#485 – Amazon Search Query Performance & Product Opportunity Explorer Deep Dive

41 minute read

Published: August 22, 2023

Modified: August 25, 2023

Today, we have a special Serious Sellers Podcast episode where we recap our latest fireside chat with Amazon. Our guests are Francesca Smith and Julia Hiltzik, Senior Growth Consultants at Amazon, and they are members of the team behind Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer, and Search Query Performance! And for the first time ever, Amazon is “opening the hood” and letting us know how these data points are collected and used. Tune in and learn how you can leverage unique Amazon data points in conjunction with Helium 10 to level up your business.

In episode 485 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Francesca, and Julia discuss:

00:28 – Why This Is A Special Episode
01:26 – Search Query Performance Brand View
04:27 – Search Query Performance ASIN View
05:10 – Search Query Details
06:50 – Search Analytics Search Volume Is Now Denormalized!
09:10 – What Counts Towards Search Volume
11:05 – What Does Not Count?
12:00 – What Counts For Products With Variations?
15:10 – Difference Between Helium 10 And SQP?
17:30 – How Is Search Query Score Calculated?
19:00 – How Does Product Opportunity Explorer Work?
21:26 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Search by Keyword or ASIN
23:12 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Keyword Niche
24:40 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Search Terms Tab
26:58 – What Is Unit Sold Data Based On?
27:45 – Download Feature Now Available In Product Opportunity Explorer
28:30 – Niche Details: Insights
30:15 – Niche Details: Trends
30:56 – Brand Analytics x Helium 10
34:39 – Search Query Performance x Helium 10
37:15 – Q&A with Francesca And Julia
41:20 – Get Your Tickets For Amazon Accelerate Event

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today’s a special episode as we’ve got reps from Amazon, from the departments that are responsible for Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance, and Product Opportunity Explorer, opening up the hood for the first time, these super cool metrics and answering all your questions about them. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that is our recap of our Fireside Chat that we had with Amazon. Now, these are the people at Amazon who actually work in the departments and are responsible for Search Query Performance, Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer. And for the first time ever, Amazon is kind of like opening up the hood and letting everybody know like how these different data points are to be used. So this is definitely something that is gonna be very informational and we wanted to make sure that you guys got the best highlights of it. For those of you who missed the our live workshop keep in mind that if you have questions after this send them in our serious Sellers podcast Instagram account, because we’re gonna try and do a follow-up event where we go over all of the unanswered questions that you might have after today’s lesson. So let’s go ahead and hop right in to this Fireside Chat. Now you work for Amazon. Can you go ahead and you know, tell us what your title is there, how long you’ve been there, et cetera?

Julia:

Yeah, so my title at Amazon is a senior growth consultant. I’ve been at the company for about a little over two years now. And I get to work with our awesome analytics tools that you were just talking about. So excited to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Talk about what we’re seeing here a little bit, Julia.

Julia:

Yeah, so this is a screenshot, I believe it’s from your Project X account for Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf brand, the famous coffin shelf. So you can see we have where the customer starts and where they end going from impressions, clicks, card ads, and purchases. And in this case, just to clarify, purchases means orders. So what’s really cool is you can see for each of those four metrics what your brand count is, or how many of each metric your brand’s ASINs received versus Amazon as a whole or total count. So you can start to really get a sense of what mark your market share is for a specific search term over different time, sorry, over different timeframes. You can also see where the customer’s dropping off across the funnel. So in our case, you know, if I’m adding to my cart and not coming back to it, I might drop off before I see purchases show up. So maybe you have high click share, but a customer isn’t necessarily transitioning to adding your product to their cart. You can start to think of different strategies on how to entice them to move forward, you know, towards a purchase. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> maybe it’s a coupon, maybe it’s getting more defensive with your ad campaigns or even just optimizing your detail page to include certain buzzwords that customers are searching for.

