SQP (Search Query Performance)

Amazon & D2C glossary · Harpy Media

Search Query Performance is an analytics view that maps the shopper funnel for a search term: from the searches made, through impressions, clicks, and cart additions, to the purchases completed. It shows what happens across the whole journey for a given query.

What is SQP?

Search Query Performance is an analytics view that maps the shopper funnel for a search term: from the searches made, through impressions, clicks, and cart additions, to the purchases completed. It shows what happens across the whole journey for a given query.

Its value is diagnosis. A term can underperform at any of four stages, and each stage has a different remedy. The dashboard locates the leak precisely, which turns decisions about listing content, imagery, price, and advertising into targeted interventions rather than broad guesses.

Reading the funnel stage by stage

Impressions against searches indicate relevance: if shoppers search the term and your products rarely appear, the listing is not matching what the query means, and the fix is content and term coverage rather than price. Clicks against impressions indicate the listing’s pull in the results grid — the image, title, price, and rating that a shopper sees before deciding where to look.

Cart additions against clicks indicate the detail page’s persuasion: how well it answers what the shopper came to find. Purchases against cart additions indicate the final decision — price, delivery promise, reviews, and the shopping experience. Each of those is a distinct lever, and knowing which one is leaking is most of the work.

Comparing against the field

The stronger reading comes from comparing your funnel with the category’s aggregate for the same term. Where you take a larger share of clicks than of impressions, the grid creative is working and relevance is the constraint. Where you take a larger share of cart additions than of clicks, the page converts well once it is reached, and visibility is what’s missing.

That comparison turns a report into a priority list. It identifies which specific terms are leaking at which specific stage — so effort goes to the term where a content fix would change the outcome, rather than to the whole catalogue in general.

In practice

A brand reviews the funnel for its twenty priority terms and finds two where impressions are strong but clicks are weak: the listings are being seen and not chosen. Images are rebuilt and titles sharpened; clicks on those terms rise sharply in the following weeks while everything else is left alone.

How Harpy Media helps

Funnel analysis is part of our growth work: each search term diagnosed stage by stage against category benchmarks, and fixes applied where the leak actually is rather than where it is easiest to guess.

SQP FAQ

What is Search Query Performance?

An analytics view showing the shopper funnel for a search term — searches, impressions, clicks, cart additions, and purchases — so performance can be diagnosed by stage.

How do I use it?

Compare your funnel against the category aggregate for the same term. The stage where your share drops most is the one to work on: relevance, grid appeal, page persuasion, or the final decision.

Why not just look at conversion?

Because conversion is one stage of four. Diagnosing where the loss occurs tells you whether the remedy is content, imagery, price, or visibility — adjusting price when clicks are the problem wastes margin.