If we had a magic wand, we’d wave it to grant you an unlimited advertising budget. 🪄 Since we don’t, we’re sharing the next best thing: Tips to make the most of your ad campaigns.
It’s not about spending more, it's about spending smarter. With countless sellers fighting for the same customer attention, understanding how to optimize your ad placements can mean the difference between wasted budget and significant profit growth.
7 Strategies to Get More Out of Your Top Ad Placements
These seven strategies can help you maximize the performance of your advertising placements on Amazon and beyond, while driving long-term growth for your brand.
1. Target the Whole Funnel
For sustainable growth, you need a comprehensive approach that engages customers at every stage of their buying journey, from initial awareness to final purchase to retaining high-value customers.
Many sellers make the mistake of focusing solely on bottom-of-funnel (BoFU) placements that drive immediate conversions. While these are important, they're only part of a complete strategy. Here's how to effectively target the entire funnel:
- Use negative keywords strategically. This improves conversion rates and rankings while lowering ACoS and preventing campaign cannibalization.
- Target specific long-tail keywords. These connect you with BoFU customers who know exactly what they want.
- Analyze the Amazon search terms report regularly. This uncovers opportunities for awareness-building at all funnel stages, particularly at the top.
- Create custom and lookalike audiences. This allows you to reach middle-funnel and top-funnel customers, expanding your reach to new potential buyers.
By balancing your keyword and segmentation strategies across the entire funnel, you'll drive immediate sales and build a pipeline of future customers to keep your business growing.
Harvest Top Keywords For Your Products
Receive expected search volume, bid ranges, and overall keyword competition to maneuver through the Amazon results page.
2. Use Retargeting Wisely
Customers who have already shown interest in your products represent a valuable opportunity. DSP retargeting allows you to reconnect with these shoppers and increase your chances of conversion.
Here's how to implement effective retargeting:
- Use your existing customer data. Combining information from AMC, Walmart, and Shopify creates powerful behavioral and contextual targeting options. A tool like Trellis’ Audience Builder + can integrate these rich data sources to target users based on demographics, life events, and product-specific interactions.
- Implement dynamic creative optimization. This automatically generates tailored versions of your ads that resonate with specific target audiences.
- Focus on high-LTV customers. Track and optimize for “the golden ratio” (LTV:CAC) to balance customer lifetime value against acquisition costs.
- Identify your "halo products." Promoting items that drive repeat sales and additional purchases from your catalog boosts customer lifetime value. Use advanced DSP targeting to cross-sell with rules like “bought X but not Y.”
Effective retargeting can dramatically improve your conversion rates while making your advertising budget work harder for you. Rather than spreading your budget too thin, Trellis' Placement Max algorithm lets you focus your dollars on top placements—whether that's top of search, detail pages, or even your off-Amazon DSP placements.
3. Select Ad Types Strategically
Not all ad types perform equally for every goal. Understanding which formats work best for specific objectives is crucial for optimizing your return on investment.
As always, it all depends on context, but here’s a high-level look at the best Amazon ad placements for some common eCommerce goals:
| Ad Type | Placements Included | Description | Goals |
| Sponsored Display | - Product Detail pages - Search results - Third-party websites and apps via Amazon DSP | Ads that can appear on and off Amazon, targeting shoppers based on interests, behaviors, or previous interactions with your brand | - Target specific segments - Retargeting - Awareness |
| Sponsored Brand | - Product Collection - Store Spotlight - Video Ads | Banner-style ads featuring your logo, custom headline, and multiple products | - Differentiation - Attracting NTB shoppers - Sales/conversions - Customer loyalty |
| Sponsored Products | - Top of Search - Rest of Search - Product Detail pages | Product-specific ads that appear in results or product detail pages | - Sales/conversions - Attracting NTB shoppers |
Knowing when to use Sponsored Display vs. Sponsored Product ads helps you maximize the impact of your advertising budget. Here are a few tips for choosing the right ad types and placements:
- Use Sponsored Product ads to drive sales and increase visibility.
- Use Sponsored Brand ads to build your brand and promote customer loyalty.
- Target Top of Search placements to increase profitability—49% of shoppers report often or always buying the first product listed in Amazon’s search results.
- Use Product Details Page placements to steal competitor traffic.