Bradley Sutton:

I know some of you guys that don’t have big screens right now, maybe it’s gonna be hard for you to see the number, but those of you who can see it take a look there at the top. This is what we had opened up before. Do you see how the number one keyword was coffin shelf? Right? You see there under search query volume, it says that there are 4,000 searches for this keyword, and my brand had 9,000 impressions. Now, of those 9,000 impressions, if you look on the right hand side, you’ll see that buyers clicked on one of my brand’s products about 220 times. Okay? And of those 220 times, only 30 people added it to their cart. Now, if off screen, you can’t even see it here, if you scroll to the right from there, you’ll be able to see how many purchases I had from those 220, or from those 30 adds a cart. So this is for my brand as a whole. Now, this is the brand is Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, I have like five or six different coffin shelves and a coffin tray and other spooky items in there. So this is showing me this kind of level of information at the hole, but what other view do people have an option to see?

Julia:

Yeah, so you can also switch to the ASIN view to see which we did earlier actually. And you can see which are driving the most engagement for you. So you’ll see a similar format to the brand view, but at the ASIN level, so you can drill down to see how each of your products are performing. Another difference on this view is that, which is really cool, you can see now that each search term has a, has like a hyperlink. So if you click on one of those, you’re going to be able to see the top 10 ASINs with their actual number of impressions and clicks for the selected timeframe, which is data that we’ve never shared before.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay? So we can see that here, like, like take a look guys. So this is, this is, you can only click on the word. So everybody, I hope you guys are doing this with me. I hope you still have your window open. So if you were on the ace in view, you’ll see that all of the search terms have a hyperlink. Now just click on one of those and this is the window that should show up. Does everybody see the search? And see who were the top 10 products that had activity for this keyword? And if you see here, I’m not number one, but something interesting here that, again, I understand that you guys probably can’t see if, unless you’re looking on this on a big screen, but I noticed there was one competitor here that only had 3% of the impressions, alright?

Bradley Sutton:

3% of the impressions, and they had 200 clicks, 200 of the clicks, all right? That means their click share was 10%, despite only having 3% of the impressions. So people are loving this product right now. Take, compare that to mine, where I had more impression share. I had 4% on one of these products, but I only had 6% in the click. So these are the kind of insights that you’ve never been able to to see before. Now, us, a while back, there was actually a big change in the numbers that were shown in Search Query Performance. And then there was a message across the screen that said, Hey, this is used to be normalized and now it’s de-normalized. So can you talk a little bit about the search volume that we see in Search Query Performance and what this whole normalized and de-normalized? I mean, I think we already know that. I’m like, I’m the de-normalized one ’cause I don’t purchase and I’m kind of weird, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.

Julia:

Yeah. So within the 24 hour period, we count all search queries by the same customer. And what this means is that if a customer types in dog brush if they enter it into the search bar, again within that same 24 hour timeframe, the search volume will count as two. Whereas before it would only count as one. And there are some other nuances as well. If a customer searches for, again, dog brush and they click through to the next page of search results, or if they hit the back button, this is also going to add to the total search volume.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, hope everybody caught got that. That was very important. You know, so, so you know, th th you know, like if you’re using Helium 10, you might see a number that’s a monthly number that almost is the same as, or very similar to the weekly number. So you might be think, wait a minute, thi this monthly number must be off because Amazon is showing that this in a week, it gets this almost. But remember what the, the Helium 10 data is normalized. All right? So does, did you guys understand what she was saying? Like when you type in dog brush, that’s one search. And then let’s say I click on a product and then I click back well, there, there’s another search all of a sudden. Now what if I go to page two of the search results? Well, guess what?

Bradley Sutton:

There’s another, another search right there. So it’s just a different, it’s not that one way to look at search volume is right and one is wrong. It’s just one is de-normalized, one is normalized. ’cause Different people have different viewpoints on what they wanna see. But with Search Query Performance, the number that you see includes all of those different scenarios. Now next question. You know, if, if we go into the search results, you know, I I could see one product maybe like seven times, right? You know, it could be the sponsored brand headline ad. It could be a sponsored brand video ad. There’s an organic placement, there’s a sponsored product ad. Maybe there’s the, the highly rated like little widget and maybe there’s some sponsor display here or there. Now we’re going over now all of the top questions that, that you users had submitted for what is going on in Search Query Performance. So the one of the top questions is, is what, which of all of these placements counts as an impression that Search Query Performance is, is counting?

