reporting-43`, `P-reporting-44`. [official] AmazonAdsAPIALLReportsContract_prod_3p.json; Getting started with the Reporting API v1; Retrieving accounts; QueryAdvertiserAccount API; Create a subscription; and 5 more.
+- **R7.** A v1 request is refused synchronously with numbered 400 codes (among them `400004` incompatible fields, `400005` unknown field, `400006` missing field, `400025` past the look-back), and a failed report carries a failure code. — `P-reporting-13`. [official] Handling errors.
+- **R8.** A completed v1 report may carry warnings (`NO_PERMISSION`, `PENDING_DEPRECATION`, `DATE_LIMITED`) in a list Amazon says will grow, and warnings never stop it completing. — `P-reporting-14`, `P-diagnosis-24`. [official] New features; Amazon Ads API v1 release notes; Amazon Ads API v1 merged OpenAPI; v1 "New features".
+- **R9.** Amazon's pages disagree on Reporting v1 concurrency: its limits page and v1 overview say limits apply per client id, shared across every advertiser the client calls for, with concurrency "as low as 1", while the reporting overview, the Stream v2 overview and the GA note say per advertiser. — `P-reporting-15`, `P-ads-api-surface-28`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-31`, `P-diagnosis-77`. [official] Limits and best practices; Overview of the Reporting v1 API; Amazon Ads reporting overview; Amazon Marketing Stream v2 overview; Amazon Ads API v1 release notes; and 6 more.
+- **R10.** In v1 rows are the group-by of every requested dimension, an attribute needs its primary key, money metrics need `budgetCurrency.value`, and currencies are not summed across budget currencies unless `currencyOfView` converts them. — `P-reporting-16`. [official] Getting started with the Reporting API v1; Helpful concepts; New features; Costs metric.
+- **R11.** In v1 a missing value is `null` in JSON and `""` in CSV and "does not imply zero", a measured zero being `0`. — `P-reporting-18`, `P-diagnosis-23`. [official] Helpful concepts; v1 "Helpful concepts".
+- **R12.** v1 daily rows reach back 24 months at up to 120 days per request and hourly rows 14 days, while most v3 types keep 60 to 95 days. — `P-reporting-20`. [official] Dates and historical data retention; v3 type pages (figures for human readers only).
+- **R13.** Amazon recommends one or two report requests per advertiser per day per type, spread through the day, and taking metadata from exports joined on `campaignId` rather than from reports. — `P-reporting-24`. [official] Sponsored ads reporting FAQ (version 3); Get started with version 3 reports; Reporting and analytics component.
+- **R14.** Reports hold only entities with activity in the range, and during the v3 Sponsored Brands preview campaigns with `isMultiAdGroupsEnabled=False` are missing from SB reports. — `P-reporting-25`, `P-reporting-26`. [official] Campaign reports; Sponsored ads reporting overview (version 3); Sponsored ads report types (version 3).
+- **R15.** Stream v2 delivers Parquet totals at least once to an S3 bucket and SQS queue in the subscriber's AWS account, the record to keep for a key being the one with the highest `streamBatch.version`; thresholded values fall into an `(Other)` row evaluated at the exact level of detail; a destination belongs to the application that first uses it, at most five per application. — `P-reporting-27`, `P-reporting-42`, `P-ads-api-surface-34`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-17`. [official] Stream v2 overview; Data delivery; Datasets overview; Limits (Stream v2); Create a subscription; and 11 more. [opinion] Nova (search terms below "Amazon's privacy threshold are grouped").
+- **R16.** The SP Performance Over Time, SP and SB search term impression share and SP Budget reports exist only in the console, and Amazon treats console-to-API differences above 5% as a support matter. — `P-reporting-30`, `P-diagnosis-43`. [official] Reporting in the advertising console vs. API (version 2); Version 2 reporting overview. [opinion] emax digital; Openbridge, "Amazon Advertising Console vs Advertising API".
