Use Cases: Paid Search & Sponsorship

Identify Competitors Conquesting Your Branded Keywords

Use this workflow when you want to see exactly which competitor brands are bidding on your brand terms — and understand how aggressively they're doing it.

Steps:

1. Open Sponsorship Activity Tracker and filter to your branded keywords — enter your brand name terms in the keyword filter. Look at the brand-level activity breakdown: which competitor brands are appearing on your branded keywords, how frequently, and in which ad types.
2. Cross-reference with Competitive Sponsored Search Intelligence — this is a hidden report; access it via the search bar. Filter to the same branded keyword set and enter your brand plus the top competitors you identified in step 1. The keyword-level breakdown shows you ad type activity by brand — useful for seeing whether competitors are using Sponsored Product, Featured Products, or Video to conquest your terms.
3. Note the trend over time in Sponsorship Activity Tracker — if competitor activity on your branded terms has increased recently, this often signals a deliberate conquesting campaign worth flagging to your paid search team.

What you'll know when you're done: A clear picture of who is bidding on your brand terms, at what frequency, and in which ad formats — the direct input for a branded keyword defense strategy.

Find Non-Branded Keywords Where Competitors Advertise But You Don't

Use this workflow when you want to find whitespace in your paid strategy — keywords where competitors are running active sponsorship but your brand has no presence.

Steps:

1. Open Competitive Sponsored Search Intelligence and filter to your category keywords — this is a hidden report; access it via the search bar. Enter your brand and 2–3 key competitors. Review the keyword-level table and identify keywords where competitor brands show high sponsorship activity but your brand shows none or very low activity.
2. Cross-reference with Sponsorship Activity Tracker filtered to those specific keywords — this confirms the competitive activity level and shows you which ad types competitors are using on those keywords. Keywords where competitors run multiple ad types (Sponsored Product + Video, for example) are heavily invested terms worth evaluating.
3. Check your brand's organic rank on those keywords via Organic Rank Tracker — if your brand already has a decent organic position on a keyword where competitors are advertising heavily, that's a prime candidate for paid investment: you have proof of relevance and a competitive reason to defend the position.

What you'll know when you're done: A shortlist of high-priority keywords where competitors are running paid campaigns but your brand is absent — with enough context to evaluate whether each gap is worth closing.

Identify Ad Type Gaps in Your Keyword Coverage

Use this workflow when you want to go beyond keyword-level paid coverage and understand where you're missing specific ad formats that competitors are using on the same keywords.

Steps:

1. Open Sponsorship Activity Tracker and filter to your brand and a relevant keyword set — note: filtering to your own brand shows only your activity. To see competitive context, add the top keywords directly or pull them from Brand KPIs. Review the per-ad-type activity breakdown for each keyword.
2. Identify keywords where you're active in Sponsored Product but absent in Featured Products or Brand Video Ads — these are your ad type gaps. Compare this to competitor activity on the same keywords — if competitors are running Video or Featured Products on a keyword where you're running Sponsored Product only, they may be capturing more page 1 real estate.
3. Prioritize gaps by keyword importance — use search volume from Keyword Trends or Keyword List to weight which ad type gaps matter most. A Video Ads gap on a high-volume keyword is a higher priority than the same gap on a low-volume term.

What you'll know when you're done: A keyword-level map of your ad type coverage gaps — and which formats competitors are exploiting on your most important keywords.

Track Sponsorship Trends Leading Into a Key Selling Season

Use this workflow when you're planning paid strategy ahead of a major retail event or seasonal peak — using historical data to time your ramp-up correctly.

Steps:

1. Open Sponsorship Activity Tracker with a window leading up to last year's event — set your date range to the 8–12 weeks prior to the event date from the previous year. Review how sponsorship activity built week over week across the category and on your target keywords. Note when the ramp-up started and how steep it was.
2. Identify the highest-contested keywords in the pre-event window — look at keyword-level activity and sort by peak sponsorship intensity. These keywords will be the most expensive and most competitive during the event itself — your team needs to be active before competition peaks.
3. Cross-reference with Promo Analyzer for the same event from the prior year — this gives you the full picture: which brands dominated search visibility during the event and what badge and sponsorship strategies they used. Use both to build your timing and keyword targeting playbook.

What you'll know when you're done: A clear view of when competitive bidding starts ramping on your target keywords before a key event — so you can get in front of the competition rather than reacting to it.

Measure Whether Paid Investment Is Lifting Organic Performance

Use this workflow when you need to demonstrate — or investigate — whether sponsorship activity is generating a halo effect on organic rank.

Steps:

1. Open Sponsorship Impact Tracker and set a 13-week window — filter to your brand and a category or keyword set where you've been running paid campaigns. The report overlays your sponsorship activity trend against your organic search visibility trend on the same chart.
2. Look for a lagged correlation between paid and organic curves — a rising paid curve followed by a rising organic curve with a 2–4 week lag is the classic halo signal. This happens because consistent paid placement drives click-through and conversion signals that the retailer algorithm interprets as relevance, which lifts organic rank.
3. If the organic curve isn't responding, cross-reference with Organic Rank Tracker — confirm which specific keywords are and aren't moving. A halo effect is often keyword-specific: it tends to appear most on the keywords where the paid campaign is most active.

What you'll know when you're done: Data-backed evidence of whether paid investment is supporting organic rank growth — and if not, which keywords to investigate further.

Benchmark Your Brand's Sponsorship Investment Against the Category

Use this workflow when you need to put a brand's paid investment in context — understanding whether they're over- or under-indexed on sponsorship relative to the category.

Steps:

1. Open Brand KPIs & Benchmarks and filter to your brand and category — review the Sponsorship Activity percentile score. This shows where your brand sits relative to all brands in the category, expressed as a percentile.
2. Compare the sponsorship percentile against the organic search percentile — a brand in the 70th percentile for organic visibility but the 30th percentile for sponsorship activity is under-investing in paid given the organic foundation it has. A brand in the inverse position may be using paid to compensate for weak organic content.
3. Use this framing to prioritize the recommendation — an under-investing brand with strong organic is the clearest case for incremental paid investment. An over-investing brand with weak organic has a content problem that more spend won't solve.

What you'll know when you're done: A percentile-based benchmark that contextualizes a brand's sponsorship investment against the category — and a clear narrative for why the current level is appropriate, too low, or compensating for a different problem