Julia:

Yeah, there’s a lot going on on that first page of search results. So both organic and paid placements are included in Search Query Performance in that impressions number it’s the same as I, like you were saying, shows up twice. So once sponsored, once organic, it will count as two. So it’ll count as two impressions. Also mobile app, any views or purchases on mobile are counted. And then in terms of pages, there is no concept of scrolling. So if the page is loaded, the ASIN will be counted as impressed. The customer has to click on the subsequent page for those ASINs to count in the report. So within the mobile app, infinite scroll is actually still using that pagination logic, but it’s just hidden from the customer. So when the customer’s scrolling to the bottom of the screen, when they reach page two, the results will be counted as they would on the desktop when a customer clicks on page two. And then lastly, just as a clarification point multi-unit purchases. So if I put three dog brushes of the same Asian in my cart and buy it are counted once, so that would be counted as one order, so not as three separate units.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. Guys, I hope you understand the fire that’s being given right here. Like, this is stuff that Amazon has never fully explained in their documentation. This is like a historic moment here. Amazon is opening up the hood and letting us know what goes into this. Like all if all of a sudden, like, you see Julia’s camera go off me, it means she’s maybe giving us too much information. Her bosses are like, yanking her away, but let’s keep going here with this stuff before that happened. So that’s what counts. Now another question that a lot of sellers were having was, what are the things that don’t count for impressions and purchases et cetera?

Julia:

Yeah, so we don’t include paid ads shown in widgets, like what you’re seeing on the screen here, like highly rated climate pledge friendly new arrivals, as well as Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Video Ads. We also don’t count purchases that originate from search, but occur after the customer clicks a link to the PDP. So if it’s from the brand store or like from the related products, from a different detail page,

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, that makes sense. Alright, now another question that comes up and that I’ve always had too is variations. Because now this opens up a whole other can of worms here. Let’s say I type in a search, I click a listing that has variations, be it color, be it size, whatever. But then when I click into it, it’s maybe the red one or something. But now I go in and I click on the black one or the blue one. What happens then?

Julia:

Yeah, so this is a little tricky and I’m gonna do my best to explain it, but basically the child ASIN has to be clicked from the search page to be counted as a purchase through search. So the impressed ASIN has to be purchased for it to be considered as a search attributed purchase in SQP. In the case that we have pictured here, child ASIN A or the gray T-shirt would have one impression and one click if I click on it when it comes up in search, but zero purchases if I decide to go with a different t-shirt color child ASIN B or the red T-shirt is a variation of child ASIN a. So if I decide to click on this color and purchase it, it would have zero clicks and zero purchases since it didn’t show up and search and get the original impression.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. It’s a little bit complicated, but I think overall I hope it may makes sense to most people now though in some categories I don’t think I have this in for the coffin shelf, even though I have variations, but I know in some categories in the search results you can actually, while still being on the search results click through to a different variation, like in this little mini carousel kind of thing. So in that situation, how does Search Query Performance work?

Julia:

Yeah, so there is a nuance where if a child ASIN is impressed, but a different color or pattern is clicked from a search page that child ASIN child will receive the impression. So for example, if I search for red bedsheets, we can see on the screen that this ASIN has multiple colors that you can click on. So if I click on the blue color, the blue ASIN will actually receive the click, but the red ASIN or what appeared in search results will receive the impression.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now how does the brand level, not the ASIN level, but the brand level search crew performance report account for a customer who clicks through to a product page for a Brand Parent ASIN, let’s just say, but then they purchase a different ASIN from the same brand, from that same page. So we were talking about the ASIN level here, but what, how does it work when we’re looking at that brand report?

