Amazon has recently updated their Reports section for those of us who publish through their KDP system. For a detailed description of what they updated, you can look here.

I’ve been wishing for more trackable data from Amazon for a while now, and this is a great first step, in my opinion. The graph on the dashboard will be a great help to indie authors who want to have more control over tracking their sales and marketing efforts. You can filter the graph by dates, title, and various international markets to target what’s selling and when.

This update will help indie authors to track their marketing efforts much more accurately. Instead of having to keep a list of numbers in mind, we’ll be able to see how many of each title we’ve sold on any given day. If you’re trying several promotions in a month, for instance, you’ll be able to check the dates for those promotions and compare the success, or lack thereof, directly.

This is something we’ve had on Smashwords for a while, so it’s nice to see Amazon catching up. Here are some more things I’d like to see on my sales dashboards in the future:

-Referral traffic data. I’d like to know how many people are coming from my website, social media, outside sources, etc. This would also benefit people running promotions, as we’d be able to determine how much traffic we get from those promo sites.

-Data on repeat customers. How many people who bought book 1 moved on to books 2 and 3?

-Page views for my Amazon pages, including books and author pages. Are my pages getting traffic? What’s the bounce rate? How often do pageviews convert into sales?

That’s my 2 cents on Amazon’s latest update for KDP users. Hopefully we’ll get more of these author-benefitting changes in the near future! What are some things you’d like to see?