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The definitive breakdown of Amazon's Search Query Performance report — what every metric means, how to read the data, and how to turn it into a keyword strategy that compounds.
Key Takeaway
Amazon Search Query Performance (SQP) is the only report that shows your brand's exact click share, conversion share, and impression count by keyword — derived from Amazon's actual transaction logs, not estimates. This guide covers every metric, every use case, and the complete workflow for turning SQP data into a keyword strategy that improves every week.
Search Query Performance is Amazon's most powerful gift to brand sellers — and one of the most consistently underutilized. Every Brand Registry seller has access to it. Almost none of them have built it into a systematic workflow. This guide changes that.
This is the complete reference: every metric defined, every analytical framework you need, and the full workflow for turning SQP data into a keyword strategy that compounds across quarters.
SQP is available exclusively to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. If you sell under a registered trademark and have active Brand Registry enrollment, you have access to SQP for all ASINs in your registered brand.
Marketplace availability: US, UK, CA, DE, FR, IT, ES, JP, AU, MX, BR, AE, SA, NL, SE, PL, TR. Not all marketplaces have identical report features — the US marketplace has the most granular SQP data.
Vendor Central: Vendors have access to Brand Analytics but through a different interface. The SQP report exists, but navigation and export workflows differ from Seller Central.
Not available for: Sellers without Brand Registry, third-party resellers of other brands, wholesale accounts selling other brands' products.
If you don't yet have Brand Registry, getting enrolled should be a priority. The data access it unlocks — especially SQP — is the most significant analytical advantage Brand Registry provides beyond listing protection.
Before diving into analysis, understand precisely what each column in the SQP report means.
The exact search term Amazon is reporting on. This can be:
The total number of times this query was searched on Amazon during the reporting period. This is Amazon's actual count from its search infrastructure — not an estimate. It is the most accurate search volume figure available for any keyword.
Note: Amazon may suppress the exact count for very low-volume queries, showing a range or minimum instead. High-volume queries show the precise number.
Total impressions = how many times any product in search results appeared for this query Your brand's impressions = how many times your products appeared
The ratio (your impressions ÷ total impressions) gives you your impression share. High impression share means your products are appearing consistently in results. Low impression share on a high-volume keyword means you're either not ranking or not winning sponsored placements for it.
Total clicks = how many times any product was clicked from search results for this query Your brand's clicks = how many times shoppers clicked your products
These are not estimated. They're the actual click counts from Amazon's event logs.
Your brand's clicks ÷ total clicks for the query
This is the most watched metric in SQP and for good reason. Click share is a direct measure of your competitive dominance for a keyword. If 10,000 people searched a term and 2,300 of them clicked your product, your click share is 23%.
Click share benchmarks by competitive context:
How many shoppers added your product to their cart after clicking from this search query. Cart adds without purchases indicate buyers who showed intent but converted elsewhere or abandoned.
Cart add rate (cart adds ÷ clicks) reveals listing-level conversion friction. A high cart add rate with a lower purchase rate may indicate price sensitivity — buyers are adding to cart and then comparing competitors before buying.
Exact number of completed orders your brand received that Amazon attributes to this search query. This is the ground truth for revenue attribution at the keyword level.
Your brand's purchases ÷ total purchases for the query
Where click share measures visibility dominance, conversion share measures purchase dominance. The two metrics together are the most important combination in SQP analysis.
Purchase Rate (calculate manually: Your Purchases ÷ Search Query Volume) gives you the keyword-level transaction intensity — what percentage of all searches for this term result in a sale from you.
Every keyword in your SQP falls into one of four quadrants:
Quadrant A — High Click Share, High Conversion Share You are winning this keyword. Buyers choose you both in the results page and on the product page. Your job is to protect and maintain. Ensure consistent PPC coverage (even if ROAS is lower here — this is defensive spend), keep the listing fresh, and watch for new competitors.
Quadrant B — High Click Share, Low Conversion Share Visible but not convincing. You're getting buyers to click but losing them on the product page. Diagnostic checklist: Is your price competitive? Are your primary images matching the keyword intent? Does your main bullet copy address the buyer's specific concern for this query? Are competitors' review counts significantly higher? This is your listing optimization priority.