Julia:

Yeah, so it’s the same logic if a customer clicks through to the detail page for Brands Parent ASIN, but then purchases a completely different ASIN from the same brand. So brand is an aggregation of ASIN level data. So if a brand has two ASINs A and B and the impressed ASIN is A and the purchase ASIN is B, the metrics are computed independently for each ASIN and then aggregated or rolled up to the total brand level, which is what you would see on your brand SQP report.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it, got it. All right. Next thing, another question that users have is probably the most common thing that as soon as this came out, everybody was saying, Hey, there’s no way this is right. You know, like the purchases seem way too low. Like for example, what I’m showing you guys right here in the screenshot I have Helium 10 atomic, what I use for my PPC management, and I just did a date range of eight six to eight 12. And just in PPC, you know, forget about my organic orders just in PPC for the word coffin shelf or for the search term coffin shelf. Amazon is saying that I got six orders, but then if I look for the same exact date range in Search Query Performance, it’s saying that overall organic and sponsored purchases, I only got four. And so e everybody else, you know, has a very similar thing where it’s like, wait a minute, this doesn’t even match with what my Amazon advertising is saying.

Julia:

Yeah, so that’s a great question and probably the most frequently asked for sure that we receive. So search for your performance attribution is currently only 24 hours. So you will see a difference between SQP and your advertising reports, which does have a longer attribution window. We are looking to update this in the future to show a more consistent view. However, for now, let’s say you received a click and add to cart ad from advertising one of your sponsored products campaigns but the customer left the product in their cart and not like you, Bradley, only checked out and they, you know, they checked out or purchased it four days later. So you may actually see that attributed sale in your advertising report, but you won’t see that reflected in Search Query Performance since it’s outside of the 24 hour window. So I know it’s a little confusing right now, but definitely something to note.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, that kind of makes sense. You know, the attribution window, the action has to be taken guys within 24 hours. So, you know, if, if I search for something and I’m clicking, I’m adding it to cart and that all happens like at the same time, those are all counted. But then if I just leave it there and I still purchase it the next day, even if it was just 25 hours later, it’s actually not going to count in Search Query Performance. So good to know. Alright, next question is on the left hand side, the very first column after the search term itself is this column entitled Search Query Score. Alright, so how is this calculated and is this like the reason why sometimes keywords might fall off of our Search Query Performance list?

Julia:

Yeah, so I actually saw a question in the chat about that earlier. So glad that we’re addressing it now. The keyword score the Search Query Score is calculated for each query based on impressions, clicks, card ads, and purchases count. You know, the four metrics we don’t share the calculation externally, but

Bradley Sutton:

I thought you were sharing everything with us today. What’s going on here? Hold them back on us, Julia.

Julia:

95%.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay, that’s cool. Sorry, go ahead.

Julia:

But basically the higher the number of impressions clicks, card ads purchases, collectively the higher the keyword score, and then we use the keyword score to rank the queries based on performance. So essentially, to answer your question, yes, this would be the reason why you may see a search term one week, but not the next. We only show within the brand view the top 1000 theories in the selected timeframe and top 100 for ASIN view.

Bradley Sutton:

Francesca is gonna be talking about product opportunity explore. But before we get into that, please introduce yourself to us how long you’ve been at Amazon and what’s your title, et cetera, et cetera.

Francesca:

Yeah, so my name’s Francesca Smith. I am a Growth Consultant at Amazon. Work really closely with Julia and the Product Opportunity Explorer team. I’ve been with Amazon for about five years, so most of my time actually has been spent working with some of these seller central analytics tools, so really excited to be able to share more about Product Opportunity Explorer and Brand Analytics.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I see here on the slide here it has a little section about customer searches. Now you guys, as in the Opportunity Explorer team, kind of like take it to a different place than just a Search Query Performance. So can you talk about how you group these, et cetera?

Francesca:

Absolutely. I can definitely walk you through that. So very similar in the search funnel description. Earlier, customers tell Amazon what they want when they enter search terms to find their next purchase. So we’re taking that same search data, but there is a clustering component to it. So essentially what we’re doing is combining those similar search terms and those top click products to group them into product niches. And so we’re looking at the top 90% of click and purchase products coming from the search terms. So from there you can take a look at these niches and understand more about what customers are looking for and identify any other opportunities for improvement. And then last–

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, hold on really quick. Hold on really quick. Did anybody catch something she just said that is new? Like, she kind of just like completely glossed over it, but it, but for those of you who have been using Product Opportunity Explorer, she kind of like slid something under the radar there that is new Robert’s Got it. Steve’s got it. Okay. Yeah, Helen’s got it. Yes, 90%. Like before guys what Product Opportunity Explorer would be based on was 80% of the market, but they just like slid that under the radar a couple of weeks ago where it’s now 90%. So anyway, sorry for interrupting. Go, go ahead and continue.

Francesca:

Definitely excited to reveal that. Yeah, so I think really from here we’re taking the same concept, being able to review what are those search terms, what are those top clicked and purchased products representing the top 90%. And from there, sellers can use this information to understand where they can potentially launch new products, discover potential for new products, as well as how to optimize their own listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Here, I entered coffin and this is showing the matching niches for coffin. Now we’re gonna talk a little bit later about what exactly makes up a niche, but Francesca, what if instead of a keyword I entered an ASIN?

Francesca:

Yeah, so if you enter asin what we’ll end up sharing here is a Target ASIN, which is the ASIN that you just entered. And then we’ve also got similar ASINs that are gonna be in the same bestseller rank category as yours. And we’re also going to order them based on the relevance to the title as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now guys, here’s just a quick hack. Quick hack here of how you can use this information. Let’s say, you know, a product and its variations have been in stock the whole year, never went outta stock. You know how Amazon reports BSR at the parent level, you know, not at the child level. So you never know which one is a good seller unless you, you know, use the other hack of using Helium 10 review insights to look at who has the most reviews. But another way to, to kind of estimate which color is selling the most is you enter that any of the ASINs into Product Opportunity Explorer. And then as you can see here, the top ones are almost always going to be the other variations. And if they were always in stock for the last 360 days, you could see kind of which one is probably the sold the most. Like the black one here got 22,000 clicks, and then the pink and the purple only about five, six, 7,000 each. And so that’s just like another way of getting estimations on how much each child item in the variation is. Let’s go to the next kind of view here. And this is a a keyword niche. So if I were to click into one of those keyword niches that, that came up, and I’m gonna go to this page now again, talk about how you make a keyword a niche.

Francesca:

Yeah, so what we do is we take a look at groups of similar search terms and check out what are those top clicked products that represent the 90% clicked and purchase products. So that’s actually what you’re looking at here on the products tab. Those top 90% of clicked and purchase products after customers might enter coffin shelf. If you wanna see what those similar search terms are, you can actually look at that in the search terms tab as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so, so guys, this is actually a kind of cool way to see the domination or the non domination in certain niches. Like if there’s only five products that you see in a keyword niche, that means that those five products make up 90% of the sales. And so those five products are absolutely crushing it? So it might be, you know, some people might view that as opportunities, some might view it as the opposite. There, there’s, there’s no one way to look at things, but then you look at a niche where there’s like, it’s made up of 200 products, well, that means it takes 200 products to get to 90% of the sales for that niche. So, so just that in itself, the number of products that show up here is an insight. Keeping going here on this, this topic of the keyword niche, this tab is a different tab. This is the the search terms tab that make up this niche. So how, how, what goes into to this getting, getting search terms into this page?

Francesca:

Yeah, so these are going to be the search terms that are going to have a really similar search to purchase funnel. So you’re going to see coffin shelf, coffin bookshelf these are similar terms as coffin shelf, and we basically share with you there that search volume, the search volume growth, and the top three clicked products. I think a lot of times if you haven’t taken a look at this page, search conversion rate is often missed as well. So you can really see what are those successful search terms and maybe study these over time to see where you might need to transition in terms of discoverability.

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely. Now just for those who didn’t notice this a few weeks ago or a few months ago, Amazon changed the Opportunity Explorer Search Volume to 100% match the Search Query Performance one. So if you see a number in Search Query Performance, it, it’s based on the same exact de-normalized data that you would see in Search Query Performance here in Opportunity Explorer. Now really quick, this page, I’ve talked about this before a year ago, something on this page inspired a Manny’s mysterious oddities product. So I noticed that a lot of products were getting like 1% and such conversion rate, you know, like coffin shelf, but then this keyword coffin bookshelf was getting like 0.1, like less than 0.1%, meaning that people were not finding what they were looking for. They were searching for it, but not clicking into it.

Bradley Sutton:

And so that told me that the market was kind of bare for this product, and so that’s why we made a coffin bookshelf and, and started killing the game with it. But that original idea for the product came directly from Product Opportunity Explorer. So that was a good, what did you say?

