Search Term Impression Share & Brand Category Benchmark Reports in Amazon PPC

June 2, 2021
By The Badger

Fellow data junkies, rejoice: Amazon came out with two brand-new reports. One is for both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, while the other is exclusive to Sponsored Brands. The way Amazon organizes and reports our data has a powerful effect on how we as Amazon sellers interpret it.

After viewing your data through the same reports, focusing on the same metrics over and over, the lens through which you view that data starts to mold to the limitations of those reports. Now, with these new reports from Amazon, we have the opportunity to look at this data from a whole new angle, challenging how we view our data and revealing some insightful connections in the process.

How to Access Your Amazon Advertising Reports

If you’re new to Amazon Advertising, or if it’s been awhile since you last checked your reports, we’re here to give you a quick tutorial on how to access these new reports.

From your Amazon Advertising console, click on the sidebar and go to Reports.

From there, you can see all the reports you’ve generated in the past. Click on the “New Report” button in the upper left-hand corner.

Here, select what campaign type you want to analyze and select the report you want from the drop down menu.

Then, just give your report a name and click “Run Report!”

After a few minutes of processing, your report should be ready to go.

Without further ado, let’s dive right into these new reports and what they can do for you!

Search Term Impression Share Report

When you look at the Search Term Impression Share report, you’ll find a lot of metrics– CTR, CVR, etc.– that you’ve seen in previous search term reports for Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand ads. However, early on in the sheet, you’ll find two new columns: Search Term Impression Share and Search Term Impression Rank. Save for these two columns, it’s exactly the same as your garden-variety Search Term Report, so you may want to consider swapping this new report in for even more sweet, sweet data.

Search Term Impression Share

If you have any experience with Google Ads, the concept of Impression Share might be familiar to you. Search Term Impression Share is, as it sounds, the percentage of possible impressions you’ve earned on a particular search term. For example, if a certain search term is searched 1,000 times and you have 100 impressions for that search term, your Search Term Impression Share is 10%. Keep in mind that this isn’t a guarantee that shoppers physically saw your ad, just that it showed up for a given search term.

This Impression Share metric is incredibly useful for making your best search terms even more profitable. If your ACOS for a certain keyword is a good deal lower than your target ACOS, it can determine whether or not there’s value in bidding more for that keyword to make things tougher for your competitors.

It also tells you whether or not a higher bid will gain more impressions. For example, if you already have great ACOS and your Impression Share for a particular search term is 100% or close to it, it’s probably not worth it to bid more.

On the other hand, if you have a lower Impression Share– say, below 70% or 80%– and you have low ACOS, you have a lot to gain by bidding higher to capture those untapped impressions.

Another way to utilize Search Term Impression Share is by working backward and getting an estimate of the search volume of a given search term. Just convert your Impression Share to a percentage, then divide your impressions by your Impression Share…

…and voila! You have a solid estimate of how many times shoppers entered a given search term.

Search Term Impression Rank

The other new metric in the Search Term Impression Share report is Search Term Impression Rank. This one is a little more tricky to understand and use since there’s very little information available on it from Amazon.

Our interpretation of Search Term Impression Rank is that it compares your impression share against everyone else whose Sponsored Brand ads gained impressions for a particular search term in a given period of time. For example, if you have the highest Search Term Impression Share for a given search term, your Search Term Impression Rank for that search term would be 1.

With Search Term Impression Rank, the utility comes when you filter for a high number. If you see that one of your priority keywords shows up in a search term with a high rank, that could be a sign that you need to push harder on that keyword. Keep in mind, however, that this metric focuses on search terms rather than keywords, so it’s not the best place to draw conclusions unless your campaigns are extremely segmented with tons of ad spend.

We took an in-depth look at everything you can do with this report with our friend Elizabeth Greene from Junglr. Check it out!

Brand Category Benchmark Report

A quick disclaimer about Brand Category Benchmark: not all Sponsored Brand campaigns have access to it yet. If you don’t see it in the drop down menu, don’t freak out– just be patient and it will be available in time.

There is useful never-before-seen data in this report. Namely, it gives you new insight on how you size up against your competitors.

Right off the bat, the report shows your brand and all of the categories and subcategories where your Sponsored Brand ad appeared. For example, if you were selling a wrench, your brand would likely show up in the “Tools & Home Improvement” category, then the “Power Tools & Hand Tools,” “Hand Tools,” and “Wrenches” subcategories. With Brand Category Benchmark, you can compare and contrast how you perform in all of these subcategories alongside benchmark data for each.

Brand Category Benchmark works on a percentile system. It shows your performance on a given metric, then compares you to the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for that metric in your ad’s category or subcategory.

This report is incredibly useful for finding out whether you’re in a good spot with your metrics given the category. For example, you might think your ROAS is too low, but if it’s higher than the 75th percentile for ROAS in your category, you’re doing really well. On the other hand, if you have metrics such as conversion rate that are down below the 25th percentile, those might be areas to improve so that you’re on par with your competitors.

The next time you’re wondering, “Am I in a good spot with my [insert metric here]?” Brand Category Benchmark will have the answers you seek.

Key Takeaways

With these two new Sponsored Brands reports comes a lot of utility in terms of deciding where and how to optimize your Amazon PPC campaigns.

Search Term Impression Share gives you a proportion of how many shoppers entering a given search term see your ad. If your Search Term Impression Share is lower, you have the opportunity to gain more impressions by upping your bid. If you follow the philosophy of “bid as much as possible to turn up the heat on your competitors,” Search Term Impression Share shows whether or not you’ll gain a worthwhile number of impressions from bidding extra on an already well-performing keyword.

With Search Term Impression Rank, on the other hand, we wouldn’t recommend drawing conclusions from the data in that column unless your campaigns are highly segmented with tons of ad spend. It is, for the most part, a comparative metric to show where you stand in terms of your Impression Share.

Brand Category Benchmark offers never-before-seen data that gives you a ballpark estimate of where you measure up to your competitors with your KPIs. This gives you new insight on whether you’re in a good position with your key metrics within your category and gives you a heads up if there are any metrics that need special attention.

All in all, these are some great new reports, and we’re looking forward to whatever Amazon cooks up next. Happy analyzing!