Analytics Dashboards | Commerce Max Help Center

Onsite Sponsored Products Missed Opportunities Report

The Missed Opportunities Report provides a comprehensive analysis of missed opportunities in your Sponsored Products campaigns caused by cap-out and pacing limitations. By utilizing this data-driven insight, you can make informed adjustments to your campaign budgets and settings, ultimately maximizing performance and optimizing your return on investment (ROI).

Missed Opportunities Report Overview

The Missed Opportunities Report is a powerful tool for identifying where opportunities were missed due to campaign cap-outs and pacing issues. With this information, you can better allocate your resources, ensuring that your campaigns are operating at full potential.

Why It Matters

Identifies missed opportunities for impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Recommends additional budget needed to capture lost traffic.

Shows average cap-out time, helping you evaluate daily delivery pacing.

Informs budget strategy to maximize ad visibility throughout the day.

When To Use It

When campaigns are capping out early in the day.

When you see underperformance in delivery, impressions, or sales.

While evaluating budget allocation efficiency across campaigns.

During campaign reporting and performance review periods.

Where To Find It

To access the Missed Opportunities Report:

Click Analytics in the top navigation bar of the platform

Click the Sponsored Products Missed Opportunities Report

Customize Your Report

The Missed Opportunities Report offers flexibility in terms of the metrics and dimensions you want to analyze. You can tailor your report to focus on specific aspects of your campaign's performance. Here's how you can interact with the report:

Access Your Report: Open the Missed Opportunities Report in the Demand Analytics tab.
Customize with Metrics and Dimensions: Use the flexible metrics and dimensions selector to personalize your report based on the data that matters most to you.
Set Analysis Dates: Choose the specific dates you want to analyze, and you can also select a comparison period to understand performance trends over time.
View Missed Traffic: Quickly identify how much traffic your campaign missed due to capping out.
See Missed Spend: The report shows how much spend was missed due to reaching your daily or monthly caps.
Average Cap-Out Hour: View the average time when your campaign hit its cap and stopped delivering.

Available Metrics, Dimensions, & Filters

The Missed Opportunities Report is highly flexible, allowing you to customize the metrics and dimensions based on your focus area. Below is a breakdown of the available options:

Dimensions

Campaign
Line Item
Date
Retailer

Metrics

Daypart Schedule: The scheduled time of day when your ads are displayed.
Average Cap-Out Hour: The average time of day your line item spends all of its dedicated budget.
Missed traffic: The number of page loads where the advertiser did not display an impression after capping out.
Spend: Total spend including any platform fees.
Est. Missed Spend: The estimated additional budget recommended for your ads to display in optimal conditions.
Est. Missed Clicks: The estimated clicks that you could have received if their ad activity hadn't capped out.
Calculated using the number of clicks at the cap-out time against measured missed traffic.
Est. Missed Impression: The estimated impressions that advertisers could have received if their ad activity hadn't capped out.
Calculated using the number of impressions at the cap-out time against measured missed traffic.
Est. Missed Sales: The estimated additional revenue that could have been attributed to your ads if they had displayed.
Calculated using the Total Revenue against measured missed traffic.
Clicks: The number of clicks on your ad
Sales: Revenue that is attributed to your ad according to the date of sale.
Revenue is measured from your last ad view or click event.
Impressions: The number of times your ads were shown.
ROAS: Return on ad spend (ROAS) is calculated by dividing the number of attributed Sales by the total ad Spend.
Avg. CPM: The average cost-per-mille. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of impressions by the total number of impressions (Spend/ Impressions).
Avg. CPC: The average cost-per-click. It is calculated by dividing the total click ad spend by the total number of clicks (Spend/ Clicks).
CTR: Click-through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of placement impressions.

Filters

You can refine your report using the following filters:

Campaign
Line Items
Campaign Status
Sales Channel
Retailers

How To Read The Missed Opportunities Report

Understanding the key metrics in the Missed Opportunities Report will help you identify where you're losing opportunities and how you can optimize your campaign settings. Here's how to interpret the data:

Average Cap-Out Hour: This shows the time of day when your campaigns stopped serving ads because they hit the daily or monthly cap. If you notice your campaigns stop early, it may indicate that your caps are too restrictive.
Missed Traffic: This metric shows the percentage of traffic lost due to your campaign hitting its cap. The higher the missed traffic, the more potential opportunities you've missed for engagement and sales.
Estimated Missed Impressions and Clicks: The report estimates how many impressions and clicks you missed due to capping out. These are potential interactions that did not happen because your campaign stopped serving ads.
Estimated Missed Spend and Missed Sales: Based on the missed impressions and clicks, the report also provides an estimate of the missed spend and missed attributed sales. This helps you understand the potential revenue you lost due to caps.

