Amazon PPC Placements: How to Optimize for Sponsored Products & Sponsored Brands

Your Amazon ad campaigns feel like a black box. You’re spending money, but you’re not sure where it’s going or how to improve.

One area often overlooked is ad placements. Most sellers just set their bids and forget about it. But placements – where your ads appear on Amazon – can significantly impact your ACOS and overall profitability.

In this article, we’ll break down how to optimize your Amazon PPC placements for both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Let’s get started.

Understanding Amazon PPC Placements

Amazon placements dictate where your ads show up to shoppers. There are three main categories:

• Top of Search (First Page): Ads appear at the very top of the search results page.
• Product Pages: Ads appear on product detail pages, often under the “Sponsored Products related to this item” or “Customers who bought this item also bought” sections.
• Rest of Search: Ads appear throughout the rest of the search results pages (typically pages 2 and beyond).

Why do placements matter? Because visibility and conversion rates vary significantly. Top of Search usually gets the highest click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate, but it’s also the most expensive. Product Pages can be cheaper, but might not convert as well for certain products.

Sponsored Products: Placement Optimization

For Sponsored Products campaigns, you can adjust your bids based on placement performance. Here’s how:

Finding Placement Data

1. Navigate to Your Campaign: Open the specific Sponsored Products campaign you want to optimize.
2. Go to Placements Tab: In the campaign dashboard, click the “Placements” tab.
3. Review the Data: You’ll see metrics like impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and ACOS for each placement (Top of Search and Product Pages). Rest of Search is rolled into Product Pages, unfortunately.

Analyzing Placement Performance

Before you start blindly cranking bids, analyze the data carefully.

• ACOS is Key: Focus on ACOS for each placement. Is your ACOS significantly higher on Product Pages than Top of Search? That’s a sign you might be overbidding on Product Pages.
• Conversion Rate Matters: Also, compare conversion rates. If Top of Search has a much higher conversion rate, it might be worth paying a premium for those placements.

Adjusting Bids for Sponsored Products

Here’s the process for adjusting your bids based on placement performance:

1. Access Placement Adjustments: Within your Sponsored Product campaign, go to “Settings,” then “Campaign Bidding Strategy,” and select “Adjust bids by placement.” This unlocks placement bid modifiers.
2. Set Placement Multipliers: Now, you can set a percentage multiplier for Top of Search and Product Pages. For example, if you set a Top of Search multiplier of +20%, Amazon will increase your bid by 20% for those placements. Set a Product Page multiplier of -10%, Amazon will decrease your bid by 10% for those placements.

Example Scenario: Sponsored Products

Let’s say you’re selling coffee mugs.

• Top of Search: ACOS of 25%, Conversion Rate of 8%
• Product Pages: ACOS of 40%, Conversion Rate of 3%

In this case, you might increase your Top of Search multiplier by 15-20% to capture more of those high-converting placements. Simultaneously, you could decrease your Product Pages multiplier by 10-15% to reduce wasted spend.

Placement Optimization Best Practices

• Start Small: Don’t make drastic changes all at once. Incrementally adjust your multipliers and monitor the results.
• Consider Product Type: Some products perform better on Product Pages than others. For example, complementary products might do well on related product detail pages.
• Regularly Review: Placement performance can change over time. Check your data at least weekly and adjust your bids accordingly.

Sponsored Brands: Placement Optimization

Sponsored Brands campaigns offer slightly different placement options. You don’t have as much granular control as with Sponsored Products, but there are still ways to optimize.

Sponsored Brands Placement Options

• Amazon Search Results: Your ad appears in relevant search results, typically at the top, middle, or bottom of the page.
• Product Detail Pages (Beta): Some Sponsored Brands campaigns now have access to product detail page placements. This is still in beta, so availability may vary.

Sponsored Brands Optimization Strategies

Since you can’t directly adjust bids by placement for Sponsored Brands (except for the new beta), focus on these strategies:

• Keyword Selection: Target relevant keywords that align with the placements where your ads are most likely to appear and convert. Review your search term reports regularly!
• Creative Testing: Experiment with different headlines, images, and product selections to see what resonates best with shoppers in different placements.
• Landing Page Optimization: Make sure your landing page (Amazon Store or product detail page) is optimized for conversions. A poor landing page will waste clicks, no matter where your ad appears.

Example Scenario: Sponsored Brands

Imagine you’re selling protein powder.

• You might target keywords like “whey protein,” “protein powder for men,” and “post-workout protein.”
• Your headline could be “Fuel Your Workout with [Your Brand] Protein.”
• Your landing page should highlight the benefits of your protein powder (muscle recovery, energy boost, etc.) and include clear calls to action.

Placement Optimization Best Practices

• Monitor Campaign Performance: Track your Sponsored Brands campaign metrics (impressions, clicks, sales, ACOS) to identify trends and areas for improvement.
• Use Amazon Attribution: If you’re driving traffic to your Amazon Store from external sources, use Amazon Attribution to track the performance of those campaigns and optimize your targeting.

Don’t Set and Forget

Amazon PPC isn’t a one-time setup; it’s an ongoing process. Regularly analyzing and optimizing your placements is crucial for maximizing your ROI and staying ahead of the competition. So, dive into your placement data, adjust your bids, and watch your ACOS improve.

Key Discussion Points from the Episode

Here are some of the most valuable insights Andrew and Stephen shared during the full episode discussion:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is very clear. Now you’ll also see in here homepage placements, which is very interesting.

Apparently sponsored brands are starting to appear on the homepage, meaning people go to Amazon.com there are sponsored brands there. Super weird. How did they get there?

What keyword did we target? What keyword did I target that landed to be on the home page, typed into the search bar? Targeting people’s search history?

Well, I meant like if they previously searched for something, they’re like, okay, we got you. Yeah. There are no targets for homepage.

By the way, you can’t just say. You want Amazon homepage placements. Yeah.

Make sure you add Amazon.com to your product listing for better SEO for the homepage placement. Yeah. In general, though, the homepage data that I’ve seen, I mean, this is my whole entire account here and there’s only 350 impressions.

Almost no clicks. I mean, actually, no, no clicks or orders. And I’ve tried increasing this slightly.

Like, I raised homepage by like 50%. Didn’t really make a difference. I wasn’t in the mood to keep close tabs on it because again, this data is not directly in the ad console.

So anytime I want to check up on it, you got to download a report. It’s kind of annoying. So I didn’t feel like keeping close tabs on it.

So I didn’t really push the experiment any further. I just tried raising it. Didn’t really see too much of a difference.

Point being, yeah, the revenue per click here is divided by zero. Right. We’re getting an error.

So this is a good example of a low data confidence environment in which we can’t really do this. Or actually, let’s just pretend I had like one click and one order on here with, you know what was my average a 40? Let’s say 44.

This article is based on Episode 44 of That Amazon Ads Podcast. Subscribe for weekly Amazon PPC strategies.