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Most brands have access to Search Query Performance and don't know what to do with it. Here's the four-pillar system Nectar uses to turn SQP data into a growth operating system — stopping cannibalization, surfacing real opportunities, diagnosing funnel leaks, and tracking the market share that actually matters.
Key Takeaways
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Amazon's Search Query Performance (SQP) report — available inside Brand Analytics under Search Analytics — is one of the most powerful data sets Amazon has released. It gives brand-registered sellers query-level visibility into the full customer journey: impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases, compared against the rest of the market. For sellers, it's available now; Amazon has been rolling it out in beta for vendors as well. Yet across the accounts we review, we consistently find the same pattern: teams open SQP once, close it without knowing what to do with it, and never go back.
At Nectar, we manage nine figures in Amazon media annually — and we've built our advertising strategy around tying SQP data to ad spend trends over time. What follows is the framework we use: four pillars that transform SQP from a report you glance at into an operating system for growth.
Key Benchmarks from Nectar Account Analysis:
What SQP Actually Unlocks
Before SQP, you could see your ad performance in one place and your organic rank in another — but you couldn't see them together, overlaid on your share of a search term. That's the gap SQP closes. It maps the full customer navigation journey: Impressions (visibility) → Clicks (engagement) → Cart Adds (intent) → Purchases (conversion), all at the search query level and segmented at the ASIN level.
What Amazon doesn't do — and this is where the real work lives — is trend your SQP data against your advertising spend over time. They give you the data. They don't tell you how to use it. When you stitch SQP together with ad data, organic rank, and sales trends, you can actually quantify whether your ad spend is growing your share or just recycling demand you already own. That's the lens this entire framework is built around.
We've structured the four pillars around the most common scaling problems we see across every account size:
Want help building this system for your account? Talk to our retail media team.
Pillar 1: Stop Organic Cannibalization
Organic cannibalization — running paid ads on queries where you already own the organic demand — is one of the most expensive mistakes we see, and it's almost impossible to measure without SQP. Here's how to diagnose it.
Step 1: Identify queries where your organic purchase share is already dominant. SQP shows you your brand's purchase share on every tracked query. A term with 90%+ purchase share is almost certainly owned organically. Pull back your view across the top 20 terms and flag anything where you're already capturing the overwhelming majority of purchases.
Step 2: Recognize when paid is recapturing existing demand, not growing it. This is the gut-punch moment: you're bidding on a keyword, winning the click, attributing the sale to advertising — but that customer was going to buy from you anyway. You paid for something you'd have gotten for free.
Step 3: Reduce bids and spend on high-organic terms. Protect your rank, but stop paying full price for demand you already own. There's a clean test here: if you cut branded spend by 50% and your purchase share stays at 99% or falls only to 98.5%, the math on that recaptured budget is straightforward.
Step 4: Reallocate toward incremental growth. Take the recaptured budget and move it to terms where paid actually moves the needle — search queries where your purchase share is low but there's real volume and real opportunity.
"If you already own the demand organically, paid should protect, not compete." — Harriet Carson, VP of Advertising at Nectar
To illustrate: consider two terms — a niche product-specific query with 90%+ purchase share and a broad category term with only 37% purchase share. The broad term has higher search volume and far more share to win. If the account is spending heavily on the niche term because ROAS looks clean, that budget is almost certainly better deployed against the underpenetrated category term. ROAS looked great. Share wasn't growing.
This is also why branded spend deserves a dedicated audit. The real question isn't whether to run branded — it's whether reducing branded spend causes purchase share to drop. If competitors aren't winning on your branded terms and customers are finding you organically, that budget works harder on terms where paid is actually incremental.
Pillar 2: Uncover Scalable Opportunities
Once you've identified waste and pulled back where it makes sense, the next question is: where does that budget actually go? The answer is already in your SQP data.
The signal to look for is low impression share combined with a healthy purchase rate. When customers do find you, they buy — you just aren't showing up enough. That's not a product problem. That's a visibility problem, and spend can fix it. Amazon's ranking algorithm rewards consistent ad presence, so improving impression share in the right places compounds into organic rank gains over time.
Nectar classifies queries into three buckets — a framework we run inside iDerive for every account we manage:
Query Classification Logic:
QueryClassificationImpression SharePurchase RateActionBlack Wolf face washScale Ready4.2%12.8%Raise bids, expand placementsBlack Wolf shampooWasted Spend Risk68.5%14.2%Audit incrementality, pull back if not driving new shareMens body washFix Before Scaling22.1%2.1%Fix PDP, pricing, or relevance before adding spendSonic scrubberScale Ready6.8%15.4%Raise bids, expand placements
Scale Ready means low impression share and a healthy purchase rate. The product converts — it just isn't visible enough. Increase coverage: raise bids, expand budgets, test placement modifiers. Then come back and measure the impact on purchase share, not just ROAS.
Wasted Spend Risk ties back to Pillar 1. High impression share but likely low incrementality. The question isn't whether ROAS looks good — it's whether paid is driving that share or whether you'd own it organically anyway.
