Good news for brands on Vendor Central: Starting April 1, every seller with an Amazon Brand Registry will have access to Amazon Brand Analytics. Previously called Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) and ARA Premium, this access to expanded metrics carried a price tag between $30,000 and $73,000 per year for brands looking for deeper insights into their sales numbers.
What is Included in Amazon Brand Analytics?
One of the biggest gripes vendors have historically had with Amazon is the lack of detailed reporting offered by the site. For those unwilling or unable to pay the premium price tag, many of the particulars regarding Amazon sales figures were shrouded in mystery.
Now, any brand on Vendor Central that has registered with Brand Registry by March 31 will have access to the Amazon Brand Analytics dashboard, which offers:
- Access to keyword searches by Amazon customers, ranked by popularity
- Ability to see the top 3 most clicked ASINs for specific search terms, and what percentage of clicks each ASIN received
- Sales data separated by state or zip code
- Which products customers view after viewing your item
- Which items customers buy along with your item
These detailed insights into sales, traffic, and the sales locations can be instrumental in refining and strategizing marketing campaigns, listing optimizations, developing new products, and much more.
Why is Amazon Giving This Information Away for Free?
Brands have been begging Amazon for more detailed sales metrics for as long as they’ve been selling on the site, but don’t think that Amazon dropped the hefty fees they once charged for access to Amazon Retail Analytics and ARA Premium out of the goodness of their corporate heart. This transition to Amazon Brand Analytics is part of the site’s current push to be not just a sales channel but a “brand builder.” For brands to feel comfortable using Amazon as a foundation for building their ecommerce platform, they need to feel like the lines of communication are open.
The expansion of Amazon Brand Analytics to every brand on Vendor Central goes hand-in-hand with Amazon’s recent announcement of New-to-Brand Metrics for Amazon Advertising clients, which “now provides display, video, and Sponsored Brands advertisers the ability to measure and optimize campaigns, as well as plan future marketing strategies, to help grow your customer base on Amazon.”
In addition to helping soften Amazon’s long-standing fickle and anti-competitive image, giving brands free access to this information will further invigorate Amazon Advertising. Letting brands see which keywords are performing best prompts them to increase advertising bids and budgets for those keywords. Showing which ASINs get the most clicks for a specific keywords encourages brands to allocate more budget to those specific ASINs. More useful and detailed reporting makes the platform more competitive, and more competition means bigger ad spends.
Tips for Taking Advantage of Amazon Brand Analytics
For some brands, this will be their first access to reporting that was previously only available through Amazon Retail Analytics Premium. Larger brands might have already paid for ARA Premium or were given reporting by vendor managers, but many did not have access to the expanded ARA Premium service. For these brands, the biggest difference they will find in the Amazon Brand Analytics dashboard will be greater access to additional reporting and more customizable data.
- To start, we recommend brands begin pulling additional reports like Market Basket Analysis, Search Term Reports, and more robust purchase behavior, as well as customer reviews and repeat purchase behavior to get a more holistic view of how well products are selling and advertising campaigns are functioning.
- Look at which pages are converting and see if there is a correlation between high-quality A+ and Premium A+ content. If your optimized pages are outperforming those without optimized content, consider improving the content on the pages that are lagging behind.
- Find out which search terms are working and integrate them into your product pages. Integrating search terms is the best way to ensure products stand out on the crowded digital shelf.
- Remember that Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) isn’t the only way to tell if campaigns are functioning at peak efficiency. There are other factors that play into the health of high-functioning campaigns.
