The share of consumer search activity captured by top terms on Amazon US varies significantly between categories. Assortment breadth within a category is a meaningful factor, with a reasonable correlation between the number of distinct products offered in a category and the share of total search volume captured by the top 100 terms for that subcategory.

One extreme example is the largest subcategory by product count, Women’s Clothing, where the top 100 search terms account for just 15.4% of overall search volume. In fact, to account for 80% of the total category search volume in Women’s Clothing you’d have to add up the top 4,183 search terms.

Contrast this with the Video Projector subcategory in Electronics. With just 2,000 distinct products, the top 100 search terms capture 74.6% of category search volume.

An example of a more ‘middle of the road’ category is Automotive Lights & Accessories. The category sports over 25,000 unique products, and 53.8% of category search volume is concentrated across the top 100 search terms.

Biggest Takeaways for Brands

• For newer or less populated categories on Amazon, focus on top terms
  • This likely will result in higher ACOS, but it’s going to be the best path to driving meaningful sales volumes
  • Ensure any share of voice (SOV) metrics are volume-weighted so you are getting the most actionable metric  
• Build a competitive edge that matches the shape of the category you play in
  • For categories with a higher share of traffic going to top terms, brands need to maintain a tight focus on budget allocation, campaign structure, product quality, pricing, and branding
    • Being competitively priced with a meaningful value proposition, while capturing paid slots on select, top terms is going to be a solid foundational strategy
  • For categories with a lower share of traffic going to top terms, brands need to be more agile and willing to invest to break past stagnating growth
    • Following trends and niches with supporting keyword research, paid search, and SEO can help you win
      • One simple method that can help in ensuring that auto campaigns are feeding into manual campaigns based on predefined conversion criteria

Methodology

Momentum Commerce examined the estimated search volume associated with the top 1 million search terms on Amazon US over the month of September 2024. Search terms were categorized based on the subcategory associated with the majority of products appearing on the corresponding search results pages. For the purposes of having a meaningful number of search terms associated with each subcategory, only level-two subcategories were analyzed (e.g. Toys & Games/Building Toys).