Amazon Search Query Performance—Advanced Reporting Dashboard Unlocked

Amazon Search Query Performance—Advanced Reporting Dashboard Unlocked Speaker 1: Alexa, play That Amazon Ads Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing That Amazon Ads Podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to That Amazon Ads Podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 2: All right, everybody, the Search Query Performance Report, one of my favorite pieces that Amazon has released within Seller Central. We're going to be talking a lot about different use cases, some of the different benefits to using this and how you can more quickly and more easily We're going to use this data to help inform what your strategy should be within your Amazon PPC. Is your Amazon PPC having an impact on growing your market share? Do changes to main images actually cause any sort of change in your click share on certain keywords? We're going to be diving in and showing you exactly that. But Stephen, before we do that, I think we have a kind of announcement for everybody. Speaker 1: A little bit and before the announcement, I've got more information to say, which is go back and watch episode 73 if you haven't because we're not going to rehash all the reasons why that's important, but I will rehash one thing. Which is something that we said on that podcast is that the most difficult thing about the SQP reports in their current state is that they were not accessible via Amazon's API, which means you needed to go in and download one report at a time, which could be extremely cumbersome. And then we had our friend Yuri Rahimi come on for another episode where he had created a bot kind of crawler thing for Google Chrome that could go through and download these reports for you, but would still take a very long time. And we were getting all these requests because we were showing how we were going to automate this through his bot and then create these nice Google Sheet templates. And as we were working on that, Amazon dropped the biggest API update where they said you can now access the SQP reports through the API. And so we were in Berlin with the dev team. It was me, Andrew, and our five developers. And while we're in Berlin, we realized, let's jump on this and build out this function and capability for AdLabs because the sooner we get it up, the sooner we can start pulling in all of these weekly data reports that are still extremely slow to pull in the API. So the sooner we get started, the better. And with that, we're going to screen share here and we're going to pull open what this SQP report looks like. So we're in the SQP, the newest search query performance reporting section within AdLabs, which is the software that we made for you guys. And I just wanted to say a quick few disclaimers about the API. The Amazon API does not give us the brand level core metrics such as your total brand impression share for different search terms or your purchase share. It only gives you the individual ASIN reports. which means we have to download one ASIN report at a time. And let's just say there's an account that has, let's say 25 ASINs. That's probably average, right? So you would have to download 25 separate reports for one week and then add them all together. And then go back to the next week, do another 25 reports. That's now 50 separate and unique reports from the API. The API only lets us pull one report per minute. So just to backfill the last two weeks of data for a small to medium sized account would take minimum We call it an hour. So we take an hour just to backfill two weeks. Now, what you see is going on here is we have data for this account going back to June. During our team call earlier this morning, we had that data going back to August. So within the last several hours, we were continuing to just pull more and more and more reports. The idea being we're going to backfill all the way back to January. Why January? Because then When you have a whole year plus of data, you can then start to analyze year over year changes, especially as we're recording this episode in April. We're just wrapping up Q1. So being able to look back on all of Q1 and see why did my sales increase or decrease? Why did my A-costs increase or decrease? What's going on here? To be able to analyze all of the Q1 search volume data and these metrics up here that Andrew's gonna talk about in just a little bit. Being able to see those year over year trends for an entire quarter This podcast is massively, massively helpful data for interpreting your KPIs and strategizing your marketing plans and goals. So just so you guys know, normally when you sign up for AdLabs, we just backfill the last 60 days of data, including your SQP data. But for the month of May, which is when this episode is going live, for the whole month of May, if you sign up during the month of May, we will backfill the last 18 months for you going all the way back to the start of 2024 in your SQP data. So make sure you sign up This month, to take advantage of that, this is also the year 2025. In case if this episode lives long and goes into next year, it probably won't. Okay, Andrew, tell me about these metrics. And I'm actually gonna shorten this just for now. I'm just gonna go look at last four weeks, which is basically March. And now we can see some better like period over period stats. But tell me, Andrew, what these like kind of top metrics mean here. There's a lot more metrics we could put in there, but I've just got my favorites to look at here. Walk us through what these metrics mean and why they're important. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So search query volume, the first one you've got pulled up there, that's going to be first party data access to actual query volumes over time. So this is highly valuable for you to understand how the demand and the search demand for your market is changing over time. You know, like Stephen alluded to earlier, having those year over year comparisons is super important. You know, let's just say your sales are down in Q1 this year. Maybe it's actually driven by just an overall retraction in your market search volumes down. You'd be able to see that and be able to pinpoint and figure out what's the actual driving cause. Is it your PPC or is it just like the overall markets trending down? And so that's a huge data point that I like to track very regularly and it helps kind of inform whenever things are going well or when things are going bad. Usually search volume is one of the first places that I'm going to look to help kind of figure out and pinpoint what's going on. Going from left to right there, we've got total click-through rate. This is just gonna give you a overall benchmark for how frequently other competitors are getting clicked whenever people are searching for things. Same with total conversion rate. You'll get an idea of what the overarching average conversion rate for specific keywords, or in this case, we're actually aggregating specific keywords. Stephen, do you have something? Speaker 1: Well, I was going to say that is just a wildly huge number. A few episodes ago, we were talking about performance benchmarks on Amazon and trying to break these down by categories. That was just aggregating, I forgot how many, it was like 500 or 1,000 profiles. Speaker 2: Over 1,000, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, we were just aggregating some metrics we had, but that's not specific to you and your keywords. Here I do intentionally have very short tail, vague terms that are not super specific to our category, mainly because I just don't want to be showing you guys the super low funnel keywords that we have. So like we're obviously in the tools category, right? But just like tools, Milwaukee tools, like these are all competitor or not even competitors. These are completely other brands than compared to what we're actually trying to sell here. But we are kind of in the tools industry. So tools is the largest search term just by volume and by far. So I do have some filters here just to kind of refine it. So if you are looking at just tools, for example, but in a better example, you would have filtered things down to a much better set of keywords to pull in highly accurate conversion rate information that you can then compare yourself to with the async conversion rate compared to the total conversion rate, which is of all the clicks on Amazon. So whenever someone ever searches tools and clicks on it, How many times do those clicks result in a purchase? That's what that total conversion rate is. But keep going, Andrew, back to you. Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's a great point. I mean, you can put your own ASINs conversion rate next to the market average and you can see just on what search queries do you actually outperform the average. And usually that's a great indicator for keywords that you're either already ranking really well on or keywords that you could rank well on if you started actually pushing some additional traffic through them. So that's a great benchmark to kind of figure out where you stack up against competitors in the overall market and find those pockets of opportunity where you're actually converting a lot better than everybody else on certain queries. Now, the next thing I'll mention on this is the old way of using the SQP report, you had to calculate all of these things. So Amazon gave you the raw data, then you actually had to go through and do all the calculations for total conversion rate, ASIN conversion rate. In here, it's just quick. It's just done. It's already right there at your fingertips, which is a huge value add and just absolutely makes things significantly faster for analyzing things. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm going to add one thing. I think in the original SQB reports, there is something Amazon calls total purchase rate or purchase percentage, something like that. Speaker 2: Yeah, we have that in here too. Speaker 1: Yeah, we do have that, but that was specifically purchase divided by search query volume. So if there were 2.4 million searches, and then for easy math, let's just say there were 1.2 million purchases, that would be a 50% purchase rate relative to the search query volume. But Amazon calculates in your advertising conversion rate as orders divided by clicks. So not just how many times, you know, it's not orders divided by impressions or orders divided by how the search volume, it's orders divided by clicks. So when they actually clicked onto a product, how many times do they purchase it? And that's where that conversion rate metric becomes key. And they don't give us that. So that is a field that you have, you would have to manually calculate. And I also don't know, Andrew, now that I think about it, I don't think it necessarily means, I think if they click on one product and buy another product, I think that would still count as a conversion. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not totally sure, but to what you were saying around just the total purchase percentage or total purchase rate, I think is what it was called. That's a great metric for identifying which keywords are actually driving purchases and which ones are more upper funnel, browsy keywords. So usually on things that have a low total purchase rate, that's not a great place to be putting a lot of ad dollars just because that's not what's actually driving purchases, unless your goal is to really drive upper funnel awareness and just be present in higher volume queries. But that total purchase rate will give you an idea of, are these keywords where people are actually going and converting, or are they just where people are shopping around, looking at all the different options? And you can get a good idea of the different strategies that you can put together and group your keywords even by different funnel stages and get a better sense of where to put the dollars to drive conversion. Speaker 1: Yeah. And also just seeing like total medium prices are huge too because on that episode, The thumbnail says Amazon PPC Statistics. I forgot what the episode title is. Something along those lines. But we did talk about the