Read your Search Query Performance data before you touch your listing

When a listing underperforms, the usual reaction is to rewrite the title, add twelve keywords to the bullets and redo the A+ content. Sometimes that works. Often it just changes things that were not broken. Before we touch a single word of a client's listing, we open one report: Search Query Performance, inside Brand Analytics. It is free for brand-registered sellers, and it is the closest thing Amazon gives you to a map of where you are losing customers.

What the report shows

For each search term that led shoppers to your brand, Search Query Performance shows a funnel across four stages: impressions, clicks, add-to-carts and purchases. For each stage you get the total for the whole market on that query, and your brand's share of it. You can view it weekly, monthly or quarterly, at brand level or for a single ASIN.

The power is in comparing your share across stages. If you get 8% of impressions for a query but only 3% of clicks, something between "seen" and "tapped" is broken. If you get 8% of clicks but 2% of purchases, the problem is on the product page itself.

A simple way to read it

Export the quarterly view for your hero ASIN. Sort by search query volume. Take the top 20 queries and, for each one, write down four numbers: impression share, click share, cart-add share and purchase share. Then look for the biggest drop.

• Low impression share on a relevant, high-volume query. This is a visibility problem. You are not indexing well or not ranking. Look at your title, backend search terms and whether you are advertising on that term.
• Impression share healthy, click share much lower. Shoppers see you and choose someone else. This is almost always the main image, the price, the star rating or the title as it appears in search. Run the 200px test on your main image first.
• Click share healthy, cart-add share much lower. They land and leave. Look at your secondary images, bullets, A+ content, review content and how your price-per-serving compares.
• Cart-add share healthy, purchase share lower. Something happens at the last step. Check delivery promise, stock status in key pin codes, and whether a coupon on a competitor is pulling people away at checkout.

An illustrative example

Say a supplement listing has good reviews and decent ad spend, and Search Query Performance shows a clear pattern: on the top five queries it holds a healthy share of impressions but less than half that share of clicks, while cart-add share on the clicks it does get holds up reasonably well.

That says the product page is not the main problem. The thumbnail and the search title are. So the first round rebuilds the main image and front-loads the title with the ingredient and dose shoppers are actually typing, and leaves most of the bullets alone. A+ and backend terms come in later rounds. The order of work matters: fix the biggest leak first. Our sample listing audit walks through the same method.

Queries you should not chase

The report will also show queries where you have tiny share because you simply do not belong. A berberine brand appearing for "weight loss tea" is not a gap to close. Mark those queries as irrelevant and move on. Chasing them burns ad money and muddies your listing's relevance.

Equally, watch for queries where you are the only real answer but volume is small, like a specific dose or form ("berberine 500mg capsules vegetarian"). These are worth owning outright. A 40% purchase share on a small query is a stable base.

Five common mistakes

1. Reading one week. Weekly data is noisy, especially for smaller brands. Use monthly or quarterly for decisions.
2. Looking at brand level only. If you have five ASINs, the brand view hides which one is leaking. Switch to ASIN view.
3. Ignoring price. A click-share gap is sometimes not creative at all. Check the price and pack size of the listings winning those clicks.
4. Changing everything at once. If you rewrite the title, swap the image and launch a coupon the same week, you will never know what worked.
5. Not re-reading after changes. Put a date in the calendar four to six weeks after each change and pull the same export again.

Your first hour with the report

• Open Brand Analytics, then Search Query Performance, then the ASIN view for your best seller.
• Switch to the last full quarter and download the CSV.
• Take the top 20 queries by volume. Delete any that are not relevant.
• For each remaining query, mark the stage with the biggest drop in your share.
• Count which stage appears most often. That is your first fix.

The report does not tell you what to write. It tells you where to look. That alone can save a month of guessing.