How To Use RD

How To Use Rank Diagnostics

Rank Diagnostics by its name is meant to be a tool to help you diagnose sales issues (good or bad) and come to intelligent conclusions.

Please keep in mind that while compared to your traditional keyword tracker that searches a single zip code location, depending on the marketplace Rank Diagnostics search anywhere from 100 to over 500 locations. In fact, on Amazon.com we may search up to 535 locations, that is equivalent to approximately a full year and a half of searches done instantaneously when compared to your traditional single location keyword trackers. Given that it should not be a surprise that we cost more than those tools.

As a result, it is important that you prioritize which keyword(s) you want to track. While keyword selection is outside the scope of this write-up, we recommend that you concentrate on your top 3 – 5 keywords for each ASIN. These keywords should be the money keywords that deliver the vast amount of your sales – or has the potential to deliver the lion’s share of sales. Note this is not necessarily the keyword with the largest monthly search volume – though it may be. Additionally we recommend you georank track once every two weeks – not daily. This way you can maintain decent situational awareness of where your sales are coming from.

If you’ve ever had a sales spike or drop, yet the single location trackers you use show no change in your rank, this is where Rank Diagnostics situational awareness can help. It allow you to see zip codes that may have improved or degraded that your single location tracker missed.

Inventory as a Ranking Factor

Another reason you rank may drop precipitously overnight is a lack of inventory.

While we do not know the exact formula, we do know as a verifiable fact that Amazon has an rank-dampening algorithm based on inventory and ship times. If we have to guess we would say they have a moving average for daily inventory levels that when hit will trigger a rank reduction. Further, the longer your ship time from the available stocked inventory warehouses, the higher the low-stock ranking penalty.

This penalty is geographic-based and keyword specific. Our guess is that they use the average sales for the top 3 sellers on a specific keyword as the trigger to launch the dampening algorithm. That means that the penalty across keywords will vary with lower impact on low volume keywords and higher impact on high volume keywords.

With Rank Diagnostics, you can compare your rank in specific cities to where you inventory is located. This will help you to diagnose a sudden ranking or sales drop.