Discover How Amazon’s New Top-of-Search IS Can Help You Generate More Sales

Oct 19, 2021

Amazon’s Sponsored Products CPC is getting more and more expensive. This year alone, it has jumped over 50% across different niches. Maintaining a healthy ACoS has become extremely hard.

In this article, you’ll learn to calculate precisely how many sales you can make if your product ranks in the top 3 for the keywords you are advertising for. We’ll explain how Top-of-Search IS can help you choose the right keywords for ranking, ultimately leading to a lower TACoS and more money in your pocket. And with setting a budget, you’ll know exactly where to invest!

Running PPC ads in the beginning 

 

According to Amazon: 

Use top-of-search impression share to understand how effective your campaign is at driving top-of-search impressions.”

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Top-of-search impression share is a metric that measures the percentage of the total first-page searches pie you could get. This statistic is available for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products campaigns. 

Sounds amazing, but how does it help you make more sales? 

I remember the first time running Sponsored Products almost a decade ago. You had to guess the traffic of a keyword using only the impressions and clicks. 

I say “guess” because even though you were running ads for a specific keyword, Amazon also showed your ads on product pages associated with this keyword. Well, they still do, but you have more options now. More on that later.

For example, if you received 1,000 impressions and ten sales per day, you didn’t know if the sales were from advertising on the keyword itself in the search results or getting the impressions from product pages related to it. Your product could have been at the top or bottom of search results or on another product page. You were at the mercy of Amazon’s ad placement decision.

A few years back, Amazon started taking steps to become a little more transparent on where it spends YOUR money and introduced Placements.

A closer look at placements 

 

When running Sponsored Products, there are three types of placement:

  • Top-of-Search – The top ad spots of the first search results page.
  • Product Pages – Different ad spots in product listings related to the keywords.
  • Rest of Search – Ad spots in the mid, bottom of the first page, search results after the first page, and other pages.

 

When running a manual Sponsored Products campaign, Amazon breaks down where these impressions are coming from and gives you different stats (CTR, ACoS, CPC, etc.) for each placement, not only the total. For each different placement, you can also increase the bid by up to 900%.

If you look closely, you’ll find that most of the traffic comes from product pages. Amazon has so much traffic directed to these pages from various search engines, social media, affiliate links, and other websites that it needs to use it. The company increased profits from these traffic sources by prioritizing showing your ads on different product pages.

And you guessed it, they give you the option to increase the bids for the different placements, but you cannot disable any of them. 

With the development of the marketplace and the increase in the number of sellers, Amazon has done a marvelous job in making it hard for the customers to distinguish between sponsored products and ones that rank organically, thus incentivizing sellers to spend more and more on ads. If you look at the number of locations that can place ads, you’ll be in shock. A considerable percentage of the pages have lots of product ads.

So what about that new metric Top-of-Search IS? How does it help us?

 

Here’s an example of actual campaign data where you think you have hit the jackpot and found keywords with huge search volume (campaign name is different for privacy).

 

Top-of-Search IS

 

This campaign for Silicone Spatula has had over 110,000 impressions in the last 30 days. On the surface, everything looks great. You’re getting clicks and making sales. What more can you ask for?

 

Top-of-Search IS

 

Diving deeper, you’ll realize there is no keyword data that you can use if you want to rank your product organically–80% of the impressions are from product pages.

Top of search has a higher CTR (expected because shoppers click more on the product that shows on top of the search results), but there are only a few sales because there aren’t many impressions. Inevitably, as all other sellers in your case would do, you ask yourself if increasing your bids for the Top of search will get you more impressions. Yes, it should. But by doing so, how much more impressions can you expect to gain?

This is where Top-of-Search IS comes into play!

 

We can see that the 1,502 impressions we got from the Top of search are less than 5% of the total volume of the searches. This means your ad is rarely ever appearing at the top ad spots of the first page results. There are many top-of-search impressions on the table that you are not tapping into.

 

Top-of-Search IS

 

Now that we have this data, it’s essential to know how to use it. The next step will be to get the precise total top-of-search volume for our chosen keywords. We do that by targeting them with exact matches combined with placements.

Let’s take, for instance, another campaign that we created using the search terms from the previous example.

When we created the new campaign, we increased the placement bids for top-of-search by 300-500% and put lower bids on the keywords we were targeting. That way, more traffic was diverted to the top-of-search ad spots.

We can use the impressions and clicks we received to quickly calculate how much search volume the keywords have. This will help us decide which keywords are worth ranking for, thus allowing us to invest more in the keywords that could help us convert more sales organically.

 

Top-of-Search IS

 

Above is a snapshot of the newly created Exact Match campaign after 30 days. It achieved 94,017 impressions and had 17.43% Top-of-Search IS.

When reviewing the placement grid, we can see that the product pages associated with the keywords in the campaign are not performing and only have a measly CTR of 0.14%. We expect this because we are aiming to get the data for the Top of search. 

 

Let’s break down the numbers from our second campaign where we use placements and want to get Top-of-Search IS data (last 30 days)

 

  • 17.43% in Top-of-Search IS
  • 6,573 Impressions
  • 346 clicks
  • 5.26% CTR
  • Leading to 98 orders in total.

 

This means our ad was shown in the top ad spots for 17.43% of all customer searches, which drove 346 clicks and resulted in 98 sales with an average of 5.26% CTR.

So theoretically, if our product ranks for the keywords we are targeting with this newly created campaign, we would get 100% Top-of-Search IS running no ads. That’s 5.74 times more sales (100% / 17.43% = 5.74 multiplier). 

When we do some math, we can easily see that if we rank our product in the top 3 for the keywords that have resulted in 17.43% Top-of-Search IS, we can achieve around 563 orders per month. This is a great way to calculate exactly how much ROI will our ranking campaign make, instead of relying on different keyword software to tell us.

 

Top-of-Search IS

Conclusion about Top-of-Search IS

 

Ranking campaigns can be expensive. The biggest problem is that you don’t know if your product will stick to the top of the page after the campaign is over and if the ranking campaign will be worth the investment.

Well, with the help of the Top-of-Search IS and placements, you can see how many sales you would get if you were already there and decide for yourself if the keyword is worth the ranking investment.

Top-of-search IS is powerful because you can determine if you should rank a product for a specific keyword using real-time data from Amazon.

Final thoughts on Amazon

 

Amazon is constantly developing, meaning that it introduces new tools and tactics all the time. That’s why it’s vital that sellers, like yourself, need to keep up-to-date with the latest features. And by doing so, you will see your profits soar!

If you want to know how to make the most of these new features, be sure to get in touch with us. We are your Amazon Team that will help you HYPER-grow your sales!

About the author

 

Radoslav Mazganov

Radoslav Mazganov is the CIO at Hyperzon and a PPC & Analytics Specialist with over ten years of experience in Amazon marketing. He has high expertise in PPC, Analytics data analysis, and implementation of new business strategies for Amazon sellers. Being extremely collaborative, he always does his best to contribute to the client’s goals fully!

 

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