Note: Estimated missed metrics (impressions, clicks, spend, and sales) are calculated based on the first missed opportunity event recorded for each line item per day. Once a budget limit is detected, all subsequent traffic availability for that day is counted as missed.

This approach works well for the most common scenario of a line item hitting its daily cap and not serving again until the next day. However, there are specific edge cases where estimates will be less accurate:

Budget added after a cap-out: If a line item exhausts its budget and then has funds added mid-day, causing it to resume serving, the report will still count all post-limit traffic as missed. Estimated missed figures for that day will be overstated.
Multiple cap-outs in a single day: The report does not model scenarios where a line item caps out, resumes serving (due to a budget top-up), and caps out again. Days with this pattern should be treated as directional only.
Intra-day pacing changes: If a budget cap is added and then removed within the same day, the effective pacing state at any given hour may not be fully reflected in the report.

Use this report as a directional tool to identify trends and prioritize budget optimization, not as precise, impression-level accounting. For the most accurate view of actual delivery, refer to your standard campaign performance reports.

Actions You Can Take

If you notice significant missed traffic and opportunities due to capping, here are some actions you can take:

Reduce or Remove Restrictive Caps: Loosening your campaign caps allows your ads to continue serving, which can help capture more traffic, impressions, and conversions.
Optimize Campaign Budgets: Consider adjusting your daily or monthly caps to better align with your campaign goals. This can help ensure that your budget is being fully utilized without prematurely stopping your ads.
Monitor Performance Regularly: Regularly review your Missed Opportunities Report to ensure your caps are not too restrictive, and adjust them as needed to maximize your campaign’s performance.

By actively managing your caps and leveraging the insights from the Missed Opportunities Report, you can improve campaign reach, increase engagement, and optimize overall campaign performance. Regularly optimizing your campaign caps ensures you capture the full potential of your advertising efforts and maximize ROI.

Download, Save, and Schedule

Once you've customized and reviewed your Missed Opportunities Report, you have several options to save and export your data:

Download: You can download the report as an Excel or CSV file for further analysis.
Save: Click on the Save icon to store the report in your Library for quick access.
Schedule: You can schedule the report to be automatically sent to your inbox regularly, ensuring you stay informed on missed opportunities without having to manually generate the report.

By regularly reviewing the Missed Opportunities Report, you can ensure that your campaigns are running efficiently and make proactive adjustments to capture more opportunities, ultimately improving your ad performance and ROI.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Missed Opportunities Report

Will the new Missed Opportunities Report match the same data you received from internal reports?

Yes. The new Missed Opportunities Report will utilize the same data pipelines as the report used by your account strategist.

How far back can you see cap-out data?

The Missed Opportunities Report has been backfilled to measure cap-out data from April 17th, 2024. Data before this date won’t be available in the report.

Are there any data discrepancies between the cap-out report received from my Account Strategist and the new version?

The latest version incorporates new data pipeline logic that now considers line items that have been day-parted. Therefore, you may notice a variance between the new and the current cap-out reports accessible in HUB and Insights (Gradient).

Here are some of the variances:

Missed Traffic - There is an average difference of 7% - 12% in missed traffic data for line items with cap-out.

Time zone - The previous cap-out report might indicate certain line items capping out on one day, whereas the new report might show the same cap-out on a different day. This discrepancy is attributed to a time zone conversion issue in the old report, leading to an average 6% difference in line items capping out between these two versions.

All discrepancies affecting various metrics in the report will result in a 1% variance between the updated and previous versions of this report.

What is the latency of the Missed Opportunities Report?

For non-sale metrics (Example: clicks, impressions): 48hours

For sales metrics (Example: sales, ROAS), the initial estimations (Est. Missed Sales, Est. Missed Traffic, etc.) will be visible after 48 hours, followed by an update after 4 days.
Note: Like the previous cap-out report, the final data reporting still requires up to 4 days. This delay is due to the characteristics of our attribution pipelines and the inclusion of late-received sales.
Because of this 48hrs delay with the Missed Opportunities Report, some days may not align with the activity report

Do some of the metrics in the Missed Opportunities Report align with the activity dashboards?

Yes, most metrics such as Impressions, Clicks, Avg. CPC, Spend, CTR, and ROAS will align with the Activity dashboards.

Meanwhile, due to the logic we use to calculate cap-out, metrics such as Sales will not match the same attributed transactions we report in the activity dashboard.

The Missed Opportunities Report's Sales are the number of attributed transactions at the time when the ad activity capped out, whereas our activity dashboard is based on the date of the sale. This causes some variances in the report aggregation logic.

Will the Missed Opportunities Report be offered in the API?

Yes, a comprehensive report will be accessible via the API.

Will there be a missed opportunities report for onsite display campaigns?

As of now, the cap-out for Onsite Display campaigns is not planned.