The Amazon Search Term Impression Share report has been a very useful tool for us to gauge how aggressively we are bidding on a keyword compared to the competition. The report offers the Impression Share on a keyword level, but more importantly, it provides an Impression Rank. This means that if your impression rank for the keyword “Garlic Press” is 5, 4 other competitors are bidding and winning more on this keyword. We often aimed for the #1 Impression Rank, especially for keywords we targeted aggressively.
But one of our Amazon PPC marketing account managers pointed out something last week that changed everything!
He argued that by going more aggressively on Top of Search on a keyword, you actually LOSE Impression Share, and your Impression Rank will drop.
And here is why:
Do you know which Placement gets the most impression? most people think it’s “Top of Search” But, in fact, Product Placement gets the most impressions for most accounts!
Look at this image. This is for a ranking campaign where the Top of Search modifier is at 150%, winning 83% of the spending and only 19% of the impressions. Product Placement is getting 54% of the impressions!
That means that by increasing the Top of Search on a keyword, you are increasing spending, but you are REDUCING the impressions you are getting, hence reducing your Impression share and rank.
This was a real shocker to us because that makes the Impression Share report almost useless when looking to measure how you are spending compared to your competitors.
A better report that would more accurately represent how we are winning traffic on a keyword vs the competition would be a Click Share and Click Rank report. This will give us an idea of how much traffic we are getting to our listing through a specific keyword, and how it’s compared to the market.