+- **R17.** On the seller side, Sales and Traffic aggregates its by-ASIN section over the whole range and weeks run Sunday to Saturday; Data Kiosk Economics carries ad charges per MSKU per day with weeks and months in UTC; Seller Analytics rolls weeks back to Sunday–Saturday, has all metrics ready after about 34 hours, states no time zone for a day, needs the Brand Analytics role and keeps results 30 days. — `P-reporting-31`, `P-reporting-48`, `P-reporting-49`, `P-reporting-50`, `P-reporting-51`. [official] sellerSalesAndTrafficReport.json; Report Type Values – Analytics; analytics_economics_2024_03_15.graphql; analytics_salesAndTraffic_2024_04_24.graphql; analytics_sellerAnalytics_2025_03_31.graphql; and 6 more.
+- **R18.** Ad ASIN fields may hold a retailer offer id of another format and length, and v1 product ids pair with their marketplace. — `P-reporting-32`. [official] Reporting columns (version 3); Advertised product; Converted product.
+- **R19.** SP invoice postings reach SP-API Finances as `ProductAdsPaymentEvent`, with posted date, charge or refund, invoice id and base, tax and total. — `P-reporting-33`. [official] financesV0.json.
+- **R20.** Amazon's v3-to-v1 field map gives `keywordId` as `adGroupTarget.id`, `keyword` and `targeting` as `targeting.value`, `keywordType` and `matchType` as `targetingMatchType.value`, `keywordBid` as `adGroupTarget.bid` and `searchTerm` as `searchTerm.value`; the Dimensions library defines no `target.value`, though Amazon's own v1 examples write it and the New features warning example flags it `PENDING_DEPRECATION`; v1 pages document no incompatibility between placement and target, term or hour dimensions (an incompatible pair is refused with `400004`), while v3 has no target-by-placement report, Stream v1 carries `keyword_id`, `placement` and the hour in one record until 2027-06-30, and Stream v2 `ads-performance-v1` keys hourly records by placement, target and search term. — `P-reporting-39`, `P-reporting-40`, `P-reporting-41`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-61`, `P-change-measurement-47`. [official] Reporting API v3 Report Type Migration Guide; Target; Targeting; Targeting match type; New features; and 16 more. [opinion] Intentwise data model.
+- **R21.** Stream v1's Sponsored Products datasets are `sp-traffic` and `sp-conversion`, documented on the page whose path is `sp-performance`, with the hour in the profile's time zone. — `P-reporting-47`, `P-bids-and-placements-50`. [official] Sponsored Products performance datasets; Dataset migration guide; *Sponsored Products performance datasets* (Marketing Stream); *Deprecations*.
+- **R22.** Ads API v1 is one set of `POST` create, update, query and delete operations over campaigns, ad groups, ads, targets and associations, which Amazon says will eventually replace the per-product APIs; SP, SB and DSP campaign management have been GA since 2025; at launch each call is bound to one ad product, with a per-product rate limit and batch sizes (`maxItems`, `maxResults`), SB writes taking far fewer items per call than SP's; the v1 contract and overview also list Sponsored Display and Sponsored Television as supported, and SD has a published v1 specification with no dated GA note. — `P-ads-api-surface-12`, `P-ads-api-surface-13`, `P-ads-api-surface-14`, `P-ads-api-surface-15`, `P-ads-api-surface-65`. [official] *Amazon Ads API v1 overview*; *Campaign management: Entities overview*; *Release notes: Ads API v1*; *contracts.json*; *Campaign management overview*; and 2 more. [opinion] `zhangwg4apollo`, issue 475; `iYetaimei`, issue 481.
+- **R23.** The Amazon Ads MCP server is served from `advertising-ai.amazon.com`, `-eu` and `-fe`, not the Ads API hosts, with the same token and client id, and the `cx-amazon-ads` door, whose origins are the `advertising-api*` hosts, does not reach it; its `campaign_management` group holds 32 tools, among them a single-call SP campaign create whose specification states no response and no behaviour on a failure part-way, and none named for harvesting or negatives, although its 2026-02-18 release note describes workflows that "automate keyword harvesting from automatic to manual campaigns"; Amazon's skills library is served by `GET /skills` on the Ads API hosts, with an `ads-api-migration` skill published on 2026-11-02. — `P-ads-api-surface-38`, `P-ads-api-surface-39`, `P-ads-api-surface-40`, `P-launch-46`, `P-search-terms-and-negatives-29`, `P-automation-and-amazon-tools-16`. [official] *MCP: Get started*; *MCP: Get started with Lite*; *MCP: OAuth*; *MCP tools: campaign_management*; *MCP overview*; and 12 more.