Julia:

I love hearing that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. She gets she gets a little bonus check from Amazon every time somebody says, says something like, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll need a little bit of a commission on that. All right. Now, now that was a good overview of these tabs here. Now one of the tabs there, it had shown something that said units sold. So where does that unit sold come from?

Francesca:

Yes. So again, taking that same concept from Search Query Performance, this unit sold data is based on when customers purchased products after entering the search terms. So it is a search to purchase conversion sale that is counted. And we are also following the same logic there as Brand Analytics. The sale only counts if the customer searched one of the search terms and made a purchase in the first 24 hours. So that same attribution time window is the same as Brand Analytics logic.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, perfect. Perfect. Now, a couple questions came in already about this. We’ll get to the questions later, but is this available for download or through the API only?

Francesca:

We are very excited to share that we have just launched the download feature in Product Opportunity Explorer. So you can download data and Product Opportunity Explorer in five different places. You can download the niche view, the ASIN view of the search results page and then when we go into those niche detail pages there we have the products tab and search terms tab. I think the most popular download that we’re seeing right now is on the search terms tab. So definitely take advantage of that. And then we also have one more download there on the product deep dive page where this niche product appears in.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Speaking of the niches, this page here, Niche Details insights. Now, what are a couple of highlights from this page? This is something we haven’t shown people yet.

Francesca:

Yeah, so on this page what we essentially do is provide some high level statistics about this niche. So you can see starting from that top line, which we will get this update here, here to show you that it is top 90% of clicks and purchases. But we’ve got, you know, from today, 90 days ago and 360 how many products have existed in this, in this niche. So you can track, you know, how many entrances are coming in, in and out. We also have the what I think is really important and what we heard from sellers when developing this page is they wanted to understand how many products and brands were representing the top five or, or 20. And so you can see we have the top five and top 20 product and click share displayed. This page can also tell you a little bit about the maturity of the niche.

Francesca:

We have things like what is the average brand age selling partner age, and then probably my favorite part of it is the customer experience, which is that bottom section there. In addition to seeing that star rating tracked over time, we also display average out of stock for this niche. And I think this is one of those really simple ways to identify if there is unmet demand. If there’s a consistent high out of stock there, you’ll, you probably do have some opportunity to to meet unmet demand there. And then it’s a little bit cut off on this slide, but we also have the listing quality score so you can get a sense for how these ASINs are, are doing in terms of their listing quality, you know, title, image, detail page. That’s a really easy way to differentiate yourself if you’re taking a look at that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Another page we didn’t show was this trends page. And this is cool because of all those search terms that are in that niche. This aggregates that data and, and shows the, the overall search volume week by week. Alright, week by week it’ll show the search volume and then it actually so shows the product count as well. So this is kind of interesting. You can kind of see like over time, well that 90% metric of how many products it takes to the niche, you can kind of see is it going down, you know, going down, meaning that, you know, there’s a few products that are starting to dominate a little bit more, or is the number of products going up, meaning that it’s kind of like wild west in this niche as far as who’s dominating the sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Those of you who have a Helium 10 Diamond account, I hope you are using the Brand Analytics. We talked about Search Query Performance which is inside of Brand Analytics. We talked about Opportunity Explorer. Some of this stuff you need to start using in conjunction with each other. Like if you go to cerebral or magnet, if you have a Diamond account or above, you are gonna be able to click on any of these keywords and see the, the top click and purchase share that comes directly from these data points we’ve been talking about today. And why this is beneficial is because sometimes combining Helium 10 data with what we talked about, it gives you a next level of insight. Like, for example, if I was looking at these coffin letter boards, I could see that to be the top clicked in October of last year, for example, it was almost all about organic rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Like the, the other top two click. They weren’t even in the top, you know, they weren’t even on page one or two of sponsored ranks. But sometimes you’re gonna see trends where the sponsored rank is more important, like for our coffin shelf, if you look at Brand Analytics, you see, hey, coffin shelf is the number one most clicked product for this keyword, but then you look at the Helium 10 data and we’re only 12th or organically, but we are number one. So then now all of a sudden I’ve got this insight, well, wow, for this keyword, I really have to make sure my sponsored rank is at the top because it looks like people are buying from the sponsored ad on the top row as opposed to the organic rank. Another keyword might be something totally different, but again, you need both the Search Query Performance and Brand Analytics data and then combine it with the Helium 10 data, which like I said, if you have the Diamond account, you’re going to be able to do.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that you guys can do is on, you know, even people on the free account of Helium 10, you guys have the search widget. When you go on the widget for BSR on any Amazon page, I suggest looking at your top competitor, right? Look at your top competitor and find when they had, they were just crushing it in sales, you guys should know that it’s the valleys of A BSR, the lower the BSR, that means the higher the sale. So I’m looking at this one competitor and I can see that, oh my goodness, like in July they had this crazy dip in BSR, so they were just probably selling like crazy. They had another crazy dip in like November, you know, during the holiday season where their sales just kind of skyrocketed compared to what it was normally.

