Amazon Advertising Reporting for Vendors: How to Join Ads Reports to Vendor Central by ASIN

You have your Sales, Inventory, and Traffic exports joined into one row per ASIN, and now you want ad spend in the same table so you can see which ASINs are buying traffic, what that traffic costs, and whether there's stock behind it. That data lives somewhere else. Amazon Advertising reporting runs in the Amazon Ads console, and none of the Retail Analytics reports in Vendor Central carries a spend column, so the two sets of numbers only meet if you put them together yourself.

This guide is the advertising follow-on to combining Vendor Central reports by ASIN. It assumes you have that joined sheet, or at least know its XLOOKUP and Power Query pattern, since everything below builds on it.

Two Systems, Two Exports

Retail Analytics sits inside Vendor Central and covers what Amazon bought, sold, and holds. The Vendor Central report definitions guide walks through the reports there, from the Sales and Traffic Diagnostic reports through Inventory Health, Real-Time Inventory, Forecast and Inventory Planning, Net PPM, and Geographic Sales, and none of them reports advertising spend.

Your ad data lives in the Amazon Ads console. Amazon's own guide to campaign reporting starts there: select Campaigns from the left column, then choose the campaign you want to review. The metrics on that side are advertising metrics, such as click-through rate, page views, ROAS, and ACOS, along with new-to-brand, reach and frequency, viewability, and off-Amazon conversion measures.

The sales figure differs between the two sides as well. An Ads report counts ad-attributed sales, meaning the sales Amazon credits to a click on your ad, while Retail Analytics counts shipped revenue. They measure different things, so your combined sheet needs both, each in its own column.

If you came from Seller Central

Seller Central puts advertising reports under Reports, then Advertising Reports, in the same account you sell from, whereas vendor accounts work from the Amazon Ads console. The attribution window differs too: on Vendor Central accounts, ad sales count within 14 days of a click, while Sponsored Products on Seller Central counts sales within 7 days. So if you've ever compared ACOS between a vendor account and a seller account, the vendor figure had twice as long to collect sales.

What Each Side Reports

Sponsored Products offers several report types, and only some of them help with an ASIN join:

Advertised Product Report. Performance for every advertised ASIN in every campaign that received at least one impression, broken down by campaign, ad group, and SKU. This is the report you join on.
Purchased Product Report. The non-advertised products shoppers bought after clicking one of your ads, which is useful when you want to know which ASINs your ads ended up selling.
Campaign Report and Budget Report. Performance and spend at campaign level. They work for budget pacing but are awkward for an ASIN view (see the breaks below).
Search Term Report. The searches that triggered your ads. It's valuable for keyword work but has nothing to contribute to the ASIN join.

Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display have their own report lists, so before you plan the join around them, open each one in your console and check whether it breaks spend out by ASIN.

On the Retail Analytics side, the Sales report gives you ordered and shipped revenue and units at ASIN level, plus Shipped COGS, while Inventory gives you stock position and Traffic gives you glance views.

Picking the Join Key

ASIN ties the two systems together, the same way it ties the Vendor Central exports together. The same cleanup applies, and the Ads report adds two steps of its own.

Open the Advertised Product Report and find the advertised ASIN column. The report also carries SKU, but Retail Analytics reports by ASIN, so ASIN is the key.
Set the ASIN column to Text format and run =TRIM() over it, exactly as you did for the Vendor Central files, because a reformatted or padded ASIN misses its match without throwing an error.
Collapse the Ads rows to one per ASIN per period before you join. The report breaks results down by campaign and ad group, so an ASIN advertised in three campaigns appears on at least three rows, and because XLOOKUP returns only the first match, a plain lookup would silently drop the other campaigns' spend.
Decide which ASIN gets credit for ad sales. The Purchased Product Report shows that some ad-driven sales land on an ASIN that was never advertised. If you want ACOS by advertised ASIN, the Advertised Product Report on its own is enough, but if you want to see where ad-driven revenue went, add the Purchased Product Report as a second lookup and keep its figures in their own column.

Where This Join Breaks

A join of these two systems can run cleanly and still mislead you, so work through these checks before you trust it.

The attribution window does not line up with the retail week

For Vendor Central accounts, ad-attributed sales follow the ad system's 14-day rule, but Retail Analytics shipped revenue follows the reporting week. The same purchase can show up in different weeks on each side, and for a single ASIN in a single week, ad-attributed sales can even come out higher than shipped revenue. Read the combined view over four weeks or more, and treat the most recent two weeks as provisional.