Quadrant C — Low Click Share, High Conversion Share The most important quadrant for growth investment. When buyers do click you, they buy at a premium rate. Your listing converts — you just need more buyers to see it. This is your highest-priority PPC expansion target. Increase bids on this keyword. Your product quality is being validated; you're just undershooting on visibility.
Quadrant D — Low Click Share, Low Conversion Share Either this keyword isn't relevant to your product, you have a weak listing, or a structurally dominant competitor has captured this term. These keywords consume PPC budget with poor returns. Consider whether organic ranking is possible before investing in paid.
Calculate purchase rate for every keyword in your SQP:
Purchase Rate = Your Purchases ÷ Search Query Volume
This metric answers a different question than click or conversion share: not "are you winning" but "how valuable is winning." A keyword with 200,000 monthly searches and a 0.3% purchase rate generates 600 monthly transactions at full capture. A keyword with 8,000 monthly searches and a 4.2% purchase rate generates 336 monthly transactions at full capture — less than the "bigger" keyword.
Sort your SQP by purchase rate descending, filtered to keywords where your current share is under 15%. These are keywords where the market converts at high rates and you're leaving most of it uncaptured. These should drive your PPC and listing optimization prioritization.
SQP data contains both branded (searches including your brand name) and non-branded (category searches) queries. Analyzing these separately is essential.
Branded query health indicators:
Non-branded opportunities:
SQP doesn't show organic ranking directly, but impression share is a strong proxy. If your impression share on a keyword is 95%, you're appearing in almost every search result page for that term — you're ranking high organically and/or capturing nearly all sponsored placements. If impression share is 8%, you're rarely appearing.
Impression share gaps that persist after 4-6 weeks of PPC investment suggest an organic relevance problem — Amazon's algorithm may not fully associate your ASIN with that keyword. Relevance-building tactics: ensure the keyword appears naturally in your title, backend search terms, and A+ content. Check that your ASIN is in the correct browse node.
SQP data directly informs PPC strategy in ways that estimated keyword tools cannot.
Quadrant A (high click share, high conversion share): Defensive spend. Don't cut bids here — protect the position. ROAS targets may be lower than other keywords because the strategic value of maintaining click share on core terms compounds through organic ranking over time.
Quadrant C (low click share, high conversion share): Aggressive expansion. These keywords are your best ROAS candidates. Your conversion rate on them is already proven; you just need more impressions. Bid up. Target top-of-page placement.
Quadrant B (high click share, low conversion share): Pause or reduce bids until listing issues are fixed. Paying for clicks that don't convert is a pure cost. Fix the conversion problem first, then scale.
Quadrant D (low click share, low conversion share): Low-bid broad match test at most. Don't invest meaningfully until organic relevance improves.
SQP regularly surfaces keywords you didn't consciously target but are receiving impressions and some purchases for. These organic associations — where Amazon's algorithm has connected your ASIN with a query — are golden PPC opportunities because the algorithm already considers you relevant. Add them to exact match campaigns.
Look for keywords where:
These are keywords where Amazon is already showing you organically and some buyers are choosing you. A PPC push here works with the algorithm, not against it.
Gap analysis using SQP identifies keywords where demand exists, your product is relevant (based on impression data), but your share is too low to be meaningful.
True keyword gaps: Keywords with substantial search volume, high purchase rate across the category, and either zero impressions or impression share under 5% for your brand. These require both listing optimization and PPC investment — you may need to build relevance from scratch.
Partial gaps: Keywords where you have reasonable impression share (15%+) but low click share (under 5%). You're being seen but not chosen. The gap is in click-through, not in ranking. These are typically image or price problems.
False gaps: Keywords with high volume and purchase rate where a single competitor holds 60%+ click share. Technically a gap, but the competitive barrier is high. Evaluate the dominant ASIN carefully before investing here.
A single SQP snapshot is informative. SQP history is what turns it into a strategic intelligence system.
To understand whether your business is genuinely growing its Amazon market share — not just riding category demand — you need to track click share and conversion share by keyword across time. A brand growing its keyword-level click share is building structural competitive advantage. A brand maintaining absolute revenue on declining click share is at risk: category demand is compensating for a competitive position that's eroding.