importance of average order value and conversion rates. So that's another thing that's super duper helpful here. We're like, if you do see that, we don't have median in here. We could add that in there though. That could be a helpful thing. Looking at the total median sales prices. I guess it is tough to aggregate it because you've got a bunch of different search terms and blah, blah, blah. Anyways, we'll figure that out. So yeah, and here's that example where total purchase rate is usually gonna be a lot lower than the conversion rate, because this is just divided by a much larger denominator, i.e. the volume, not necessarily the clicks, which yeah, the conversion rate, just going back to what I was saying earlier, it is, because I just was thinking, we're just taking all the clicks and all the orders. It's not necessarily they clicked and ordered from the same thing. So yeah, it is just anytime someone clicked on any product in Amazon and then ended up purchasing, whether or not it was that same product, that's gonna be where that rate is. So that rate will probably likely usually be a little bit higher than yours just because of how it's calculated and things like that, but still a phenomenal reference point because You can see trends in that conversion rate as well. And we also need to switch this over probably to being, I like line graphs for percentage rates rather than bars. But looking back, and I'm not sure how far our data goes now, I think we were backfilling to like June so far. We can see if we made any more progress. Yeah, we're still going back to June. But you can see how these conversion rates trend. And it's like, bing, here's Prime Day. And then bing, here's Prime Day number two. And like, here's a key insight. Like how did the conversion, if people are saying, hey, why didn't October Prime Day do as good as the July Prime Day? Well, you can say, well, the search query volume dropped from 1.8 million to 1.1 million. That's 1.1 divided by 1.8. A 40% decrease in search volume and the conversion rates went from 5.4 to 4.7. That's a 13% decrease in conversion rate. So you got some phenomenal insights there, right? Actually, I think this is huge. So you have Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Actually, this is something we actually talk about all the time. You have these huge spikes in search volume on Black Friday, September Monday. Lots of times people, you do, and you also have a good bump in that conversion rate there, going from 3% to 4%. So you're going to have that sales bump, obviously, because of all the deals on Black Friday. But a lot of the search volume there is people just shopping for themselves or shopping to get ideas for Christmas. But ultimately, the biggest peak in those conversions really happens The week or two weeks before Christmas, that's your peak conversion rate. That's where, even though the volumes are declining, I mean, that's still a million searches, right? Like you should be capturing as much of that one million searches. Like that's where you would hope to see that your click share is like, you know, going a lot higher there. This brand could have probably done more, I think, but they sold out. Like they were out of stock by the time December hit. So that's probably why that dropped. But yeah, like that, that's just critical insights for you to be like looking at these trends To know how to strategize, And you can see already hopefully why it's just so invaluable. But then also when you're, if you're a brand owner and you're trying to understand your own business, this is going to be how you understand the ebbs and flows. Why are my sales down? What are the reasons why sales would normally drop excluding SQP for now, SQP data, just based on just what could happen with the competitors or with the brand's own products versus competitor products? What are a few of like the biggest reasons that come to mind for why sales might drop? Speaker 2: Ultimately, I'm thinking like traffic decrease. So overall searches kind of dropping off. Your conversion rates decreased, which could be related to competitors running deals. So if you're not running deals, competitors are running deals, they're going to capture more of the market share there and you might see a dip in your sales as people kind of shift towards We're going to be talking about buying other people's products. So those are just two that come to mind. You have anything else? Speaker 1: Well, we did the episode. It was actually episode 15. We should probably redo it, but it was titled the only three ways to grow your sales on Amazon. And that was in September of 2023. So almost like a year and a half ago. So I already kind of forget what we said there, but it was something along the lines of you either, either the traffic dropped. Or the conversion rate dropped. And so what this information is going to allow you to do is to see if you saw your conversion rate dropped, you can now find out, is that just me? Like if you find out the general marketplace conversion rates were actually increasing substantially while your conversion rates are decreasing, that's good intel. Now you know there's either something wrong with your listing. That's most likely the case. Maybe you dive in and you realize, especially if you're a vendor, you realize Amazon like Like skyrocketed your product prices like they used to sell for, you know, $50 and Amazon repriced them at $90. Okay, that's a good indicator. Or it could have just been that all your competitors are running deals because there was like a holiday or whatever and they were all running deals and you were not like lots of things to look into from there for why the conversion rate discrepancies would have occurred. But that's the first thing that you have to look at is Is this just me or is this a bigger market trend? If it's a bigger market trend, then, you know, first of all, that's just, you can probably sleep a little bit easier at night knowing that it's kind of out of your control, but you also know how can I strategize to fight against this? What are other tactics or alternative strategies we can do to try to fight against these declining conversion rates that we're seeing in a general sense? Speaker 2: Going back to some of these scorecards here, I mean, probably the one The one metric that most of my clients are focused on and really love to see is that ASIN purchase share. Now, the purchase share gives you an idea of the total possible purchases that happened on Amazon. How many did you actually capture? And this helps you basically understand your share of the market and give you almost a market share. This is first party market share data, essentially. