What is Amazon Search Query Performance and how do I read it?
Search Query Performance is the Brand Analytics report showing total impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases for a search query — and your share of each. Unlike the advertising report it covers organic traffic too. Reading the three shares in order tells you which step you are losing: low impression share is a visibility problem, good impression share with low click share is a listing problem, and good click share with low purchase share is a price or review problem.
Three shares, three different problems
| What you see | What it means | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| Low impression share | You are not being shown | Bids, relevance, indexing |
| Good impressions, low click share | You are shown and skipped | Main image, title, price, reviews |
| Good clicks, low purchase share | They arrive and leave | Price, detail page, availability |
Reading these as one blended number hides which of the three it is — and the three call for completely different work.
Why the ads report cannot answer this
Your advertising report describes the auctions you took part in. It has no idea how large the query was or what happened to the rest of it. Two accounts with identical ACoS can have 2% and 20% impression share on the same query, and only one of them has room to grow.
A practical reading order
- Is the query big enough to care about? (search volume)
- Are we being shown? (impression share)
- Are we being clicked? (click share vs impression share)
- Are we being bought? (purchase share vs click share)
Stop at the first step that is weak. Fixing step three while step two is broken wastes the work.
Checklist
- Do you have Brand Registry, so SQP is available?
- Are you reading impression, click and cart share separately?
- Do you act on the first weak step rather than the last?
- Are SQP queries compared against the search terms your ads ran on?
Frequently asked questions
What is Search Query Performance?
A Brand Analytics report showing total impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases for a search query, with your share of each. It requires Brand Registry.
How is SQP different from the search term report?
The search term report only covers queries your ads appeared on. SQP covers the whole query including organic, and shows how much of it went to someone else.
Is SQP competitor data?
No. It is aggregate market data for queries your brand appears on. No individual competitor figures are shown.