Clicks
What it means
Clicks is the number of times someone tapped one of your Amazon ads and landed on a listing. It's a count for the selected period, not a rate. Every click is charged whether or not it ends in an order.
Google Ads reports a figure under the same label, from its own auctions on its own sites. The two count different traffic and are never added together or compared.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
What the count includes. Every click Amazon charged you for in the period, across all your campaign types. Organic visits to the same listing are not in it, and neither is anything arriving from outside Amazon.
Worked example. Your ads are shown 200,000 times and get 2,000 clicks — a click-through rate of 1%. At €0.50 a click that is €1,000 of spend. If 40 of those clicks become orders, you paid €25 for each one.
Being a count, the size of the number tells you nothing on its own. A small catalogue on a small budget should have small Clicks.
It answers the question
How much traffic did the Amazon ad budget buy? Clicks is the volume; whether it was the right traffic shows up further down, in orders.
Why it matters
Clicks is where the money leaves. Impressions cost nothing and clicks are billed, which makes this the hinge between the two halves of the account: everything above it is a targeting and bidding job, everything below it belongs to the listing.
So when orders fall, Clicks tells you which half to go and fix. It is footfall through the door — you can count everyone who walks in, but only the till decides whether it mattered.
What good looks like
There is no benchmark here, and there shouldn't be — a sensible number depends on your budget, catalogue size and category. Judge it against your own trend and against the two figures either side: what each click cost and how many became orders. Clicks rising faster than orders means you are buying more of the wrong traffic.
There's no read here on the clicks you didn't win. The Google Ads pages carry exactly that, which is why their version of this number can be judged against a ceiling and this one can only be judged against its own history.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Bid up the terms that already earn | Raise bids on search terms with a proven order rate to win more of their traffic | Clicks up on the terms that convert | 3–7 days | CPC rises for every term in the ad group, not only the good one, so the cost of an order climbs with the volume. |
| Fast Stop campaigns going dark | Lift daily caps on campaigns that spend out before the evening | Clicks up with no change to targeting | 2–5 days | The hours you buy back are the ones you were skipping, and late traffic browses more than it buys, so the order rate on the extra clicks is worse. |
| Slow Cut the clicks that never buy | Add negatives for terms with 30+ clicks and no orders over 30 days | Clicks down, orders unchanged, spend down | 2–4 weeks | You trade discovery for efficiency. Terms with a long consideration cycle get cut before they ever prove themselves. |
| Slow Earn the click instead of buying it | Sharper main image, price and review count so more of the people who see the ad tap it | More Clicks from the same Impressions and the same spend | 4–8 weeks | Creative work and review generation cost money that never appears in Ad Spend, and a price cut buys clicks by giving away margin. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Clicks tells you how many came in. The number beside it tells you whether they were worth letting in.
Traffic that buys
More visitors and more orders. The targeting is finding the right people and the listing is closing them.
Cleaner traffic
Fewer, better visitors, usually the result of negatives or tighter match types. This is the most profitable direction on the chart and the least celebrated.
Paying for browsers
You are buying more traffic that doesn't buy. Either the targeting drifted onto loose terms or the listing stopped converting — check price, stock and reviews too.
Going quiet
The top of the funnel shrank. Look for a budget cap, a lost Buy Box or a bid that no longer clears the auction before you blame the season.
One divided by the other is your click-through rate, the only read on whether the ad itself is any good. Clicks flat while Impressions double means the ad is being shown to people it doesn't appeal to — a targeting or creative fault that neither number shows alone.
Credited revenue divided by clicks is what a visitor is worth, and that figure sets the most you can afford to pay for one. At €1.20 of revenue per click and thin margins, a 60-cent CPC is already too dear no matter how healthy the click count looks.
Common misreads
Clicks is the cost side of the account. You can push it up this afternoon by raising bids and end the month with the same orders and a bigger bill. It is a spend signal until orders confirm otherwise.
It only counts visits your ads paid for. Organic search, brand traffic and everything arriving from outside Amazon never appear here, which is why Clicks can fall while the listing gets busier.
Some convert days later inside the attribution window, and recent days always look worse than they will finish. Judge a click cohort once the period has settled, not on the Monday after.
Also called
Ad clicks · paid clicks · billable clicks
See yoursYour Amazon ad clicks for the last 30 days, next to Impressions, CTR, CPC and Purchases.
Open Ads Analytics →Clicks
What it means
On the Google Ads pages, Clicks is the number of times someone clicked one of your Google ads and arrived on your own site or product listing. It is a count for the period, added up across every campaign type in the account — Search, Display, Shopping, Performance Max and Video all land in the same figure.