+- **R24.** Test accounts serve and bill nothing, are created under a separate `advertising::test:create_account` scope as vendor or author accounts only, and do not run rules. — `P-ads-api-surface-37`. [official] *Test accounts overview*; *Using test accounts*; *Advertising test account* model; *Deprecations*.
+- **R25.** AMC has been open to every sponsored-ads advertiser since 2025-09-16, uses its own `Amazon-Advertising-API-AdvertiserId` and `Amazon-Advertising-API-MarketplaceId` headers, needs its terms accepted once in each region (NA, EU and FE) in the AMC interface, and lets aggregated results be exported but not raw event information. — `P-ads-api-surface-36`. [official] *Release notes* (2025-09-16); *Get access to AMC using self-service APIs*; *Instance management*; *How does Amazon Marketing Cloud work*.
+
+## Where the files disagreed
+
+Each conflict below was found between files or between Amazon's own pages, recorded in the files' verification notes, and settled as stated. "Owner" is the file whose position carries the full record; the others now point to it or match it.
+
+| Topic | What disagreed | How it was settled |
+|---|---|---|
+| Dynamic bids up and down ceiling | Four current Amazon sources (help, library guide, SP 3.0 and v1 models) say up to 100% for all placements; the author-facing guide says 100% top of search and 50% elsewhere; some files called the 100/50 figure "the older rule". | Both texts are recorded; no Amazon page dates a change, so "older" was dropped as a reading. Owner `areas/bids-and-placements.md` (B6); launch, diagnosis, automation and change files match. |
+| Rufus, Alexa+ and Alexa for Shopping | Files differed on whether Rufus still exists, and one said no ads page names Alexa for Shopping. | Rufus and Alexa+ merged as Alexa for Shopping for US shoppers on 2026-05-13; outside the US the assistant is Rufus; Alexa+ on devices carries Conversational Ads; Amazon Ads pages do name Alexa for Shopping, while no API page does. Owner `beyond/ad-products-and-eligibility.md` (P12). |
+| Amazon Ads Agent | The platform name, the closed-beta chat and the help centre's "formerly known as Amazon DSP" were read as three things. | One platform name from 2026-09-29, a chat inside it with no API, and the DSP wording is the same name in DSP passages. Owner `beyond/automation-and-amazon-tools.md` (B37). |
+| Reserve share of voice limits | Amazon's pages give flights of 15–92, 30–92 or 14–90 days, different US minimums and different marketplace lists. | Not settled by Amazon; the figures are recorded page by page and the live value is the v1 validation reply. Owner `beyond/brand-defense-and-competition.md` (T36). |
+| SB Product Collection end | January 2027 (deprecations: creates error) against February 2027 (ListMigrations note: no longer supported). | Read as two events, creates failing first and support ending after; owner `method/ads-api-surface.md` (T19), with its open question kept. |
+| Reporting v1 concurrency | Two v1 pages say per client id; the reporting overview, the Stream v2 overview and the GA note say per advertiser; one file had said the Stream v2 overview states neither. | Both readings recorded, unsettled; owner `method/reporting.md` (R9), with a first-run question; the change-measurement file was corrected. |
+| Global account id | One file used the legacy `/adsAccounts*` endpoints for run-time reads. | `query/advertiserAccounts` is the replacement; the run-time row was corrected (A5). |
+| Sponsored Display on v1 | One file said SD is "not yet in v1". | SD has a v1 specification and is listed as supported, with no dated GA note (B20, R22). |
+| `/v2/stores` | Some files still named it as the source of `brandEntityId`. | Shut off 2026-06-01; `brandEntityId` comes from `stores/list` or SB `GET /brands` (P18). |
+| SB negative paths | Three model files placed SB negatives differently. | `/sb/negativeKeywords` is in the SB 3.0 YAML only; the JSON titled "Sponsored Brands 3.0" and the SB 4.0 JSON hold category, product-count and brand-recommendation targeting paths (T39, S24). |
+| `topOfSearchImpressionShare` report types | The reporting file listed SP only. | The v3 columns page lists `spCampaigns`, `sbCampaigns` and `sbTargeting`, and the type pages add `spTargeting`; v1 offers it with campaign-level dimensions only (T31). |
