Bol.com

MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you measure your findability on bol?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·22 July 2026·Temps de lecture 5 minutes

You only read your findability on bol correctly once you separate two things: are you ranking on your own strength or because you're paying for it (your pure organic position versus the weighted position), and how much of the market do you actually reach (your impressions and your Share of Voice). MarktMentor measures that pure data with its own system, including competitor positions. A lighter tool like Rylee mainly shows the weighted position bol returns directly, and misses that context.

Say your product sits at position 5 for an important keyword. Good news, you might think. But the question behind that matters more: are you there on your own strength, or because you're paying for it? And maybe even more important: how often are you seen at all? Your findability data lives or dies on those two questions: what your position is really worth and how many people you reach. Let's first take a step back to see what a ranking on bol actually says, and only then look at what one tool shows you more of than another.

What does a ranking on bol actually say?

That depends on how you measure that position. bol gives you a position per keyword in your seller account, but that's an average: your organic spot and your sponsored spot mixed together, weighted by how often each was shown. As a basis you can do something with that. The downside is that the figure is contaminated, because your ads count towards it. And ads are something you can steer: by bidding and paying you buy a better spot. So that weighted position mainly tells you what happened on that day, and hides how dependent you are on advertising. What it doesn't tell you is where you'd stand if you stopped advertising for a moment. More on this distinction is covered in rankings on bol: organic versus combined.

Why you steer on your organic position

That exact question, where do I stand without ads, is the important one. Your pure organic position is the spot you occupy on your own strength. With it you can test: if I turn off my ads today, am I still visible? That's why the bigger sellers mainly steer on their organic position. For them, the sponsored spot is a means, not a goal: you advertise to get going, but the end goal is a strong organic position that holds up once you scale back advertising. A weighted position doesn't show that end goal, your organic position does. That's why you want to be able to measure it separately.

Position isn't everything: your impressions and your Share of Voice

And then there's something that's often forgotten, even though it may matter more than your position: your impressions, in other words how often you were actually shown. Your position tells you where you rank, your impressions tell you how many people actually saw you. In the past bol didn't release that impression data, so sellers used their position as the best approximation. By now bol does provide impressions, and with that you can steer even more precisely.

Only a number of impressions by itself doesn't say much. You want to know how many you got out of how many you could have gotten. That's your Share of Voice: the ratio between your impressions on a keyword and all impressions on that keyword combined. You want to grow that step by step towards as large a share as possible. The nuance lies in where those impressions come from, because you're shown both through ads and through your organic position. In the beginning your Share of Voice leans heavily on advertising, because you need to keep advertising to be visible. As your organic position grows, your impressions shift along with it towards organic and you can scale back advertising. That's why you're best off looking at Share of Voice and organic position together: you want your organic position to rise while your Share of Voice stays level or grows along with it.

How does MarktMentor measure your findability?

MarktMentor measures your pure organic position, separate from sponsored, per keyword and per lowest category, along with the historical development. You also see your Share of Voice and what share of your impressions comes from advertising, so you make exactly that distinction between what you achieve on your own strength and what you buy. The mobile app is the leading channel here, since most purchases happen there. Everything is tracked automatically once you connect your shop, in the My Rankings tool.

And it doesn't stop at your own numbers. You also see your competitors' positions, including their organic position, so you can figure out what strategy they've followed, learn from it and apply it yourself. The same insights come back in the product radar, which lets you track entire markets. How you turn those insights into a better position is covered in findability on bol: how it works and how you improve it and the bol algorithm and ranking higher in search results.

Where does the difference with a lighter tool come from?

It lies in what runs behind the scenes. As far as is publicly observable, a lighter tool mainly shows the weighted position, that mixed figure of organic and sponsored, and not your pure organic spot. That's not unwillingness, it's what you can retrieve directly from bol. Measuring your pure organic position can't be done with one simple query: for that you need to combine multiple data sources and keep monitoring the positions yourself, which requires a whole system underneath. MarktMentor has built that, and on top of that also simply retrieves the positions a lighter tool retrieves. That's why we can show the distinction between organic and sponsored, plus the competitor positions and your Share of Voice, while a tool that only passes through what bol returns misses that Share of Voice entirely.

The consequence for you: if you use a ranking tool that only shows the weighted position, you're partly looking at contaminated data and can't do the analysis on your pure organic position. It's no coincidence that serious sellers work with that less in practice.

From measuring to steering: what do you do with those positions?

Measuring is nice, but the question is what you do with it. The main use is your advertising strategy. Based on your organic positions you determine where you scale up your ads and where you scale them back, because you already rank strongly there organically. The good part is that MarktMentor also has the advertising features for that, letting you automate it, steered on your pure data. This way you track the positions on one hand, and immediately steer based on your organic spot instead of a contaminated average on the other. Steering on the right data is the foundation for doing it well, and that's exactly what you can't do with a tool that doesn't have that pure data.

A difference in approach, not in price

The underlying difference is therefore the architecture. A lighter tool retrieves data and shows it, data that at its core you could also request from bol yourself. MarktMentor has a bigger system underneath that monitors the positions itself, tracks the market, and can therefore give you the pure organic position, the competitor positions and your Share of Voice. That's more to build and maintain, and Rylee accordingly positions itself as a budget solution. At entry level the difference is small, so price isn't what it comes down to. But if you want to keep optimising and competing in the long run, you need that pure data and that context, and that's exactly what a pass-through tool doesn't offer.

In short

• A ranking only means something once you know whether it's an organic or a weighted (mixed) position.
• You steer on your organic position, because it shows whether you stay visible when you're not advertising. That's your end goal.
• Your impressions tell you how often you're seen, and your Share of Voice which part of the market you capture. You grow that, increasingly from organic.
• MarktMentor measures the pure organic position, your Share of Voice and the competitor positions with its own system, and lets you advertise on it in an automated way.
• Rylee mainly shows the weighted position bol returns directly and misses the Share of Voice, because it passes through the data instead of monitoring it itself. The difference lies in the approach, not the price.

Steering findability is one of the things you need to master to succeed on bol. The complete overview is in what you need to succeed on bol.

Read more:

• Rankings on bol: organic versus combined
• Findability on bol: how it works and how you improve it
• The bol algorithm and ranking higher in search results

Compare MarktMentor and Rylee by feature

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• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you grow profitably on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you optimise your listing on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you advertise on bol?

The comparison with Rylee is based on publicly observable information at the time of writing.