Dive Brief:

• Amid mounting scrutiny from Congress about its relationship with third-party sellers, Amazon unveiled its new search analytics dashboard, which provides merchants enrolled in its Amazon Brand Registry with search performance data about their products, the company announced on Wednesday.
• The feature will be available to sellers in the U.S. in early 2022 for free for merchants enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, according to the announcement.
• With the "catalog" and "query" performance sections within the search analytics dashboard, sellers can see the top search terms associated with their products and understand their sales funnel for their products. Merchants can spot conversion issues and pinpoint when they lose consumers' attention, per the announcement.

Dive Insight:

Amazon already offered sellers a search terms report that provided insights such as click data, conversion share and search frequency rank, but the new search analytics dashboard aims to provide merchants more information about how their products are performing on the platform, the company said. The e-commerce giant also noted that it invested $18 billion last year in creating other resources for supporting brands on the platform. 

"The Search Analytics Dashboard will provide sellers with a wealth of anonymized data to better understand customers' interests and shopping choices for their products," Srikanth Thirumalai, vice president of search at Amazon, said in a statement. "This information will help sellers optimize their listings, inform inventory planning, plan their product development roadmap, and grow their business both on and off Amazon." 

Amazon has been introducing other tools in its effort to improve its marketplace functionality, and the effort appears to be paying off. The e-commerce platform began testing a feature to allow Amazon merchants to contact customers via email directly. In the company's second quarter earnings this year, revenue from services for its third-party marketplace sellers rose 38% to $25.1 billion, and marketplace growth outpaced the company's own retail sales growth. 

But as Amazon highlights its new features and touts the 1.8 million jobs created by its sellers, the company has also come under fire. U.S. representatives this week said that Amazon corporate officials, including Jeff Bezos "may have lied" under oath during the House's investigation of the company. The investigation, in part, delved into Amazon's relationship with its sellers.