+| Stream v1 dataset ids | `sp-performance` was taken for a dataset id. | The ids are `sp-traffic` and `sp-conversion`; `sp-performance` is the documenting page (R21). |
+| Position and conversion rate | Four published studies point in different directions. | Recorded as a disagreement among studies, no side taken; owner `areas/bids-and-placements.md` (B21). |
+| `extendedData` field names | The request flag's description and the response schema name the fields differently. | Both recorded; the response schema is what a reply carries (A15). |
+| `target.value` against `targeting.value` | Files used different v1 names for the target text. | Amazon's v3-to-v1 map gives `adGroupTarget.id` and `targeting.value`; the Dimensions library defines no `target.value`, though Amazon's own v1 examples write it and a warning example flags it `PENDING_DEPRECATION` (R20). |
+| TACOS on Amazon pages | One file said Amazon names TACOS on one page. | Two pages (G14). |
+| Multi-touch fields | Amazon's launch page says "most report types for version 3"; the v3 column pages show none. | The fields are recorded as v1 fields; the launch page's claim is recorded as unsupported by the column pages (M16). |
+| New-to-brand on Sponsored Products | Amazon's help page says SB and display only; the v1 field list names SP purchases and sales. | Both recorded, with a first-run question (G10). |
+| SP carry-over | Qin's study found none beyond three weeks; Tong's 20% after the window covers all ad products; a seller's switchback treats its figure as a floor. | Recorded side by side with their scopes (G31, M19, C23). |
+| Pause tests | Studies find a pause overstating loss (Golden & Horton) or understating it (Ju et al.); Coviello against Blake on brand terms. | Recorded as study results with their settings (T43, G25, C17). |
+| Self-competition | Files read Amazon's highest-bid rule as covering campaigns against each other. | Amazon's text covers match types of one keyword only; practitioners disagree on the rest (T22). |
+| Daily over-delivery | Amazon's library guide prints 25%; help and API say 100% by default with a 25% opt-out. | The guide is stale; 100% stands, read per profile from the feature flag (B22). |
+| SB `PORTFOLIO_OUT_OF_BUDGET` | The SB v4 model lists it; the common enums page does not. | Both recorded (A17). |
+| Walmart's position research | One file attributed Xue et al. to Amazon. | It is Walmart's; Amazon researchers' related work is cited separately (B21). |
+| Console search term coverage | Impressions (v3 FAQ) against clicks only (console help, unified reporting). | Unsettled; recorded with a first-run question (S1). |
+| Campaign-level negative product targets | Three Amazon texts conflict for a seller's manual SP campaign. | All three recorded (S11). |
+| Negative broad | Console help says exact and phrase only; SP 3.0 and v1 accept broad. | Both recorded; behaviour is a first-run question (S9). |
+| Exact match and word order | Two Amazon guides disagree. | Both recorded (T23). |
+| Sahni & Nair and He et al. | A summary sentence on "the gap" between paid and organic outcomes went beyond what the papers measured. | Declined; the positions state each paper's own finding (L21). |
+| Brand Registry for vendors | `method/ads-api-surface.md` (P-ads-api-surface-9) says seller and vendor profiles need Brand Registry for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. | The vendor file's verifier re-opened the *Profiles* guide (the note sits on the seller row only), the FAQ ("Only sellers must enroll") and *Understand Sponsored Brands*; vendors need not enroll. Owner `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md` (L22). |
+| Display and SB without the Featured Offer | The 2017 AMS toolkit and Intentwise say Product Display or Sponsored Display keeps serving after a lost buy box or a stock-out. | Amazon's current Featured Offer page holds for Display (0 impressions); the toolkit and Intentwise lines are recorded as dated or theirs (A8, A26, A30); whether SB serves when the product is out of stock everywhere is open. |
+| Net PPM | The Net PPM report schema and the Data Kiosk vendor schema define Net PPM with different formulas. | Both recorded as Amazon's current wordings, unsettled (G34). |
+
+## Open questions
+
+### For Jack's word (Jack, or counsel through him)
+
+1. **The package name.** `cx-ads-playbook` is recommended above; the alternatives are `cx-amazon-ads-playbook` and `cx-ppc-playbook`.
