As a brand owner the ultimate goal is to increase your market share profitably. You could just drop you price and lose money on each sale to boost your market share but that isn’t a sustainable thing. So the key is finding a sweet spot of maximizing your market share and overall profitability.
Some of the key questions I will aim to answer in this post:
- What are the most important metrics to track for a brand’s account on Amazon?
- In what order should these metrics be tracked?
- What metrics does Amazon provide that are useful to incorporate in your analysis?
Amazon 1st Party Data
Here we will explored the useful data Amazon offers which is scattered about on it’s website for sellers and not fully integrated into a dashboard that can provide useful insights into what actions to take for sellers. We will look at what currently exists, what is missing, and how this data can be better organized.
Insights & Planning
Brand Impression Share looks at your branded terms over time and measures the percentage of top-of-search impressions your ad campaign received out of the total impressions they could actually receive. You can view this data at the Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Products level. Here’s what it looks like
At first glance this looks great but upon closer inspection this data is only partially useful. Why?
- No benchmarks are provided for the overall category - how can a seller tell whether they are performing similarly vs other sellers in the same space or in general on Amazon?
- How does a seller know that the terms used to create this report are indeed branded terms?
- The seller should be able to view the terms that make up this data and make necessary adjustments if needed.
- Is this data the same as what is available in the Search Query Performance Report? If so why not show this over a longer time frame than just 1 week? Showing just a week’s worth of data isn’t helpful to identify patterns over time
- No ability to see how changes in advertising impacted the results - for example if I increased the TOS for my branded terms will that improve the share of all impressions I get for my brand and furthermore does this actually matter for my brand, meaning if I don’t advertise on my branded terms am I losing sales to competitors and also what is the “sweet” spot where I can have a low bid and still cover most of my branded terms shelf space.
- One thing to note is that usually there are 4 sponsored ad placements at the top of search for a brand. If a brand only has 2 relevant products then the max impression share they could get would be 50%. So in this situation an impression share of 50% would be the max they could get and it shouldn’t be seen as a sign of bad performance.
What is missing here?
- Allow sellers to construct a focused set of search terms to monitor the impression share, i.e. their overall shelf space and see how this performance changes over time. Allow sellers to see this data at a big picture level for the overall account, a mid level for a specific category of products (group of SKUs that sell through similar keywords in a “Niche”) and at a more granular level of a parent ASIN and then finally a child ASIN level. Being able to navigate these levels well helps to provide useful insights for brands to know where upside potential exists and how to action on it.
- Allow sellers to see and adjust the keyword set that makes up their branded terms - be more transparent with the data so sellers can then trust it more. Currently sellers cannot see what terms make up the metrics so how do they know whether they can trust it? A better approach is for sellers to use Sponsored Products Search Term Impression Share Report which is located here - in this way they can see performance at a specific customer search term level and aggregate data from there knowing that it is built on top a steady foundation. This report can be done for both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads.
The gold standard is seeing how advertising spend impacts organic rank more clearly and hitting certain targets for profitability which takes into consideration TACOS and where there is upside at a specific customer search term level to spend more to gain an advantage in rank. Looking at terms where a product is ranking in spots 15-30 for example can be an area of opportunity, especially if the term has a lot of search volume. Identifying these important terms is crucial for a brand and maintaining a close eye on them as well as a brands conversion off of competitors and BSR performance vs key competitors helps to paint a complete overall picture of the health of the brand and what should be done if anything to improve performance.
Using the search query performance report data I was able to build an interactive market share visual chart shown below. This chart allows one to group specific customer search terms together. For example a group of “Top Generic Terms”, “Branded Terms”, “Opportunity Terms” (those terms where there is opportunity to push and improve the overall purchase share. The search query performance report provides insight into the Amazon purchase funnel but it is important to segment out the niches of products an account has if the catalog is larger and also segment out the different types of terms that make up those segments. This follows closely with the format of the Product Opportunity Explorer in Amazon where a “Niche” has a group of ASINs that account for 90% of all of the click share for a set of up to 20 customer search terms that are the core set of important terms for the niche.
The area outlined in red shows where the listing’s secondary images were renovated AND the products main image was improved. This lead to:
- First Order Benefit of Increased Purchase Market Share - The listing renovation improve CVR which fed the A9 algorithm good data
- First Order Benefit was an increase in the Click Market Share - A better main image leads to more clicks vs competitors which also helps with relevant for Amazon.
- Third Order Benefit - the A9 algorithm want’s to put products that convert better & get more clicks in front of shoppers as Amazon receives a 15% commission on the sales price of the product. This lead to an increase in the impression share as the product is ranking organically better for the Top Generic Terms.
Using the Search Query Performance Report data we were able to confirm an improvement with the changes made. An additional piece of information to analyze to confirm an improve in performance would be analyzed the same terms performance with Sponsored Products advertising - tracking the CTR and CVR for those terms before and after the changes were made.