Analyzing Traffic Data: How Vendors can uncover Valuable Business Insights
Amazon is a big place, and if customers can’t find your products, they can’t buy from you. That’s why traffic data is such an important indicator for Amazon vendors that tells them how much visibility their products have. After all, the more traffic you get, the more you can sell.
But you won’t be successful in boosting that traffic unless you understand what the traffic data is telling you now. In this guide, we’ll talk about why this traffic data is useful, what that means for the recently deprecated “Lost Buy Box” metric, and how to use all of this data.
Where Do I Find Traffic Data in Vendor Central?
You can find the Vendor Central traffic report by logging into Vendor Central and going to Reports > Retail Analytics > Traffic. Within this report, you'll find data on glance views, which is the traffic data metric vendors should be most concerned about.
How Vendors Can Use Traffic Data to Improve Products and Make Better Decisions
Traffic data can do everything from help you identify star products that should be marketed harder to making better decisions about product development and advertising in the future. Here are some of the top ways you can use traffic data to boost your bottom line.
1. Identify High/Low Performers
Traffic data will help you quickly spot which of your products do well and which are lagging. This gives you the opportunity to make critical decisions. In particular, there are two methods for finding these high and low performers:
Items with the highest and lowest traffic volumes. Higher traffic tends to correlate to higher sales simply due to more eyeballs on your product, so this can be a good indicator.
Items with the largest increases and decreases in traffic volume. Check both month-to-month and year-to-year traffic changes to identify which products are seeing increases and decreases in traffic.
2. Use Ads to Get Initial Traction
Sometimes, a new product has a chicken-or-egg problem: your product gets no traffic and therefore has no sales, but it won’t get traffic until Amazon gives it a better ranking, and it needs sales to get that good ranking. In that case, you may need to rely on paid traffic until you get there. Experiment with initial ad runs when you launch products to work around this issue.
3. Diagnose Product Detail Page Issues and Fix Them
Bad traffic could simply mean your product detail pages aren’t good enough. It’s not good enough to simply list your product: you must put a lot of effort into both the title of the product detail page and the description. For example, if you sell a mountain bike, you wouldn’t want the title to simply be “Mountain Bike” – you would want it to be as specific as possible.
The product description should also include specific features your customers are searching for. Many times, customers are not just looking for a product, but one that has unique attributes. If you haven’t listed those attributes, Amazon has no way of connecting you with those customers, and you won’t rank in search results when customers search those terms.
Can Traffic Data Help Vendors Calculate Lost Buy Box (LBB)?
The short answer is: no. One of the biggest losses for vendors with the Amazon Retail Analytics relaunch in 2022 was the deprecation of the Lost Buy Box metric. Vendors relied on the LBB metric to help them understand what the missed opportunities were from not winning the Buy Box in terms of units and revenue.
Without the LBB metric, it’s almost impossible for vendors to quantify what is going on. They’ve been looking for alternatives: the most common way is to use detail page scrapers – bots that look at a detail page to see which offer is winning (whether a vendor or a fulfillment-by-Amazon (FBA) seller or a merchant-fulfilled-networked (MFN) offer.
The scraper looks at the merchant info to determine who the Buy Box winner is, and does this over and over to come up with an approximate LBB rate.
This works to a degree, but it doesn’t work at scale because who wins the Buy Box can vary for at least two reasons:
It depends on who is looking at the page. A person’s Buy Box experience in Seattle is different from someone’s in Florida, because a merchant may only be able to fulfill directly from their network but only in certain regions.
Recent European Union legislation may complicate the issue. If proposed legislation is enacted, Amazon must provide a second, competing offer in the Buy Box, which will make it harder to determine who is “winning” the Buy Box. (Note: This may have been why Amazon deprecated the metric to begin with).
Related article: How to Use Procurable Product OOS for Amazon Vendors
The LBB Metric May Return – But It May Look Different
Amazon understands the importance of the value of this metric to vendors, so there is a strong chance they will bring it back in some form – it’s a good bet engineering teams probably are working on identifying replacement metrics right now.
So how will it change? It’s hard to say, but LBB is currently a binary metric (you either have the BB or you don’t). With the new paradigm in Europe, Amazon may opt for more of a hybrid or composite metric.
Traffic Data in Isolation Ultimately Isn’t Enough
Traffic data is essential, but you shouldn’t make major business decisions based solely on it. It is inextricably tied to your sales and inventory data as well, so all three must be combined and compared. This is not an easy process, but it is essential as a business owner if you want to fully understand your business and gain insights that will help you solve problems and grow your company.
To help vendors, we’ve put together a detailed (and free) whitepaper, “Use Traffic Data to Grow Your 1P Amazon Business.” This guide will break down everything you need to know about traffic, and how to combine it with sales and inventory data to take your company to the next level. It’s available for download below.
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Use Traffic Data to Grow Your 1P Amazon Business
This whitepaper offers a much more detailed discussion of Amazon traffic data. We created it for Amazon vendors who want to grow their business by making sound business decisions through key insights derived from traffic data. It includes everything you need to know about what glance views are, where to find this data, what insights you can gain by combining it with other VC reports, and what options are available if you don’t have time for manual data-gathering.
Download the free whitepaper: