Understanding Amazon Search Term Impression Share

This article explains the importance of improving your Amazon sales rank, how to use Amazon search terms strategically, how to calculate Amazon impression share, how to evaluate the impression potential of an Amazon search term, and much more. By the time you finish reading, you will have the knowledge needed to assess and calculate your Amazon impression shares to optimize your listings profitably.

As an Amazon seller, emphasizing the proper search term can be the difference between making a sale or losing to the competition. To address competitiveness, the eCommerce giant offers a tool to sellers that helps sellers with their insatiable quest for sales visibility: the Amazon Search Term Impressions Report.

The report reveals a tailored, account-wide advertising impression calculation for all designated Amazon search terms. In short, the report gives you the percentage of impressions you earned as they pertain to search terms. Amazon search term reports are a form of seller reporting that collect the following information:

• The most popular search terms during a particular period (middle of the day, 9 p.m., Wednesday).
• The rate at which the search terms occur.
• The top items that the majority of customers click when searching such terms

If the weeks prior to the date you generated your report have not shown any changes to your Amazon sales ranking, individual sections of this report may be lacking. This situation is also likely if no items are clicked after inserting the search term. However, the chances of no change between periods are unlikely.

These reports come to you in the form of large data sets presented within an Excel table. The tables are easy to navigate if you have prior experience using Excel. The data inside can be insightful in terms of increasing the potency of your Amazon sponsored ads.

When paying for an Amazon sponsored ad, the search term impression share is the number of impressions on targeted keywords. That means if you are targeting “designer shoes” alongside competitors who have similar campaigns (Reebok, Nike, etc.), the share may tell you that you receive ten percent of those clicks.

If you know anything about Amazon sponsored ads, ten percent of anything says nothing by itself. Therefore, try not to make any assumptions about a standalone piece of data.

Before you increase your bid for particular keywords, you have to make a marketing decision and decide whether or not it is worth more time and money. The more you bid, the higher you appear. However, at the same time, you may be increasing your average cost of sale (ACOGS) to the point where it no longer earns you a profit.

If you are only receiving ten percent, that is considered a low number. In this case, it may be suitable to target other less competitive keywords, although once you gain more brand recognition, you could potentially return to the keyword.

To see positive results, you should focus on the following metrics:

• Search term impression share
• Search term impression rank 

The two are broken down into percentiles compared to competitors looking at the exact keywords. Other metrics focus on the number of clicks and impressions that contribute to calculating total search volume. Below is a breakdown of what those things mean.

A search term impression rank is the numeric rank of your impression shares and other impressions generated from paid advertising for one specific Amazon search term. For instance, the more you invest in advertising campaigns, the higher the ad rank. Another factor that affects the Amazon search term impression rank is the competitiveness of the topic.

Given that this rank comes from your click-through rate (CTR), this does not necessarily mean that you increase your conversion rate (percentage of sales when put up against clicks). Compare this figure to the number of sales you earn as you grow in rank. This combined data will tell you whether or not your campaigns are effective.

Moreover, impressions have great potential to result in higher sales. However, sellers should prioritize positive keywords that increase audience recognition and boost sales. For example, having a higher Amazon sales rank for a keyword is not optimal if it does not increase sales.

Clicks are the number of times that those searching your designated Amazon search term have clicked on your display ad. Impressions are the number of times that your advertisements appear. The combination of the two determines your click-through rate (CTR). For example, having 1,000 impressions and 100 clicks means your CTR is ten percent (100/1,000).

The search term impression rank can utilize this data to determine the search volume of your ad. This volume is the number of times that your ad appears when people look for a term.

So, if your Amazon search term impression rate is ten percent and you have 100,000 impressions, that means your content has appeared around 1,000,000 times. However, only ten percent of those times result in people seeing your ad, meaning that other people have likely invested more.

Amazon’s Search Term Impression Reports adds value to overall keyword ranking through the ways in which it allows you to understand the effectiveness of Amazon Sponsored Ads through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. If you have sponsored products or brands, you will see the significance of targeting a particular keyword.

If you find that your advertising campaign is ineffective, you may need to target different keywords. However, you may also find greater efficacy from tweaking other aspects of your advertising campaign, such as your overall Amazon sales rank.

Above all, you should understand organic search and how it works to improve your Amazon sales rank. For instance, the more people that use your products in response to a specific search term, the higher your products will rank for that term. Eventually, higher organic search results lead to more sales.

All of this works with a combination of impression shares, ranks, and clicks.

