Amazon quietly released a new analytics dashboard last week to marketplace sellers that Amazon vendors previously paid a hefty annual subscription fee for.
The dashboard, called Amazon Brand Analytics, is available to third-party marketplace sellers who are Brand Registered. As of the time of writing, the feature has not been introduced to all Seller Central accounts.
The analytics platform allows users to:
- Look up keywords search by Amazon customers
- See how popular a given keyword is, relative to others
- See what the #1, #2, and #3 “most clicked” ASINs (Amazon product identifier) are for a given search term
- Percentage of clicks that the “most clicked” ASINs received for the given search term
Similar data points available to vendors using Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) in Vendor Central are only available through purchasing an annual subscription starting at $30,000. The more advanced Amazon Retail Analytics Premium (ARAP) package was billed at $73,000 per year, or 1% of the value of shipped orders. Besides the keyword analytics now offered for free to registered brands on Seller Central, the paid analytics programs also provide access to other data points like top-selling items, sales data by category and location, and cross-sell opportunities.
Other retailers, such as Walmart and Kroger, also charge suppliers for access to similar data points.
So why is Amazon making all this data available for free?
Amazon is notorious for keeping its proprietary shopper data close to its chest. The opacity of data points like traffic sources to product pages, bounce rates, customer lifetime value, and even aggregated customer profile information has dissatisfied many brands.
By making this data readily available to a large volume of merchants, Amazon is partly looking to soften its anti-competitive image. After all, the Brand Analytics tool also displays the conversion and keyword data for its own wildly popular Amazon Basics product line. There’s nothing like opening the kimono a little, especially when some merchants accuse Amazon of manipulating product reviews to gain traction for their own private label brands.
But the more compelling reason to share this important data with brands is to compel them to ramp up advertising spend on Amazon.
Amazon says of the program:
Brand Analytics is a feature that contains valuable insights to empower Brand Owners to make informed, strategic decisions about their product portfolio and marketing/advertising activities.
By showing brands exactly which keywords are converting best, it prompts brands to increase their advertising bids and budgets for those keywords. And by showing brands which ASINs are capturing the most clicks for a given keyword, it prompts brands to allocate more budget to targeting those specific ASINs.
With Advertising being a fast growing and wildly profitable segment of Amazon’s business, its worthwhile giving advertisers a taste of the data they need to justify allocating more budget to Amazon.
This is also seen with the introduction of Amazon’s “New To Brand” metric a couple of weeks ago, a metric that shows brands the percentage of orders made by customers that had not shopped from that brand in the past 12 months. This addresses the lingering perception that Amazon is more of a distribution channel than a customer acquisition channel. By showing brands that they can acquire new customers through the channel, brands are more willing to pay more in advertising costs to acquire a sale.
