How to Use Amazon Brand Analytics the RIGHT WAY

In this post, I'll review one of the most powerful FREE tools Amazon has released in a long time and why it may be one of the best product and competitor research tools you'll use.

What is Amazon Brand Analytics?

Amazon Brand Analytics is a tool that provides insight into your product's performance, customer search behavior, and competitors. Around 2017, Amazon employees started stealing and selling many similar reports that are now available in Amazon Brand Analytics.

One could say that Amazon Brand Analytics is, arguably, at least a partial response to this problem.

Related Listening: E178: How Chinese Sellers Are Manipulating Amazon and Outsmarting You

For better or worse, Amazon Brand Analytics is currently only available to Brand Registered Sellers. You access it by going to Reports -> Brand Analytics.

Amazon Brand Analytics gives you access to four primary types of reports:

• Amazon Search Terms: See the overall rank of keywords in terms of volume; see how what percentage of sales and clicks the top three search terms for any keyword gets
• Market Basket Analysis: Allows you to see what other items are being purchased along with your products
• Item Comparison and Alternate Purchase Behavior: See the top five other items that customers also viewed along with yours
• Demographics: Gives an overview of the certain key demographics of your audience.

Let's break each of these reports down a little bit further.

Amazon Search Terms Report

What the Amazon Search Terms Report Does: The Amazon Search Terms report is perhaps the most interesting and valuable report within Amazon Brand Analytics. The Search Term Report tells us a numerical rank of the volume of a particular search term AND what percentage of sales and clicks the top three items for that search term get. You will notice it does NOT tell us the actual search volume.

So we can see from this report that from April to June 2019 (Q2 2019) the top three search terms were wireless earbuds, bluetooth headphones, and iphone charger.

We can also see that the Pasonomi Bluetooth Earbuds were the most purchased item for this search term, being purchased 11.32% of the time.

You can also type in individual search terms to see how they rank. So we can see that in Q2 2019, camping gear was the  #556 most frequent search term. However, we can also generate some great keyword and product ideas. Kids camping gear was the #38,064 searched-for term while dog camping gear was the #73,478 most searched-for term.

You can also search for a particular ASIN and find out what their most important search terms are. For instance, for the Jackery Portable Power Station we can see some of their top terms are as follows:

The ASIN report is a bit finicky and inconsistent as it's unclear how exactly Amazon is deciding which search terms to show (in our random testing of several items, many known high-volume keywords for our items were not shown).

Why It's Useful: The search term report is incredibly useful for many things:

• See Your Market Share: See what percent of conversions you get for a particular search term and what percentage your competitors are getting.
• See Clickthrough Rates for a Particular Term: You can see what percentage of the time your competitors are getting clicked, which gives you a solid indication of whether your titles and/or main gallery image can be better optimized to increase click rates.
• Verify Keyword Volume: Tools like Helium 10 are invaluable for estimating Keyword Volume however, they are only estimations. Before making important business decisions, I verify the volume in Brand Analytics to confirm the estimated numbers make sense (for instance, if Helium 10 reported massive volume for a search term but Amazon Brand Analytics showed it had a search frequency of #150,000 I would be suspicious of Helium 10's numbers).
• Product Research: Downloading the list of the top 250,000 search terms and/or filtering by keywords in your niche is a great way to find high-volume search terms that may (potentially) not have a lot of competitors.

Caveats:

• Search Rank, Not Volume: The Search Term report only shows you the rank of frequency, not volume.
• Only Top Three Products Shown: The search term report only shows the top three items for a search term so you can't see what percentage of conversions/clicks the #4 ranked item or lower is getting
• ASIN Report Inconsistent: Want to see the top search terms for an item? Don't rely on Amazon Brand Analytics ‘ ASIN report as it gives inconsistent data.

Amazon Basket Analysis

What Amazon Basket Analysis Does: Amazon basket analysis allows you to see what other items are being purchased along with your items.

Why It's Useful: The Basket Analysis tool is not terribly useful if your items have relatively low sales. Amazon is relying on a lot of customers purchasing the same item along with yours to compile the data. For most items though, especially those without natural compliments, there's not enough similar buying behavior for Amazon to generate meaningful data. If you do have a high-volume product, however, it may be a good way to generate complementary product ideas.

Caveat

• High Volume Product Required: Your item needs to have a lot of sales volume in order for Amazon to generate meaningful Basket Analysis data.

Caveat

• Reflects Purchaser's Account, Not Necessarily Customer: The overall demographics show the demographics of the purchaser's account, not necessarily the customer. For example, I purchase everything on Amazon with my wife's account including my Size 10 Male Soccer Cleats. Amazon's Demographic Data is subsequently not entirely accurate.

Conclusion

Amazon Brand Analytics tool is one of my favorite reporting tools within Seller Central now. While it doesn't replace other third-party tools like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout, it is a nice compliment.

Have you tried using the Amazon Brand Analytics tool? If so, what is your favorite report within it?