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Amazon Ads Placement Adjustments: Stop Wasting Ad Spend on Low Converting Placements

Published on September 29, 2025

About this video

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Learn how to optimize your Amazon advertising campaigns through strategic placement adjustments and bid management. This tutorial shows you exactly how to funnel traffic to your most profitable ad placements while reducing wasted spend on underperforming locations.

Amazon PPC placement adjustments are one of the most overlooked optimization strategies that can dramatically improve your advertising ROI. Many sellers waste significant budget on rest of search and product page placements that convert poorly, while missing opportunities to maximize their top of search performance.

In this step-by-step guide, you'll see real campaign data showing how top of search placements often deliver the highest conversion rates and click-through rates. I'll demonstrate the exact process of placement isolation (also called placement funneling) using a custom calculator to determine precise bid adjustments.

The method involves strategically increasing top of search bid adjustments while simultaneously decreasing base bids to maintain the same effective CPC for your best-performing placements. You'll learn why gradual changes in 10-20% increments work better than dramatic adjustments, especially for high-volume accounts.

This Amazon advertising optimization technique works for both sponsored products and sponsored brands campaigns. Whether you're running single keyword campaigns or broader targeting, the placement adjustment strategy can help you reduce Amazon advertising cost while improving conversion rates.

The video includes a practical calculator demonstration showing how to move from 30% to 70% top of search placement adjustments while maintaining bid efficiency. You'll also see how to handle rest of search and product page placements to prevent traffic loss during the optimization process.

Contents: 0:00 Introduction to placement adjustments and common audit findings 0:47 Why top of search placements typically outperform other locations 1:20 Step-by-step placement isolation strategy using bid adjustments 2:00 Calculator demonstration for precise bid change calculations 3:25 Gradual implementation approach with 10-20% increments 4:30 Alternative strategies for rest of search and product page optimization 5:13 Final recommendations for placement adjustment optimization

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Transcript

Hi guys, short topic for today, placement adjustments. This is something that I keep seeing while doing the audits and it's so simple to fix that everybody should know it. So let's cover it once again. So this is just an example of the account where for example you can see that top of search is having good clickthrough rate and the highest uh conversion rate here in the brackets and then in even more spent on rest of search and some of the spend on product pages but rest of search and product pages are having really low conversion rate. So we want that majority of traffic if not all of the traffic comes through top of search and limit the rest of search and product pages from spending and having any traffic. So how we do that some call it uh placement isolation some call it placement funneling whatever you prefer it's by increasing top of search bid adjustments and decreasing the base bit at the same time. So what we actually get is that when you lower the base bit, for example, if it's a $1 currently and you uh lower it to 90 or 80 cents, but at the same time you increase the top of search adjustment, you get the same end bit, same CPC, but now only top of search will have high enough bid so that you only had get traffic to top of search and then you do that gradually. Don't do it over over a single change like increase from 0 to 100 or 0 to 300. You need to do it gradually. What I've seen that the safest method is to do it by increments of 10, increments of 20 depending on the volume of the account. The bigger the volume on a monthly level, the lower the increments um are better. So here in this exact example, let's say that we want to limit the traffic on rest of search and product pages. What I would like to do is go to my fancy little calculator and here I just input what's my current top of search and where I want to go. So let's say I want to go to this. Let's say you have the ready and then you want to go to 50 as a previous one and you want to increase it to 70%. What this calculator gives me, let's increase it a little bit. So, what this gives me is that it shows me I will increase my top of search by 20%. But I need to change my base bits or anything that's inside a campaign. If it's a single keyword campaign, the best. If it's not, then just select all bits and and decrease them by 11.76%. That's how I do it. But most of my campaigns are having either one exact match keyword or they're really well structured that I can afford to do it. Um so for the rest of search and product display p display display pages you need to in order to stay at the same level of uh bids you would have to increase them by 13%. This is done by easy calculation. You can check the formula here. So if I now want to only have traffic through top of search, I will leave a rest of search and product display pages unchanged. That way I'm actually funneling the traffic only through top of search. Then on the next change I will have enter here 70% then enter here 90%. Then I will go after this change of top of search I will go in uh the actual targeting tab and decrease bits by 10.53% and on and on until you get to the point where you don't have traffic on rest of search and product display pages and only have traffic on top of search in this example. Or you can do the same on rest of search and product display pages. Or let's say that you want to have on top of search and also want to have some traffic in the rest of search. So let's say your starting position is that you have 20% on top of search and you want to go to 40. When you enter 40 and you can recreate this easily by following the the this uh this logic and calculation. So when you enter that your increment from 20 to 30, this one will give you the actual increase on the rest of search. If you want to funnel also to that one and stay the same for rest of of the rest of search, you have to convert rate and profitability is fine. So increase top of search by 20%, increase rest of search by 70% and change all the bits by 14 99. Now there are many other ways to do that. This is how I like to do it and I've seen good results by doing it. So, it's pretty a few clicks of your time if you are a seller who is a do-it-yourselfer, but it's also pretty simple for your employees to switch this. So, check your placement adjustments because I see so much waste here that it's a shame not to fix it because it's such an easy fix as everything else with PBC basically. Stay tuned and follow me for more videos. Bye-bye.

