Almost every Amazon report tells you what happened to your money. Search Query Performance tells you what happened to the shopper. That is a different question, and it is the one that actually moves a listing.
For each search term, the report gives you the total market activity on that term and the slice of it that was yours. Sixty two thousand people searched it. Your products appeared in some of those searches, earned some of the clicks, some of the cart adds, and some of the purchases. Every one of those four steps has a number next to it and a share next to that. Which means for the first time you can see the exact rung of the ladder where you fall off.
What the report actually contains
You will find it in Seller Central under Brands, then Brand Analytics, then Search Query Performance. It requires Brand Registry enrolment, and access sits with the primary account administrator, who can grant it to anyone else on the account. If nobody on your team can see Brand Analytics, that is a permissions problem, not a missing feature.
There are two views and they answer different questions. Brand View aggregates every ASIN you own and returns your top 1,000 queries, which is the right lens for category position and keyword strategy. ASIN View drills into a single product and returns its top 100 queries, which is the right lens for fixing one listing. You can run either weekly, monthly or quarterly.
Each row carries the market totals for impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases, alongside your impression share, click share, cart add share and purchase share on that query. It also surfaces the market click rate and the market conversion rate, so you have a benchmark to judge yourself against rather than a gut feel about whether 4.2 percent is good.
Every other keyword tool estimates what a search term is worth. This one reports what it was actually worth, and how much of it you took.
Read across the columns, not down them
This is where most operators waste the report. They sort by impressions, screenshot the big numbers, and call it a keyword audit. Impression share on its own tells you nothing about profit. Click share on its own tells you nothing about whether that traffic converts. The diagnosis lives in the gap between one column and the next, and there are only four gaps worth acting on.
Diagnosis 01
Low impression share
You barely appear. The market is searching and you are not in the room.
This is an indexing and coverage problem, not a creative one. Check that the term appears in your title, backend search terms and A plus copy, that the ASIN is not suppressed or out of stock, and that you have any ad coverage on the query at all. Fixing listing copy here is cheap. Buying your way in with Sponsored Products is fast but only worth it if the next three columns say you can convert once you arrive.
Diagnosis 02
Impression share high, click share low
Shoppers see you and scroll past.
This is a search results page problem and it is almost always the main image, the price shown against the competitive set, the review count, or the absence of a badge. Compare your click rate to the market click rate on that same row. If the market converts impressions to clicks at 1.8 percent and you are at 0.6 percent, the listing is not being rejected on quality, it is being rejected on the thumbnail. Test the main image first because it is the single largest lever on that page, and test it on a phone, since that is where the majority of the traffic is looking at it.
Diagnosis 03
Click share high, cart add share low
They arrive, they read, they leave.
The click was earned and then the detail page failed to justify the price. Look at the first three images below the hero, the bullet points, the A plus module order, the delivery promise, and whether a subscription or multipack option is confusing the choice. Long tail terms carry buying intent that generic terms do not, so a weak cart add share on a specific query such as magnesium glycinate 400mg is a much louder signal than the same gap on the word supplements.
Diagnosis 04
Cart add share high, purchase share low
The basket fills and then stalls.
By this point the shopper wanted the product, so the loss is commercial rather than creative. Price against a competitor promotion, a lost Buy Box, a stock or delivery date problem, or a variation that pushes them to a cheaper size. This is the most expensive bucket in the report because you paid for every step that came before it, and it is usually the fastest to fix.
Purchase share is the number to run the business on
If you only track one column, track purchase share. It is the only one where money changed hands, and it holds your position against every competitor on that term rather than against your own last month.
Purchase share also protects you from the most common self-deception in Amazon reporting. Impression share climbs when you increase bids. Click share climbs when you increase bids. Both can rise while you take a smaller cut of the actual sales, because a competitor launched a better image or dropped their price in the same week. If your spend is up and your purchase share on your top 20 revenue queries is flat, you are renting visibility on terms you cannot close.
The inverse is the quiet win nobody celebrates. Spend flat, purchase share up two points across your core terms. That is organic rank compounding, and it shows up in your TACOS about six weeks later.
Where this report will mislead you
It is the best free data Amazon gives a brand, and it still has holes you need to hold in your head while you read it.
It does not split organic from paid. Impressions, clicks and purchases are blended, so a click share of 14 percent could be earned rank or could be a Sponsored Products campaign carrying you. Pull your Sponsored Products search term report over the same dates and subtract, otherwise you will congratulate yourself for rank you are currently buying.
Brand View aggregates. One strong hero ASIN can hold up a query where a second, weaker product is dragging the average down. Anything you plan to act on at listing level needs a second pass in ASIN View before you touch it.
