Why Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard is Awesome

August 12, 2022
By The Badger

Earlier this year, Amazon launched the Search Query Performance Dashboard, a powerful analytics tool that lets Amazon brands and advertisers view search terms’ performance and shoppers’ search behavior.

Just a few months in operation and still in beta, Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard is already revolutionizing how Amazon brands and advertisers access performance analytics on Amazon.

In this blog post, Ad Badger’s Michael Facchin and Elizabeth Greene from Junglr pull back the curtain on Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard to show you why it’s one of the most awesome Amazon tools yet!

Let’s dive in.

Everything This Article Covers

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Where Can I Find Amazon's Search Query Performance Dashboard?

To find Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard, go to Brands > Brand Analytics > Search Query Performance. (Here’s a direct link to the Search Query Performance Dashboard too.)

Important Note: Brand Analytics Dashboard and, by extension, Search Query Performance Dashboard are only available to brand-registered sellers.

You must be the brand’s primary Seller Central account administrator or have been granted permission by the account administrator to access Brand Analytics.

What is a Search Query on Amazon Advertising?

A search query is when a customer searches for a product on Amazon. You must distinguish between search queries and keywords in your ad account.

A search query can be a keyword, but it isn’t always. A keyword is what you bid on in the ad platform, while a search query is what the customer types in the search box to find the product they want to purchase.

What Information Will I Find In The Search Query Performance Dashboard?

The Search Query Performance Dashboard lets you see the performance of your search terms based on shoppers’ search behavior, both in organic searches and sponsored ad clicks.

The data provides visibility into your customers’ behavior throughout their shopping journey and highlights your brand’s performance compared to your competitors.

It doesn’t stop there!

The Search Query Performance Dashboard gives you access to each search term’s data, such as search volume and rank. It then compiles each search query data into a Search Funnel, highlighting critical performance metrics in every stage of the customer’s shopping journey, such as clicks, impressions, cart adds, and conversions.

Each of these Search Funnels highlights critical information such as the total searches, your brand’s count of the total searches, your brand’s market share, and the average price.

What Data Time-Frames Can I Get In The Search Query Performance Report?

When you land on your search query report, the first option you get is the timeframe under which you want to look at your data. You can go back up to 30 weeks or seven months, depending on how you choose to segment your data.

Such access to search terms performance data isn’t available anywhere else. It’s a new and unique feature, only available in the Search Query Performance Dashboard.

Seeing as the Search Query Performance Dashboard is still a new tool, it’s unclear if Amazon will lengthen the data timeframes and if old data will still be available or if they’ll purge it when the timeframe expires.

What Timeframes Should I Use to Analyze and Optimize Bids in the Search Query Performance Dashboard?

According to Elizabeth, the optimal timeframe for analysis in Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard depends on what you’re looking for.

If you’re analyzing historical data, then you should use larger timeframes. A shorter timeframe will give you better insight, however, if you want to look at recent trends.

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Why is the Search Query Performance Report Amazing?

We can’t emphasize enough how valuable the search query performance report is, both to Amazon advertisers and brands! This report displays what Amazon considers your top 1000 search queries.

Some of the data available from the search query performance report include:

The total number of search queries.
The total number of search queries at a given timeframe.
The clicks your brand got per search query, organic and paid.
Your brand share in total clicks and impressions.
Total Add-to-Carts per search query.
Total Conversions per search query.

And all of this is first-party data from Amazon, so it’s as accurate as it can get!

Before Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard, it was practically impossible to pull performance data at the search level. You could only get data from the ad platform or use a third-party tool to reverse-search your ASIN to see the keywords you’re ranking for.

But, with the search query performance report, you can access a compilation of both paid and organic search data for each search term to get a clear picture of your keywords and search terms’ performance, individually and combined. And to us, that’s pretty awesome!

How Can I Use the Information in the Search Query Performance Report?

Search query performance data clearly shows how shoppers are discovering your products. You can pinpoint if a majority of your searches are coming in organically or via paid ads. Using these insights, you can then fine-tune your marketing strategies by optimizing your listings for SEO to get more organic searches.

Pro Tip from Ad Badger’s Amazon PPC Campaign Manager, Clement Hynaux: If Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard says you have low clicks or add-to-cart shares, then improve your main image and add your search term to the title. (We have more tips for fixing low-impression on Amazon here.)

Alternatively, you can increase your bids on the keywords in your best-performing search terms. The search query data can also help you catch trends early and identify opportunities to generate more sales or introduce new products.

How Does Amazon Define Rank and Search Query Level?

