Amazon Brand Analytics: How to Use Search Query Performance to Win More PPC Sales in 2026

A private label seller named Elena runs a small home-fragrance brand on Amazon.com. She had been spending around $4,200 a month on Sponsored Products with a 31% ACoS, frustrated that her bids on "soy candle gift set" kept getting pushed up by competitors she could not identify. She had pulled her search term report a hundred times. She had bid harder. She had added negatives. Nothing moved the needle on that one head term.

Then she opened Amazon Brand Analytics for the first time in six months. The Search Query Performance report told her something her PPC reports never could. Of every 100 shoppers who searched "soy candle gift set" on Amazon, her listing was receiving 6.4% of impressions, 4.1% of clicks, and only 2.3% of purchases. Three competitor ASINs were dominating click share. Two of them had bundled wax melt sets she did not offer. The keyword was not failing because of her bids. It was failing because the search intent had drifted toward bundles, and her single-candle listing no longer matched what shoppers wanted to buy.

Elena built a 3-pack bundle in six weeks, relaunched, and moved her purchase share on that query from 2.3% to 8.7%. ACoS on the keyword dropped to 19%. None of that decision came from her advertising console. It came from one free Brand Registry tool that most sellers either ignore or skim once a quarter.

Amazon Brand Analytics is the most underused competitive intelligence engine on the platform. It pulls back the curtain on what shoppers actually search, click, and buy across the marketplace. Used well, it tells you where to bid, what to launch, which listings to fix, and which queries to walk away from. This guide breaks down every report, the PPC workflows that turn the data into lower ACoS, and the mistakes that quietly waste the access.

What Is Amazon Brand Analytics?

Amazon Brand Analytics is a free dashboard inside Seller Central that surfaces aggregated, anonymized shopper behavior data for sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. It sits under the Brands menu in Seller Central, and it contains a set of reports built from real searches and real purchases happening across Amazon, not just on your listings.

Here is what makes it different from every other report Amazon hands you. The advertising console and the search term report show you what is happening inside your own campaigns. Brand Analytics shows you what is happening across the entire marketplace for any search query you care about, including queries your ads have never touched.

That marketplace-wide view is the asset. You can see which ASINs receive the most clicks for a keyword you do not yet target, what share of purchases each top result captures, which products shoppers compare against yours, and which products they buy after viewing yours. None of that exists in your advertising data, and almost none of it exists in third-party tools either, because the data comes directly from Amazon's first-party shopper logs.

Brand Analytics is also one of the few free perks of Brand Registry that is worth the registration on its own. The cost to access it is zero, the cost to ignore it is whatever you waste bidding into queries you do not understand.

Who Has Access to Amazon Brand Analytics?

Access requires three things:

1. Active Amazon Brand Registry enrollment for the brand whose data you want to see
2. An approved trademark (registered or pending in select marketplaces under IP Accelerator)
3. A Seller Central role with Brand Analytics permission turned on by the account admin

If you sell private label and have not enrolled in Brand Registry yet, that is the first task on your list. Amazon publishes enrollment requirements and the application steps directly, and the approval window for a registered trademark is usually under 48 hours once your documents are in.

Resellers, distributors, and sellers who only carry other people's brands do not get Brand Analytics. Vendors using Vendor Central get a similar but separately gated suite called ARA (Amazon Retail Analytics), which we will not cover here because the seller flow is what matters for most of our readers.

The Six Reports That Matter (and the One That Will Change Your PPC)

Brand Analytics ships with six main reports. Each one solves a different problem. We will rank them by how much PPC leverage each one actually delivers in 2026.

1. Search Query Performance (SQP): The Most Important Report on Amazon

If you only ever open one Brand Analytics report, make it this one. Search Query Performance shows you, for any search query a shopper used to reach one of your ASINs, the following data:

• Search query volume (the absolute number of times the query was searched)
• Impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases for that query across the entire SERP
• Your brand's share of those impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases
• A "median price" benchmark for products that ranked for the query
• Counts at the ASIN level so you can see exactly which of your products is winning or losing on each query

Read that list again. Amazon is literally telling you the size of every keyword you rank on, your share of every funnel stage, and where you are leaking. There is no equivalent dataset anywhere outside Amazon.

The most powerful use of SQP for PPC is the share gap audit. Pull the report for your top 30 revenue ASINs at the weekly or monthly grain, then look for queries where your click share is high but your purchase share is low. That gap is almost never a bid problem. It is a listing, price, or review problem. You can keep bidding harder, but if shoppers click and then buy a competitor, you are paying to send Amazon free conversions from competing sellers. We covered the listing-side fixes in our Amazon listing optimization guide.

The second power use is the expansion audit. Sort by search query volume, descending, and filter for queries where your impression share is below 10%. Those are the high-volume queries where you are barely showing up. Some belong in new exact-match Sponsored Products campaigns. Some are not worth chasing because intent is wrong. SQP gives you the data to tell which is which before you spend a dollar testing.