Bradley Sutton:

So there’s the Helium 10 data, and now I go into Search Query Performance or Brand Analytics, either one Brand Analytics, if it’s not my competitor, if it’s my product, I would look at Search Query Performance. If it’s my competitor product, I would run it in Brand Analytics. And then I go into the daily or weekly history for this Amazon data point that correlates to this exact time that they had a big peak in sales. And now I can see where were the keywords that they were one of the top clicked for that day or for that week. So another situation where you combine Helium 10 data and then now take it back to Brand Analytics and get some additional insights. Another thing that we just opened up again for Diamond members is the time machine. So I could, instead of just looking at Brand Analytics, who is the top three picked?

Bradley Sutton:

If I noticed that there was somebody crushing it in sales in the month of September, 2022, well I can enter them into Cerebro and now I can hit this historical function where I click on a month like September, and now I know all of the keywords that they were ranking for, all of the keywords that they were running sponsored ads for. Another way that you can combine data Search Query Performance, this is, this is directly from Amazon. This is what we were looking at. I can see here that coffin shelf, I had about 4,000 or the, not I, but Amazon had search volume of 4,000 for the week, and I, as in my product had 4,000 impressions. So as you guys learned from Julia, that means that pretty much every time that somebody searched for this product, my product showed up once on the page, right?

Bradley Sutton:

But take a look at this coffin decor, it had a very similar search volume of almost 4,000, but look at my impressions, there is only 704. So if you see this in Search Query Performance, you are like thinking what in the world is going on? Why is my impressions to search volume one-to-one on this keyword, but it’s like one to five on this keyword. What’s going on? Well, this is where again, you now take it to another Helium 10 tool keyword tracker and take a look here, this is coffin shelf. You could see that for my sponsored rank and my organic rank, most of the time I was towards the top of the page, it was going off and on. And so it make, it makes sense that at least one of these times, every time somebody searched, I was near the top of the page on those times.

Bradley Sutton:

But then take a look at that other keyword, coffin decor, look at my organic rank and my sponsored rank, my organic rank. Most of the time I’m on like page two, page three, sponsored rank. Only half of the time I’m on page one. So now all of a sudden it becomes clear what I’m looking at in Search Query Performance of why I’m getting so few impressions. It’s because my organic and sponsored rank, which are the two things that Search Query Performance is taken into consideration. It’s not high. So now, you know, for, for my sponsored rank, I can just snap my fingers and increase my bid if I wanted to and, and go to the top of the page. And hopefully over time that might help my organic rank. These are just like two three of the ways where you can combine what we’ve learned today with Helium 10 data and then really getting to understand what is happening with your products on Amazon or what is happening with your competitor products. So make sure to use this especially if you’re a Diamond, you have a Diamond account, you’ve got full access to all of that. Ahad says it’s not a question, but more of a request. Hey, can you add the parent ASIN option in Search Query Performance? Because when we have a lot of variations, it’s hard to look at it. So I guess that’s kinda like a feature request.

