Key Takeaways:
- There are three types of Amazon Sponsored Ads placement settings: top of search, product page, and rest of search.
- Top of search ad placement tends to perform the best with the highest average conversion rate and click-through rate.
- Top of search placements perform the best because they are positioned to attract customers with a higher buying intent.
- Top of search placement ads come at a higher cost, so always weigh the conversion rate benefit against the cost premium to generate TOS placements.
- Placement adjustments are used more as a balancing mechanism to adjust for the difference in performance between the placements.
- We use the underlying bids for the keyword or product targets to set our actual ACoS targets for each placement.
- We caution using dynamic up and down bidding with larger placement adjustment settings since these can quickly result in a higher cost per click and largely wasted spend.
- If you do not have any placement adjustments, boost your adjustment for top of search since these are proven to perform the best.
- If your product pages are performing better than rest of search, we recommend applying an adjustment to this placement.
Overview
Amazon has done an excellent job with its ads in making them look just like other product listings. It is quite amazing that about half of shoppers on Amazon cannot identify the difference between an advertised listing and an organic listing. So, where do Sponsored Product ads appear on Amazon? In this episode we talk about placements and where these show up for Amazon shoppers. We’ll also dive into placement adjustments, performance, and actions you can take to best utilize these features.
Where do Sponsored Ads appear on Amazon?
- Top of Search: Top of Search (TOS) is a placement type where the ads are seen at the top of the #1 search results page after searching for a product on Amazon. Among all the placement types, top of search tends to perform the best. We’ve seen a very high conversion rate, at an average of 19%, and click-through rate average of 3%.
- Product Pages: This placement type is where ads are typically shown in a carousel at the bottom of a product listing.
- Rest of Search: This placement type is for ads that aren’t shown at the top of the search results page but rather further down the page as you scroll.
*Note that the average conversion rate and click-through rate for product pages and rest of search placements are 9% and 1%, respectively.
Amazon Sponsored Ads Bidding by Placement
Amazon allows us to escalate bids within a campaign for both top of search and product page placements by using bidding by placement. This means we can take the bids we set for keywords and boost them to achieve certain placements. It’s important to note that we can only adjust bids for two (TOS and product page) out of the three placements within the campaign manager.
We tend to not use dynamic up and down bidding because we can lose control of the max bid, resulting in a very high cost per click, leading to a lot of wasted spend. Instead, we prefer using fixed bids or dynamic down bidding since this allows us to have a cap on our keyword or product target bid.
Strategy Tip for Ranking Campaigns
The key ranking factors for products are sales velocity and conversion rate. To boost your product ranking, launch a campaign with very specific parameters - high top of search setting & fixed bidding strategies. These results in a high amount of top of search impressions, which can drive more sales velocity at high conversion rates, which will increase overall product ranking.
Episode Highlights:
Sponsored Products Placement Types [01:50]
Bidding by placements [03:00]
How to balance ACoS across different placement types [07:32]
Interesting feature with bidding by placement [10:03]
How dynamic bidding up and down can affect your placement settings [ 13:58]
Why do top of search placements convert better? [16:26]
When and how to use top of search placements [19:25]
Key takeaways [22:51]
