Products with a top 5 Amazon Best Seller Rank (BSR) don’t appear in the top organic results across 11.3% of higher-volume category search terms on Amazon US. This has significant implications for brands in these categories for driving search advertising efficiency even after achieving a top BSR for a given product.

Popular search terms associated with categories sporting larger product assortments and lower average price were more likely to not put top BSR products at the top of organic results.

In these categories, category revenue is often more widely distributed across brands, with a few examples below:

For example, the top three organic results on the term “beach umbrella’ captured only 17.8% of total clicks and only 9.6% of total conversions in May 2024, versus the site average of 40% and 27.3%, respectively. On this same term, the best BSR across the top 5 organic results is #8 in the ‘Umbrellas and Shade’ subcategory. This underscores that consumers aren’t consistently choosing a small subset of products when searching for this term.

Biggest Takeaways for Brands

• Achieving a top BSR isn’t a magic wand to spend less on search – you still likely need to advertise on top terms
  • Even if a given product can reach a top BSR, continuously monitor the organic rank across important search terms to determine any changes in advertising strategy
• Expect ad costs and TACOS to see less of an impact after attaining a top BSR in lower cost, larger assortment categories
  • This also raises the importance of driving branded search traffic, where TACOS will naturally be lower, via Amazon DSP or other means 
  • Conversely, for categories where top BSRs do rank highly on top search terms, ad costs can come down faster as BSR improves

Methodology

Momentum Commerce examined the lowest Amazon Best Seller Rank (BSR) across the top 5 organic results in search terms associated with all depth 1, 2, and 3 categories between May 6 and May 12, 2024 on Amazon US (e.g. Beauty & Personal Care > Skin Care > Face). For each category, the top 10 search terms by volume were studied and were enriched with the number of overall unique products and average price. For comparisons, terms where no product with a BSR better than 5 appeared across the top 10 organic results were compared with overall Amazon site averages with the same criteria (e.g. all Clothing Shoes and Jewelry > Women’s > Dresses related terms).