+2. **Stream v2.** Hourly data and Amazon's push feeds need an S3 bucket and SQS queue that belong to the application that first registers them, which for the door is ComChatX's client application, at most five per application. Whether ComChatX runs that infrastructure is a deployment ruling.
+3. **The MCP server and Amazon's skills.** Whether cx may call `advertising-ai*.amazon.com`, and whether it may fetch `GET /skills` on the Ads API origin and reuse what it returns, under Amazon's terms.
+4. **The Ads API Policies' eligibility line.** The Ads API is "made available only to companies that do not operate a significant ecommerce business, a demand-side ad platform, or an ad network". Whether ComChatX's client application stands under that line is counsel's.
+5. **Combining data.** The Partner Network Policies forbid combining Amazon data with other third-party sources without Amazon's written approval. Several positions (G20, G23, A11) set Ads data beside SP-API data for one seller. Whether that join on the seller's own box is "combining" under the policy is counsel's.
+6. **One client id, many sellers.** The licence keeps confidential information to the participant it relates to; ComChatX's single client id serves many sellers, and Reporting v1 limits may be shared across them (R9). Both the legal reading and whether a second client id or quota plan is wanted are Jack's.
+7. **Credentials.** Policy 5.1 forbids collecting or storing end users' authentication credentials; the door has the seller save a refresh token in the plugin's settings. Whether a token issued to the application by the seller's own consent is such a credential is counsel's.
+8. **Landed data.** The Ads API Data Protection Policy page could not be read (a JavaScript shell); the SP-API policy requires incident notice within 24 hours, deletion within 30 days of a trigger and origin-tagged storage. What retention, encryption and deletion rules apply to reports landed by the script is Jack's.
+9. **Disclosure of AI.** The SP-API Acceptable Use Policy requires providers to be explicit about calculations and the use of AI, their accuracy and freshness. How cx's outputs meet it, where SP-API data is involved, is counsel's.
+10. **AMC and Brand Analytics.** AMC needs its terms accepted once per region in its own interface; Brand Analytics data (SQP, Top Search Terms) carries its own terms and role. Whether the pack reads them, and keeps their results on the box, is Jack's.
+11. **Trademark law.** The pages read cover US case law and one EU study; whether the conquesting positions (T35, T45) need a counsel line for other jurisdictions is Jack's.
+12. **SP-API for a vendor.** Every vendor retail-analytics read (Vendor Sales, Traffic, Inventory, Forecasting and Net PPM reports, Data Kiosk, the Vendor Orders API, the promotion and coupon reports, Brand Analytics) sits on SP-API hosts under a vendor authorisation, outside the door. Whether cx reaches them is Jack's (gap 17 below).
+
+### For the first run on a real account
+
+1. Is Reporting v1 concurrency per client id or per advertiser, and does one seller's report queue another's?
+2. Does the console search term report still list impression-only terms?
+3. Does the API accept a broad negative keyword on SP, and what does it block?
+4. Can a seller add a campaign-level negative product target to a manual SP campaign?
+5. What does an SP v1 write return: `partialSuccess` or only `success` and `error`? How does an SP v1 delete leave the entity (archived)?
+6. Does an SP row in Reporting v1 return non-zero new-to-brand values, and does a seller's SP halo appear as `halo`?
+7. In what time zone is a Sales and Traffic or Seller Analytics day, against the campaign's `timeZone.value`, and is `timeZone.value` requestable as a dimension?
+8. Is `percentTimeInBudget` a decimal from 0 to 1 or a percentage on the live reply, and how often does `usageUpdatedTimestamp` move?
+9. Which change types does `POST /history` return for this account, and are budget-rule and theme events among them?
+10. Is an Irish profile listed by the EU origin?
+11. Does an SD v1 budget update without `recurrenceTimePeriod` still fail silently?
+12. What does the eligibility read return for a listing created days ago?
+13. Do prompt and Alexa for Shopping traffic show in any report row, and under which placement value?
+14. Which v1 recommendations list path answers: `GET /adsApi/v1/list/recommendations` or `GET /adsApi/v1/recommendations`?
+15. Do the v1 families accept `Amazon-Advertising-API-ClientId`, which the door attaches, as well as `Amazon-Ads-ClientId`?
