Which customers can be influenced?
The goal of your activities on Amazon is to convince more customers of your product. That's why it's important to understand who you can actually convince in the first place. As a first step, we'll look at how customers use Amazon. In simplified terms, there are two types of usage:
- As a sales channel: The brand is already decided, and the purchase happens out of convenience.
- As a product search engine: The customer is open-minded and takes cues from ranking, content, and reviews.
The greatest growth potential lies with customers who use Amazon as a product search engine. We therefore examined the SoC data to see whether search terms can be clustered in a way that lets us determine whether a customer is more likely in sales-channel mode or product-search mode.
Why search and search terms are the starting point
Most purchases on Amazon still start in the search bar. Even though systems like Cosmos/Alexa will change search in the long run, one thing still holds true: whoever understands how customers search and which products they click – gains market share. On top of that, there is historical customer-behavior data that remains relevant.
Our SoC analyses show:
- About 20% of all searches include a brand name in the search term.
- Over 95% of these searches lead to clicks on products of the searched brand.
- Searches without a brand name show, with few exceptions, a broad distribution across different brands.
Search type
Because of this very different behavior, we introduced the “search type” attribute for search terms, with two values:
- branded (search term includes a brand name)
- generic
The classification of search terms is done using AI and ensures that a term is only classified as branded if the successful ASINs predominantly belong to that brand.
In general: with branded search terms, searchers use Amazon almost exclusively as a sales channel, while generic searches almost always mean Amazon is being used as a product search engine.
With this distinction, we can now answer the following questions:
