Amazon Advertising Bid Placements for 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?

In Amazon Ads, your base bid is what you’ll pay per click for a keyword, product, or audience. Amazon then uses it to enter you into auctions that decide whether 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 set a Top of Search bid modifier, open the campaign settings and select “bid modifiers.” You can raise the bid by up to 900% to focus that campaign’s budget on Top of Search placements.

The key is balance. Bid aggressively enough to win Top of Search placements, but not so high that yourAmazon advertising Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) suffers.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

You can measure these tactics with AMC and ad tech providers like Pacvue.

AMC enables you to measure the NTB customer acquisition effectiveness at the Amazon advertising campaign level. For this reason, label Top of Search campaigns with “TOS” (or a similar tag) in your ad tech platform. That way, you can compare their NTB acquisition cost to your other, non-TOS Amazon campaigns.

You’ll likely focus a Top of Search strategy on a handful of key non-branded terms. Ad tech providers can then track the lift in your paid share of shelf on those terms.

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 already use Amazon DSP. You can raise sponsored ads bids for shoppers your DSP ads have already reached.

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. Next, use AMC to build a bid modification audience from these shoppers. This raises your sponsored ads bid when they search for non-branded or branded terms.

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. Amazon has also expanded the Top of Search bid modifier to Sponsored Brands. You can choose the standard CPC goal and still modify bids for Top of Search. We expect CPC+TOS modifiers will be the most efficient means of gaining top of search placements 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, you can stack modifiers. Raise bids aggressively for Top of Search Amazon placements against non-branded terms, then adjust bids further to reach NTB shoppers.

Holiday rushes and deal events tend to spike NTB acquisition opportunities. These tools help brands reach NTB shoppers via marketing campaigns when acquisition is at its peak.

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.

Lean into Top of Search, prioritize New to Brand customer acquisition, and approach share of shelf growth strategically. Together, these 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.