The 10 SQP Metrics That Matter (And 7 That Don't)

You open the Search Query Performance report expecting answers. Instead you get a grid that runs off the side of the screen. 

‍

Dozens of columns. Counts, shares, rates, prices, shipping speeds. 

‍

Somewhere in there is the number that tells you whether your brand is winning or quietly bleeding sales, and you cannot tell which one it is.

‍

Here is the short version before the long one. 

‍

About ten of those columns deserve a place in your weekly routine. The rest are either context you glance at twice a year or noise you can skip entirely. 

‍

This guide splits them for you, attaches a benchmark to the ones that count, and shows you the one read that turns the whole report from a spreadsheet into a list of opportunities with dollar signs attached.

‍

The aim is simple: give you a working shortlist of search query performance metrics you can act on, and the confidence to ignore the rest. 

‍

Most sellers fail here not because the data is bad, but because nobody told them which numbers earn a decision and which ones just fill the screen.
‍

What the SQP report is, in one screen

Search Query Performance (SQP) is a report inside Amazon Brand Analytics. You reach it in Seller Central under Brands, then Brand Analytics, then Search Analytics. 

‍

It is open only to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry with a Brand Representative role, and it does not exist for Vendor Central accounts.

‍

What makes it rare is the source. 

‍

These are first-party numbers from Amazon itself, not estimates from a third-party tool. 

‍

For each of your most relevant search queries, the report shows the full shopping journey: how many times the query was searched, how many times listings appeared, how many got clicked, how many were added to cart, and how many sold. 

‍

Then it shows your slice of each of those stages against the whole market.

‍

That last part is the point. SQP is one of the few places Amazon tells you not just what you did, but what the entire category did on the same search term.
‍

How to read the report as a funnel, not a spreadsheet

The columns look chaotic until you notice they repeat in a pattern. 

‍

Every stage of the funnel, impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases, gets the same three-part treatment: a total count for the whole market, your brand's count, and your share as a percentage.

‍

Read it left to right and it tells a story. 

‍

A shopper types a query. Listings appear (impressions). Some get clicked. Some clicks become cart adds. Some cart adds become purchases. 

‍

At each step, customers fall away. Your job is to find the step where you fall away faster than you should, because that gap is where money is sitting.

‍

Once you see the report as a funnel with a share number bolted onto every stage, the noise quiets down on its own.
‍

The 10 SQP metrics that actually drive decisions

These are the search query performance metrics worth a weekly look. 

‍

Each one answers a question you can act on, and each comes with a rough benchmark so you can judge your own number instead of staring at it.
‍

1. Purchase share: 

Your purchases on a query divided by all purchases for it. This is the closest thing SQP has to a scoreboard. 

‍

It tells you how much of the actual money on a search term your brand captured. 

‍

On your own branded terms, aim high. Amazon does not publish an official target, but many agencies treat roughly 80 to 90 percent on branded queries as healthy, and a much lower number is a warning sign that a competitor is conquesting your name.
‍

2. Click share. 

Your share of all clicks on the query. 

‍

When click share is low but the query matters to you, shoppers are seeing the category and choosing someone else's listing to open. 

‍

That points to your main image, title, price, or rating, the things that win the click before anyone reads your bullets.
‍

3. Impression share. 

Your share of all impressions for the query. Low impression share means you are barely in the race. 

‍

Shoppers cannot click what they never see. This is usually a ranking and advertising problem, not a listing problem.
‍

4. Cart add share. 

Your share of all cart adds. This sits between interest and purchase, and it is the most overlooked metric in the report. 

‍

A strong cart add share with a weak purchase share often means price, reviews, or shipping is killing the deal at the last step.
‍

5. Search query volume. 

How many times the term was searched across Amazon in the period. 

‍

This is genuine demand data, and it lets you separate a query worth fighting for from a query that looks nice but nobody searches.
‍

6. Search Query Score. 

Amazon scores each query from 1 to 1000 by how important it is to your brand against the wider marketplace, where a score of 1 marks your top query. 

‍

It ranks by sales contribution, not raw search count. Used as a sorting tool to find your top revenue queries fast, it earns its place. 

‍

Chased as a vanity ranking, it does not, which is why it appears on both lists in this guide depending on how you use it.
‍

7. Purchase rate at the query level. 

Purchases divided by clicks for that query. This is your query-level conversion rate, and it answers a sharp question: when shoppers do click my listing on this term, do they buy? 

‍

A low number here is a detail page problem you can fix.
‍

8. Click rate at the query level. 

Clicks divided by impressions. 

‍

Read alongside impression share, it tells you whether your problem is visibility or appeal. Plenty of impressions with a weak click rate means the listing is not earning attention.
‍

9. Cart add rate. 

Cart adds divided by clicks. 

‍

A useful early-warning signal, since cart behavior shifts before purchases do. Watch it on launch products to see whether interest is building.
‍

10. Brand count against total count. 

Not a single column, but the comparison that matters most. It gets its own section below, because it is where the report stops describing your performance and starts pointing at money you are leaving on the table.
‍

The 7 metrics most sellers should ignore (and why)

Skipping data feels wrong. It is not. Reporting time is finite, and these columns rarely change a decision.
‍

1. Market-wide total counts in isolation. 

The total impressions or total clicks for a query, read on their own, tell you the category is busy. 

‍

You already knew that. 

‍

They only become useful next to your brand count, which is the comparison, not the raw number.
‍

2. Median or average price of clicked items. 

Interesting once when you set pricing strategy. Useless as a weekly metric. 