Julia:

Yes, that’s something that we are definitely looking into is also a very common request and totally makes sense when you have a lot of variations, it’s a little tough to figure out what is coming from which child. So keep your eyes peeled for that for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

David has a question for me. He says, Hey, if a search period performance is de-normalized, helium 10 is normalized, why is Helium 10 search volumes always higher? It’s not, the one you’re looking at is the week. Alright, the one that shows up in Helium 10 is a 30 day search form. So it’s much, much higher, the search courier performance, you’re comparing a month to a week which is two different, two different things. You, if you wanna apples to apples, you can compare the month, the 30 day value. This is from Nicole, why would a product or search term not have any matching niches? I’m assuming we’re talking about opportunity explorer here. Yeah, that’s a good

Francesca:

Question. Question. I can take that one for Product Opportunity. Explore, it’s possible that there might not be enough search volume yet on the term that you typed in. So I would just go ahead and try some alternate terms to see if that could bring up some results. I definitely like what Jason pointed out with how he started with SQP going into OX to see what are the related niches to those search terms. I think if you’re not finding what you need, just try different search terms or you can also try the ASIN view as well. If you type in your ASIN and go to ASIN view, you can also take a look on that ASIN detail page, what are the niches this ASIN matches to, and you might be able to discover some niches that way as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And keeping with you, Francesca Logan says where it says, we talked about this a little bit, but where it says average units sold, is that per listing per month or it’s overall all of the products in that niche.

Francesca:

So it would be all of the products in the niche for the last year. And just keep in mind that it is counting the sales in that 24 attribution window. So it’ll probably will not match up with your standard sales reports.

Bradley Sutton:

Kay says, when you’ve got like 300 plus products, four brands, it’s a lot of data to go through. So what do you suggest the main focus or takeaway should be with the Search Query Performance? Like, you know, like if she’s a one woman show, you know, she can’t just sit there all day every day going through 300 products, Search Query Performance reports. So what, what would you say she should be looking for?

Julia:

I mean, in my opinion, I think you really focus on your top and your bottom ASINs, especially in Search Query Performance. Your top ASINs are most likely going to be showing up in the top 100 or at with those top 100 keywords. So I would really look at those top ASINs and see how you can continuously improve them. And then also take a look at, you know, are my bottom ASINs, are they showing up in this report and can I, you know, can I do anything to get them higher up on search or to get them, you know, more purchases. Also, take a look. I think some of the key funnel metrics are really looking at those clicks to add to carts, add to carts to purchases is your, you know, are you getting that traffic and if you are, are you getting the conversion from it? If you aren’t getting the conversion, take a look at, you know, your competitors and look at why is it pricing, is it your detail page? Could you be advertising more on different keywords? So I think that those are really the most important things I would take a look at. But agreed, it is a lot of information and we are going to try and find some ways to make that a little bit easier for you.

Bradley Sutton:

Well guys, that’s another reason that we gotta Hurry app Amazon and get this available in the API because you know, once that’s available now Helium 10 can like do a lot of that work for you and then you can set alerts and stuff. We’ll just let you know when certain things happen. Hint, hint, wink, wink to Julia there, I was teasing Francesca and Julia that they’re gonna be celebrities after this. ’cause So many people we had over 1200 people live on this webinar. So please ask them for an autograph. If you see them walking in Amazon Accelerate, you can ask them offline some questions. If you guys haven’t gotten your tickets yet to Amazon Accelerate, it’s still open. Go to h10.me/accelerate. Let me that’s just an easy way to remember the link. So h10.me/accelerate, that’ll take you directly to the Amazon website.

Bradley Sutton:

And I see that there’s maybe 60 other questions, but it’s hard to scroll in this Zoom thing here. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna consolidate all your questions. We’re gonna try and get to everything that Search Query Performance or Product Opportunity Explorer related. I saw a lot of questions that were just general, but we’re not gonna cover those. But we’ll try and do a follow-up, either podcast or video or something with Julia and, and Francesca. I thank you two very much for coming on here. This is unprecedented. You guys have never really opened up the hood on these things before. So we thank you for allowing us to break this to the audience out here. Jason, thank you for coming on and giving us a real world, real life experience of an Amazon seller who has benefited from this information. And I’ll be seeing all of you guys and everybody else out there, hopefully at Amazon Accelerate. Thank you so much. Goodbye everybody.

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