Amazon PPC Placement Isolation: Step-by-Step Technical Tutorial

Published on October 24, 2025

About this video

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Learn the technical process behind placement isolation for Amazon advertising campaigns. This video walks through the exact steps to isolate top of search placement while reducing spend on rest of search and product pages using placement bid modifiers.

In this Amazon PPC tutorial, I demonstrate how to use the Simple Placement calculator formula to determine the exact bid adjustments needed for proper placement isolation. The method involves strategically adjusting base bids while increasing top of search placement modifiers to maintain competitive positioning on high-converting placements.

The video covers the step-by-step process starting with a 20% top of search placement modifier, which requires reducing base bids by 16.67%. This keeps top of search bids at the original level while lowering rest of search and product display page bids to 83 cents, making them less competitive and reducing wasted spend.

I show how to gradually increase placement modifiers by 10% every 2-3 days, from 20% to 30% and beyond, while making corresponding base bid adjustments. Each increase further reduces spend on lower-converting placements while maintaining top of search competitiveness.

This Amazon PPC strategy helps maximize conversion rates by focusing budget on the highest-performing placement - top of search - where you get the best possible results. The technique is particularly effective for Amazon sponsored products campaigns and Amazon sponsored ads optimization.

Contents: 3:14 - Simple Placement calculator formula and Excel setup 5:33 - Setting initial 20% top of search placement modifier 9:43 - Adjusting base bids by minus 16.67% calculation 16:33 - Making bid adjustments in campaign ad groups 30:86 - Results after first adjustment showing bid changes 55:33 - Increasing to 30% placement modifier process 122:00 - Long-term strategy for gradual 10% increases 168:40 - Final results and traffic concentration benefits

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Transcript

Hi guys, in my yesterday's post I've shown you how to actually estimate what's going to be the increase in conversions if you use proper placement isolation, but today I want to show you how it actually works. So, it's going to be a little bit technical, but bear with me. I'll try to be I'll try to be as concise as possible and to make it really simple and easy. So, what it actually happens that we what we want to accomplish is go to our campaign. We want to only have traffic and sales through top of search in this example. So, we want to have on rest of search and product pages, we want ideally not to have any traffic or have it really low. So, we minimize the spend on rest of search and product pages and we focus only on top of search. How to do that? We want to stay with certain and bid certain CPC on top of search and keep lowering the bids on rest of search and product pages. And this is how it happens in reality. So, we go to the simple placement calculator. There's the formula how to use it. You can copy it to your Excel. You can use it as long as as long as you like. So, this is the current situation. We have top of search placement modifier at zero exactly as in our campaign. So, let's start with something simple. Let's do 20%. Immediately, this calculator is going to show you that we need to to change our base bids by minus 16.67%. So, we go inside and do the do the change. Only top of search 20% then go to the ad groups. Select our keywords inside. Select all of them. Adjust bid. Decrease bid by percentage and put 16.76 16.67. Right. Save. That's it. Now, what happened is that top of search remained at the bid at $1 bid and the rest of search and product display pages are at 0.83. So, that's roughly on the 16.67% less. Top of search remained the same because we increased the top of search placement by 20%. So, top of search is now still at one. So, it's going to be more competitive when we bid. Now, let's say 2 days or 3 days passed. You monitored the performance. If it's going up and down, if everything is is okay, you should be good to go. You should be see start You should start to see uh lower CPCs on rest of search and product display pages and most likely the less traffic. Then, the next day we we have our starting top of search placement at 20% and then we go to 30%. I recommend doing 10 by 10% of an increase because I've seen that that's the safest uh way to go. Then, we need we saw that now we need to change our bids on on change our base bids on by minus 7.69. We go inside. We select again all all of the keywords. Decrease bid by 7.69 and don't forget to also increase your bid adjustments only on top of search now from 20% to 30%. Now, again, what now happened in in reality is that we used to have 0.83 previ 83 previously as a base bid. Now, because we decreased the amount by minus 7.69%, now the the base bid is 0.77 on rest of search and product display pages, but not on top of search. Top of search, as you remember, stayed the same at uh $1. Now, and effectively what happens now, we'll keep increasing this by 10 and 10% every 2 to 3 days. You have top of search remain remain in the same as as as it is and you have rest of search and product display pages going lower and lower until the bid is as low that they're not competitive anymore at that bid and you get most of the traffic through top of search where you have the absolutely best possible conversion rate and best possible results. It's pretty simple, yet so many people don't do it. So, do not be the one. Do this or forward it to your team and thank me later. See you tomorrow, guys. Bye-bye.

Frequently asked questions

What are the exact bid adjustments needed to start placement funneling, and how do you move through the process step by step?

Starting from a campaign with no top-of-search placement adjustment, the first step is to set the top-of-search adjustment to 20% and simultaneously reduce all keyword base bids by 16.67%. This keeps the effective top-of-search bid unchanged at its current level while reducing the effective bid for rest-of-search and product pages to approximately 83 cents on the dollar. After two to three days of monitoring to confirm performance is stable, increase the top-of-search adjustment from 20% to 30% and reduce base bids by a further 7.69%. Each subsequent increment of 10 percentage points in the top-of-search adjustment requires a corresponding percentage reduction in base bids to maintain the same effective top-of-search CPC. Continuing this process every two to three days gradually lowers the effective bid for rest-of-search and product pages until those placements are no longer competitive enough to win auctions regularly, concentrating almost all traffic and spend on top-of-search where conversion rates are highest.