How Amazon Advertising Bid Adjustments Improve Marketing Campaign ROAS

When it comes to Amazon advertising, where and who you target is incredibly important.

Shoppers interact with ads differently depending on where they appear—Top of Search, Product Detail Pages, or deeper in the search results. Similarly, not every shopper is of equal value to your brand.

Your ability to reach high-intent, repeat, or bulk buyers will significantly increase both your short-term sales and long-term growth. Bid modifiers help you do exactly that by adjusting your Amazon ads bids based on placement and audience. This enables you to focus your budget towards the shoppers and placements most likely to deliver the best ROI through your Amazon advertising campaigns.

How Do Bid Modifications Work?

Amazon Ads is structured in such a way that you enter your base bid, which is what you’re willing to pay per click for a given keyword, product, or audience and from there, Amazon’s system will automatically enter you into auctions to determine if your ad appears.

Bid modifications (also called bid adjustments) are multipliers you can apply to your base bid. These modifiers enable you to adjust (increase or decrease) Amazon ads bids by factors like placement location or audience.

Key Types of Bid Adjustments

• Placement: Adjust bids for Top of Search (first page results) ads, Product Pages, Rest of Search or Amazon Business placements
• Audience: Adjust bids toward specific audience groups built by Amazon or custom audiences built by the advertiser using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
  • Standard: Brand Purchaser, Added Brand’s product to cart, or High Likelihood of purchase based on recent shopping activity
  • Custom AMC Built: Overlap Audiences, New-to-Brand (NTB) purchasers, engaged with ads and not yet purchased, promotional purchasers, etc.

Top of Search Bid Modifiers

Ads that appear at the top of Amazon search results tend to drive the highest click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR). According to Amazon, ads that appear at the top of search generally deliver 2–3x higher CTR compared to other placements.

To adjust Top of Search bid modifiers within an Amazon marketing campaign, simply go to the campaign settings and select “bid modifiers” then enter a bid modifier of up to +900% to focus that campaign’s budget on securing Top of Search ad placements.

The key is to strike a balance between being aggressive enough to win prime top of search placements to concentrate your budget in that area while also being mindful of achieving a sufficient Amazon advertising Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Measurement of the effectiveness of these Amazon advertising tactics can be done with AMC as well as ad tech providers such as Pacvue.

AMC enables you to measure the NTB customer acquisition effectiveness at the Amazon advertising campaign level. For this reason, it can be helpful to label top of search focused marketing campaigns with “TOS” or similarly tag them within your ad tech platform in order to compare their NTB customer acquisition cost to your other non-TOS Amazon campaigns.

You will likely have a handful of key non-branded terms you want to focus on and those can also be tracked via tech providers to measure the lift in paid share of shelf against those terms after implementing a Top of Search bidding strategy.

Getting Started with Custom Audiences

Audience bid modification generally starts with Amazon’s standard audience options, but it can quickly encourage you to leverage AMC custom audience creation if you already have an AMC instance. This is especially true if you’re also already leveraging Amazon DSP given that it enables you to increase your sponsored ads bid for shoppers who have been targeted by your DSP ads.

For example, you can leverage ads with custom audiences to target DSP shoppers who purchase competing Amazon products and have not viewed your brand recently. Then via AMC audiences, you can create an audience for sponsored ads bid modification that increases your sponsored ads bid to reach these shoppers when they search for non-branded terms to see where your brand ranks on Amazon or when they search for your branded terms specifically.

Using Goals for Amazon Marketing Campaigns

In addition to bid modifiers, Amazon also offers the ability to select Goals for Sponsored Brands (SB) campaigns. The two options are cost per click (CPC) to drive click efficiency or cost per thousand impressions (VCPM) to drive top of search impression share. However, recently Amazon has expanded the option for a top of search bid modifier to SBs enabling the standard CPC option to be selected and bids to be modified specifically for top of search. This change is new, but it is very likely that CPC+TOS modifier will be the most efficient means of gaining top of search placement similar to Sponsored Products (SP) ads.

Leveraging Opportunities to Generate NTB Shoppers

Amazon’s bid modifiers combined with seasonality also creates interesting opportunities.

For example, there’s an ability to stack modifiers to aggressively increase bids for top of search Amazon placements against non-branded terms and then further adjust bids to reach shoppers who are NTB.

Similarly, when considering the holiday rush and deal events that tend to spike NTB customer acquisition opportunities, these tools enhance a brand’s ability to reach NTB shoppers via marketing campaigns when acquisition is at its high point.

Conclusion

Amazon’s bid modification tools give advertisers the ability to make adjustments that focus budget where it matters most: premium placements and high-value audiences.

By leaning into Top of Search, prioritizing New to Brand customer acquisition, and approaching share of shelf growth strategically, brands can create a compounding effect: strong short-term ROI and long-term market share growth thanks to an optimized approach to Amazon advertising bidding.

The key is to remain data-driven by using AMC insights to validate your Amazon advertising strategy and using ad tech to monitor performance continuously and adjust bidding.

With the right approach, you’ll not only win more Top of Search placements, you’ll win more of the right shoppers with your advertising investment.