Explained: Amazon’s Gross and Invalid Traffic Report

Amazon’s Gross and Invalid Traffic (IVT) Report provides advertisers with key data about the traffic on their Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns.

Essentially, this report lets advertisers see how much of their ad traffic is from valid sources—and how much came from bots. Amazon does this by comparing your gross traffic to your invalid traffic.

About The Report

Amazon’s Gross and Invalid Traffic (IVT) Report provides advertisers with key data about the traffic on their Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns.

Essentially, this report lets advertisers see how much of their ad traffic is from valid sources—and how much came from bots. Amazon does this by comparing your gross traffic to your invalid traffic.

Gross traffic is an overview of the overall interactions and engagement a product listing receives on Amazon. This includes:

Page Views: The total number of times the product detail page was viewed by customers.
‍Impressions: The number of times the product was displayed as an ad on Amazon.
‍Clicks: The total number of times customers clicked on the product's ad or listing.
‍Sessions: The number of individual visits to the product detail page, which may include multiple page views within a single visit.

By contrast, invalid traffic is potentially fraudulent, non-human, duplicate, or illegitimate traffic, such as:

Bot-generated clicks: Clicks generated by automated programs (bots) rather than genuine customers.
Click fraud: Deliberate and deceptive clicking to artificially inflate click-through rates.
Incentivized clicks: Clicks driven by incentives or rewards, such as pay-per-click schemes that encourage fraudulent engagements.
‍Abnormal activity: Unusual or abnormal patterns of clicks that deviate from typical customer behavior.

Invalid traffic can distort advertising metrics, misrepresenting the true interest and engagement of genuine customers.

How to Leverage the Reports

To access this report, simply log into Advertising Console → Measure and Reporting → Sponsored ads reports → Create Report.

This is a self-service report, and is available to advertisers in:

‍North America: United States, Canada, Mexico
South America: Brazil
Europe: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Poland, Turkey
Middle East: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates
Asia Pacific: Australia, India, Japan, Singapore

Am I paying for invalid Amazon traffic?

Thankfully, Amazon Ads will only bill you for valid events. Amazon’s algorithm identifies invalid traffic and removes it from your bill.

While the bulk of this invalidation process happens in real-time, with no impact on your budget, sometimes Amazon only identifies invalid traffic retroactively. When this happens, Amazon adjusts your budget automatically—but you may still observe some changes in campaign metrics and invalid traffic metrics after the event.

This is how Amazon defines the following metrics in the Gross and Invalid Traffic report:

How can I use the Gross and Invalid Traffic Report?

In order to make the most of the Gross and Invalid Traffic Report, we recommend the following tactics.

Filter for your legitimate traffic. The report helps advertisers analyze and identify significant discrepancies between the total traffic (gross) and legitimate customer engagement (valid). By detecting and addressing these discrepancies, you can ensure that your ad performance metrics accurately represent genuine customer interest, allowing you to make better-informed decisions based on reliable data.

Improve ad targeting and creative strategies. The Gross and Invalid Traffic report can also help you refine your ad targeting and creative strategies. Identifying patterns of invalid traffic can shed light on potential vulnerabilities in your targeting settings or ad creative that may attract fraudulent engagements.

By making data-driven adjustments to your targeting parameters and ad content, you can enhance the relevance and appeal of your ads to a genuine audience.