Campaign-level spend does not belong to any one ASIN

If you pull spend from the Campaign Report, each figure covers every product in that campaign. Pushing it down to ASIN means picking an allocation rule, such as splitting by clicks or by ad-attributed sales, and whichever rule you pick is an estimate. Use the Advertised Product Report wherever it covers the spend, and if you do allocate, name the column "Ad Spend (allocated)" so nobody reads it as a measured figure.

The periods do not match

If your Ads export comes down by day and your Retail Analytics files are weekly, sum the Ads rows to the same weeks first. Check the first and last date in each file instead of assuming both tools start the week on the same day, because a one-day offset moves spend into the neighboring week for every ASIN at once.

ASINs appear on one side only

An ASIN with sales and no Ads row usually had no impressions in the period, since the Advertised Product Report only lists ASINs that received at least one, so its spend is zero and the sheet should say so. The reverse case needs a closer look. An advertised ASIN with no Sales row may be a brand ASIN that another supplier sells to Amazon, which shows up in Manufacturing view but not in a Sourcing view Sales file, so check the distributor view on your Sales export before you treat it as a data error.

Currencies differ across marketplaces

If you advertise in more than one marketplace, spend in one currency can end up next to revenue in another, and the ratio will still look like a plausible percentage. Rename every column you bring across with its unit, such as "Ad Spend (USD)" or "Shipped Revenue (GBP)", and join one marketplace at a time.

Building the Combined View

Extend the Power Query routine from the Vendor Central join instead of starting over.

Load the Advertised Product Report as its own query from the Data tab, using Get Data and then From Text/CSV. Set ASIN to Text.
Select the ASIN column (and the week column, if the file spans several weeks) and choose Group By. Add two aggregations: the sum of spend and the sum of ad-attributed sales. Your export's column names may differ, so pick whichever columns hold those two figures.
Open your existing Sales, Inventory, and Traffic query, choose Merge Queries, pick the grouped Ads query, match on ASIN (and week), and set the join kind to Left Outer so every Sales ASIN stays.
Expand the merged column to bring in the two summed fields, then use Replace Values to turn null spend into 0.
Close and load.

For a one-off in a plain spreadsheet, use SUMIFS in place of XLOOKUP, because it adds up every campaign row for the ASIN:

=SUMIFS(Ads!$E:$E, Ads!$B:$B, $A2)

The column letters are placeholders for wherever your export puts spend and ASIN. SUMIFS returns 0 for an ASIN it can't find, which hides genuine misses, so add a =COUNTIF(Ads!$B:$B, $A2) column beside it to tell "not advertised" apart from "key did not match".

With spend, ad-attributed sales, and shipped revenue in the same row, ACOS and TACOS are each one formula away. ACOS is spend divided by ad-attributed sales. TACOS is spend divided by total sales, which for a Vendor Central account means shipped revenue. TACOS is the one that needs the join, because it measures ad spend against the whole business: if TACOS falls while spend holds steady, your sales outside ads are growing. Wrap both in IFERROR so an ASIN with no sales doesn't fill the column with errors.

What This Still Won't Tell You

TACOS tells you how much of your revenue went back into ads, but it doesn't tell you whether that revenue left any margin. Shipped COGS is already in your Sales export, so subtracting Shipped COGS and ad spend from shipped revenue gives you a rough per-ASIN check, which is enough to spot an ASIN whose ad spend is eating most of the gap between price and cost.

Campaign-level spend stays an estimate however carefully you build the join, and day-level precision is out of reach while the attribution window and the retail week disagree, so plan to read this view by week, several weeks at a time.

What Vendor Central Will Not Give You

All of this repeats every week, across two tools. You export Retail Analytics from Vendor Central and the Advertised Product Report from the Ads console, collapse the campaign rows, check the week boundaries and the distributor view, refresh the merge, and scan the ASINs that matched on one side only. Neither tool has a setting that pulls in the other's numbers, so the merge is yours to redo each time.

InsightLeap does this join continuously. It reports ACOS, TACOS, and ROAS across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display, with Amazon Ads campaign performance set against your product and inventory data. The features page covers what else it tracks.

If you're building it by hand this week, pull the Advertised Product Report for the same weeks as your Retail Analytics files, group it to one row per ASIN per week, merge it onto the Sales join, and read ACOS and TACOS over at least four weeks before acting on any single ASIN.