Amazon Brand Analytics: Search Query Performance Explained

Last updated October 23, 2026 · First published November 5, 2026 · By Chad Norris

Disclosure: the author runs an Amazon advertising agency (Tide Flow) and builds Amazon software (AdSpark) that uses this report. The method below works with the free report and a spreadsheet. See the disclosure.

The Search Query Performance (SQP) report shows, for the queries that lead shoppers to your products, how many people searched, how many saw your products, clicked, added to cart and bought, and what share of each step belonged to your brand. The short answer on use: read the three shares together. Where your share shrinks at each step you have a conversion problem and more ad spend will make it worse; where it grows at each step you have a visibility problem, and that is where buying more impressions can pay.

What it is and who gets it

SQP is one of seven Brand Analytics dashboards in Seller Central, alongside Search Catalog Performance, Top Search Terms, Repeat Purchase Behavior, Demographics, Market Basket Analysis and Customer Loyalty Analytics. Amazon’s Brand Analytics overview (read October 2026) says it is available to brands enrolled in Brand Registry, requires a Professional selling account, and that you must be a brand representative. In Seller Central you reach it by opening Brands, then Brand Analytics, then Search Query Performance.

Amazon’s Selling Partner API reference lists the same report as GET_BRAND_ANALYTICS_SEARCH_QUERY_PERFORMANCE_REPORT, available to sellers with the Brand Analytics role who are registered in Brand Registry, in weekly, monthly or quarterly periods. Weekly periods must run Sunday through Saturday. A request cannot span multiple periods.

What the columns mean

Descriptions below combine Amazon’s overview with a vendor guide (Perpetua’s explainer, which sells ad software); where the detail rests only on the vendor guide it is marked.

Amazon’s overview adds that the dashboard lists the top queries that led to your products and compares your brand’s share against overall query performance.

Brand View and ASIN View

Start in Brand View to find where the brand is strong or weak, then drop into ASIN View for the queries that matter. If you sell several unrelated brands from one account, analyze each brand on its own, because their funnels behave differently.

The method: three shares, one funnel

For each important query, compute your share at each step:

• Impression share = your brand’s impressions / total impressions for the query
• Click share = your brand’s clicks / total clicks
• Purchase share = your brand’s purchases / total purchases

Then read the shape:

Illustrative numbers (not a real account):

Conversion here is purchases divided by clicks, computed for you and for the market from the same report. A gap between your conversion and the market’s that persists week after week is structural: bids will not close it.

Control for price before blaming the listing

Compare your median price with the market median for each query. If you are within roughly 15% of the market and still convert far below it, the listing is the likely cause (images, title, reviews, variation structure). If you are priced far above the market and convert below it, the cause is often a mismatch between your pack size and the searcher’s intent rather than an overpriced product, so the fix is targeting or value-per-unit messaging, not a price cut. This test has changed our diagnosis on real accounts more than once, so run it explicitly. The 15% band is our working threshold, not an Amazon figure.

Compare SQP with your ad data

SQP tells you what the market does on a query. The ad console tells you what you do. The gap between them is where the decisions are.

1. Pull weekly Brand View downloads for the last 8 to 12 weeks and keep them in a folder by week-ending date; a duplicate week silently doubles that week’s numbers, so deduplicate by query and week.
2. Join to your search term report by query. For each query note impressions, clicks, spend, orders and ACoS from the ad console.
3. Use SQP for relative reads, ads for absolute dollars. SQP prices purchases at the median unit price, which understates real order value wherever multipacks sell; in one of our own analyses the understatement was about sixfold on a single term. Compute revenue per click from your ad console (conversion rate times your real order value) and the maximum bid at target ACoS is revenue per click times target ACoS.
4. Find the gap. Queries where your purchase share is above your impression share and your ad conversion is at or above market are the candidates for buying share. The rule we apply: organic rank tends to follow sales velocity and conversion on a query, so buying share where you convert at or above market tends to compound, while buying share where you convert below market teaches Amazon you are the worse answer. That is our working theory from practice, not an Amazon statement.
5. Size the prize honestly. Extra clicks equal total query impressions times (target share minus current share) times your click rate. Multiply by CPC for the daily spend it can absorb. Click rate and conversion both decay past the easy impressions, so treat the result as the optimistic end. If the total falls short of a spend goal, say so rather than padding with queries you cannot win.

For the numbers that decide whether the added spend is worth it, see break-even ACoS, and for how to place the winners, Sponsored Products campaign structure.

Other uses

• SEO. Queries where your impression share is low but relevant are candidates for title, bullet or Item Highlights words; see Amazon title rules for 2026.
• Baselines. Record shares before a price change, listing change or ad change, then compare. Without a baseline you will credit the wrong cause.
• Cannibalization test. Cut ad spend on one keyword and watch purchase share. A large drop suggests ads drive sales; no change suggests organic sales would have happened anyway (vendor guide’s suggestion; confounded by seasonality, so test over several weeks).
• Peak planning. Look at last year’s peak-period queries before the season starts.

Limits to respect

• It covers search-originated actions only.
• It does not name competitors.
• Query lists are truncated to the top queries, so long-tail queries are missing.
• Date-range handling is strict: weekly requests start Sunday and end Saturday in the API.
• Automating downloads from Seller Central is brittle; verify each file in the Download Manager before you analyze it, because silent failures happen and reports expire after a few days.

When to get help

If you manage more than a couple of brands, joining SQP to ad data is a tooling job. Browse Amazon seller tools for agencies and read PPC metrics that matter before trusting any single dashboard column.