The Branded Spend “Mystery” is a Myth: Use the SQP Report to End the Debate
If you spend more than five minutes on LinkedIn, you’ll see the “Amazon Gurus” debating branded search spend like it’s a high-stakes philosophical inquiry. They treat it like a fine art—something only an elite few with a PhD in Art History could possibly interpret.
Here’s the reality: It’s not an art. It’s a math problem.
Amazon isn’t a “black box” anymore. They provide the exact data you need to measure your conversion share. You don’t need a guru; you need to correlate your spend with your Search Query Performance (SQP) data.
The Data is Already in Your Dashboard
For 3P sellers, this data lives in the Search Query Performance (SQP) Report within Brand Analytics. The SQP report is the “Holy Grail” because it gives you two specific metrics for your branded terms:
- Click Share: What percentage of total clicks on that term went to your brand?
- Conversion Share: What percentage of total purchases for that term went to your brand?
How to Run a Real Incrementality Test
The “debate” ends when you test for incrementality. You want to know: If I stop paying for this ad, does the customer still buy my product via an organic link, or do they go to a competitor?
Stop guessing and start testing:
- The Baseline: Record your conversion share on your top branded terms.
- The Throttle: Systematically reduce or increase your ad spend on those specific branded keywords.
- The Result: Observe your conversion share.
If you reduce spend and your conversion share on a branded term stays constant, you were likely overspending. As a result, you were simply cannibalizing organic sales you would have gotten for free.
Stop Overspending on Your Own Name
In the majority of audits we conduct at iDerive, we suspect that brands are overspending on branded search. When they start working with us, we don’t just guess—we prove it.
You can do this manually by downloading reports and mapping them to your PPC metrics, but we’ve automated this entire process. We integrate SQP dashboards with ad metrics and insights in our iDerive analytics platform for all our managed client partners and platform-only users.
Challenge Your Agency
If your agency is talking about “brand defense” as a vague concept without showing you Conversion Share data, it’s time to ask the hard questions. If they aren’t using this data to justify your budget, it might be time to get a second opinion.
