Four shares run through every SQP screen, and they are the same four at every level — account, product, and individual query. Together they describe a funnel; individually each one answers a different question.

Once you can read the four as a sequence, most SQP diagnosis is a matter of finding where the sequence breaks.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-four-shares-explainer-32917e06.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? A hundred and six seconds on reading four shares as one funnel, and the two traps in reporting them.*

## **The four**

![Market share, with all four funnel lines](/kb-assets/shot-sqp-market-share-e73da4.png)

Every share is **yours as a proportion of the whole market's** for the same queries:

| Share | Counts | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| **Impression share** | how often you were shown | are you visible? |
| **Click share** | how often you were clicked | are you chosen? |
| **Cart-add share** | how often you reached the basket | does the page work? |
| **Purchase share** | how often you were bought | does the sale close? |

The **Market share** panel plots all four as lines against search-volume bars, and the table beneath gives the raw figures.

![The weekly table: market and brand at each stage, with the share between](/kb-assets/shot-sqp-funnel-weeks-dcbf4c.png)

The table is the clearest statement of what a share actually is. Each stage gets **three columns** — the market's number, your number, and the share between them. Impressions, clicks, cart-adds, purchases, week by week, with a total row.

**The middle column is named for the scope you are on.** On **Account** it reads *BRAND*; on **Products** it reads *PRODUCT*. Same arithmetic, different denominator population. See [**Account vs Products: Two Ways to Read SQP**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/account-vs-products-sqp).

## **Read them as a sequence, not four numbers**

The four are cumulative. Each one starts from the population the previous stage produced, so a weakness early carries forward whether or not the later stages are healthy.

**So find the first stage where your share drops relative to the one before it.** That step is the problem; everything after it is a symptom.

| Where the drop is | What it means | The fix lives in |
|---|---|---|
| impression share already low | you are not being shown | rank, bids, budget |
| impression → **click** | shown and not chosen | image, title, price, rating |
| click → **cart** | visited and not added | detail page, content, reviews |
| cart → **purchase** | added and not bought | price, delivery, stock, Buy Box |

**Shares that hold flat across all four are good news**, even if the absolute number is small. It means you convert like the market and simply need more visibility — which is the one case where spending more is the right response.

## **Percentage points, not percent**

The single most common reporting error on these screens.

Share changes are shown in **pp** — percentage points. A click share moving from 2.12% to 2.28% is **+0.16 pp**. Describing that as "up 7.5%" is technically a relative change but reads as a much bigger move than it is, and in a board pack it is misleading.

**Report shares in pp.** If somebody wants the relative figure, give both.

## **Small shares are normal**

A single-digit share — often a low single-digit one — is ordinary for most sellers on most queries. The market includes **every seller** on that search, including large ones you do not compete with in any meaningful sense.

So do not read the absolute number as a grade. Read:

**Direction.** Is it moving, and which way?

**Consistency across the four.** Where does it break?

**Rates against market**, which the query-level funnel gives you. A 2% click-through rate against a market at 1.5% is a listing that wins the click, whatever your share of the category. See [**Search Query Cart Analysis: Why a Query Doesn't Convert**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/search-query-cart-analysis).

## **Cart-add share is the underused one**

Impression, click and purchase get the attention. Cart-add sits between click and purchase and isolates a stage most reporting skips entirely.

**A healthy cart share with a poor purchase share** is a narrow, tractable problem: people wanted it, put it in the basket, and something at checkout stopped them. Price, delivery promise, availability, Buy Box.

**A poor cart share with a healthy click share** is the detail page. They arrived, looked, and left without ever intending to buy.

Those two get treated as the same problem constantly, and they are not.

## **Where the same four appear**

| Screen | Scope |
|---|---|
| **SQP → Account** | your brand, all tracked queries |
| **SQP → Products** | one ASIN, its queries |
| **Query funnel** (click a query) | one query, with **rates** against market |
| **Market share table** | week by week, market and brand side by side |

The query funnel is the most useful of the four because it adds the market's **rate** at each step, not just your share. See **Account vs Products: Two Ways to Read SQP**.

## **What not to conclude**

**Share is not conversion rate.** Share compares you to the market; a rate compares outcomes to inputs. You can hold share while your conversion falls, if the whole market falls with you.

**Impression share is not rank.** It is how often you appeared, paid and organic combined.

**Weekly cohorts.** SQP reports whole weeks. Comparing an arbitrary date range against another is how phantom movements appear. See [**SQP Is Weekly: Reading Week Cohorts Correctly**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/sqp-is-weekly-reading-week-cohorts).

**Purchase share does not include everything you sold.** Only purchases tied to the tracked queries.

## **Related**

- [**Understanding Search Query Performance**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-search-query-performance) — the dashboard overall.
- [**Account vs Products: Two Ways to Read SQP**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/account-vs-products-sqp) — the same shares at two scopes.
- [**Search Query Cart Analysis: Why a Query Doesn't Convert**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/search-query-cart-analysis) — the four with market rates attached.
- [**Work out which queries lose you the sale at the cart**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/queries-that-lose-the-sale) — the playbook.