TrackIQ's screens answer the questions TrackIQ anticipated. Sooner or later you have one it did not — a question that joins your Amazon data to your own margins, your own forecast, or your own spreadsheet.

**MCP** is the answer. It connects your TrackIQ data to the AI tools you already use, so the analysis happens wherever you work rather than only inside the product.

**Time: ten minutes to connect. Then it is just how you work.**

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-mcp-workflow-explainer-785689bb.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Eighty-five seconds on connecting it, and the questions worth asking it.*

## **Step 1 — Connect it**

**Settings → MCP & API Keys.**

![The MCP connection panel](/kb-assets/shot-mcp-steps-a9ceb0.png)

The setup is deliberately small: **paste one URL** into Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Cursor and it registers itself. No JSON config file, no credentials to copy, no key management.

Cursor is the exception worth knowing about — it does not yet support Dynamic Client Registration, so there is a **manual OAuth client** path for it. The **Advanced** section has per-client setup instructions.

See [**Installing TrackIQ MCP in Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/installing-trackiq-mcp-in-claude-desktop-and-cursor).

## **Step 2 — Understand what it can reach**

MCP exposes your TrackIQ data as tools an AI can call — campaigns, ad groups, keywords, targets, search terms, product performance, inventory, rank, SQP, DSP and AMC.

Two things follow from that:

**It reads the same data the screens do.** If a number is not in TrackIQ, MCP cannot invent it.

**What each plan unlocks differs.** See [**MCP Tiers: What Each Plan Unlocks**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/mcp-tiers-what-each-plan-unlocks) — and note the counter-intuitive one: the **MCP Only** plan includes Search Query Performance, Amazon DSP and AMC Cloud, which **Starter** does not.

## **Step 3 — Ask the questions the screens cannot**

This is the point of the exercise. The screens are better than MCP for anything they already do — they are faster, sorted, filtered and visual. MCP earns its place on questions that **join TrackIQ data to something else**:

**Your own margins.** TrackIQ knows spend and sales; it does not know your COGS. *"Pull last month's product performance and work out contribution after ads using the cost column in this spreadsheet."*

**Your own forecast.** *"Compare actual units against the forecast in this file and list the ten biggest misses."*

**Cross-source reasoning.** *"Take the queries with the worst cart share, look up which ASINs they land on, and check those ASINs' stock cover."*

**One-off shapes.** Anything you would otherwise export to CSV and pivot by hand.

## **Step 4 — Build the repeatable ones properly**

Once a question turns out to be worth asking every week, stop asking it conversationally.

**Write it down as a prompt you reuse.** The wording matters more than people expect — name the date range, the metrics, and what a good answer looks like. The same discipline as [**Asking Aria a Good Question**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/asking-aria-a-good-question).

**Keep the source data current.** If your margin spreadsheet is three months stale, so is every answer derived from it.

**Decide where the output goes.** An analysis nobody reads is worse than no analysis, because it cost something.

## **Step 5 — Watch who is querying what**

**Settings → MCP & API Keys → Call Logs.**

![Call logs, showing the question each tool asked](/kb-assets/shot-mcplogs-logs-adc4e5.png)

The call log records **the natural-language question the AI asked on your behalf**, not just an endpoint — with **Question**, **Tool Calls** and **Posted At**, its own date range, and Search, Filters, Manage Columns and Export.

That makes it a genuine audit trail rather than a debug log, and it is worth checking for two reasons:

**Verification.** If an answer looked wrong, the log shows what was actually asked and which tools ran. That is usually enough to see whether the question or the data was at fault.

**Access hygiene.** Per-brand API keys mean you can see which integration is pulling what. An unfamiliar pattern is worth a look.

See **MCP Call Logs: Seeing Which AI Tools Queried Your Data**.

## **When to use which**

| Question | Use |
|---|---|
| Something a screen already shows | **the screen** — faster and sorted |
| A daily number, on your phone | **Aria in Slack** |
| Joins TrackIQ data to your own data | **MCP** |
| A recurring report for other people | **a report template** |
| A one-off shape you would pivot by hand | **MCP** |

The mistake is using MCP for things the product already does well. It is not a faster dashboard; it is a way to ask questions the dashboard was never going to answer.

## **What not to expect**

**It cannot change anything.** MCP is read access. Bids, budgets and rules are changed in TrackIQ or in Amazon.

**It does not know your business.** It knows your Amazon data. Context about discontinued lines, promotions or supplier problems has to come from you.

**Check anything you will act on.** An AI reading your data can still reason badly about it. The same caution as [**Checking Aria's Work When an Answer Looks Wrong**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/checking-arias-work).

**Data freshness is TrackIQ's freshness.** MCP does not reach past TrackIQ into Amazon. See [**Where Your Data Comes From and How Fresh It Is**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/where-your-data-comes-from).

## **Related**

- [**What Is MCP, and Why It Matters**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/what-is-mcp-and-why-it-matters) — the concept.
- [**Installing TrackIQ MCP in Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/installing-trackiq-mcp-in-claude-desktop-and-cursor) — step 1 in detail.
- [**The Full MCP Tool Reference**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/the-full-mcp-tool-reference) — everything it can reach.
- [**MCP Tiers: What Each Plan Unlocks**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/mcp-tiers-what-each-plan-unlocks) — what your plan includes.