Exporting ranking data: CSV for Excel and Google Sheets

What a ranking export contains

A ranking export is a long table in which every row is one check of one product for one search term on one day. The key columns:

• Product: name and a unique identifier, so variations with the same name stay distinguishable.
• Keyword: the search term checked.
• Date of the check.
• Overall, organic and ad position: where the product stood overall, among the organic results and among the ads. What separates the three values is explained in understanding otto.de rankings.
• Page: with 120 products per results page (as of October 2026), positions 1 to 120 are on page 1.

MarktRank exports rankings as CSV. Because every check is one row, you can analyse the table freely with filters and pivot tables.

View 1: change per keyword versus last week

1. Create a pivot table: rows = product and keyword, columns = calendar week, values = organic position (minimum or the week's last value).
2. Add a "change" column: last week's position minus this week's. A positive value means the product moved up.
3. Sort by change and colour movements that cross a page boundary.

This view answers "what moved this week?". Small movements of one to three places are normal on otto.de, see ranking fluctuations on otto.de.

View 2: page-1 share per product

For each product, count how many of its keywords were on page 1 in the latest check and divide by its number of keywords. In Excel and Google Sheets this works with COUNTIFS on the page column.

The page-1 share is more robust than an average position, because a single "not found" does not distort it. Why page 1 is the boundary that matters most is covered in page 1 on otto.de.

View 3: the client-ready table

Clients do not want a pivot table, they want a page they can read in a minute. What works:

• one row per product with its three to five most important keywords,
• current organic position, last week or last month, change shown as an arrow,
• an "ad" column if the product is promoted with Sponsored Product Ads,
• below it, two sentences explaining what moved and why.

The structure of a full monthly report is described in the monthly ranking report. If you also want to bring in revenue data from OTTO Partner Connect, its exports are covered in OTTO Partner Connect reports.

Common mistakes when importing and analysing

• Broken umlauts: Excel often does not open a CSV file as UTF-8 on double-click, so "Gartenstühle" turns into gibberish. Import via Data → From Text/CSV and choose UTF-8. Google Sheets usually detects UTF-8 by itself.
• Semicolon or comma: German Excel expects a semicolon as separator, English Excel a comma. If they do not match, everything lands in column A. Set the separator during the import.
• "Not found" as a number: entering a missing ranking as 0 or 999 distorts every average. Leave the cell empty and count "not found" separately.
• Averaging unequal keywords: a mean that weights the head term and a rare long-tail term equally says little. Analyse important keywords separately or weight them deliberately.
• Dates as text: after importing, check that the date column was recognised as dates, otherwise pivot tables sort incorrectly.

When a spreadsheet beats a dashboard, and when it does not

A spreadsheet pays off when you combine rankings with your own data (revenue, margin, ad spend), need a report in the client's layout, or want to answer a one-off question the dashboard does not ask.

For daily monitoring, the dashboard is quicker: it shows the history without an import, and new checks appear straight away. A rule of thumb: look at the dashboard daily and export weekly or monthly for the report. Which metrics suit a weekly rhythm is shown in KPIs for OTTO sellers.

Frequently asked questions