Amazon ranks your search queries from number 1 to 1000. But, you’ll notice it doesn’t define the rank based on sales, add-to-cart action, or even clicks. Instead, Amazon combines a variety of factors to create an aggregated metric that it then uses to rank your search queries.

What makes the search query ranking even more interesting is that Amazon is quite transparent about its ranking metric. If If you go to your search query performance report, there’s a metric glossary at the top right-hand corner explaining Amazon’s definition of a search query ranking.

Another thing worth exploring is how Amazon ranks the search query volume on the search query performance report. Search query volume is the number of times shoppers searched a particular search term. If a shopper clicks on your product from another product page, that won’t reflect as a search query on the report. It’s a pretty cool feature to give you accurate insight into your search term performance.

How Does Amazon Define Impressions in the Search Query Performance Dashboard?

Search query impressions are the number of results that pop up when a shopper runs a search on Amazon. For example, if a shopper searches for the search term “running shoes,” and there are 50 products on the first page of search results, Amazon will record the impressions for that search query as 50.

If the shopper clicks on the second page, that’s another 50 impressions recorded, totaling 100 impressions. Now, if you have four different products on the search page, your brand has four impressions for that search.

Amazon can then calculate your brand’s impressions market share as a percentage of the total impressions, which in this case would be 4%.

How Does Amazon Define Clicks in the Search Query Performance Dashboard?

Clicks as a metric generally offer more actionable insights regarding your search query performance. It’s basically a count of how many shoppers interact with your products after a specific search query — an accurate measure of your traffic.

This is where you’ll see immediate changes if your ranking improves or if you’re using Amazon PPC ads because these are the two scenarios that increase visibility and interactions on your products.

How Does Amazon Define Cart Adds in the Search Query Performance Dashboard?

The next column on the search query report covers the cart adds per query. The cart adds reported here don’t have to translate into a purchase.

Amazon records the total cart adds per query as a different data point, separate from conversions. Then, depending on how many of those products added to the cart are yours, Amazon shows your brand’s performance as a percentage of total cart adds per query.

Pro Tip from Clement: If your add-to-cart share is low, you may have a more complex case of misalignment of your offer with the search query, perhaps from your images, bullet points, or descrption.

Here's what to do when customers saw your listing, were interested enough to click on it, but they failed to add your product to their cart:

Review your copy and ensure that you confirm that the customers are on the right product page and that your products solve their challenge.

Less obvious but still worth checking: you may be running low on inventory, leading to shipping delays in some areas. If this is the case, you may be missing the buy box altogether!

Clement Hynaux

If an inventory issue is causing your cart adds issue, then check out these episodes we created on The PPC Den Podcast: How Do I Perfect My Amazon Inventory Management and 10 Steps to Maximize Amazon FBA Inventory Limits.

How Does Amazon Define Search Funnel for Purchases in the Search Query Performance Dashboard?

The search funnel for purchases shows your conversions. Amazon has taken steps to distinguish between cart adds and actual purchases, which helps paint a clear picture of how shoppers finalize the purchase after adding your product to the cart.

Elizabeth observed that product-specific search queries have the cleanest search funnel regarding clicks, cart adds, and purchases. Hyper-specific searches signal high buyer intent and typically have higher conversion rates.

Pro Tip from Clement: Identify your perfect scenario for growth by looking at your brand shares throughout the customer journey.

If your purchase share is higher than your add-to cart’s, higher than your clicks’, which is also higher than your impressions,’ then that tells you that you are hyper-relevant and convert for that term, but your exposure limits you.

Get in that ad console and boost your impressions for that search term, ideally targeting it on exact match if it has enough search volume (see the Search Query Volume column to get the data from Amazon).

Clement Hynaux

By sending more traffic to your DPD, you will boost your impressions and clicks, and your add-to-cart and purchase shares will likely follow. This is one example of how we’ll use Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard for our Managed Services clients at Ad Badger.

Is There Anything We Don't Love Amazon's Search Query Performance Dashboard?

We love Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard a lot, but there is one thing that we don’t love about it.

SQPD can’t export data. That can be extremely cumbersome… for any Amazon PPC-er who doesn’t have The Search Query Performance Analyzer for Amazon Advertising, available for free here.

Wrapping Up Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard

We hope you’re as excited as we are about Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard.

It’s the first time we’re getting first-party search query and conversion data from Amazon and the first time Amazon brands get first-hand brand market share insight. Head over to your Search Query Performance Dashboard and start exploring that system if you haven’t already!