The Amazon Advertising platform has released a new report for Sponsored Products called ‘Search Term Impression Rank Report,’ which is really useful (the report has been introduced first for Sponsored Brands in October 2020).
We’ll go through the following topics in this article:
- What is the content of the report?
- What’s the best way to get it?
- And how can you put it to use?
What is the content of the report?
The Search Term Impression Share report contains existing metrics you’ve seen in previous reports, such as Cost Per Click (CTR), Conversion Rate (CvR), and Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – on a search term level, in addition to two new important metrics, ‘Search Term Impression Rank’ and ‘Search Term Impression Share.’
Here’s a peek at the new Sponsored Products report (the image below displays a Sponsored Brands report; the Sponsored Products version looks quite similar and may be used in the same way).
The new benchmarks
- Impression Rank for a Search Term
- Impression Share of a Search Term
Provide additional information that allows sellers to compare their campaigns to those of other advertisers.
This is what they imply:
Impression Share of a Search Term
Your account-wide percentage (in percent) of total impressions across all advertisers is your search term impression share.
For example, on February 15, your search impression share for the term ‘running shoes’ is 40%. That means you received 40% of all ad impressions for ‘running shoes’ on that particular day across all of your campaigns. The remaining 60% went to all other advertising.
Impression Rank for a Search Term
The numeric rank of your account-wide impression share in comparison to all other advertisers generating impressions on the same specific search phrase is your search term impression rank. If your account gets a numerical rank of 1, it means your account has the highest search phrase impression share for that search keyword.
On February 15, your search phrase impression rank for the search keyword ‘running shoes’ is 3. That means that on that particular day, two other advertisers earned more impressions than your account.
Where can you obtain a copy of the report?
Select ‘Reports’ from the horizontal list in the Amazon Seller Central panel, and then ‘Advertising Reports’ from the drop-down menu. Click the ‘Create report’ button in the upper left-hand corner of the advertising reports page.
Select the campaign type you want to analyze and the report type you want from this new page. The new Search Term Impression Share column has been introduced here:
What is the significance of the search term Impression Share?
The new metrics in this report will help you better understand how three separate components or questions influence your results:
- How many impressions can a search keyword generate? (Get a rough estimate of search volume)
- How competitive is a search term’s niche?
- For a given search keyword, how competitive are my ads? (Estimate your voice share)
The first issue concerns the search term’s potential, while the other two concern your ability to realize that potential in light of your competition and your own activity.
What is the impression potential of a certain search term? (Get a rough estimate of search volume)
The search phrase impression share report is useful since it provides an indication of relative search volume for search terms.
To arrive at this figure, we must first figure out the total number of ad impressions across all advertisers:
The absolute search volume (i.e. the number of customer searches for a specific search phrase over a certain time period) is not equivalent to the total number of ad impressions across all advertisers. Because of the following reasons:
- During the same consumer visit on Amazon, the amount of impressions includes impressions from a variety of different marketers.
- During a customer’s Amazon visit, the same ad may show many times (e.g. on search results and different product pages)
- During a consumer visit, multiple adverts from the same advertiser (for example, for various ASINs) may appear.
- The total number of impressions is also affected by the advertising activity level (e.g. the more advertisers the more ad placements are occupied and the more impressions are generated).
The total number of ad impressions across all advertisers, on the other hand, allows you to derive a relative search volume, i.e., that search word X has a higher search volume than search term Y. Because the overall number of ad impressions across all advertisers is closely related to the absolute search volume, this is the case.
How competitive is a search term’s niche?
When you combine impression share and bid, you may get a sense of how competitive a search phrase is.
For a given search keyword, how competitive are my ads? (Estimate your voice share)
The search term impression share data allows you to calculate the audience penetration of your adverts, often known as the “share of voice.” This serves as a barometer for the visibility of your brand initiatives and how much you control the ad space in your industry.
This report introduces a new benchmark to measure the success of Sponsored Brands campaigns in addition to the existing new-to-brand-metrics. Share of voice can be useful for any ad type, but it is especially useful for running Sponsored Brands campaigns, which are often mid-to-upper funnel ads to drive brand awareness, i.e. this report introduces a new benchmark to measure the success of SB campaigns in addition to the existing new-to-brand-metrics.
The impression share can also be used to assess the effectiveness of strategies aimed at increasing the share of voice, particularly in the media.
- Increasing the number of bids
- Adding more advertisements
Keep in mind, however, that there are several ad placements on Amazon. Depending on how many advertisers are running advertisements for a given search keyword, achieving a high impression share may be more difficult or perhaps impossible.
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