Using the Wrong Brand Analytics Report to Find Competitors?

Static ASIN targeting is lazy. You pick the five biggest products in your category, point Sponsored Products at them, and leave it running for a year while the category rearranges itself around you.

The better version is to target competitors who are currently weakening — losing share, losing conversion, out of stock — because that is where displaceable demand actually sits.

The instinct is right. But the report most people reach for to do it is the wrong one, and using it will send your conquesting budget at products that were never your competitors.

Which Brand Analytics report shows your real competitors?

Brand Analytics is often discussed as one thing. It is six reports answering six different questions, and three of them touch competition.

Market Basket Analysis shows the top products customers bought in the same order as yours. A shopper buys your protein powder and a shaker bottle together. That is a complement, not a competitor.

This is the report most commonly misused for conquesting, and it is the wrong tool for it. If you build ASIN targeting from Market Basket data, you are bidding on products people buy alongside yours — which means competing for a shopper who was already going to buy from you. You will pay to interrupt your own customer.

Market Basket Analysis is genuinely valuable. It is a bundling and cross-sell report. Use it to design bundles, build variations, and target adjacencies where you sell the complement too. Just not for conquesting.

Item Comparison shows the top five products customers viewed within 24 hours of viewing yours, with the percentage of times each appeared. This is your consideration set — who you are being weighed against.

Alternate Purchase shows the top five products customers bought instead of yours after viewing yours, with the percentage for each.

That last one is the conquesting report. It is the only one that tells you who actually beat you, on a shopper who had already found you. If you are going to spend money displacing a competitor, start with the list of competitors who are currently displacing you.

On "market share movement"

None of these reports gives you share movement as a metric. There is no column labelled “trend.”

What you can do is snapshot. Pull Item Comparison and Alternate Purchase monthly, save them, and compare. A competitor whose comparison percentage is climbing is taking a larger share of your consideration set. One whose alternate-purchase percentage is climbing is winning more of the shoppers who saw you first — a more urgent problem.

For actual share data, Search Query Performance is the report you want. It gives impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases by search query, along with your share of each. Track your purchase share on your top twenty queries month over month and you have a real share trend, at the level where advertising decisions get made.

The work is in the saving and comparing. Amazon does not do it for you, and neither does most agency reporting.

Why does it matter why a competitor is weakening?

Here is where the tactic needs more judgement than it usually gets. A competitor losing share is an opportunity. Why they are losing it determines whether the opportunity lasts a week or a year, and how hard to push.

They went out of stock. The best conquesting target there is, and the most time-limited. Their demand has to go somewhere immediately, and the shopper is deciding today. Bid aggressively and expect the window to close the moment they restock — but the rank and reviews you pick up during it persist.

They raised price. A durable opportunity, provided you can hold your own price. Worth a sustained position rather than a burst.

Their review profile deteriorated. The most durable of all, because reviews are slow to repair. A competitor drifting from 4.5 to 4.1 stars will keep leaking shoppers for months.

They cut advertising deliberately. Usually a margin decision, not weakness. They will be back, and you may simply be buying the traffic they stopped subsidising — at a price they decided was too high.

They are being outranked by someone else. Their share is moving to a third party, not to you. Targeting them puts you in a fight you did not start and may not win.

Only the first three are genuinely worth a budget shift, and they call for different tactics.

The honest caveat about conquesting

Competitor ASIN targeting converts worse than category or keyword targeting in most accounts, and the reason is structural.

When you appear on a competitor’s detail page, you are interrupting somebody who has already decided what they want. You are asking them to reconsider, and most will not. Your conversion rate on that placement is usually a fraction of what you see on a search result where intent is still open.

Which means conquesting needs a break-even calculation of its own. Use the same formula — margin multiplied by conversion rate — but with the conversion rate you actually achieve on ASIN placements, not your account average. Run it as its own campaign so that number is visible rather than blended away.

There is also a retaliation dynamic worth thinking about. Conquesting a competitor who has not been bidding on you frequently teaches them to bid on you. Against a larger competitor with more budget, starting that exchange can be a poor trade.

What we would actually run

Pull Alternate Purchase first. That is your target list, ranked by who is beating you. Not the biggest products in the category — the ones winning shoppers who already found you.

Cross-reference with Item Comparison to see who you are being weighed against but not losing to. Those are competitors where the gap is small, and a listing improvement may serve you better than an ad spend.

Snapshot monthly and compare. Movement is the signal, and it only exists if you kept last month’s file.

Establish why before you spend. Check the competitor’s stock status, price history and recent reviews. Five minutes of checking prevents a month of chasing a competitor who simply paused their ads.

Run conquesting as its own campaign with its own break-even target, and judge it on that rather than on blended account ACoS.

And use Market Basket Analysis for what it is for — bundles, variations and cross-sell. It is one of the most underused reports on the platform, just not for this job.

One practical note: Amazon changes report labels periodically, and availability differs between Seller Central and Vendor Central. Verify what your account actually shows before building a workflow around a report name from an article — including this one.