What You Can Learn From the Amazon Sales Rank
Archive, December 2010. The original methodology piece: what the rank number represents and why a single reading tells you almost nothing.
The Amazon sales rank can be a fascinating trove of valuable information - practically indispensable. We'll admit though, checking the sales rank by yourself from time to time, while interesting, is not that helpful. But don't despair...
Anyone who has written a book (or a song, or made a product of some sort) will have taken a moment here and there (and if we're honest, a little more than that) to search their Amazon product page in order to check the latest Amazon sales rank. And why not? After all, if the sales rank has halved overnight then that's a good indication that a few more dollars are winging their way to you right now.
That's all good and well, but there are a whole host of services out there who can track your product's sales rank. Doing this is a good first step, because now you don't have to limit yourself to viewing small snapshots of the rank, you can see its whole history laid out before you in glorious detail. Graphs are quite helpful here - you'll be needing them to make sense of the numbers.
So now you can see how your sales rank changes over time. What else could you possibly want to know? What about how your competitors are faring in comparison? For this you need to be able to track a bunch of products at a time and view them all together in a graph.
Is there anything else it can tell you? Sure, what happens if you do a live radio interview and the next day your sales rank hasn't changed. Or, better yet, someone blogs about your book and immediately your sales rank dips like crazy. In this case the sales rank has told you which event was better at promoting your products. So it's a good marketing intelligence tool.
That's got to be it, doesn't it? Nope, there's more that the sales rank can tell you. In the right hands (i.e. RankTracer's) it can also provide the means to derive accurate sales estimates. Actual sales figures are incredibly powerful because now you can get a good grasp of what the sales rank actually indicates. Combine this with powerful graphing, reports, alerts and all the other goodies that RankTracer provides, and you got yourself a full-featured sales and competitive analysis machine!
At the very least, you should be using RankTracer to keep track of how many extra sales we generate for you...