+16. How long after a write does a list or query show the new value?
+17. Are the audience ids from `audiences/list`, `targetableEntities/list` and v1 `query/audiences` one id space, and is the shopper-cohort recommendation's percentage in basis points?
+18. How far back do v1 search term rows reach in practice (the dates page says 24 months)?
+19. Does a v1 placement-by-target report run, as the compatibility tables imply?
+20. What do the limits page's odd rows (the EG maximum SP bid) return as a refusal on a live write?
+21. On a vendor account, what do `INELIGIBLE_PRODUCT_COST` and the `CP_INELIGIBLE`, `CP_INELIGIBLE_ASIN`, `CP_INELIGIBLE_UNKNOWN` and `CP_INELIGIBLE_VENDOR` reasons coincide with? No current Amazon page describes them (A27).
+22. For a company with a seller and a vendor account, who counts as "the same advertiser" in the attribution page's merchant-and-brand sentence: the advertising account, the global account or the brand (M25)?
+23. Which Net PPM formula do a vendor's report and Data Kiosk return, and does a vendor's sponsored-ads cost move Data Kiosk's `contraCogs` ("Display Ads Contra COGS")? Reason Automation reports a Vendor Central Net PPM bug in January 2026 (G34).
+24. Who may request the rapid retail reports: the Amazon Ads page says "both sellers and vendors", the SP-API reports say vendors, the notifications say sellers and vendors.
+25. What are a vendor's current promotion lead times and 2026 event deadlines? The only Amazon source read is the March 2017 PDF (E25), and the seller deadlines differ between Amazon's staff post, Quartile and My Amazon Guy.
+26. Does Sponsored Brands keep serving when the product is out of stock everywhere, which the Featured Offer page's "as long as the advertised product is available to buy" suggests it does not?
+27. Do a vendor's sponsored ads change Amazon's purchase orders? Amazon's 2017 PDF says Amazon often buys more for promotions (E25); no page read says the same of ads.
+28. Which revenue does a vendor's TACoS sit on? Amazon names none, and m19 uses manufacturing ordered, manufacturing shipped and sourcing shipped revenue; a hybrid brand adds its seller-side sales (G37).
+29. Does vendor SP attribution ("Only products sold by Amazon are attributed") count Amazon Business and Fresh orders of the same ASIN, which the Sales report splits as `BUSINESS` and `FRESH`?
+30. On a hybrid ASIN whose Featured Offer alternates within a day between Amazon retail and the brand's own offer, how fast do the Eligibility status and the serving-status reason follow, given that impressions for the previous holder "stop immediately" (A25)?
+31. What does `validPaymentMethod: false` do to serving on a vendor profile, and how does it relate to the billing status (A18, A24)?
+32. Does deduction from payments fail when a vendor's POs stop? The help page says it fails if the vendor code's available funds are short; no page says how Amazon nets ad costs against retail payables (P20).
+33. What `replenishmentCategory` values exist? The Data Kiosk schema types it as a free string, "Availability status for the ASIN".
+34. Do the 2017 toolkit's rules still hold where no current page restates them, such as Headline Search needing three eligible ASINs in stock and one past the threshold (A26)? The vendor-only negative product targets on manual campaigns stay with S11 and question 4.
+
+## What `cx-amazon-ads` lacks
+
+Read against that package's `SKILL.md` and `references/door.md` (whose Amazon guides were read 2026-11-03). Each item is offered to that package's owners; none is done here, and none changes what this pack's positions say.
+
+1. **A report reader.** The door names the v3 three-call flow and leaves the download to the box; there is no script that lands a report, keeps a receipt, carries on an unlanded ask and strips the pre-signed link. The R part proposes one for this pack; the door could carry it instead.
+2. **Reporting v1.** `door.md` documents v3 only, with its 2027-06-30 stop. v1 names the advertiser by global account id in the body, lands up to 100 parts, answers 207, and its retrieve is a `POST`.
+3. **The global account id.** `POST /adsApi/v1/query/advertiserAccounts` and the `Amazon-Ads-AccountId` header are not named, though v1 reporting, v1 recommendations and Stream v2 need them; the legacy `/adsAccounts*` endpoints answer `Warning: 299` and are due to stop.
