Everyone wants to know how to rank on Amazon. But how do you know whether you’re paying attention to the right Amazon ranking metrics?
Let’s be real. Whether you are a veteran Amazon seller or dipping your toes in the river for the first time, selling a new product on Amazon can be nerve-wracking.
It doesn’t help that there are a gazillion articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, and opinion pieces denoting the best strategies to help launch and rank your product. It’s always good to have resources, but how do you know which ones are the best?
To make things even more confusing, Amazon uses what also seems like a gazillion metrics to determine your placement and success among its pages.
Discerning which metrics to focus on is a daunting task, even more so because they all influence one another. However, when you understand the systems Amazon has to measure performance, you’ll realize that you need to only focus on a handful of fundamental metrics.
To be clear, this article isn’t meant to imply that Amazon only uses four metrics to determine your listing’s health, nor is it to oversimplify how easy it is to succeed on Amazon. The A9 algorithm uses dozens of internal and external factors to determine how well a listing will perform. Some of them are more heavily-measured and well-known pillars, whereas others are obscure and less emphasized. This article will focus on some of the lesser-known measurements that influence the more common ones like sales, relativity, SEO, and reviews.
For starters, don’t make the mistake many Amazon sellers do, which is to hyper-focus on the BSR (Best Sellers Rank) of your listing. Many sellers get hung up on this and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with actual sales or a listing’s success. The Amazon Best Sellers Rank is more of a vanity metric than anything else.
However, your Amazon Best Sellers Rank is still a trailing indicator of sales velocity. It’s updated by the hour, and using amazon paid tools you can track your BSR to get an idea of how consistent or volatile your product sales velocity is.
BSR is far from the most vital metric to spend time on; however, it may be something to check in on now and again.
Now let’s focus on the metrics you should hyper-focus on!
The Price is Right