‍

It moves slowly and rarely triggers an action.
‍

3. Shipping-speed click sub-columns. 

SQP breaks some stages down by same-day, one-day, and two-day shipping. 

‍

For the vast majority of sellers on Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), this is fixed by Amazon and not something your weekly review can influence. 

‍

Glance at it during a logistics review, not your keyword review.
‍

4. Search Query Score chased for its own sake. 

The score is a fine sorting tool. 

‍

It becomes a vanity metric the moment you start trying to "improve your score" instead of improving the share metrics underneath it. 

‍

The score is a symptom, not a lever.
‍

5. Branded-query metrics treated as growth. 

Winning 90 percent purchase share on your own brand name is expected, not impressive. 

‍

It is defense, not growth. 

‍

Real expansion shows up on non-branded category terms, so do not let strong branded numbers flatter your reporting.
‍

6. Raw cart add count without its share. 

The market total for cart adds, without your share beside it, is a number with no verdict attached. Share gives it meaning. Count alone does not.
‍

7. Day-to-day chasing of any single week. 

SQP reports on fixed weekly periods and purchases are attributed within 24 hours of the search. 

‍

Note too that, by most tool-vendor accounts, cancellations and returns are not stripped out of the purchase figures, so a high-return product can read better than it really performed. 

‍

One twitchy week is mostly noise. 

‍

Trends across several weeks are signal. Reacting to a single bad day is a waste of attention.
‍

The single read that matters most: total count vs brand count

If you take one habit from this guide, take this one.

‍

For any query, put the total count next to your brand count at the purchase stage. 

‍

The gap between them is the opportunity, sized in actual orders.

‍

Say a query shows 100,000 purchases across the market in a quarter, and your brand count is 100. Your purchase share is a tenth of a percent. 

‍

That gap is not a rounding error. It is 99,900 orders you are not getting on a term shoppers clearly use to buy. 

‍

Now compare that to a query where the total is 2,000 purchases and you already hold 1,400. 

‍

There is far less room left to win there. This single comparison reorders your entire priority list. 

‍

Big total, small brand count, and proven purchase intent is the textbook target for new advertising and listing work. 

‍

It is the difference between optimizing a term you already own and chasing one where the category is spending money you never see.
‍

SQP vs the Search Term Report: which one, when

These two reports get confused constantly, and the distinction is simple once you anchor it.

‍

The Search Term Report lives in Amazon Ads. It only shows queries that triggered your ads and led to a click, plus what you spent and what converted. 

‍

It is your tool for campaign optimization, bid changes, and building negative keyword lists.

‍

SQP lives in Brand Analytics. It shows organic and paid behavior across the whole market for a query, whether or not anyone clicked an ad. 

‍

It is your tool for market positioning, listing optimization, and seeing where you stand against competitors.

‍

The rule of thumb: use the Search Term Report to manage your ads, and use SQP to understand your market. 

‍

Sellers who lean on both consistently make sharper calls than anyone relying on either one alone.
‍

How often to check SQP (by seller size)

Cadence depends on how much you can actually act on.

‍

A smaller brand with a tight catalog does well with a monthly review. 

‍

Weekly data on a handful of ASINs is mostly noise, and the monthly view smooths it into something you can trust. 

‍

A larger brand or an agency managing real ad spend benefits from a weekly pass on top queries, watching share trends rather than single-week swings. 

‍

During a product launch, tighten to weekly regardless of size, because the early funnel shifts fast and cart add rate will warn you before purchases do.

‍

For teams that need near real-time signals, the Search Query Performance API and Amazon Marketing Stream open faster access paths than the manual dashboard, though both come with throttling limits that cap how many ASINs you can pull per day.
‍

Turning SQP into PPC and listing decisions

Data is only worth the action it triggers. A simple sequence:

‍

Start with the delta read. Sort your queries by the gap between total count and brand count at the purchase stage. 

‍

Those are your highest-opportunity terms. For each one, check where the funnel breaks. 

‍

Low impression share points to advertising and ranking work, so harvest the term into your campaigns and push for organic placement. 

‍

Low click share with healthy impressions points at your main image, title, or price. Strong cart add share with weak purchase share points at reviews, pricing, or the detail page itself.

‍

Then close the loop. 

‍

Feed the high-opportunity, high-volume terms into Sponsored Products, refine bids where purchase rate is already strong, and pull spend off terms that draw clicks but never convert. SQP tells you where the demand is. 

‍

Your campaigns and listings decide whether you capture it.
‍

Common mistakes that quietly cost sales

A few errors show up again and again.

‍

Reading branded queries as a win and stopping there. Strong numbers on your own name are table stakes, and they hide the fact that growth lives on category terms you do not yet own.

‍

Reacting to a single week. Returns and cancellations appear to stay in the purchase data and the report uses fixed weekly periods, so one period is rarely the truth. Trends are.

‍

Tracking everything equally. Sellers who try to watch every column end up watching none of them well. The skip list exists so the keep list gets real attention.

‍

Ignoring cart add share. It is the early signal hiding in plain sight, and the gap between cart adds and purchases is often the cheapest sale to recover.

‍

Treating SQP and the Search Term Report as interchangeable. They answer different questions, and using the wrong one leads to confident decisions built on the wrong data.
‍

A note on getting this right

SQP rewards the seller who reads it consistently and acts on a small number of metrics, not the one who screenshots every column. 

‍

If your team is spending more time formatting the report than acting on it, that is usually a sign the analysis needs a clearer system around it. 

‍

Amplivus builds that system for brands through Amazon PPC management and audits, turning query-level data into ranking and conversion decisions rather than another spreadsheet nobody opens. 

‍

The data is already yours. The advantage comes from what you do with it.

‍