+4. **Reads sent as `POST`.** v1 queries, SP v3 and SB v4 lists, exports, budget usage, eligibility, product metadata, change history, recommendations and the v1 report retrieve are `POST`s that change nothing, and the gate reads each as a change, so a lost reply reads "sent, outcome unknown". The opposite also holds: `POST /recommendations/apply` and v1 creates are real changes with no idempotency key.
+5. **Families not named.** Manager accounts, exports, change history, budget usage, eligibility, product metadata, moderation, portfolios, budget and optimization rules, recommendations of each kind, audiences, brands and Stores, localization, reserve share of voice, promotion offers and rewards, Events and measurement. The door carries them; it does not name their media types or account headers.
+6. **`Content-Type` per operation.** The door composes none, while SP v3, SB v4, product metadata, moderation and change history name versioned media types, change history's theme events need the v1.1 `Accept`, and extended-data list calls weigh five times a standard call.
+7. **Header names.** The door attaches `Amazon-Advertising-API-ClientId`; several v1 and MCP pages use `Amazon-Ads-ClientId`. Whether every v1 family takes the older name is not stated.
+8. **No wait on 429, and no 425.** The door adds no wait; Amazon's guidance is backoff on `Retry-After`, and field reports show 429s without it. v3's `425` duplicate answer is not named.
+9. **Ireland.** The origin table has no IE row, though IE profiles exist under region EU.
+10. **Hosts outside the door.** The MCP server (`advertising-ai*`), the asset library's 15-minute S3 upload URL (so a new image or video creative cannot be made end to end), export and report downloads, AMC download URLs and Stream v2's S3 files are outside the door's origins. Whether `--body` carries the binary multipart that SB `POST /stores/assets` takes is not stated.
+11. **Stream v2.** It needs an AWS account and destinations the door does not have.
+12. **A fresh token per call.** The door trades the refresh token at Login with Amazon on every call, so each call is two requests; LwA's own limits are not documented on the pages read.
+13. **Test accounts and AMC.** Test accounts need a separate scope and have no seller type; AMC needs its own headers and a per-region terms step in its interface.
+14. **Unlisted models.** Targetable Entities, AMC Administration and `SponsoredBrands_prod_3p.json` are served but absent from `contracts.json`, so a reader mapping the surface from the index misses them.
+15. **The door's own prompts.** `spend-this-week`, `wasted-keywords` and `out-of-budget` rest on Reporting v3, which stops on 2027-06-30.
+16. **Terms under one client id.** The licence, the Ads API Policies and the Partner Network Policies bind the client application the door calls under; `door.md` says nothing of what is done with landed data afterwards (see the open questions for Jack).
+17. **SP-API for vendors.** The door reaches Ads API origins only and names no SP-API route, so a vendor's retail-analytics reads (Vendor Sales, Traffic, Inventory, Forecasting and Net PPM reports, Data Kiosk `analytics_vendorAnalytics_2024_09_30`, the Vendor Orders API, the promotion and coupon reports, Brand Analytics and their notifications) are outside it, and the Eligibility read on a vendor's ASINs, a `POST`, passes the gate as a change (item 4).
+
+## Pages read
+
+Counts are rows of each file's *Pages read* table, counted on 2026-11-09 with a shell command that runs a short Python script over the eighteen files (the script is kept outside this directory). The method: (1) take the lines between each file's `## Pages read` heading and the next `##` heading; (2) count every table row except the header and separator; (3) treat everything after a line beginning "Unreachable" as the unreachable list, counting its list items and table rows there only, and not counting gap-fill sub-headings or the "not called, by rule" lines; (4) class each read row by its *Type* cell: internal (a ComChatX or cx package file) is left out, a type naming research, a paper or an abstract is research, a regulator, court or standards body without "official" is counted apart, a type containing "official" is official, a type naming opinion, practitioner, vendor, agency, press, blog, a GitHub issue or sellers is opinion, and a row with none of these is classed by its URL's host (Amazon's sites, docs hosts and `amzn` GitHub as official, `amazon.science` and academic hosts as research, the rest as opinion); (5) count distinct URLs as the first `http(s)` URL in each counted row, deduplicated across all files exactly as written. The same page read by several seats counts once per file in the rows and once in the distinct URLs.