The 1,000 query cap hides the tail. For a broad category that is a small slice of real search behaviour, and the tail is often where a new product finds its first honest conversion rate. The report will not show you a term you have never appeared on, so it tells you where you are losing, not where you are absent.
Finally, the calendar is Amazon's, not yours. Weeks run Sunday to Saturday and requests cannot span periods, so a promotion that started on a Wednesday will smear across two rows. If you pull it through the API, expect throttling limits at account level and note that most third party tools can only retrieve the ASIN View, which is why agency dashboards often look thinner than the report you can see yourself in Seller Central.
What this looks like in practice
The operators who get value out of this report do not run it when something goes wrong. They run it on a fixed cadence and let it set the week's work. The version I use with brands takes about forty minutes on a Monday.
Pull the Brand View for the last completed week. Sort by purchase volume rather than impressions, and keep the top 50 rows, because those are the queries carrying the category. For each row calculate two differences: click share minus impression share, and purchase share minus cart add share. A negative first number puts the query in bucket two. A negative second number puts it in bucket four. Everything with low impression share to begin with goes in bucket one, and what is left goes in bucket three.
Then pick one fix per bucket and ship it. Not twelve. One main image test, one detail page change, one price or availability fix, one indexing correction. Amazon needs time to give you a clean read, so you re-pull four weeks later and judge the change on purchase share, not on the ad dashboard the following morning.
Across a quarter that is twelve or thirteen deliberate changes made against evidence, in a channel where most brands make forty guesses and cannot tell you which one worked.
Inside the system
How we build this for brands
Forty minutes a week is cheap for one brand and impossible across a portfolio, so this runs as an agent rather than a calendar reminder. It pulls the Search Query Performance data, joins it to the Sponsored Products search term report so paid and organic are separated rather than blended, buckets every query into the four diagnoses, and returns a ranked list of the terms where we are losing share fastest with the likely cause attached. Where the fix is creative, that hands straight into the voice of customer engine, which mines reviews and support messages for the language shoppers actually use and turns it into new image and A plus copy rather than another guess from a brief.
On top of that sits the weekly reporting layer, which ties purchase share movement back to contribution margin so nobody celebrates share bought at a price that loses money. Part of this runs live for portfolio brands today; the full system is what we deploy when we take a brand on.
Amazon Growth Audit
Find Out Which Keywords You Are Losing
I will read your Search Query Performance data against your ad reports, show you the terms where share is leaking and why, and give you the ranked list of fixes in the order they should be shipped. Numbers and next actions, nothing else.
Book Your Amazon AuditFrequently asked questions
What is the Amazon Search Query Performance report?
Search Query Performance is a Brand Analytics report inside Seller Central that shows the full shopper funnel for each search term: impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases. For every query it gives you the market total and your brand's share of it, so you can see not only how many people bought but how many bought from somebody else. The Brand View covers your top 1,000 queries and the ASIN View covers the top 100 queries per product.
How do I access the Search Query Performance report?
In Seller Central go to Brands, then Brand Analytics, then Search Query Performance. You must be enrolled in Brand Registry, and you need either primary account administrator access or permission from the administrator to view Brand Analytics. You can toggle between Brand View and ASIN View, and between weekly, monthly and quarterly windows.
What is the difference between impression share, click share and purchase share?
Impression share is the percentage of all impressions on that query that belonged to your products. Click share is your percentage of all clicks. Purchase share is your percentage of all purchases. Impression share measures visibility, click share measures whether your image, title, price and reviews earn the click, and purchase share measures whether your listing closes. The value comes from reading the difference between them, not from any one number.
Which Search Query Performance metric matters most?
Purchase share. It is the only column that reflects money changing hands and your position against every competitor on that term. Impression share can rise because you spent more, and click share can rise on traffic that never converts. If purchase share is flat or falling while your spend rises, you are buying visibility on queries you cannot win.
Does Search Query Performance separate organic and paid results?
No. The report blends organic and sponsored impressions, clicks and purchases into one set of numbers, so you cannot tell from this report alone whether your click share was earned or bought. Pair it with your Sponsored Products search term report on the same date range to work out how much of the share came from ad spend.
What are the limitations of the Search Query Performance report?
It reports only your top 1,000 queries in Brand View and 100 per ASIN, so the long tail is invisible. Brand View aggregates every ASIN, which lets a strong hero product mask a weak one. It does not split organic from paid. Weeks are fixed to the Amazon calendar, starting Sunday and ending Saturday, so mid-week promotions never line up cleanly. API pulls are throttled and most third party tools can only retrieve the ASIN View. Share metrics also move when competitors change behaviour, not only when you do.
About the author
Caner Veli is a DTC operator who has helped 350+ brands fix broken growth engines. He built Liquiproof from zero to 3,000+ global retailers in under 6 years. He now runs the same playbook, supported by AI systems he built himself, for DTC and CPG brands.