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great. Speaker 2: And so you can start to use this as information whenever you are trying to push spend on a certain keyword or push your ad spend on a certain product. You can see whether or not that ad spend is actually having an impact on you capturing more of the market as a whole on a specific keyword or for a specific set of products. That's really one of those key indicators for Growing on Amazon and one thing that a lot of my clients anyway really like to look at and when I showed them this report, they were super I'm excited to be able to track this on a regular basis. Speaker 1: And the question that a lot of people are probably asking is, what's a good ASIN purchase share percentage? To which I think Andrew and I would both say, it really doesn't matter. Like there's no percentage number that is a good number or a bad number. There's way too many other variables involved. The least of which is not just overall volume. Back when Andrew and I, before SQP, we were working with a vendor. Well, vendors don't have SQP anyways. So our closest proxy to this, working with a brand that was spending like a million dollars a month on ads, was the impression share reports. And the clients were wondering why the keywords that we designated as like the most important keywords for them, why we had such a low impression share on those keywords compared to the super long tail bottom of funnel keywords. And it was because just the search volume amounts. If there's a keyword that gets searched, let's just say for again, easy math, you know, 10 times a month and you won, you know, 10 of the impression, possible impressions or whatever, and you now have You know, 100% purchase share or impression share on just 10 searches. That doesn't mean that much. The larger the volume and the more upper funnel it is, the more like the larger the category is. And also the shorter the terms are, right? Like when someone types in tools, the number of possible products that could be in that keyword is massive. So the impression share is going to go down wildly. I'm looking at this purchase share. Like this is probably very low, but again, these are not my core keywords. These are intentionally super top of funnel keywords. So these are going to be very low. You shouldn't be so super focused on what that metric should be unless if you've backfields the last like 18 months and over the last 18 months for like your top 10 keywords that are bottom of funnel that are high volume that are super relevant to you. You see that you generally have a 3% purchase share and that can now become a good benchmark for you to move relative to. So it's really these trends and the changes in purchase share rates that you want to be keeping an eye on. So on this one going from 0.05% to 0.14%. That looks like some astronomical growth, which would be really good if these were the top relevant keywords for us that we're really trying to go after. But in this case, it's just kind of low data, not super relevant keywords. That's not super reliable, but it is more the changes in that that you want to be seeing. Did you want to switch to the other example, Andrew, or show anything else here? Speaker 2: I think that's good. Let's let's fast forward into the next. Speaker 1: Let's go over to the other. Nope. Unknown Speaker: That's this one. Speaker 1: So. Andrew, this is an account you're working on. Tell me what we're looking at here and what are the major callouts? Speaker 2: Yeah, biggest thing here. So one thing with the SQP report before it was available in the API was you could either look at a brand level or you could look at an individual ASIN level. And now since it's available through the API, we've got a little bit more customization capabilities where we can actually look at multiple ASINs as opposed to just one or and some people might say like, I could just look at the brand report, but In reality, if we were to clear out this, it's going to change a lot because you can have multiple different products getting a little bit of purchase here and there on maybe not the exact keywords that they're supposed to. And so it kind of skews your data a little bit if you're just looking at an overall brand level. This dashboard here allows us to group up and aggregate data across multiple different ASINs. So if I have a parent ASIN that has in this case 17 different ASINs associated with it, I don't have to go through ASIN by ASIN and look at All of those to figure out and try to sum up exactly what my purchase share is. I can drop them in here and get an aggregated view of all of the purchases that are happening across all of those different child ASINs and then that sums up and basically gives me an idea of the purchase share, click share, the aggregated performance of that parent ASIN, which is absolutely vital and really makes this super powerful and how I've been using it a lot. It's just kind of grouping up different ASINs and then seeing how our different trends are changing based on what we're actually trying to accomplish. So for this account right now, the biggest call outs are if we were to actually extend this back just a little bit into December, this would really help kind of illustrate things. I don't think it goes that far, but that's fine. Speaker 1: This one is still undergoing the backfill process. Speaker 2: Yes, yes it is. So, biggest thing here, we're looking at ASIN purchase share here. We can see kind of a steady pickup. We also see a pretty nice pop in