The monthly ranking report for otto.de: what sellers and agencies should show

Who the report is for

A ranking report has two readers: the client or the management, who want to know whether the work is paying off, and the team, which derives the next steps from it. Both need the same numbers, but at different depths: the client reads the first page, the team the table behind it.

That is why a good report starts with a page that is understandable without prior knowledge, and attaches the details.

Page 1: four numbers and one sentence

• Keywords on page 1: "18 of 40 search terms are on page 1 (previous month: 14)." The most important number, because it sums up visibility in one value.
• Average position of the generic keywords, without brand terms.
• Improved / declined / same: the number of keywords that moved more than five places.
• Revenue or orders from Partner Connect for the same period.

Below it, one sentence that explains the numbers: "The gain comes from the beds category, where the new titles have been working since the 8th."

Page 2: winners, losers, causes

List the five keywords with the biggest improvement and the five with the biggest loss, each with product, position before, position after and a cause. The cause is the part that takes work and that makes the report valuable: "title changed on the 8th", "promotional price until the 15th", "competitor X new on page 1", "product was unavailable for four days".

Where you find no cause, write that down. An honest "cause unclear, we are watching it" is more credible than an invented explanation.

Fluctuation or change?

Positions on otto.de move a few places from day to day without anything having changed. A report that announces every movement loses its audience. Two rules help:

1. Compare the average of the month's last week with the average of its first week, not two single days.
2. Report only movements of more than five places or a page change as a change.

The rest is noise and belongs in the table in the appendix, not on page 1.

Page 3: measures for the next month

Every loser line should lead to a measure, every winner line to a lesson you transfer to other products. Phrase the measures so they can be checked in the next report: "add the size to the titles of the three children's beds by 5 November, goal: page 1 for 'children's bed 90x200' by month end."

This turns the report into the log of a series of tests, and the client sees month by month what was tried and what it brought.

The report in 20 minutes

With a rank tracker the effort is small: choose the period, download the report as PDF and CSV, annotate the five biggest movements in each direction with causes, write the sentence for page 1, note the measures. In MarktRank the report for any period gives position on the first and last day, change, page-1 counts and trend per keyword; clients with read access can download it themselves.

Frequently asked questions