2. Top Search Terms (formerly the "Amazon Search Terms" report)

The Top Search Terms report ranks the most popular search queries on Amazon by a metric Amazon calls Search Frequency Rank (a smaller number means more popular). For each ranked query, you get the top three ASINs that received the most clicks, with each ASIN's click share and conversion share.

This is the closest thing Amazon publishes to a free keyword tool, and most sellers do not even know it exists. It works as a discovery engine in two directions.

Direction one: find profitable head terms you are not bidding on. Filter by category, sort by Search Frequency Rank, and scan the queries that are relevant to your products. The top three ASINs are your competitive set. Their combined click share and conversion share tells you whether the SERP is dominated by one brand (hard to break in) or fragmented (worth testing).

Direction two: reverse-engineer your competitors' keyword universes. Search by competitor ASIN. The tool returns every search query where that ASIN was a top-3 click winner. That list is essentially your competitor's most valuable PPC keyword set, handed to you. Drop those queries into a Sponsored Products manual campaign as exact-match, with bids slightly above the placement floor you see in your placement report. We walk through the bid mechanics in our match types guide and our placements guide.

If you only had Brand Analytics and a calculator, the Top Search Terms report alone would replace 70% of what most third-party keyword tools sell you, for $0.

3. Item Comparison and Alternate Purchase Behavior

Two reports, paired together. Item Comparison tells you the top five products shoppers viewed in the same session as your ASIN. Alternate Purchase Behavior tells you the top five products shoppers actually purchased after viewing your ASIN (instead of buying yours).

These are your real competitors. Not the brands you think are your competitors. Not the ASINs your competitor research tool flagged. The actual products shoppers consider in the same breath as yours.

Two PPC moves come out of this data. First, run ASIN targeting Sponsored Products campaigns against the Item Comparison set to defend your traffic at the product detail page level. Second, run ASIN targeting Sponsored Display campaigns against the Alternate Purchase set as a retargeting tactic, since those are the listings shoppers chose over you. The defensive ROI on these campaigns is consistently strong because the intent is already proven.

4. Market Basket Analysis

This report shows the top three products most often purchased together with one of your ASINs in the same order. It is most useful for bundling decisions and for cross-sell ad placements.

If shoppers consistently buy your product alongside a complementary item from another brand, two opportunities open up. You can launch a bundle that captures both sales in one cart, or you can run Sponsored Display product targeting against that complementary ASIN to put your offer in front of buyers when they shop for the partner product.

5. Demographics

The Demographics report aggregates age, gender, income, education, and marital status data for shoppers who bought your products in the last 12 months. Amazon does not show individual buyers, only the percentage distribution of the cohort.

For PPC, this report is mostly useful when paired with Sponsored Brands Video or Sponsored Display audience targeting. If you discover that 68% of your buyers are women aged 35-54 with a household income over $75K, that demographic profile becomes your audience targeting baseline. We cover the audience targeting mechanics in our Sponsored Display guide.

6. Repeat Purchase Behavior

This report shows how many of your unique customers returned to purchase the same or related products over a 12-month window. It is the closest Amazon comes to giving you a retention metric.

The PPC implication is subtle but important. If a product has a high repeat purchase rate, you can afford a higher acquisition ACoS on the first sale because lifetime value subsidizes the cost. That is exactly the kind of thinking baked into our ACoS vs TACoS guide.

The Search Query Performance Workflow That Lowers ACoS

Here is the weekly Brand Analytics workflow that has worked across hundreds of sellers we have advised. It takes about 45 minutes once a week and consistently pulls 3-7% off blended ACoS within 60 days.

Monday: Pull the SQP report at the weekly grain. Filter for your top 20 revenue ASINs. Export to a spreadsheet.

Tuesday: Run the share gap audit. Sort by purchase share, ascending, within your top-volume queries. For every query where click share is more than 2x your purchase share, flag the ASIN. That is a listing problem, not a bid problem. Add it to a list of listings to fix this month.

Wednesday: Run the expansion audit. Filter for queries where your impression share is below 10% but the absolute search query volume is in the top 25% of your category. For every query that passes, add it as an exact-match keyword in a new or existing Sponsored Products manual campaign. Bid at 60-75% of the top-of-search bid for the query, taken from your placement report.

Thursday: Run the retreat audit. Filter for queries where your purchase share is high but your impression share is dropping week over week. Those are queries you are losing. Decide: are you losing because of price, reviews, or competitor advertising? If it is advertising, raise your bid. If it is anything else, you cannot fix it with PPC, so stop bidding harder. We dig into this kind of triage in our search term report guide.

Friday: Cross-reference with the Top Search Terms report. For every query you flagged on Wednesday, look at the top three ASINs in Top Search Terms. If two of the three are competitors you can plausibly beat on conversion (similar price, similar reviews, comparable images), bid into the query. If the top three are dominant brands with 30%+ click share each, deprioritize.

This whole loop runs in under an hour and does not require any third-party tools. It also feeds directly into the kind of decisions Amazon PPC automation can execute at scale once you have decided which queries are worth pursuing.