There are several ways to evaluate the impression potential of Amazon search terms. Below are a few examples:

Test Your Keywords

• An early-stage Amazon PPC campaign can be a short-term testing phase for a variety of potential targets. In this case, your goal is to produce a negative keyword list that provides you with knowledge on what does and does not work. Having this list allows you to target potential customers with functioning keywords. Negative keywords lead to no sales, which do not help grow your business. This process may feel like burning your advertising costs but will provide you with much knowledge. This knowledge will come to you through Amazon seller reporting information, which you can run reports on at any time.

Invest More Money Into Your Keywords

• For Amazon sponsored brands to reach top levels of searchability, they typically start by funding their campaigns. If you want to test your keywords’ effectiveness in generating impressions, increase funding to your most important campaigns. Ad performance (when it comes to keyword bids) typically comes from a willingness to invest.

Check Your Ad Quality

• Ad campaign managers often believe that simply increasing ad spend will be enough to move the needle, but money is not the only determining factor. Instead, re-evaluate your campaigns with ad professionals to establish a strategy geared to increasing sales. Do not be afraid to get an outside opinion from a third party. Remember, having a higher Amazon sales rank is not a guarantee of more sales. In more competitive fields, you have one final option.

Target More Detailed Options

• In SEO and advertisement, targeting long-tail keywords may result in tapping a smaller audience. However, that same audience may also result in a higher return on ad spend, reducing your overall advertising cost. In addition, Amazon sponsored ads do not always have to target the most obvious keyword.

If you can reduce the amount of money behind your advertisements’ working capital, you may end up becoming more competitive down the road. Try Amazon keyword research to find the most effective keywords for your listings.

The process of leveraging the Rank Report to Assess an Ads Competitiveness for an Amazon search term can be a bit daunting for those who are just beginning. The best way to attain a comprehensive understanding is to go through an analysis process from the beginning. This section provides a working example of how to measure your Amazon sponsored products’ competitiveness.

Contextual Background 

For the purpose of this example, imagine that you are a small shoe company aspiring to become the next Nike. At this point, you have a long road ahead of you, and you are under the impression that Amazon’s informational database can help you achieve your goal. In this case, assume that there is no other Amazon seller reporting data to work from.

You do all of the necessary things needed to start your Amazon brand and have achieved a certain amount of success. This process includes optimizing your product’s pages, but you have an Amazon PPC campaign focused on some of your more premium products. Given your focus, your objective is to create a line of running shoes. You decide to target “athlete jogging shoes” because the keyword is detailed. The campaign lasts for several months with moderate success, and you choose to try and use that data to launch a new campaign.

Here is an example of what you have gathered:

• Your campaign lasted from April 2020 to January 2021.
• Your targeted Amazon search term was “athlete jogging shoes.”
• Your search term impression rank was seven.
• Your search term impression share was five percent.
• You received 1,271 clicks.
• You had 70,682 impressions.

After analyzing the information, you determine that your conversion rate was about twenty-five percent from additional sources among the one thousand clicks. This information is not in the report but from your internal figures. Your findings reveal that you are lagging behind six other competitors that did better than you. However, this does not necessarily mean that they made more money than you.

Regardless, you received a substantial amount of 1,271 clicks, which received a good deal of attention. Among those, about 318 people made a purchase. Assuming these shoes cost $125, you would have made $39,750 gross earnings. You did this by appearing in roughly 350 thousand searches. But, depending on how much you spend on producing the shoes, advertising, and other fees, you feel like this is a small success.

Unfortunately, this data, combined with other information, indicates that you did not reach your underlying profit goals. You found that part of your mistake came from not spending enough to remain competitive. You determine that your next goal is to reach a search engine rank of twelve percent. If you make another 200 sales, this new goal is feasible. Ultimately,

You also decide to analyze the efficacy of your advertising strategy. Your findings reveal that targeting additional keywords is easier now that your product has gained more traction in the market. Coupled with SEO efforts and new brand photography, you now have a far more attractive-looking ad.

By being aggressive with sponsored products and brands, Amazon responds by allowing you to appear more aggressively in PPC results. You see, the solution to some problems does not always mean more money.  If your overall campaign flopped, you might have to go back to the drawing board.

In this data-driven world, humans need to rely more and more on numbers and data analysis to achieve peak performance. This article identified various ways to improve your overall Amazon search term impression rank through campaigning and explained how to calculate Amazon impression share to optimize your listing profitability.