The Search Query Performance Report—one of the most-loved Amazon data sources among brands and agencies—is now available via API.
That is going to make it far, far easier for e-commerce professionals to leverage the rich insights available in the report.
Analyzing the SQP report was historically a heavily manual process. You had to download it by hand week to week, month to month, and apply your own filters and calculations.
But now, with the SQP API, brands will be able to get a real-time view of their impression, click, and purchase performance compared to the rest of the market.
It’s a big deal. With the SQP API, you’ll get a gut-check of whether your strategies are working—and identify new spending opportunities you’ve been missing—with a single glance.
What is the Search Query Performance Report?
Basically, the Search Query Performance Report tracks your top 1,000 keywords based on impressions, clicks, purchases, and other key metrics, and then compares them to the rest of the market.
You’ll see how your brand’s purchase or click share compares to all of your competition. And you’ll be able to see how customer searches turn into brand discovery… or don’t.
You can filter all of this data at either the brand level or at a specific ASIN level.
The Search Query Performance Report is the best way to put your performance into complete context. You can get insights on your:
Market share. How are you performing compared to your competitors at the impression, click, add to cart, or purchase level?
Purchase journey. The SQP report lets you see not only how your brand compares to your competitors—it also gives you a glimpse into where in the path to purchase your content is breaking down.
For instance: If you have a higher share of clicks compared to your competitors, but a lower share of purchases, that’s an immediate indication that something is potentially going wrong with your content or your price. It may be time to troubleshoot why shoppers are visiting your product page, and then falling off.
Successful keywords. The SQP report will rank your top search queries for you, using what Amazon calls its Search Query Score.
You’ll be able to see how you are performing across the highest-volume search queries that are relevant to you, and identify search terms and keywords where you might want to invest more.
There are countless applications of this. For instance: If your impressions are low on a highly searched query, maybe it’s time to up your spend.
Or if there’s a search term where your products get a much higher click rate or conversion rate than your competitors, but you aren’t spending heavily on it, then maybe that’s another place to allocate more ad dollars.
How do you use the Search Query Performance Report?
As Mike Frekey, Managing Partner at IG PCC, discussed in our webinar on the Search Query Performance Report, there are plenty of ways to use the SQP to analyze your marketing strategy.
If your share of impressions is low: That probably means you need to up your ad spend to get your product more visibility.
If your share of clicks is low: As long as your impression rate is solid (above 2% or so), the problem instead is that your clickthrough rate is probably too low. Shoppers are seeing your ad—and then not clicking.
It’s worth testing out different images and coupons. It also might be worth bidding higher to get to the top of search.
If your share of purchases is low: If your conversion rate is far below your traffic, then it might be worth reconsidering pricing or product page content.
Another key use case is to calculate and compare your conversion rate to your competitors. According to Frekey, the SQP report is one of the only places where you can see how well you’re able to sell curious shoppers on your products, compared to your competitors.
You just have to do a couple calculations to get there.
First: Go into the search term data in your SQP report, and identify the terms that actually matter to you. Ignore all of the keywords that show up related to your terms but which actually has very little to do with your product.
Once you’ve winnowed down your list of actually relevant keywords, create a conversion rate for the whole of your brand’s sub-market. You can do this by just dividing the total purchases by the total clicks. Then, repeat the calculation for your specific brand.
That way, you’ll be able to see how your conversion rate stacks up in your category. This is not an end-all-be-all figure: You of course want to evaluate your conversion rate share in context.
If your price is higher than your competitors, of course you are going to have a slightly lower conversion rate.
Sometimes, you may want to use add-to-cart data instead of purchase data to calculate the conversion rate. If your product is significantly higher in price than the rest of the market, add-to-cart data tells you a lot more about how effectively your marketing is working than raw purchase totals can.
Because ultimately, with a higher price, it’s going to be harder to get customers over the finish line.
What are the limitations of the Search Query Performance Report?
For as powerful as the Search Query Performance report is, it does have a few notable limitations that you need to keep in mind.
You don’t see all of your keywords. The report only shows you a snapshot of your top keywords—you’ll see only 1,000 terms at the brand level or 100 terms at the child ASIN level.
Sales are only tracked within 24 hours of the original click, so your sales numbers won’t match your ad reports or your overall sales. This means that you’re not seeing the full picture of your sales. Remember, a basic rule of thumb is generally that 30% of your sales happen 24 hours after an ad impression, so you are potentially missing out on 30% of sales in the SQP data.
Sponsored Brands placements are not tracked. The SQP only shows you data for organic interactions or for interactions from a Sponsored Products ad. Sponsored Brands data is not included in the data sets.
Why is the Search Query Performance API such a big deal?
Previously, brand managers would have to do all of this analysis work manually. You would have to download the Search Query Report, and then manipulate the Excel spreadsheet yourself in order to isolate the data you need.
The API lets your software partner pipe in this data directly into your existing dashboards and reporting. Now, when you are tracking your ad performance, you can do it with the full context of how your product stacks up compared to your competitors.
You’ll also be able to immediately isolate high-potential keywords from the SQP data, and either incorporate them into your content, up your ad spend, or both.
It’s all the power of the SQP data, but easier to automate, segment, and put into context.
