What is Units Sold?

Units sold counts individual items, where orders count baskets. The two columns sit side by side in advertising reports and diverge whenever shoppers buy more than one item at a time.

Average Order Size = Units Sold ÷ Orders

Why the difference matters

Conversion rate in Amazon advertising is orders divided by clicks, so units never inflate the CVR figure. A seller whose customers habitually buy two at a time earns the extra revenue in the sales column and in average order value, not in conversion rate.

A hypothetical worked example

The figures are invented for round arithmetic. Suppose 100 clicks produce 5 orders and 8 units, and the product sells for 30 pounds.

• CVR is 5 per cent, because CVR keys off orders
• Average order size is 1.6 units
• Ad revenue is about 240 pounds, so revenue per click is about 2.40 pounds

Revenue per click, not units per click, is the number a bid should be built from.

Units are the operational column

Units sold is what inventory planning, contribution margin and cost of goods all consume, because each unit carries its own cost and its own fee. Profit per click is revenue per click minus the per unit costs of the units that click produced, so a campaign can look strong on sales and thin on profit if its units are heavily discounted or expensive to fulfil.

Units are also the velocity signal. Sales velocity and conversion earn organic rank, while advertising buys the audition rather than the ranking itself. That is why a launch is judged on conversion and unit movement long before it is judged on ACoS.

Same SKU units

Advertising reports carry same SKU columns beside the totals. Units bought from elsewhere in your catalogue after the same click are real revenue, but they do not prove the campaign is ranking the product it advertises. Check the advertised product report before treating a strong unit count as evidence that a keyword belongs to that ASIN.