Fix Before Scaling is the most important bucket to get right. The instinct when something isn't performing is to spend more. But if visibility is decent and conversion rate is low, more spend just burns faster. Fix the content, pricing, and reviews first. Scale after the page earns the click.
One important caveat: don't apply these buckets rigidly. A high-volume competitive term like "mens body wash" may justify a lower ROAS if the real prize is organic rank. Spending consistently on a high-volume term can push you up the organic results — and if the organic sales that follow exceed what you'd get from a more efficient paid-only play, the math flips. It's a longer game, but a powerful one.
SQP also has ASIN-level reporting, which means you can identify which specific products should receive spend behind which keywords. That level of specificity is a separate session — but the principle is the same.
Ready to identify your Scale Ready queries? Talk to our Amazon advertising team.
Pillar 3: Diagnose Funnel Leakage Before Raising Bids
Pillar 3 is about diagnosing where in the funnel performance is breaking down — before touching any bids. This one prevents a significant amount of wasted spend in the short term.
The SQP funnel maps impressions → clicks → purchases on a per-query basis. When you read those metrics against each other, they tell you exactly what's broken:
High impressions, low clicks → a creative, pricing, or relevance issue. Your hero image, title, or price isn't compelling enough to earn the click. More spend will increase impressions further — but if the creative isn't converting impressions to clicks, the underlying problem remains.
High clicks, low conversions → a product detail page (PDP) or offer issue. Reviews, pricing, or content is killing the sale. Same problem: raising bids sends more traffic to a page that doesn't convert. Fix the page first.
One chart from a recent Nectar account audit showed a 3× spike in ad spend on a given term over 12 weeks — and purchase share moved essentially flat throughout. That's not a bidding problem. That's cannibalization or a conversion problem, and the spend made it worse. SQP's trend data made the diagnosis immediate.
The diagnostic workflow:
This is also where SQP's ASIN-level report adds value — you can identify which specific products are losing purchase share on a given term and diagnose whether the issue is the listing, pricing, or ad structure.
Pillar 4: Track True Market Share
Pillar 4 is where the framework pays off long-term — and it's the shift most brands haven't made yet.
ROAS measures how efficiently your ads attributed sales. It does not tell you whether your business is growing. High blended ROAS often means you're heavily indexed on branded and retargeting — efficient on paper, not expanding the customer base or category footprint. Purchase share tracks something different: your share of total purchases on a given search query over time. That's market ownership.
When you overlay purchase share against ad spend on a time-series chart, a clear picture emerges. Spend more in the right places — purchase share goes up. Pull back on cannibalized terms — purchase share holds. Spend more on the wrong terms — purchase share barely moves, and you've confirmed those dollars weren't incremental.
"The question I'd encourage every brand to start asking every single week is: are you defending and growing your share, or are you just recycling spend on demand that you already own?" — Harriet Carson, VP of Advertising at Nectar
This visualization alone changes how budget conversations happen. Teams stop asking "what's our ROAS?" and start asking "is spend growing our share?" Those are very different questions, and they lead to very different decisions.
A critical distinction for context: on Meta or Google, paid ads don't impact organic visibility — the only return is what you drive through ads. Amazon is different. Your paid ads directly influence your organic rank. Amazon's algorithm rewards consistent relevance and conversion in paid positions, which compounds into organic visibility. If you only measure ROAS, you're measuring half the picture. Purchase share captures both.
Bringing It All Together: From Data to Profit
The four pillars work as a system. Run them independently and you'll see marginal improvements. Run them together and you have a growth operating system:
When these four run together, SQP stops being a report you check once a month and becomes the primary lens through which ad strategy is set, tested, and measured.
A note for larger organizations: the first application of this framework is also a way to prove incrementality internally. Run micro-tests — pull back on a high-organic term, track whether purchase share holds, quantify the recaptured budget, reallocate it, measure the delta. That's the proof point that moves the ROAS-first conversation toward a share-first conversation.
Operationalizing SQP Without Overwhelm
The most common objection at this point is volume. There are thousands of search queries in a mature account. How do you actually operationalize this without drowning in data?
The 80/20 rule applies here: focus on the top 10–20 highest-impact queries first. You don't need to analyze thousands of terms to see results. Start with your top products and highest-volume queries, build your workflow there, and expand outward. The four steps:
Amazon does provide tools to go deeper. The new reporting beta tool, released in 2026, delivers new-to-brand (NTB) metrics at the keyword level without requiring Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). That means you can merge reporting beta data with SQP data at the search query level — and with SQP supporting up to five years of lookback by week, there's real history to work with.
One practical shortcut: download the simple view of SQP. It contains everything covered in this framework — impression share, click share, purchase share, conversion rate by search term, add-to-cart data, average price versus your selling price. That's the complete picture for the analysis described here.
Need help building your SQP tracking workflow? Talk to our team.
