Most sellers optimize their listings on instinct. They read a competitor's title, run one keyword tool, rearrange their bullet points, and hope the needle moves. Amazon actually gives brand-registered sellers something far better: Search Query Performance (SQP), the Brand Analytics dashboard that shows the real search queries shoppers typed, how many impressions your brand captured, and exactly where in the funnel — impression, click, cart add, purchase — you lost them.
SQP is the only keyword data source on Amazon that reflects actual shopper behavior on your marketplace, reported by Amazon itself. Yet most sellers either never open it or glance at the totals once and move on. This guide covers what each metric means, how to read the funnel like a diagnostician, a weekly workflow that surfaces the queries you're losing, and how to turn those gaps into concrete listing and campaign fixes.
You'll find it in Seller Central under Brand Analytics → Search Query Performance (some accounts label the menu "Search Analytics"). Requirements and scope:
For each search query, SQP reports four paired metrics: the marketplace-wide total and your brand's number for impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases. Ratios between the stages are where the diagnosis lives.
| Metric | What it measures | Healthy signal | If your share is low |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Query Volume | Total times shoppers searched the query in the period | — (market size, not performance) | Prioritize queries with the highest volume where your share lags |
| Impressions | How often your products appeared in results for the query | Impression share roughly matches or beats your organic position | You're under-ranked or not indexed — fix keyword coverage in title, backend, and category |
| Clicks | Clicks from the search results page to a product detail page (any offer, not just buy box) | Click share ≥ impression share (you win clicks more often than you appear) | Title/main image/price/review-visibility problem — shoppers saw you and scrolled past |
| Cart Adds | Add-to-cart events following a search-result click | Cart add share ≥ click share | Detail page underperforms: images, bullets, A+ , or price/value perception |
| Purchases | Orders attributed to the query session (within Amazon's attribution window) | Purchase share ≈ cart add share | Checkout-stage friction: price, shipping, reviews, or variant availability |
One clarification that trips up newcomers: "clicks" in SQP counts clicks to any offer of any product that belongs to your brand, not only your buy-box offer and not only one ASIN. That makes click share a robust measure of how often shoppers find your brand compelling in the search results, but it won't match your advertising console numbers. Don't try to reconcile them — they measure different things.
The fastest way to use SQP is to compute a three-stage comparison for each query that matters to you:
Shoppers see your product but pick someone else from the results page. The decision happened in under a second, on the basis of four things: main image, title, price, and review count. Fixes, in order of impact:
You win the click but lose on the detail page. This is a conversion-asset problem: secondary images, bullet points, A+ content, badge (Best Seller/Amazon's Choice), or a price-to-value mismatch that only becomes visible after the click. Compare your image stack page against the competitor the shopper likely compared you with — usually the one with the highest purchase share on the same query.
Uncommon but informative: shoppers commit, then abandon at the offer level. Typical causes are shipping speed (if you're FBM or far from the customer), price jumps between the search results and the offer page, out-of-stock variants, or a competitor coupon showing at checkout. Fix offer-level mechanics, not content.
You're invisible for a query shoppers actually use. Two distinct causes with different fixes:
SQP produces so much data that most sellers drown. Restrict yourself to a weekly routine on a fixed day:
| Step | Action | What you're looking for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Export last week's data; filter to your top 50 queries by (query volume × your purchase share) | Your money queries — anything deteriorating here is urgent |
| 2 | Sort the same set by query volume, descending; scan the top 100 for queries where your impression share < 5% | Gap pattern D — coverage holes |
| 3 | Among queries where impression share > 20%, flag any where click share < half your impression share | Gap pattern A — results-page losses |
| 4 | Among flagged queries, check whether impressions rose but click share fell vs. the prior week | New competitor entering, or your hero image/title slipping |
| 5 | Pick the 3 worst queries and log one concrete fix each in your ops sheet (content, price, or ad bid) | Forces action instead of observation |
SQP tells you where you lose; the fix usually lands in your listing content. Map each gap pattern to its content lever:
Before you push changes, run the revised copy through a structured check — title length, banned-phrase risks, backend term limits, and claim compliance. A free pass with the Amazon Listing Checker catches the mechanical errors that otherwise waste a week of learning. Then change one variable at a time and give each change a full week of SQP data before judging it.
Roughly 24 months of history is retained for weekly, monthly, and quarterly views, depending on marketplace. Long history matters for seasonality: pull the same weeks from last year before concluding that a query's decline is your fault rather than a seasonal pattern.
Yes — impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases include both organic and sponsored placements. That's exactly why it's valuable: it shows your brand's total footprint per query, not just the organic slice. But it also means a high ad spend can hide weak organic performance, so review your ad console alongside.
There's no universal benchmark — it depends on how many brands compete for the query. A practical rule: your click share should be at least half your impression share. If shoppers see you at 30% of impressions but click you 8% of the time, your results-page presentation is losing.
SQP attributes at the query-session level across your whole brand, with Amazon's own attribution window, while your business reports count sessions and orders per ASIN per day. Expect differences in both direction and magnitude. Use SQP for relative shares and trends, not for revenue accounting.
Weekly data typically becomes available early in the following week (with data through the prior Sunday), and monthly/quarterly aggregations follow their period close. Plan your review cadence on the weekly refresh rather than checking daily.
No. SQP shows only your own brand's metrics per query, plus marketplace totals. To understand who is winning the clicks you lose, you need manual search-result analysis: search the query yourself and compare the top click-share-worthy listings' images, titles, price, and reviews.
Not directly — access requires Brand Registry. Until you qualify, approximate the funnel with the Search Term report in advertising (for query-level clicks and spend), plus rank-tracking for impression proxies. Getting brand registered is usually the faster path, since SQP is only one of several Brand Analytics tools you unlock.
Score each query on three axes: query volume (market size), your current purchase share (headroom), and how cheap the fix is (a title tweak beats a full image reshoot). Work the top of that ranked list, three queries per week, and let compounding do the rest.