Amazon Search Query Performance Report - Seller Guide 2026
Amazon's SQP report inside Brand Analytics is the most underused first-party data sellers have. Here is what the five columns mean, the three diagnostic patterns that drive decisions, and how to pair search-share with margin so the keyword call has a profit answer.
Claude
Gemini
ChatGPTThe Search Query Performance (SQP) report inside Amazon Brand Analytics is one of the few first-party views sellers get into how shoppers actually search, click, add to cart, and buy. Most sellers open it once, get overwhelmed by share columns, and close the tab. That is a mistake. SQP is where you find the keywords your brand is winning, the ones you are leaking to a single competitor, and the search funnel steps that are quietly killing margin.
This guide covers what the SQP report is, the five columns that drive decisions, three diagnostic patterns to look for, how to pair search-share data with margin so the keyword call has a profit answer, and the limits of SQP that vendors and tools rarely admit.
What the Search Query Performance report actually is
SQP lives inside Brand Analytics, the suite Amazon gives to Brand Registered sellers. It reports, for a given search term, how a customer search resolved into impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases, then attributes a share of each step to your ASIN (in ASIN view) or your brand (in brand view).
Three cadences are available: weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Quarterly is the most stable for strategy work because Amazon back-fills returns and corrections; weekly is the best for catching a new competitor moving up the funnel. Access requires Brand Registry, and ASIN-level access requires that the ASIN belong to your registered brand.
You can read Amazon's own description of the report inside the Brand Analytics help hub, but the help docs do not tell you which columns matter or how to act on them. That is what this guide is for.
The five columns that drive decisions
- Impressions and Impression Share: how often your ASIN showed up for this query, and what slice of total impressions you got. This is your visibility number.
- Click Share: of every click on this query, how many landed on your ASIN. The gap between Impression Share and Click Share is your listing's click-through problem.
- Cart Add Share: of every cart add on this query, your slice. The gap between Click Share and Cart Add Share is your detail page's persuasion problem (image, price, reviews, A+ content).
- Purchase Share: of every purchase on this query, your slice. The gap between Cart Add Share and Purchase Share is your checkout-stage problem (price, Prime eligibility, delivery promise).
- Search Funnel Conversion: derived: clicks-to-purchase rate by query. This is the closest thing to a query-level conversion rate Amazon publishes.
The trap is reading any of these in isolation. Impression Share alone tells you nothing about profit. Click Share alone tells you nothing about whether the traffic converts. The diagnostic value of SQP comes from reading the differences between columns, not the columns themselves.
Three diagnostic patterns to look for
Pattern 1: High Impression Share, low Click Share
Example read: 22% Impression Share, 6% Click Share on a head term (illustrative, not a benchmark).
Read: Amazon shows you to plenty of shoppers, but the main image, title, or star rating loses the click. This is a listing-craft problem, not a PPC problem. Throwing more bid at it makes the leak more expensive.
Pattern 2: High Click Share, low Cart Add or Purchase Share
Example read: 18% Click Share, 7% Purchase Share on a category term (illustrative, not a benchmark).
Read: Shoppers land on your page but bail before checkout. Usual suspects: price drift versus the category median, review count below the top three competitors, missing Prime badge in a region, A+ content that does not address the buyer's actual question. Run a price-and-review audit before changing creative.
Pattern 3: Share leaking to one identifiable competitor
Example read: SQP shows the top three ASINs by Purchase Share for a query. One of them holds 35% on terms you used to own (illustrative).
Read: You have a single beatable competitor, not a category problem. Pull their detail page, review velocity, and Sponsored Brand placement; pick the one delta you can close fastest. This is the single best use of SQP for offensive strategy.
Related read
Why true ROAS matters more than ACoS
Pair SQP with margin so the keyword call has a profit answer
Every SQP read above ends with a tactical move: bid harder, fix the image, drop the price, push reviews. Each move costs money or margin. Without a profit view at the SKU and marketplace level, you cannot tell whether closing the gap on a query is worth the cost of closing it.
The practical workflow is two-screen. SQP on one side tells you which query is leaking share. Your profit view on the other side tells you what that ASIN earns per unit after referral fees, FBA fulfillment, storage, returns, and PPC product-level spend. A query with strong share leak on an ASIN that earns $1.20 of contribution margin per unit is worth fighting for; the same leak on an ASIN earning $0.10 after fees is not.
Nova's SQP module is in beta (launching Q3 2026). When it ships, it will join Brand Analytics share data to the same SKU P&L Nova already builds for fees, returns, refunds, and product-level PPC, so the bid-or-walk decision happens with the margin number visible. Today, the live FBA cockpit and PPC analytics view already use that SKU P&L. Nova users can request early access to the SQP beta today.
Take SQP from a report to a routine
Start Nova free to see the live SKU P&L the SQP beta will plug into. Every query paired with the contribution margin it drives, no spreadsheets, no two-tab workflow.
Want to be first on the SQP beta? Join the waitlist from the SQP feature page.
Limits of SQP, honestly
- No PPC attribution. SQP does not tell you whether the click was organic or paid. Pair it with your advertising console for a complete view.
- No demographics. Brand Analytics demographics has its own report; SQP does not break out age, income, or location.
- ASIN-level requires Brand Registry. Resellers and unregistered sellers see brand-level only, which is much less actionable.
- Sparse on long-tail. Amazon suppresses very low-volume queries. SQP is a head and torso tool, not a long-tail discovery tool.
- Lag. Weekly reports update with a few days delay; quarterly reports are the most accurate but the slowest. Treat the cadence accordingly.
Industry analysts who track Amazon retail media performance have written extensively about how brand-level share metrics need to be paired with downstream commercial outcomes. Tinuiti's research insights library is a useful outside benchmark for sellers reading SQP alongside ad performance reports.
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