Amazon's Sales Impact Estimate: A Review

Amazon recently added a new metric to their Growth Opportunity Tool: Sales Impact Estimates. We wanted to see just exactly how useful this new metric was, so we did a deep dive. Check out our review below (If you're already familiar with the Growth Opportunity Tool, feel free to skip directly to How It's Going).

How It Started

If you’re not familiar with the Growth Opportunity Tool, allow us to give you some background. In early 2021, Amazon announced the launch of the Amazon Growth Opportunity Tool in Seller Central. (You can find it in the Growth section of the dropdown from the hamburger in the upper left part of your window.) One of the features is the “Product Recommendations” tab which provides suggestions around how to improve a seller’s product portfolio. The recommendations are updated daily and can range from Creating A+ Content, to Adding Video, to enrolling in FBA Small and Light, to Lowering Your Referral Fee.

To make the most of this tool, we recommend filtering the report by standard product characteristics like ASIN, Brand, or Category, or by Amazon features like High Value and High Potential. You’ll see relevant average stats for each product from the last 30 days like Daily Sessions, ASIN Conversion Rate, Category Conversion Rate, and Sales Rank. The report also includes the percent change compared to the previous 30 day period, so you can see if a metric is trending up or down. The real heart of this report is in the recommendations, though. Amazon provides a recommendation from the list above as well as an explanation for why this will improve a key metric.

Overall, the tool has been a great way for sellers to spot-check their products all in one place and make sure they’re implementing best practices across the board. It’s especially useful to new or less experienced sellers who might not be familiar with those best practices.

How It's Going

This month (January 2023) Amazon added a Potential Sales Lift metric under the column “Impact”. The number in this section is the dollar amount Amazon predicts your sales will increase in a 90-day period if you implement their recommendation.

In the above example, Amazon predicts an estimated sales lift of over $16,000 if we follow their recommendation. That’s a huge lift! (That recommendation is, of course, launching a sponsored display campaign, and the sales lift number does not include the cost of that campaign.) Amazon claims to generate the potential sales lift estimate by analyzing a sponsored display campaign’s performance for a ‘similar’ product, and applying that performance against your most recent 90 days. It doesn’t specify what a ‘similar’ product means, but our best guess is that it’s a product in the same category with a similar sales rank.

Now, as we were reviewing the recommendations and sales lift estimates, we couldn’t help but notice that nearly all of the recommendations expected to make a big impact were related to investing more in Amazon, either through ad campaigns or switching to FBA from FBM. The majority of experienced sellers are likely not running ads or using FBA for very specific reasons, so these predicted sales lift numbers aren’t that insightful. For other recommendations, like adding video, the expected increase in sales tends to be underwhelming at best (like for the product below - $60 over 90 days).

At the end of the day, we don’t see much added value in this new metric. The Growth Opportunity Tool is still a good tool to use if you’re looking for ways to further optimize your account, and if you haven’t taken a look at it yet, it’s worth spending some time in there. We wouldn’t necessarily recommend using the sales lift as the primary method you use to prioritize your optimizations, though. You know your business best and the historical data and experience you have will be more helpful for prioritization.

This Got Us Thinking...

We want to put some of these recommendations to the test. We’re working on a few case studies to measure the effectiveness of the recommendations and the accuracy of the sales lift numbers. We’re data nerds, what can we say? Follow Stoke on our socials to make sure you don’t miss the results!

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