That makes it a wider number than the Amazon one, over different auctions and different landing places.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
What the count includes. Every click Google charged you for, summed across the rows of whichever table you are reading — campaign, product, search term, country or channel. Google Ads returns no total of its own, so the summary line is those rows added together.
Worked example. A month takes 50,000 Clicks at an Avg. CPCAvg. CPCCost per visit from Google search. of €0.40, so CostCostRead against conversions and value-per-cost, never alone. = 50,000 × 0.40 = €20,000. Google records 500 ConversionsConversionsSales or actions Google drove; pair with cost-per-conversion., so Google Ads Conv. Rate = 500 ÷ 50,000 = 1% and Cost/Conv.Cost/Conv.What each Google sale costs you. = 20,000 ÷ 500 = €40.
Clicks is the denominator under both of those rates. Move it and both move with it, even when nothing about the ads changed. Note that Google Ads divides conversions by clicks, while the Google Analytics rate of the same name divides by sessions — another reason the two platforms' figures never line up.
It answers the question
How many visits did Google Ads actually buy this period? Almost every efficiency figure on the page is this number divided into another one, so it explains several of them at once.
Why it matters
Google Ads is an auction, and Clicks is what your bids won. It sits between two things you also control: ImpressionsImpressionsPure visibility; only matters if clicks and sales follow. above it and Conversions below. A move here with no matching move in either is usually the auction changing rather than you.
It also spans campaign types that behave nothing alike. One account-level figure can hide opposite stories running side by side, which is what the Cost By Channel table exists to separate. Open it before you read a rise as good news.
What good looks like
No published band would travel, because Clicks scales with your budget, your category and how many campaign types you run. What Google Ads gives you, and Amazon does not, is a sense of the ceiling: Click ShareClick ShareYour clicks / estimated clicks available on Search. Competitive headroom signal is your clicks against the clicks estimated to be available on Search, and Search ISSearch ISSee the full entry. is the share of eligible Search impressions you won.
A low figure on either is headroom you can buy. A high one means the next clicks have to come from somewhere other than Search. Then read the shape: Clicks up with Conv. RateConv. RateWebsite visits that ended in a purchase. Not the same as Google Ads Conv. Rate, which divides by clicks.3.5% or more is healthy holding is growth, Clicks up with it falling is volume you overpaid for.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Take the headroom Search IS shows | Raise budgets and bids on campaigns with a low Search IS that are already hitting your Cost/Conv. target | Clicks up in auctions you already win | 1–2 weeks | Cost rises the same day. The impressions you buy back are the ones you were losing on rank or budget, so Avg. CPC and Cost/Conv. usually worsen before volume settles. |
| Fast Close the gap between Search IS and Click Share | Rewrite headlines, descriptions and sitelinks on campaigns being shown but not clicked | More Clicks from impressions you are already winning | 2–4 weeks | Copy tests need traffic before they mean anything. Calling one on a few hundred impressions is how a working ad gets switched off. |
| Slow Negate the search terms that never convert | Work the Search Terms table and block terms carrying clicks with no conversions | Clicks down, Conversions flat, Cost/Conv. down | 2–4 weeks | You trade discovery for efficiency, and a negative added in March is easy to forget in September when that term starts converting. |
| Slow Feed Shopping better product data | Fix titles, images and attributes in Merchant Center for the products carrying the spend | The same budget matches more searches, so Clicks and Conversions rise together | 1 quarter | Feed work is slow and never appears in the Cost column, so the extra traffic looks free when it wasn't. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Clicks prices nothing on its own. Read it against what you paid for it and what came of it.
Cost is Clicks multiplied by Avg. CPC, so a rising bill is always one of the two. More clicks at the same price is a scale decision you made; the same clicks at a higher price is the auction charging you more, and only one of those is yours to fix.
Together they say whether the traffic was worth having. Clicks up with Conversions flat means you widened the net onto searches with less intent — usually a match type or a Performance Max campaign spreading, and it shows here weeks before Cost/Conv. looks alarming.
Common misreads
Two platforms counting clicks on their own ads by their own rules, on different sites, for different audiences. Adding them produces a number that describes nothing. Read each against its own history.
Check the budget cap and Search IS first. A campaign that spends out at noon, or a bid that stopped clearing the auction, cuts clicks while demand for the search is unchanged.
Clicks is the cost side. A Display or Video campaign can out-click a Search campaign many times over and sit behind it on Cost/Conv. Sort by what an order costs, not by traffic.
Also called
Ad clicks · paid clicks · Google Ads clicks
See yoursYour Google Ads clicks for the period, next to Impressions, CTR, Avg. CPC and Cost/Conv.
Open Google Ads Analytics →