August 13, 2020

The Key Metrics for Amazon Sellers

Growing your Amazon account can be a challenge. How do you know if your listing is optimized? Do you have the right keywords in your title and bullets? Are your images good? These are some of the many questions you might be asking yourself as you look through your product catalog.

Instincts are experiments. Data is proof - Alistair Croll, Lean Analytics.

Said best by Alistair Croll, knowing what the data is telling you and making informed decisions based on that data is the difference between getting the sale and not. Amazon presents a lot of data when analyzing your account. For this article, we are going to break down the metrics you should be analyzing when considering search performance, listing performance, and ad performance.

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Search Performance

Search performance refers to how well your listing is ranking organically, how much engagement your listing is getting in search results, and how relevant your title and main image are. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't have metrics like click-through rate or impressions, however, we can infer some conclusions based on specific data points.

Sessions are the number of users your Amazon product page gets in 24 hours. A steady flow of traffic with incremental growth indicates a strong title, quality images, price point, or review count.

A good strategy for improving your sessions is to split test one feature at a time and measure results over a specific period. For example, you update your titles to include a unique function that competitors are missing and you note an increase in sessions from 2k to 3k over 30 days, indicating a 50% improvement in sessions. Good move!

Session Percentage is the percentage of sessions that contain at least one page view for a particular ASIN relative to the total number of sessions for all products. Knowing which products get the most sessions can help you prioritize your optimization efforts or discover where opportunity may lie within your catalog.

Improving your search performance is based on a few factors that will entice a click or session: the title of your product, the main image, price point, fulfillment method, and review count/quality. If you find that you are not seeing an improvement in sessions or that number is declining, consider the above factors.

Listing Performance

Listing performance refers to how well your product detail page performs. Understanding how users engage your listing, how they behave on your listing, and if your listing is converting are specific questions we can answer using the data available.

Unit Session Percentage is the conversion rate on your product listing. The unit session percentage is calculated on Amazon using the number of units purchased relative to the number of people who viewed your product (sessions).  

Functions of the product detail page that affect conversion rates include A+ or Enhanced Brand Content, secondary image quantity/quality, features called out in bullets, and fulfillment method. Using the split-testing methodology mentioned above is a great way to take a measured approach to improving your listing.

Pro Tip: Look over reviews and customer questions on your products and competitor products to get an idea of different features or pain points that should appear on your listing.

Page Views are the number of hits your Amazon product page gets for the selected time period. Page views can be multiple hits from the same user, which is why page views are usually higher than sessions in your business reports.

Understanding page views gives us insights into the behavior of an Amazon shopper on your listing. A listing with 2-3x the session count may indicate that a user is actively browsing your product and competitor products. Think of it as an opportunity to improve different facets of the product detail page that could reduce browsability and make it a no-brainer to make a purchase.

Improving listing performance is based on a few factors which will enhance the conversion rate on your products. Using A+ or Enhanced Brand Content, improving secondary image quantity/quality, adding video content, concise yet helpful bullets, and fulfillment method all improve the conversion rate on your listing.

Ad Performance

Advertising performance refers to how well your ads are performing in terms of sales and efficiency. Understanding the ratio of cost to sales and what you can do to improve performance is key to growth using advertising.

Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) is the ratio of advertising spend to advertising sales. This metric is an efficiency metric and is used to determine how efficiently you are managing your ad account.

To maintain a level of efficiency in your advertising account, you should be conducting routine bid management, segmenting campaigns based on branded vs. non branded search queries, and adding negative keywords to ad groups.  

Click-through Rate (CTR) is the ratio between impressions and clicks. The higher the percentage, the more relevant your ads. A low CTR means a poor ad experience. Consider negating these keywords or minimizing bids. 0.15% is a good baseline for low CTR.

Cost-per-click (CPC) is the average amount paid for a click on the keyword (on the ad), calculated as total spend divided by the number of clicks (spend / clicks). CPC is a fundamental metric when it comes to bid management. Using the CPC on a keyword, ad group, or campaign is the baseline for managing bids.

For example, if a keyword is at $1 CPC and you are currently bidding $2, but this keyword is running at 150% ACoS, you would want to reduce the bid to $0.75 on that keyword. The goal would be to see if you would generate sales at a profitable ACoS at a lower bid point.

Improving advertising performance is an art as much as it is a science. Use your search term report and do preliminary keyword research to get an idea of how users search for your products and how to incorporate them into your listing and ad campaigns properly. Leveraging all your ad types and testing different hypotheses is key to improving performance.

Conclusion

You can see that different points of the customer journey on Amazon require us to consider various metrics in determining how we can manipulate our listings to drive a specific behavior. The parameters above are what we believe to be more important metrics to focus on as you experiment with your listings.

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Read further:

Read this post to learn about the anatomy of a best-selling Amazon listing – to know which parts of your listing to tweak first and how. Make sure to go through this extensive guide that will walk you through the key steps to seeing top results on Amazon.