The Rank Tracker records, for every keyword and product in a project, where that product appeared in Amazon's search results on a given day.

[Watch the rank walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-rank-explainer-c50a38b3.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Fifty-seven seconds on reading rank correctly.*

![The Rank Tracker headline figures](/kb-assets/shot-rank-kpis-7bd758.png)

## **Two ranks, recorded separately**

**Organic rank** is your position in the unpaid results. It reflects relevance, sales history and conversion — the things you influence slowly.

**Sponsored rank** is your position among the sponsored placements for that keyword. It reflects your bidding, and it can change within a day.

They are tracked independently, and one does not imply the other. A product can rank well organically for a keyword you are not bidding on at all, and vice versa.

## **Lower is better**

Rank is a position, not a score. **Rank 1 is the top of the results.** A product moving from rank 12 to rank 4 has improved.

This catches people out when sorting: sorting a rank column ascending puts your *best* positions first.

## **A blank rank is not rank zero**

If a cell is empty, the product **was not found within the depth that was checked** that day. It does not mean the product ranked zero, and it does not mean it was delisted.

The practical reading of a blank is “not visible for this keyword”. That is meaningful information — a product that used to appear and now does not has lost visibility — but it is different from a numeric drop.

A product may also have a blank **sponsored** rank simply because you were not running ads against that keyword that day. Sponsored data is naturally sparser than organic.

![The rank project list](/kb-assets/shot-rank-projects-29006f.png)

## **Only tracked keywords are recorded**

The Rank Tracker records what you have asked it to record. A keyword that is not part of a rank project has no history, and adding it today does not backfill yesterday.

This is worth planning: decide the keywords that actually matter for a product and add them early, because the value of rank data is in its history.

## **Your products and your competitors'**

A rank project can track ASINs that are not yours. Each tracked product is marked as either your own listing or an external one added purely for comparison.

That makes a project a genuine head-to-head: the same keywords, the same day, your position and theirs side by side. When you are losing ground on a keyword, this is what tells you whether it is because a specific competitor gained.

## **Rank tells you position, not demand**

The Rank Tracker does not tell you how many people search a keyword. Ranking first for something nobody searches is worth nothing.

For search volume, use **Search Query Performance**, which reports market-wide impressions per query. The two together are the useful pair: SQP tells you which keywords are worth winning, Rank Tracker tells you whether you are winning them.

## **Related**

- [**Reading Visibility, Average Position and Top 10**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/visibility-average-position-top-10) — the tiles above the split.
- [**Rank Tracker: Creating Your First Project**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/rank-tracker-creating-a-project) — setting tracking up.
- [**Rank Data Shows Blank**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/rank-data-shows-blank) — when one side is empty.