The Autron Benchmarks Dashboard, available under the Insights section, serves as a powerful tool for Amazon sellers to compare their brand performance with category competitors. By providing critical data on both organic performance and advertising metrics, it helps you understand how your brand measures up and where improvements can be made. This guide will walk you through the features, how to use them, and what to keep in mind to get the most value from the Benchmarks Dashboard.
What the Benchmarks Dashboard Offers
1. Brand Metrics:
Brand Metrics provide an in-depth look at how your brand is performing in the context of Amazon’s customer journey funnel. This dataset is broken into several key performance indicators (KPIs), helping you to track how effectively your brand is reaching and converting customers.
Product Page Views: This metric tells you how many times your product pages are viewed by Amazon customers. It is a direct measure of how visible your products are to the audience in your selected category.
Add to Carts: This figure shows how frequently customers add your product to their carts, reflecting how many customers are seriously considering purchasing your product. A higher add-to-cart rate suggests that your product is compelling enough for customers to consider purchasing.
Purchases: Both for regular and high-value Amazon customers, this metric captures the number of customers who follow through and make a purchase. For sellers focused on premium products or recurring customers, monitoring the high-value customer segment is particularly important.
Competitive Indexes:
These individual metrics—page views, cart additions, and purchases—are combined to create a Competitive Index across three critical stages of the customer journey:
Awareness: The first touchpoint where customers are exposed to your product, most often through search or product browsing.
Consideration: This measures customer intent and the extent to which customers are seriously evaluating your product, typically captured by the number of add-to-carts.
Sales: Reflecting actual purchase behavior, the Sales Index measures your product’s ability to convert shoppers into paying customers.
Each of these three areas is scored on a normalized scale from 0% to 100%. This allows you to see how well your brand is performing relative to the competition within your product category. For example, a Competitive Sales Index of 90% would indicate that your brand is outperforming 90% of other brands in the same category.
ℹ️ Note: These metrics are not advertising-specific and reflect the total brand performance, incorporating organic traffic and purchases alongside any ad-driven results.
2. Sponsored Brand Campaign Metrics:
For those utilizing Amazon’s Sponsored Brand ads, this section of the dashboard provides critical advertising performance benchmarks. The key metrics covered here include:
Impressions: This indicates the number of times your ad has been displayed. Tracking impressions helps you understand your ad visibility compared to other brands in your category. A lower number of impressions could indicate the need to adjust targeting or bids to increase your ad’s reach.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): A metric that reflects the ratio of clicks on your ad to the number of impressions. A higher CTR usually suggests that your ad is resonating well with customers, while a lower CTR could point to a need for improvement in your ad copy, visuals, or targeting strategy.
Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS): ACOS is one of the most important metrics for Amazon advertisers, showing the ratio of ad spend to sales generated from that spend. A lower ACOS indicates greater efficiency, meaning you’re spending less on advertising for every dollar earned in revenue. The dashboard helps you benchmark your ACOS against the bottom 25%, median, and top 25% of brands in your category.
Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS): ROAS is the inverse of ACOS, reflecting how much revenue is generated for every dollar spent on ads. A higher ROAS means better performance, and similar to ACOS, the dashboard provides insights into how your brand’s ROAS compares with your competitors.
These advertising metrics allow you to see not only how your Sponsored Brand campaigns are performing but also how they stack up against the competition in your product category. This data is valuable in optimizing ad spend and understanding where your brand may need to improve.
How to Use the Benchmarks Dashboard
Accessing the Benchmarks Dashboard
To start using the Benchmarks Dashboard, navigate to the Insights section within the Autron platform. Once there, click on the “Benchmarks” tab or go directly to Autron Benchmarks.
From here, you can filter data based on time ranges (e.g., 30, 60, 90 days) and by brand or category. This allows you to drill down into specific time periods and compare performance at both a brand and category level.
💡 Tip: Use the Category filter to focus on your brand's most important category. This helps you accurately compare top performers, as including all categories might skew the results with weaker products.
Key Metrics to Focus On
While the dashboard offers a wide range of data, here are a few key metrics that are especially valuable for most sellers:
Competitive Sales Index: By tracking this over time, you can monitor how your brand’s performance evolves within the category. This index gives a clear picture of whether you’re gaining or losing ground relative to competitors.
Customer Conversion Rates: These are essential for understanding how well your products are converting interest (page views, adds to carts) into sales. If your conversion rate is lower than competitors, it may indicate a need to optimize product listings, pricing, or reviews.
ACOS and ROAS Trends: For sellers who run Sponsored Brand campaigns, tracking these metrics over time helps optimize ad spend. Seeing your ACOS decrease or ROAS increase relative to competitors signals that your ads are becoming more efficient.
Important Considerations When Using the Benchmarks Dashboard
Data Delay: It’s important to note that Brand Metrics have a lag time of about two weeks from Amazon. Keep this in mind when analyzing recent trends, as there may be a slight delay in data reflecting your current performance. Similarly, Sponsored Brand Campaign metrics are also collected weekly. Be aware of this when tracking ad performance and making adjustments to campaigns.
Sponsored Brand Data Only: While the dashboard provides excellent insights into Sponsored Brand Campaigns, it does not currently support benchmarks for Sponsored Products—Amazon’s most widely used ad type. If you are only running Sponsored Product campaigns, the advertising benchmarks section will not display any data.
Relevance of Category: If your product falls into a very niche category, the comparison data might be less meaningful. In cases where there are few competitors or where the product type doesn’t neatly align with the broader category metrics, you may need to interpret the results carefully. Benchmarks in these cases might not provide as clear a competitive landscape for your specific product.
💡 Tip: If you’re not running Sponsored Brand ads, focus on Brand Metrics to understand your organic performance. You can always use these insights to guide your future ad strategy.
Conclusion
The Autron Benchmarks Dashboard offers a wealth of data to help you track and compare your brand’s performance within Amazon. Whether you're focused on boosting your visibility, improving conversion rates, or optimizing your advertising spend, this dashboard equips you with the insights needed to make data-driven decisions. Make sure to explore the Competitive Index for a holistic view of brand performance and dive into Sponsored Brand Metrics to ensure your ads are delivering optimal results.
By regularly checking your benchmarks and making adjustments based on the data, you can stay ahead of the competition and maximize your brand’s potential on Amazon.
Feel free to reach out if you need any more details or assistance with your dashboard!