The Amazon marketplace grows more complex for sellers with each passing day. This has left more than a fair share of sellers scratching their heads and wondering how their advertising efforts are stacking up against their competitors'.
One important and powerful way for any Amazon seller to gauge the success of his or her current Amazon advertising strategies and campaigns, is through benchmarking...collecting data that compares their performance with that of their competitors.
The Category Benchmark and Search Term Impression Share reports are intended to help sellers to understand where they stand when compared to their competition within a category, and by search term rank for Sponsored Brands ads.
These reports are rather new and are often underutilized by sellers. The best thing about these two reports is that they are fairly easy to interpret and supply sellers with a wealth of actionable data. They offer several options in terms of deciding where and how sellers can optimize their Amazon PPC campaigns.
In this blog, you will discover how to analyze both of these reports, so that you can use this information to find hidden opportunities to improve your ad performance on Amazon.
Category Benchmark Report
This report shows a seller’s brand and all of the categories and subcategories where their Sponsored Brands ad appears. The report is available for a 90-day look back window. With the Category Benchmarks report, sellers can compare and evaluate their Sponsored Brands performance relative to their peers.
The Category Benchmark report is based upon a percentile system. It shows a seller's performance on a given metric, then compares them to the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for that metric in their ad’s category or subcategory.
Category Benchmark reports track impressions, click-through rate (CTR), return on ad spend (ROAS), and advertising cost of sales (ACoS). For each metric, the report presents the seller's performance with their closest peers’ performance values.
Why is this important?
Sellers are able to use this information to identify if they are in a good position with their key metrics within a category, and which metrics need special attention (for example, if there is insufficient Ad Spend in categories with lower relative impressions).
Sellers can also better understand how performance changes are impacted by their own campaign optimizations or category trends.
Search Term Impression Share Report
The Search Term Impression Share report reveals the percentage of possible impressions a seller earned on a specific search term. It provides valuable information that can help sellers determine whether or not there’s value in bidding higher in order to gain more Impressions.
Inside of the Search Term Impression Share report, sellers will find data on:
- search terms that have the brand name in it
- search term impression rank*
- percentage of Impression Share
- type of targeting (keyword or ASIN = ‘Targeting Expression’)
- match type (Broad/Exact/Phrase)
- number of clicks
- cost-per-click
- click-through rate
- Ad Spend
- total orders (14-day period)
- total sales (14-day period)
- total ROAS
- total ACoS
- conversion rate
Amazon Search Term Impression Rank
* The Search Term Impression Rank compares a seller's impression share. It is the numeric rank of a seller's account-wide impression share in relation to all of the other Amazon sellers generating impressions on the same specific search term. A numerical rank of one (1) would indicate that the seller's account has the highest Search Term Impression Share for a specific search term.
Sellers should use this report to determine which search terms are performing well (highest sales, conversion rates, number of orders), and place them into individual campaigns to help improve those search terms rankings and to boost their product's visibility.
The Brand Category Benchmark and Search Term Impression Share reports for Amazon Sponsored Brands, are two important tools that can be combined with other reports (Search Term Report / Brand Analytics), to facilitate the on-going process of sellers optimizing their Sponsored Brands ads by removing any search terms that are not relevant to the products they are selling.
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