Ranking drop on otto.de: find the cause in five steps

1. Is the drop real?

A single check is a snapshot. Positions move between two checks even when neither you nor your competitors changed anything. Before you touch the listing, answer three questions:

• Do several consecutive checks show the drop, or only the latest one?
• Does it affect several search terms of the product, or just one?
• Is it large enough to matter, such as moving from page 1 to page 2?

A drop for one term on one day is usually normal movement (more in Ranking fluctuations on otto.de). A drop across several checks and several terms almost always has a cause you can find.

2. Did something change in the listing itself?

The most common causes sit with your own product, and they are the quickest to check. Open OTTO Partner Connect and go through:

• Status: is the product online? A product that is not online disappears from the search. How to read the status is covered in Product not visible on otto.de?
• Stock: was stock at 0 in the last few days, even briefly? See Stock and availability on OTTO.
• Price: has your price changed, for example through a repricing tool or the end of a promotion?
• Variations: were variations newly created, split or merged?
• Content: were title, category, attributes or images changed, by you, an agency or an import?

Put the date of every change next to the position history. If the drop coincides with a change, you have your first suspect.

3. Did ads move?

otto.de mixes labelled Sponsored Product Ads into the search results. A rank tracker such as MarktRank therefore measures three values per search term: the overall position (with ads), the organic position (without ads) and the ad position.

• Only the overall position falls, the organic one stays the same: there are more ads in front of you than before. Your listing has lost nothing.
• Your own ad position disappears: check budget, bids and run time of your campaign.
• The organic position falls: the cause lies in the listing, with competitors or in demand. Continue with step 4.

The difference between the three values is explained in Understanding Otto rankings: overall, organic and ad position.

4. Did competitors move?

Your position is always relative. When another product climbs, you slip down, even if you did nothing wrong. Search your most important term on otto.de and compare the products ahead of you with how things looked before the drop:

• New products: are there offers that were not there before?
• Prices: has a direct competitor cut their price?
• Badges: do products ahead of you now carry labels such as a bestseller badge, or more reviews?

5. Are season or search behaviour changing?

If listing, ads and competitors look unremarkable, check demand. Before holidays, at the change of season or during large promotion periods, shoppers search differently and the result lists reshuffle. A product that sat at the top in summer can give way to seasonal products in autumn.

If you have the history, compare with the same period of the previous year. Also check whether shoppers are using a new term: let the tracker suggest new search terms for the product and add the relevant ones to your tracking.

What to do next

1. Clear cause: fix exactly that point, such as restocking, resetting the price or reverting the title change. Do not change other things at the same time.
2. Cause in ads: decide whether you want to win back the overall position with your own ads. The organic position stays separate from that.
3. Cause in competitors: compare price, title, images and reviews with the new product ahead of you, and improve where you are weaker.
4. No cause found: watch for two weeks with daily checks before changing anything.

In every case, note the date and the action. That is the only way to see later in the history whether the correction worked.

Frequently asked questions