3 Sponsored Products Ad Placements & How to Use Multipliers to Win Them

If you’ve ever run ads on Amazon, then you’re probably familiar with one of the most popular ad types on the platform: Sponsored Products. These cost-per-click ads feature a single product and, when clicked, take the searcher directly to the Product Detail Page for that product. While many advertisers are using Sponsored Product ads to promote their products, not all understand the different placement options for these advertisements, or, more importantly, how to better control which placement they get.

In today’s post, we’ll teach you about the three placements available for Sponsored Product ads as well as their pros, cons, and uses. We’ll walk you through how to know where your ads are showing and how they are performing based on their location. We’ll teach you how to better control where your ads are shown and why you should care about ad placement anyway! Finally, we’ll use a case study to demonstrate how leveraging ad placements can be a game changer for your ad strategy.

1. Top of Search

The most sought-after spot to land a Sponsored Product ad is on the first page of search results, at the top of the page. This is one of the first places customers searching for products will see, so if you want your product seen this is the place to be! Because Sponsored Products operate under a CPC model, the highest bid for a keyword will determine which product gets this premium placement. The search volume for a given keyword helps determine how many slots there are for ads at the Top of Search. If there is low search volume and traffic, fewer ads will be shown.

Conversely, if there is high search volume and traffic, more ads will be shown. If you’re not sure how to tell which products shown are ads and which are organic, you’re not alone! This is one of the benefits of Sponsored Product ads—they blend in with organic results quite well. However, the distinction under the photo of the product that says “Sponsored” can help you tell which products are ads and which are not.

Most brands and products typically see their best Sponsored Product return come from this placement, but it is also the most difficult placement to land, due to the competitiveness of the space. The cost-per-clicks tend to be the highest in this location. You might see only 5% of your ads served here. So, where do the rest of your ads show, then?

2. Rest of Search

Apart from the top of the first page, there are other places within search results where ads can be served. They can also be placed alongside and within the organic results further down the page and on subsequent pages of results. Lower bids that did not win premium placements can land ads in these spots. Any ad that is within or alongside organic results but not at the top of the first page is considered rest of search.

The main benefit to rest of search ads is that these placements are cheaper. The main drawback is that fewer customers will see them and click on them.

3. Product Detail Pages

The last place a Sponsored Product ad might show up is on Product Detail Pages. These ads show up underneath the product listing and typically showcase products similar to the one featured on the detail page.

This can be particularly useful if you are trying to land ads on a competitor’s product pages. This way, as customers are browsing those products, they can encounter an advertisement for your product. Product detail page placements typically cost less than Top of Search placements, but can definitely still provide value to you based on your strategy.

How do I know where my Sponsored Products ads are showing?

To know where your ads are showing and how they are performing based on those placements, simply run a Sponsored Products Placement Report in the reports section of the advertising portal. Once you’ve run the report, you will be able to see how many of your ads were delivered for each placement, how many were clicked, the average CPC, total orders, total spend, and total sales. In the example below, you can see that only 3% of the ads were shown at the Top of Search, but 71% of the sales came from this placement, as well as a return 3x higher than in any other placement.

With this information, what could be done to better control where the ads are served?

Controlling Sponsored Products ad placement with placement multipliers

Perhaps you’re trying to get a higher percentage of your ads to serve at the Top of Search. Maybe you’ve found that the return is greatest for you on Product Detail Pages because of the lower CPCs. Regardless of the reason or strategy, you can influence where your ads serve to some extent through the use of Placement Multipliers.

Placement Multipliers essentially tell Amazon that you are willing to bid higher—a certain percentage higher—for a specific placement. So, for example, if you are bidding $1 for the term “hair brush,” if you add a placement multiplier of 200% for the Top of Search, you are saying that for that placement, you are willing to increase your bid by 200%—from $1 to $3. You can use Placement Multipliers for both Top of Search and Product Detail Pages. We recently used this strategy to help one of our partners get more of their ads on the Top of Search.

Case study: RoAS up 23x, CTR up 78x

We work with a major supplements brand that was struggling with obtaining a strong non-branded Return on Ad Spend (RoAS). Looking into the placement report, we were able to determine that the magnitude of difference in RoAS between Top of Search and the other placements was extremely high. We decided to test what would happen by drastically decreasing bids across the board, but using a Placement Multiplier to increase the bids only in cases where they would serve at the Top of Search.

In three months, we saw that although impressions decreased on the whole, almost all ads that were served landed in the Top of Search premium placement. Spend also dropped because we stopped paying for placements that weren’t performing well. We were left with an incredible increase in efficiency in our campaigns, seeing the RoAS increase 23x and the click-through-rate increasing 78x! Clearly, knowing about Sponsored Product Placements plays long-term dividends.

Don’t waste any time or money—download a Placement Report today and start taking advantage of Placement Multipliers! Want to learn more about how Pattern’s advertising team works our magic? Reach out to get a demo today here.