+
+| File | Positions | Official | Opinion | Research | Regulator, court, standards | Internal (left out) | Unreachable entries |
+|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
+| `areas/launch.md` | 51 | 77 | 25 | 15 | 0 | 3 | 21 |
+| `areas/campaign-structure.md` | 59 | 83 | 33 | 7 | 0 | 2 | 11 |
+| `areas/keyword-and-product-targeting.md` | 65 | 116 | 26 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 25 |
+| `areas/search-terms-and-negatives.md` | 63 | 88 | 36 | 14 | 0 | 2 | 14 |
+| `areas/bids-and-placements.md` | 53 | 98 | 16 | 14 | 1 | 0 | 14 |
+| `areas/budgets-and-pacing.md` | 60 | 124 | 29 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
+| `areas/seasons-and-deals.md` | 72 | 119 | 20 | 9 | 4 | 1 | 14 |
+| `areas/ads-organic-and-total.md` | 36 | 82 | 29 | 27 | 2 | 0 | 17 |
+| `areas/diagnosis.md` | 85 | 122 | 26 | 23 | 1 | 2 | 22 |
+| `beyond/ad-products-and-eligibility.md` | 63 | 148 | 13 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 14 |
+| `beyond/metrics-and-attribution.md` | 54 | 88 | 15 | 20 | 6 | 3 | 9 |
+| `beyond/goals-and-economics.md` | 70 | 74 | 23 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 20 |
+| `beyond/brand-defense-and-competition.md` | 58 | 98 | 33 | 26 | 5 | 0 | 16 |
+| `beyond/automation-and-amazon-tools.md` | 33 | 74 | 35 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 16 |
+| `beyond/vendors-and-hybrid.md` | 67 | 76 | 22 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
+| `method/ads-api-surface.md` | 67 | 153 | 36 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 36 |
+| `method/reporting.md` | 51 | 110 | 21 | 5 | 0 | 5 | 14 |
+| `method/change-measurement.md` | 75 | 83 | 33 | 50 | 0 | 2 | 21 |
+| **Total** | **1,082** | **1,813** | **471** | **283** | **21** | **22** | **301** |
+
+**2,588 read rows** (1,813 official, 471 opinion, 283 research, 21 regulator, court or standards), behind **1,562 distinct URLs**: 919 official, 406 opinion, 222 research and 17 regulator, court or standards. The 1,082 file positions merge into the 333 positions above.
+
+**Unreachable, in summary** (301 entries, some naming a group of pages):
+
+- **Seller Central help pages** (deals, coupons, Featured Offer eligibility, Pricing Health, SQP and Top Search Terms, the account budget cap, billing, Brand Tailored Promotions, Customer Engagement, variations): a plain GET returns the help hub's JavaScript shell, and their content comes only through the `GetHelpTopic` POST this research may not call. Where a capture or another Amazon page carried the text, the files cite that instead.
+- **Amazon pages that moved or never existed at the guessed path:** Ads API guide paths answering `NoSuchKey` on the documentation host, library guides answering 404, help nodes redirecting to the Support Center homepage, aboutamazon and sell.amazon.com pages answering 404, the docs sitemap served as a shell.
+- **Bot walls and lead forms:** Pacvue (403), Search Engine Land (Cloudflare), Triple Whale, Helium 10's knowledge base, Sellozo, dblp, EconBiz, EUR-Lex (an empty 202), the Internet Archive's snapshot host, and lead-form reports (Tinuiti, Jungle Scout).
+- **Paywalls and unextractable files:** journal full texts at INFORMS, AEA, JPE, Elsevier and the ACM library (abstracts or records used instead), and PDFs this machine could not extract (the ESCI paper, an Amazon Science PDF, a Jungle Scout report).
+- **Sign-in pages, not attempted:** Vendor Central help (every address redirects to sign-in, so no current Amazon text on vendor promotion lead times or Vendor Central operations was read), the Coupons, Deals, Vine and Promotions dashboards, the Ads console, the AMC instructional-query library and Amazon's advertising-copy policy in several locales.
+- **Not called, by rule:** every Ads API host (including `GET /skills`), Login with Amazon, the Amazon Ads MCP endpoints and every SP-API host.