Common Mistakes Sellers Make With Brand Analytics

Mistake 1: Treating "search frequency rank" as search volume. Frequency rank is ordinal, not absolute. A rank of 1,200 in one category is not the same as a rank of 1,200 in another. Always interpret rank within the category, never across categories.

Mistake 2: Pulling reports only at the monthly grain. Monthly data hides the velocity changes that matter for PPC bid decisions. Use weekly grain for SQP and Top Search Terms. Use monthly only when you are looking at structural metrics like repeat purchase behavior.

Mistake 3: Ignoring the ASIN-level SQP data. Aggregate brand-level SQP is interesting. ASIN-level SQP is where the actual decisions live. Always drill down to the ASIN, because the same brand can have one ASIN winning a query at 12% purchase share and another losing the same query at 2% purchase share, and the fixes are completely different.

Mistake 4: Bidding harder on queries with low conversion share. If your click share is much higher than your purchase share, the problem is not your bid. Bidding harder will only increase the click-share-vs-purchase-share gap and lift ACoS. Fix the listing first.

Mistake 5: Skipping the Top Search Terms report because the data feels "too aggregated." It is aggregated, on purpose, to comply with privacy rules. The signal is still strong enough to drive 70% of your competitive keyword decisions. Use it.

Mistake 6: Not setting up team permissions. Brand Analytics access is gated by Seller Central user permissions. If your PPC manager, agency, or freelancer cannot see the reports, you are paying them to optimize blind. Give them the read access in Seller Central, Settings, User Permissions.

How Brand Analytics Connects to PPC Automation

The reports above are most powerful when the workflow is repeatable. Pulling SQP every Monday, running the share gap audit, the expansion audit, and the retreat audit, then translating those decisions into bid changes across dozens of campaigns is exactly the kind of high-leverage but time-consuming work that breaks down when sellers get busy.

If you want to see what that looks like running on your own catalog, start a free 14-day trial and connect your Seller Central account. The system will start the audit on day one and surface the biggest share gaps before the end of the first week.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Amazon Brand Analytics free?

Yes. There is no fee. The only prerequisite is active Brand Registry enrollment. Once you have an approved trademark and your brand is enrolled, the entire dashboard is included at no cost.

Do I need Vendor Central to use Brand Analytics?

No. Brand Analytics is available in Seller Central for Brand Registered sellers. Vendor Central uses a separate suite called ARA (Amazon Retail Analytics), which has overlapping but distinct reports.

How often is Brand Analytics data updated?

Most reports refresh weekly, typically on Sundays for the prior week's data. Some reports, like Demographics and Repeat Purchase Behavior, update monthly because the underlying cohorts need a larger sample. Always check the "last updated" timestamp at the top of each report before drawing conclusions.

Can I see competitor data in Brand Analytics?

You see competitor ASINs in aggregated form across Top Search Terms, Item Comparison, and Alternate Purchase Behavior, but you cannot see individual competitor sellers' revenue, ad spend, or conversion rates. You see the competitive landscape, not the competitive financials.

What is the difference between Brand Analytics and the search term report?

The search term report shows queries that triggered your ads inside your own campaigns. Brand Analytics shows queries across the entire marketplace, including queries you have never bid on. The two are complementary: search term report tells you how your ads performed, Brand Analytics tells you what queries exist and who wins them.

How does Search Query Performance differ from the regular Top Search Terms report?

Search Query Performance shows your ASIN's share of impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases for queries that touched your listings. Top Search Terms shows the top three ASINs by click share for any query, regardless of whose listings are involved. SQP is "how am I doing," Top Search Terms is "who is winning this query."

Can I export Brand Analytics data?

Yes. Every report has a CSV export button. Pulling the data into a spreadsheet or BI tool is recommended for serious workflows because the in-browser filters are limited.

Will Brand Analytics replace third-party keyword research tools?

For Amazon-only keyword research, mostly yes. The Top Search Terms report covers the head and mid-tail of Amazon's query space. Third-party tools still add value for long-tail discovery, off-Amazon search data, and historical trend lines, but for most sellers Brand Analytics covers 70-80% of the use case for free.

Putting It All Together

Amazon Brand Analytics is the most leverage you can extract from a free tool on Seller Central. The reports are dense, the data is first-party, and the implications run from listing copy to ad bids to product roadmap. Sellers who treat it as a once-a-quarter curiosity miss the weekly signal it sends. Sellers who build it into a recurring workflow consistently find share gaps before competitors notice them, expand into queries with proven volume instead of guessing, and pull back from queries that drain budget.

The hard part is not the data. The hard part is the discipline to pull the reports every week, run the audits, translate the findings into specific bid and listing changes, and repeat the loop. That is where automation closes the gap between knowing what to do and getting it done across hundreds of campaigns.

Set your ACoS target. Pull your first SQP report. Find the three biggest share gaps in your catalog. Fix them. Then do it again next week. That is the entire program. Most sellers will not run it, which is exactly why the ones who do quietly take share for years before the rest of the market notices.