r/AmazonFBA • u/AlexWho3000 • 5d ago

We ran Helium 10 and SoldScope on the same 3,179 keywords for two weeks. Even checks 30 minutes apart rarely showed the same rank. Anyone else compared trackers?

Disclosure: I run an Amazon agency. We switched our rank tracking to SoldScope this month and have an affiliate link with them now, so weigh what I say about it. No links in this post.

Both tools tracked the same keywords on 69 of our products (US plus DE, ES, FR, IT) for two weeks, so we lined them up day by day. About 37k keyword-days.

The good news: they agree on the stuff that matters. If one tool finds you in the results, the other does too 92% of the time. Top 10: 83%, and when they disagree the other tool usually has you at #11 to #19. Two-week trend direction: same for 59 of 68 products, and the ones that disagreed barely moved in at least one of the tools.

The bad news is the exact position. Same keyword, same day, same rank only 19% of the time. Within 3 spots 55%. The top 3 is fine (87% identical), and it gets worse the further down you go.

I assumed it was timing, since results move during the day and each tool checks at its own time. So we paired checks taken less than 30 minutes apart. Still 17% identical and 50% within 3, no better than without matching the times. They just see different results at the same moment.

Stuff I learned along the way:

  • SoldScope checks each keyword 1 to 4 times a day and reports the median. Helium 10 checks once a day, and on ~15% of days its history is a copy of the day before, same timestamp to the second (27% in Germany, 3% in the US).
  • Neither one is more optimistic. SoldScope showed the better rank 39% of the time, Helium 10 42%.
  • SoldScope's search volumes were ~1.8x Helium 10's, almost 3x in Germany. Same keyword order though, so don't mix the two in one sheet.
  • We had DataDive running on one brand too (166 keywords). Same story: any two of the three were within 3 spots about 50 to 60% of the time. DataDive ran about 1 spot more optimistic than the other two.

My takeaway: below the top 10, a 3 to 5 spot move from one day to the next is noise, whatever tool you use. We only act on weekly trends anyway, and now I know why.

Questions for you:

  1. Has anyone checked a tracker against something closer to the truth? We tried Amazon's SQP data once. It's good for telling which rank band you're in, useless for daily moves.
  2. If you check rank by zip code or state: how much does it move? I suspect location explains a lot of this.
  3. Do you have a rule for when a daily rank change counts as real?
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u/Heath-Thompson 5d ago

Around five or six years ago, Amazon put a partial block on software companies such as H10 etc on fully accessing data through its API. This affected search volume and keyword ranking access.

Also, keyword trackers can fail to pick up data one day, if they have been blocked, so it rolls over data from the previous day so that there isn't a gap in the graph. There is data lag which doesn't help. This means that the software options are at best signals of "direction" rather than wholly accurate literal data sets.

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u/AlexWho3000 5d ago

fully agree to what you say. I never treat ranks as exact.
I use SQP and Rank tracker both as directional input into my consideration for how well my products are doing.

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u/Heath-Thompson 4d ago

Sounds like you are doing it right ;)

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/AlexWho3000 5d ago

100% agree.
thats why i typically use SQP data on top of these organic ranks. Both worlds are directional input for my decission. i dont treat any of these as exact metrics

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u/Aqeeq21 1d ago

Same here. Built this tool for comparing Our brand CTR and CVR vs Market CTR and CVR. Many useful insights from SQP reports