One of the daily frustrations for brands is identifying why their product performance shifted.
Sure, in your ads data, you can easily compare total impressions to total clicks to total purchases. These metrics give you some sense of where a drop-off in performance might be happening.
But these numbers come without context. You can’t really know to what extent your clickthrough rate is a sign of trouble, for instance, unless you know your product’s clickshare compared to other products like yours.
Same goes for your impression share and purchase share—raw numbers don’t mean a lot without understanding how the rest of the market is faring.
That’s where the Search Query Performance report comes in.
We’ve written about the Search Query Performance report before. It’s an excellent way to identify advertising gaps, such as search terms where you are under-spending compared to your market share, or vice versa.
But the Search Query Performance report also gives you a great way to troubleshoot your marketing funnel.
At what point are your shoppers dropping off? Is the issue with your keywords, with your photos, price, product content, or something else?
The Search Query Performance report lets you see your overall market share across impressions, clicks, adds to cart, purchases, and more.
And it’s easier than ever to use. Previously, you had to manually download SQP reports from Amazon and use pivot tables to map our trends over time. Now, Intentwise offers a SQP API that brings all of these metrics into an auto-refreshing dashboard in our Ad Optimizer solution.
Through Intentwise, you can see how your market share across all of these metrics changes over time, and what pricing or image tweaks seem to make the biggest impact on your funnel.
What does your Search Query Performance data really tell you?
Now, let’s break down what the different possible results from your Search Query Performance report really mean.
Just as Kenton Snyder did in our recent webinar, we’re going to offer a short guide for interpreting differences in market share across all of your metrics.
If your click share is higher than your impression share: So, let’s start simple. Of those shoppers who search your top keywords, let’s say a disproportionate number actually click your listing.
This means your product titles and images are working well. Your listing is jumping out in search results compared to your competitors.
Price could also be a factor here: If your price is lower than many of your competitors, the pricing element, in addition to strong titles and images, could explain why you’re getting so many clicks.
Basically, this is all a good thing. Even though you don’t have the highest share of impressions, perhaps suggesting you’re being out-advertised or outranked, you’re still generating a lot of interest from shoppers.
If your click share is lower than impression share: On the flip side, if you get a lot of shopper impressions but not a ton of clicks, you might start to rethink your main photos, your titles, and even your product price.
Something is clearly keeping shoppers from actually visiting your page, even though they’re seeing your product frequently.
It’s also possible that one reason shoppers aren’t clicking on your listings is that the keywords you spend the most money on aren’t actually your best keywords any longer. Or, at least, they aren’t as well-matched to your products as you had thought.
If your purchase share is lower than click share: If a higher proportion of searchers are clicking over to your product than are actually purchasing from you, this probably means there’s something going wrong with your on-page content.
Maybe your reviews aren’t as good. Maybe your descriptions and bullets need improvement. Maybe you need to test out a few new images.
If purchase share is higher than click share: Let’s say you have a surprisingly solid purchase share, even as your impression count is lackluster compared to that of your competitors.
Your product is clearly very compelling to shoppers who do stumble across it, but it’s not getting the reach you would want.
It’s probably time to increase advertising spend on those keywords.
How do you troubleshoot trends with Search Query Performance?
Comparing your market share in impressions, clicks, purchases, and so on certainly helps paint a picture of what might be going wrong.
But how do you figure out whether an intervention you’ve made is actually making an impact?
Luckily, Intentwise’s SQP solution lets you access trends over time, automatically. Let’s say you raised your price: You can look at how your impression share, click share, and purchase share shifted since that change.
Or say you recently refreshed your images. Want to know how well they worked?
Compare your click share before the image refresh to after the image refresh, and you’ll have a good sense of how compelling shoppers are finding your new aesthetics.
Here are a few examples of trends you’ll probably encounter—and what those numbers are really telling you.
If your impression share and click share are flat, but your purchase rate is declining: That means your front-end marketing seems to be working well, but you are encountering a newfound conversion rate issue.
Double check to see if something changed on your product page. Did you lose a key badge? Did one of your discounts run out?
If not, the problem may be the written content—you might need to rework your messaging for those top search terms.
If your total impressions and your impression share are decreasing: Let’s take another example. If your impression share is decreasing alongside your raw impressions, that means fewer people are seeing your product in search results.
You probably want to improve your organic rank for these terms, and maybe you also need to consider advertising more on those search terms (especially if they generate good conversion rates for you).
If your total impressions drop but impression share is flat: You have a solid list of search terms in your arsenal, and you’re getting in front of shoppers who search those terms. But the overall search volume for those terms seems to be on the decline.
This probably means it’s time to pick a new set of terms to spend on.
What are the limitations of the Search Query Performance report?
All of this analysis, of course, happens at only a very high level. With the SQP, you can see how your market share shifts over time, but you can’t see directly which types of shoppers are dropping off—and when.
To get more granular, you need to bring in Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis. With AMC, you’ll be able to directly compare shopper groups, to see if particular shoppers are the reason for a drop-off between, say, your click rate and your purchase rate.
You can isolate who clicks your listings versus who actually purchases the product. From there, it’s easy to troubleshoot what specifically is going wrong—and then, of course, to re-target those likely customers who dropped off along the way.