February. This brand for this particular product category that we're in, number one, it pops up in January anyway, but we've started spending quite a bit more. And so whenever I'm reporting back to the client, Whether or not this is actually having an impact, this data point right here is absolutely a big, big storytelling piece where I can say, Hey, yes, we've been spending and investing a lot more in this. Our ACoS is up a little bit, but look at how our purchase share, our market share has actually grown since December, where we were around like a three, three and a half percent purchase share. Now we're up to like four, four and a half percent. And we're actually capturing more of the total available purchases now. You start to see it kind of taper off there. Another good storytelling piece because this brand started to kind of run out of stock on a few child ASINs and we weren't really spending quite as much. And so we start to see that impact and how much we were actually capturing there. So that's really a couple of the key points with this example. Anything else to add there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I will just add one more clarifying point. I'm going to turn off the comparisons for now since nothing's in that previous period. But just being able to sort by like search query score and search query volume, all these things is really, really helpful. And what Andrew has done here is we were both kind of talking about the differences between like the brand level total reports versus ASIN reports. There's kind of pros and cons to both. But Andrew rightly pointed out that, and I'm gonna use the example of, let's say I sell raincoats. We're rain jackets and umbrellas and for my keyword rain, that's great. I would like to see that at the brand level because both all my products in my catalog should be applying for those. But then there could be other times where maybe people are searching for rain coats or rain clothing and maybe my umbrellas sometimes show up in those searches, but not all the time. If they don't show up in those searches, at least not with enough volume or data, then we actually don't, that search term for that ASIN does not appear in the SQP reports when I filter down for just my umbrellas ASIN. So sometimes it will. So you'll actually see on these weekly reports, there's some dropouts where some weeks That umbrella did have enough volume in raincoats or rain jackets, whatever, to get some reports and most of the other times it's just a drop off. And so that can create some problems on those ACE reports and also at the brand level, like your purchase share or your impression share can wildly vary based on what the umbrellas are doing, even though they're not necessarily super accurate. And so that's why what Andrew was kind of describing here was he filtered down specifically BigZoom to just these 17 products And only specifically for this keyword way to really drill it down to a certain niche because it's a large brand that has lots of products and lots of categories, lots of keywords. So just to be a little bit more accurate, rather than seeing like, how does our entire catalog perform for way, that could just skew the results of what you're getting here. So hopefully that clears up just some of how to use these reports, especially just because they are restricted to the ASIN level reporting. So that's all I had to add. Speaker 2: Awesome. And that's such a great point. This can be really helpful and effective whenever you have extensions of your product line that live kind of within a similar category. So like, For this one, they sell collagen, but they also sell an advanced version of that. They sell a marine collagen. They sell a coffee creamer that has collagen in it. And so there's a lot of different products that kind of show up within these similar queries. And so, you know, maybe one ASIN isn't, you know, necessarily capturing a ton of the purchase share or the volume there. But by extending our product line, we actually grew our total purchase share. And so then I can kind of aggregate multiple different product sets and see, you know, if I have different pair of ASINs and all that type of stuff kind of selling within the same category, we can group that all up and see, By adding those different products, how much more of the market were we actually able to capture by doing that? Speaker 1: So previously, all this data was inaccessible. You had to get it through some third party tools that would just guess what the surge volumes were and what the conversion rates were. And as Amazon started releasing this data, we ended up finding a lot of those third party tools were very way off, just way off in terms of what the volumes and conversions were. In terms of the trends, they seemed to be like kind of On on point but like really it's just it's always better to get the information from the source. And now we finally have it from the source when Amazon gave us the SQP about. A year ago or so. And now that they've enabled the API, we can actually take this data and do a lot more with it to manipulate it, move things around, create these views that we want. And that can just help us create the story and the narrative that we want to see when it comes to trying to understand what's actually going on with our PPC. But more importantly, explain what's going on in our PPC to others on our team or to our clients. So if you guys think this is valuable, make sure you sign up. In the month of May to get that backfill service. And you see here, we do limit it to the top 100 ASINs. So if you have more than 100 ASINs, you'll have to kind of pick and choose which ones you want. But I think the average person has fewer than that. So should it matter? And like, subscribe, Andrew, anything else to add? Speaker 2: Nope, that's it. Make sure you do everything Stephen said and we'll see you on the next episode. Speaker 1: And drop a comment if there's anything else that you want us to cover more in depth with the SQP, any questions like that. And otherwise, we'll see you guys next time on That Amazon Ads Podcast.