Search volume across Amazon US held nearly steady YoY in August 2023, dropping just 0.5%. The differences were much more varied on a category by category basis, and further point to Amazon’s growth coming on the backs of CPG categories.

Biggest Takeaways for Brands

• The growth of Beauty & Personal Care on Amazon US continues
  • August 2023 marks the fifth-straight analysis from Momentum Commerce where Beauty & Personal Care exhibited the largest YoY search volume increase of any category on Amazon US
  • These jumps have made Beauty & Personal Care the fourth-most searched category on the US retail site (8%) – just one percentage point off from Electronics (9%)

• CPG is where the growth is on Amazon US
  • Once again, the largest increases in share of total Amazon search volume over the past year went to Beauty & Personal Care (+21.9%), Health & Household (+20.6%), and the Grocery & Gourmet Food (+11.1%) categories
    • 24.1% of Amazon search volume is driven by these categories – up from just 20.1% one year ago
    • Grocery & Gourmet Food search traffic now only slightly trails the Toys & Games category on Amazon US
• Search traffic remains under pressure in Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry, Toys & Games, and Sports & Outdoors
  • Consumers conducted clothing searches at rates nearly 9% lower than last August – although that is an improvement from the 18% year-over-year drop observed in July
    • Both Toys & Games and Sports & Outdoors also took sharp YoY dives for the second consecutive month
  • The Back to School season didn’t provide much of a bump in the apparel category either, with Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry searches rising only 2.7% month-over-month
  • While Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry remains the second-most searched category on Amazon, the slow erosion of search activity should be a warning sign to relevant brands
    • For apparel, Sports & Outdoors, and toy brands, these traffic trends should underscore the importance of taking a data-driven approach to content, keyword, and advertising strategy

Methodology

Data included in this analysis is based off of search volume estimates across the top 1,000,000 search terms on Amazon during August 2022, August 2023, and July 2023. Search terms were categorized based on the top-level category associated with the majority of products appearing on the corresponding search results pages.

These models reflect the updates Amazon has made to their own search volume methodologies within Search Query Performance metrics. This includes all historical search volume estimations within this analysis.