Frequently asked questions

What is placement funneling in Amazon Sponsored Products and why is it worth doing?

Placement funneling, also called placement isolation, is the process of concentrating almost all of a campaign's traffic through the top-of-search placement by using bid adjustments to make the base bid low enough that the rest-of-search and product page placements rarely or never win auctions, while simultaneously increasing the top-of-search multiplier to keep the effective bid for that placement unchanged. The reason it is worth doing is that top-of-search consistently delivers higher click-through rates and conversion rates than rest-of-search or product pages for most product categories. Budget being distributed across all three placements means a significant share of your spend is going to lower-quality auctions. Concentrating that same total spend on top-of-search positions typically produces the same or better total sales with lower ACoS.

How do you calculate the correct bid adjustment and base bid change when moving toward placement funneling?

The calculation needs to keep the effective top-of-search CPC constant while reducing the effective bid for other placements. If your current top-of-search adjustment is 30% and you want to move it to 50%, you are increasing the multiplier by 20 percentage points. To keep the final top-of-search bid the same, you must decrease your base bids by a corresponding percentage. The formula for how much to decrease the base bid is: divide the original multiplier ratio by the new multiplier ratio and calculate the percentage reduction. A simple calculator approach is to input your current and target top-of-search adjustment percentages, which outputs the exact percentage to decrease base bids. In the example from the video, moving from 50% to 70% top-of-search adjustment requires decreasing all keyword bids by 11.76% to maintain the same effective top-of-search CPC while reducing effective bids on other placements.

Why should placement funneling be implemented gradually rather than all at once?

Amazon's advertising system responds to bid changes in ways that are not always linear, and large sudden changes can disrupt traffic patterns significantly. Moving from a 0% top-of-search adjustment to a 300% adjustment in one step, or cutting base bids by 50% at once, can cause sharp drops in impressions and sales velocity that take time to recover from. The safer approach is to make incremental changes of 10 to 20 percentage points at a time for the top-of-search adjustment, with corresponding base bid reductions, then wait several days to observe how impressions, clicks, and conversion rates respond before making the next increment. The higher the campaign's monthly spend and sales volume, the smaller the increment should be, because high-volume campaigns are more sensitive to bid changes and the business impact of a disruption is proportionally larger.

What should you do with rest-of-search and product page adjustments if you want some traffic from those placements rather than eliminating them entirely?

Full placement funneling toward top-of-search only is not always the goal. Some products convert well on product pages where the shopper is already looking at a competing or complementary product, and eliminating those placements would sacrifice profitable sales. In those cases, the placement adjustment calculation can be used to increase the multiplier for a second placement you want to retain, such as rest-of-search, while still lowering the base bid to reduce product page traffic. The calculator logic applies the same principle: for any placement you want to maintain at the same effective bid while lowering another, you calculate the percentage increase needed for the retained placement's multiplier to offset the base bid reduction. This allows you to selectively channel traffic without a binary choice between all placements or top-of-search only.