The metric that matters for long-term health:
Track the sum of (click share × search volume) across your top 50 keywords by SFR. This is a weighted market presence score. If this metric is growing quarter-over-quarter, you're winning more of the addressable demand. If it's declining despite stable revenue, you're being carried by category growth and are vulnerable when that growth plateaus.
AMZBoosted's SQP History tool builds this timeline automatically by accumulating weekly SQP snapshots. Over time, it becomes your primary instrument for tracking whether your keyword strategy is genuinely working.
The structural challenge with SQP: Amazon's interface is designed for lookup, not analysis at scale. The table is paginated with no native full export. Historical comparison requires pulling each period manually and reconciling files. For a brand with 150+ keywords in SQP, the manual process is 2-3 hours per week.
AMZBoosted's SQP Report tool solves this directly. It reads the fully rendered SQP data from your active Seller Central session and exports the complete dataset — every keyword row, every metric, every period — to a clean CSV or Excel file. This takes seconds. The SQP History tool extends this by automating the multi-period pull, building your complete keyword performance timeline without manual intervention.
The data is identical to what's in the Seller Central interface because AMZBoosted reads from the same rendered source. No API keys, no credential setup, no estimation. You get exactly what Amazon computed from its own transaction logs, in a format you can actually analyze.
Ignoring low-volume keywords. A keyword ranked at SFR 4,000 might still represent 3,000 monthly searches. If your purchase rate is 4% and you have 0% current share, that's 120 uncontested monthly transactions at full capture. Scale this across 50 such keywords and you have a significant opportunity invisible to anyone focused only on the top 100 terms.
Reading SQP in isolation from advertising data. SQP shows you total brand performance — organic plus paid combined. If you pause advertising on a keyword and click share drops, you know paid was driving most of your presence. If click share holds, organic ranking was doing the work. Comparing periods before and after ad changes reveals this.
Treating monthly data as the primary view. Monthly SQP smooths out weekly variability in a way that can hide important signals — a competitor's promotion in week 2 that temporarily spiked their share, or your own Prime Day performance that inflated a week's numbers. Weekly data, despite its noisiness, catches these signals.
Not tracking SQP data over time at all. This is the most common mistake. A single SQP pull is a photograph. The compounding value is in the time series. Set up a weekly extraction cadence and don't skip it — gaps in your history make trend analysis unreliable.
SQP is the most honest feedback loop Amazon provides for your keyword strategy. Every week it tells you, in exact numbers, which keywords you're winning and which you're losing. The sellers who listen to it consistently — and act on what it says — are the ones who build durable competitive positions that hold through algorithm updates, new competition, and category changes.
Search Query Performance (SQP) is a Brand Analytics report that shows how your brand performs for every search query associated with your registered products. For each keyword, it displays search volume, impressions, clicks, cart adds, purchases, click share, and conversion share — all derived from Amazon's actual transaction and search data, not estimated. It's the only source of first-party keyword-level performance data for your brand.
Navigate to Seller Central → Reports → Brand Analytics → Search Query Performance. You must have Brand Registry enrollment. From there, you can filter by ASIN, brand, date range, and category. Data is available weekly and monthly. Historical data goes back approximately two years. Note: The report is paginated and does not support full bulk export natively — AMZBoosted's SQP Report tool automates the complete extraction.
Impression share is the percentage of total impressions for a keyword that your brand received — meaning, out of all times a search result page was shown for that query, how often one of your products appeared on it. High impression share with low click share indicates a visibility problem: you're showing up but not compelling buyers to click. Low impression share suggests a ranking or relevance issue.
The most direct ranking lever from SQP data is identifying keywords where your click share is growing — this signals that Amazon's algorithm is rewarding your relevance. To accelerate this: increase PPC spend on keywords where you have high conversion share but low click share (your product converts well, you just need more impressions), optimize your main image and title for keywords where you have impressions but low click share, and protect click share on your highest-volume branded terms with defensive bidding.
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AMZBoosted Team
The AMZBoosted team builds privacy-first automation tools for Amazon sellers. We share tactical guides on SQP, brand analytics, keyword research, and Seller Central workflows.
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