How iDerive Turns SQP Into Action
Manually stitching SQP data to ad spend and organic rank week over week is possible — and it's how brands should start. But at scale, the manual process becomes the bottleneck.
iDerive — Nectar's proprietary analytics platform — automates this. It ingests SQP data, Amazon Ads performance, sales data, and content signals and processes them into the four-pillar action outputs: Scale, Protect, Fix, Cut. Rather than downloading weekly reports and building trend analysis manually, iDerive surfaces the insight and the recommended action in a single view. Trend analysis and opportunity identification run automatically so the team spends time acting on insights, not extracting them.
For brands not using iDerive, the principle matters more than the tool. The core exercise — overlay purchase share against ad spend over time, classify your top queries into the three buckets, and build a weekly action cadence — can be run in a spreadsheet. Automation makes it faster and more consistent, but the framework works without it.
Glossary
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Amazon Search Query Performance (SQP)?
Amazon Search Query Performance (SQP) is a report inside Brand Analytics — found under Search Analytics in Seller Central — that shows how your brand performs across the full customer journey for every tracked search query. It surfaces impression share, click share, cart-add share, and purchase share at the query level, by week, month, or quarter, down to the ASIN level. It's available now for brand-registered sellers and rolling out in beta for Vendor Central accounts.
How Do You Stop Organic Cannibalization on Amazon?
Start by pulling your SQP data and flagging search terms where your purchase share is already dominant — typically above 90% for branded terms, or significantly above category average for non-branded terms. Then test: pull back paid spend by 25–50% and track whether purchase share holds. If share stays flat, that budget was capturing demand you'd win organically anyway. Reallocate it to terms where paid is actually incremental and purchase share has room to grow.
What Is the Difference Between ROAS and Purchase Share on Amazon?
ROAS measures ad-attributed sales divided by ad spend — it's a campaign efficiency metric. Purchase share measures your brand's percentage of total purchases on a given search query, compared to the entire market. ROAS tells you how efficiently your ads attributed sales. Purchase share tells you whether your business is winning in the category. High ROAS with flat purchase share often means you're efficiently recapturing existing organic demand, not growing your footprint. Purchase share is the better North Star for growth.
How Do You Find Scalable Opportunities in SQP?
Look for search terms with low impression share — say, under 10% — combined with a healthy purchase rate of 10% or above. Low impression share with strong conversion means customers buy when they find you; you just aren't visible enough. That's a visibility gap, not a product problem. Classify these as Scale Ready, raise bids, expand placements, and measure how purchase share responds week over week. These are typically the highest-return incremental opportunities in the account.
How Do You Diagnose Funnel Leakage Using SQP?
Map each top query's impression share, click share, and purchase share. A material drop from impressions to clicks points to a creative, pricing, or relevance issue — fix the hero image, title, or price before raising bids. A material drop from clicks to purchases points to a PDP or offer issue — reviews, content, or pricing. Raising bids in either scenario amplifies spend without fixing the root cause. SQP's trend view also surfaces cases where a significant ad spend increase produced no purchase share movement — a classic cannibalization signal.
Where Is SQP in Amazon Brand Analytics?
SQP lives inside Seller Central under Brand Analytics → Search Analytics → Search Query Performance. It's available to brand-registered sellers. For Vendor Central accounts that don't yet have SQP access in beta, the workaround is to associate brand registry with a Seller Central account — Amazon permits this — and access the data through Seller Central. Download the simple view for everything covered in this framework: impression share, click share, purchase share, conversion rate, add-to-cart data, and pricing metrics at the search-term level.
Can Vendors Use Amazon Search Query Performance?
Yes. Amazon is rolling out SQP in beta for Vendor Central accounts, though access isn't universal yet. The current workaround: associate your brand registry with a Seller Central account. Amazon permits this arrangement, and once brand registry is linked, SQP data becomes accessible through Seller Central. There are no additional fees expected — Amazon has been rolling out vendor SQP access for free, consistent with how the report is available to sellers.
How Do You Operationalize SQP Without Getting Overwhelmed?
Apply the 80/20 rule: start with your top 10–20 queries by volume and impact, not thousands. Build a simple weekly tracking system — even a spreadsheet — that trends impression share, purchase share, and ad spend on those core queries over time. Set one action per query per week: scale, protect, fix, or cut. Prioritize actions over analysis. The goal is a repeatable weekly workflow, not a one-time deep dive that sits in a deck. Once the workflow is running on your top queries, expand from there.
How Does Ad Spend on Amazon Affect Organic Rank?
Amazon's ranking algorithm rewards relevance and conversion rate. When you consistently win paid placements on a search term and convert well, Amazon's algorithm interprets that as product-market fit and rewards you with stronger organic placement. That means spending efficiently on the right terms compounds into organic visibility — and organic sales. This is why ROAS in isolation can work against you: a campaign that looks inefficient on ROAS may be building organic rank that generates far more sales over time. Purchase share, tracked over time against ad spend, captures both the paid and organic dimensions.
Win Market Share, Not Just Campaigns
The brands that scale on Amazon aren't just optimizing bids — they're building a system that connects paid performance to organic visibility and market share. SQP gives you the data to run that system. Stop cannibalization, find your Scale Ready queries, fix the funnel before raising bids, and track the share that tells you whether the business is actually growing.
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