CommunicationsGEORANK KEYWORD TRACKING:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME
As some of you are aware, back in 2018 Amazon changed the way products are ranked moving from a `global` framework to a more `granular` framework.
By global I mean marketplace based ranking; essentially, regardless of where the customer originates, the page position of a particular ASIN within that marketplace would be the same (assuming time and device constant).
That meant, if your product appeared in position #1 on the page one of search results, it would be at the same position regardless of whether the customer viewing had an expected delivery address in Oregon or California – back then ranking positions were pretty straight forward.
Today, that is no longer the case; today the position a product shows up for in the search results is dependent on a number of different elements chief of which is the expected delivery address of the person doing the search. Therefore, it’s more likely than not, that the customer in Oregon and the one in California will see your products on different pages and/or page positions… sometimes drastically so.
If you were not aware of the existence of georanking you’d be inclined to think that the rank shown in keyword rank trackers was a good approximation of your ASIN’s overall rank position for a specified keyword. Unfortunately this is not true. It may be true for a product that is well ranked and holds its position with consistencies across multiple zip codes, but how can you even be sure of this if all you have is a single data point of keyword rank and absolutely no idea in which city that rank is being specified for.
Though accuracy is an important consideration when looking at any business tool, another even more important consideration is their usefulness.
How useful and therefore actionable are these single data point information outputted by current keyword trackers for you the Amazon seller?
Do they provide sufficient information for you to take precise actionable steps to further scale your business?
Are they able to provide insights as to what happened to cause you sales to skyrocket or fall off a cliff?
Or are they just pablums designed to soothe the soul of the unware and therefore potentially misleading indicator that is not representative of anything at all and should not be relied upon?
Are Single Data Point Rank Trackers Useful?
In years past, checking your keyword rank amounted to little more than keeping score. Like BSR, it served as a means of tracking the effectiveness of past marketing and sales activities; for instance, you could gauge how effectively you executed that new product launch plan, by looking at the position of you keywords in the following days/weeks. In this manner, as passive backward trailing indicators, this information was and remains quite valuable.
The question for us sellers in the current georanking environment is to ask whether tools that only surface a single data point for keyword ranking – in an environment where there are likely thousands of different rankings for the same keyword – still remain relevant? Is the information they output still a good representative indicator of effectiveness of past marketing activities? Do they remain useful or even valuable?
Clearly our answer is `NO`… this is why we developed Rank Diagnostics.
To keep up with the conversation come over and join our Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/840113437375410
It makes no sense relying on single rank data point for a keyword when there are literally thousands!
Amazon Seller