The best placement in this account got a fifth of the budget

I pulled the placement report on an account I manage last week and found something that looks wrong until you divide.

Here is sixty days, Sponsored Products, one account.

Product pages got twenty two times the impressions of top of search. On a dashboard sorted by impressions, or by clicks, or by spend, product pages is the headline and top of search barely registers.

Now divide.

Top of search returned $7.43 for every dollar spent. Product pages returned $1.55. Rest of search returned $1.92. Top of search converted at 24%. The other two converted at about 8%.

The placement that returns five times as much per dollar was getting 20% of the budget. The placement returning the least was getting 37%.

Impressions are the number Amazon shows you first and they are the number that means the least. Product pages generate enormous impression volume because your ad appears on every detail page it qualifies for, whether or not the person looking at that page is anywhere near buying. Top of search is scarce by definition. There is one top of search, and the people who see it typed something and are looking at results.

So the account was not misconfigured by anyone's decision. It drifted there, because the default behaviour of Sponsored Products is to find impressions, and nobody told it otherwise.

Every placement multiplier in this account was set to 0%. Not tuned badly. Never set. Top of search, rest of search, product pages, all of them at zero, which is what a campaign ships with.

That single setting is the whole lever. A top of search multiplier raises your bid specifically when the ad would appear there, which is how you buy more of the placement that is working without buying more of the one that is not.

Pull the Sponsored Products placement report, last 30 or 60 days. Campaign Manager, Measurement and reporting, Sponsored ads reports, report type Placement.

Ignore impressions. Ignore clicks. For each placement, divide sales by spend. That one number tells you which placement is paying for the account and which is riding along on it.

Then open the campaign's placement settings and look at what the multipliers actually are. In most accounts I open, they are zeros.

One caveat before you go and set a 50% top of search multiplier. This account was spending 95% of its daily budget every day. If you raise a multiplier while you are already hitting the cap, you do not buy more top of search, you just shift the same money around and lose impressions somewhere else. Check whether the campaign is budget constrained first. If it is, the multiplier and the budget have to move together or neither does anything.

The placement with the most impressions is almost never the placement making you money. Sales divided by spend, placement by placement, is a two minute check and I have never run it on an account where it told me nothing.

Thomas, PPC Tools