Glossary
Amazon advertising & seller glossary
The terms operators actually need, defined the way we use them with clients — no fluff, no vanity metrics dressed up as insight.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Profitability & unit economics | |
| ACoS Advertising Cost of Sales | The percentage of ad-attributed revenue spent on advertising — ad spend divided by ad sales. It is a pure efficiency ratio for paid sales only and says nothing about total-account profitability, which is why Lynx targets contribution margin instead. |
| TACoS Total Advertising Cost of Sales | Ad spend as a percentage of total revenue — organic plus paid — not just ad-attributed revenue. Falling TACoS while sales grow signals that advertising is driving durable organic rank rather than simply buying sales. |
| ROAS Return on Ad Spend | Revenue generated per dollar of ad spend (ad sales divided by ad spend) — the inverse of ACoS. A ROAS of 4 means four dollars of ad sales for every dollar spent. |
| Break-even ACoS | The ACoS at which a product's ad spend exactly equals its gross margin, so an additional sale adds neither profit nor loss. A product's contribution margin percentage before ad spend equals its break-even ACoS. |
| Contribution margin | The dollars left from a unit's sale after every variable cost — Amazon referral and FBA fees, returns, cost of goods, and allocated ad spend. Lynx optimizes for contribution-margin dollars rather than ACoS percentages, because a bank account holds dollars, not ratios. |
| COGS Cost of Goods Sold | The landed cost to produce and deliver a unit to Amazon — manufacturing, packaging, and inbound freight — before any Amazon or advertising costs are applied. |
| Amazon advertising | |
| Sponsored Products | Amazon's keyword- and ASIN-targeted ads that appear in search results and on product detail pages, promoting individual listings. The workhorse format of most Amazon ad accounts. |
| Sponsored Brands | Headline and video ads that feature a brand logo and multiple products, shown higher in search results. Used to defend branded search and drive traffic to a Brand Store. |
| Sponsored Display | Audience- and product-targeted ads that retarget shoppers on and off Amazon, including on competitor product pages. |
| Day-parting | Adjusting ad bids or budgets by hour of day or day of week so spend concentrates in the hours that actually convert profitably, instead of paying the same bid at 3am and 3pm. |
| SKAG Single Keyword Ad Group | A campaign structure where each ad group targets exactly one keyword, giving surgical bid control and clean margin tracking per search term. Part of how Lynx restructures Sponsored Products campaigns. |
| Incremental ad spend | Advertising that generates sales the brand would not have captured organically. Branded-keyword spend is often non-incremental — it pays for sales that would have happened anyway — which is the first leak Lynx tests for. |
| CTR Click-Through Rate | The share of ad impressions that result in a click (clicks divided by impressions). A diagnostic for creative and relevance — a low CTR usually means the main image, title, or targeting is off. |
| CVR Conversion Rate | The share of clicks or sessions that result in a purchase (orders divided by clicks, or orders divided by sessions). The single biggest lever on both ad efficiency and organic rank. |
| Ranking & traffic | |
| Organic rank | A listing's unpaid position in Amazon search results for a given keyword, driven largely by sales velocity and conversion rate for that term. |
| BSR Best Sellers Rank | Amazon's category-relative ranking of how well a product is selling, updated hourly. Lower is better; it reflects recent sales velocity, not product quality. |
| Buy Box | The purchase box on a product page that a single seller wins at a time. Losing the Buy Box — to a hijacker, a pricing error, or a stock issue — effectively zeroes out sales even while the listing stays live. |
| Unit Session Percentage | A session is a unique visit to a listing; Unit Session Percentage is units ordered divided by sessions — Amazon's own conversion-rate metric for a listing. |
| Catalogue & account health | |
| FBA Fulfillment by Amazon | The program where Amazon stores, picks, packs, and ships a seller's inventory and handles returns and customer service, in exchange for fulfillment and storage fees. |
| IPI Inventory Performance Index | Amazon's 0–1,000 score of how efficiently a seller manages FBA inventory — balancing in-stock rates, sell-through, excess stock, and stranded inventory. A low IPI triggers storage limits. |
| Listing suppression | When Amazon hides a listing from search and the Buy Box because of a content, image, or compliance violation. Suppressions often happen in 72-hour windows and silently cut a listing's sales to zero until resolved. |
| Hijacker | An unauthorized third-party seller that lists on your ASIN — often with counterfeit or cheaper stock — to steal the Buy Box and your sales. Brand Registry and automated takedown workflows are the defense. |
| Brand Registry | Amazon's program for trademark-holding brands that unlocks brand-protection tools, A+ Content, Sponsored Brands, and faster removal of hijackers and counterfeit listings. |
| A+ Content | Enhanced product-description modules — rich images, comparison charts, and brand story — available to Brand Registry sellers, used to lift conversion rate on the listing. |
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