Monitoring Share of Search: Automating IKEA Product Visibility Tracking

In e-commerce, being the "best" product doesn't matter if no one can find you. For brands selling on large marketplaces like IKEA, visibility is the primary currency. If your ergonomic office chair is buried on page five of the search results, your sales will reflect that invisibility, regardless of your price or build quality. This concept is known as Share of Search or Digital Shelf Analytics. It involves measuring how often and how prominently your products appear for specific keywords compared to your competitors. While standard web scraping focuses on what a product is (price or description), rank tracking focuses on where a product is. This guide walks through building a Python-based IKEA scraper specifically to track search rankings. You will learn how to monitor a product's position for target keywords and calculate visibility over time. Prerequisites & Setup You’ll need a basic understanding of Python and JSON data. We will use a few key libraries to handle requests and data o