As you may already know, Amazon has now replaced Bid+ for Sponsored Products with a new and much more flexible Adjust Bids by Placement feature. Apart from the fixed and dynamic campaign options, Amazon is now enabling sellers to run sponsored products campaigns through Adjust Bids by Placement not only for the top of the search results but product page placements as well.

A Quick Overview

The old ad campaign system, Bid+ restricted sellers from more than 50% increase for the top search results on the first page. The new feature accommodates higher flexibility allowing sellers to increase up to 900% not only for the top search results but the product detail placements as well. 

Your current campaigns using Bid+ will automatically adopt the new settings of bidding. This feature allows you to make your bid unique and evaluate performance on a more granular level which is now categorized into three different placement groups including top of search, product detail pages, and rest of search.

After the implementation of this, your ad campaign bids will see an increase of specific amounts when your ads have to compete for the placement. You can use this particular setting to enhance the ad visibility and generate extra impressions for chosen placements. It should be kept in mind that there is a chance that bidding by placement may impact your ACoS negatively, since your higher bid is just to compete for placement and not improve the conversion rate.

Key Times to Use Adjust Bids by Placement

A variety of objectives can be achieved using this new feature, however, some of the primary ones are as follows:

• Different ad placements lead to different results in terms of cost per click, click through rate, and conversion rate. Adjust Bids by Placement can be used to optimize your ad campaigns even further and see where your products are performing better and in what scenarios.
  

• It can be used in combination with your dynamic bidding strategy to further your non-sales and sales goals. For instance, your key objective may be increased conversions but you are also trying to focus on getting more impressions from a certain placement. In that scenario, you can keep the placement adjustment at 0% to meet your strictly sales-focused short term goals.
  

• You can also use it with your fixed bidding strategy to concentrate impressions on a particular placement. For example, if you want to improve the exposure of your product range through increased impressions, you can set a low bid for your ad group or the keyword and a high placement adjustment for the top of search. This will improve the competitiveness of your ad in top search results. On the other hand, impressions on other placements would be low as you've a lower bid.
  

• And finally you can obviously use the adjust bid by placement feature to improve the ad exposure for your chosen placements.
  

Using Adjust Bids by Placement for Different Positions

Amazon has categorized placements into three categories:

• Top of search
• Product pages
• Rest of search
  

You don't only have the option to optimize your bidding process with this feature but you can also monitor and evaluate the performance by placement in your ad campaigns. All you've to do is go to the placement tabs.

Top of Search

Being the most competitive placement, top of search signifies the first two listings that appear on the Amazon search engine result page or SERP. Naturally, this is a position that attracts the highest bids and best ranks generally go to the top bidders. Adjust bid by placement can work with your current bidding strategy to determine the final bid. That's why it's important to be mindful of your Dynamic Bidding settings.

If your bid is set at $1.00 for a certain keyword with an adjustment of 50% for top of search placement, your bids will be applied in the following manner:

• Your fixed bid will be $1.50
• Your down only dynamic bidding will be $0-$1.50
• Your up and down dynamic bidding will be $0-$3.00
  

Top of search brings you the highest value in terms of better conversion rates. Keep in mind that more than 67% of clicks come from first row of Amazon listings.

Product Pages

These are basically sponsored product placements that you can see on pretty much any non-search placement such as add to cart page. Product pages have a worse click through rate as compared to top of search and it can go as low as 10 times lower. It doesn't mean product page placements have no value, they can generate a lot of sales, especially when compared to rest of search placement.

Although the click through rate isn’t as much, still you can use the bidding adjustment feature to generate sales because the bidding price is relatively lower. And if you want more exposure for your products, this is an ideal way to give your potential customer a chance to see your product.

Rest of Search

These are the placements that start from the middle and bottom of the very first page and go to infinity. Although your base bid applied to this placement, you can't make bidding adjustments for rest of search. However, you can still device your overall PPC and bidding strategy around the performance of rest of search placements by modifying bids for product pages as well as top of search.

Simple Math Behind Adjust Bids by Placement

Imagine you are starting a new auto campaign and want to optimize it using adjust bids by placement feature. Once you've created the campaign, go to the placements tab.

For easy understanding, let's say your targeted ACoS is 20% for this particular ad campaign. Now it's very likely that when you start monitoring your placement data, you will observe that top of search may be performing at 10% ACoS while rest of search and product pages are around 30%.

Now, if you want to meet the target, you need to increase the number of top of search bids while decreasing it for the other placements. You can do it by making adjustments to your campaign bid. Here's the simple formula:

Max Bid = Revenue per Click x Target ACoS%

This will deliver the accurate bid you need to meet your target. In order to adjust product page and top of search placements, you can use the adjust bids by placement feature to increase the bid to bring them closer to the target cost per click.

Final Words

Bid modification by placement is a new but quite impactful optimization feature. There are many moving parts and if you are not for it or want to spend your time focusing on your business, you can always use a service like PPC Winner which utilizes the power of artificial intelligence and human experience to optimize your Amazon PPC campaigns and meet your targets.