Many Amazon sellers agree that using all three ad types strategically gets the best results.
Advanced ad platforms like Trellis help you monitor campaign performance and double down on your best-performing placements. Our Placement Max feature automatically identifies and prioritizes your top performers, eliminating wasted spend on placements that aren't delivering results. See it in action by booking a no-strings-attached demo.
4. Sync Ad Spend with Business Goals
Your advertising strategy should align directly with your overall business objectives, whether that's profitability, growth, or inventory management.
Here's how to synchronize your ad spend effectively:
- Set appropriate maximum and target ACoS. Base these on your profit margins—but recognize when higher ACoS is acceptable for strategic objectives, e.g. a new product launch.
- Use manual campaigns with precision. This allows for specific targeting to lower ACoS when profitability is the priority.
- Optimize listing content. Using Amazon’s A+ Content tool can significantly increase RoAS through improved conversion rates.
- Adjust spend based on inventory. Reduce advertising when stock is low to prevent stockouts, and increase when moving excess inventory.
However you choose to adjust your marketing strategy, make sure your campaigns support your goals—rather than working against them.
5. Track Performance and Trends
Success in Amazon advertising requires constant monitoring and adjustment based on performance data.Which metrics matter on Amazon? Here’s a breakdown:
| Metric | Business Impact |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | Measures audience engagement with your ads, indicating how compelling your listings are to shoppers. Higher CTR means more efficient ad spend and better organic ranking signals. |
| Conversion rate | Shows how well your product page converts visitors to buyers. Directly impacts profitability by determining how much of your ad traffic actually generates revenue. |
| Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) | Evaluates your advertising efficiency by showing the percentage of revenue spent on ads. Lower ACoS generally means higher profitability. It only accounts for ad spend, not other costs like shipping or fulfillment. |
| Break-even ACoS | Identifies the exact point where ad costs equal profit margin, i.e. the threshold between profitable and unprofitable advertising. Provides a clear benchmark for campaign performance evaluation and bid adjustments. |
| Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) | Measures revenue generated per ad dollar spent, providing insight into advertising efficiency. While ACoS focuses on measuring profitability, RoAS is better for evaluating overall advertising effectiveness. |
| Break-even RoAS | Shows the minimum return needed to cover advertising costs. If your RoAS is below break-even, you’re losing money on Amazon ads. |
| Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS) | Contextualizes how your ad spend impacts overall profitability and total sales, including organic. |
Our top advertising analytics tips:
- Start with RoAS. It’s an easy measure of how much revenue each campaign generates. Consider steps to improve RoAS if it starts to fall. Sponsored brand ads have the highest RoAS.
- Look beyond basic metrics. ACoS and RoAS are important but don't tell the whole story about advertising strategy health.
- Contextualize metrics with customer lifetime value. Sometimes lower immediate RoAS is profitable if you're acquiring high-value, repeat customers. Your analysis should include LTV and “the golden ratio” (LTV:CAC) to optimize for long-term profitability.
- Adjust strategy when metrics underperform. Focus on higher-conversion keywords, optimize content, or change ad types when results fall short.
Regular performance analysis helps you spot what's working, what isn't, and where your opportunities for improvement lie.
6. Spot New Opportunities in Your Data
Your advertising data contains valuable insights that can reveal new opportunities for growth and optimization.
Here's how to identify these opportunities:
- Analyze your Amazon Search Terms Report. This uncovers what potential customers are searching for and can inform new campaigns or product development.
- Study high-performing product listings. Examining successful listings in your category reveals elements to incorporate in your own listings.
- Use market intelligence tools. Monitor trends and consumer behaviors so you can capitalize on emerging opportunities.
- Conduct thorough competitor analysis. Identify main competitors, analyze their keywords, study their listings, and examine their bidding strategies.
By regularly digging into your data and the broader market context, you'll discover new ways to optimize your advertising that your competitors might miss.
Turn market insights into profitable action. Trellis’ Market Intelligence tools give access to actionable data around competitor strategies, market trends, and growth opportunities. See what your manual analysis is missing by booking a quick demo.
7. Monitor and Optimize Ad Timing
When your ads appear can be just as important as where they appear. Optimizing the timing of your advertising can significantly improve performance.
Consider these timing strategies:
- Use dayparting on Amazon. Bid more during times when shoppers are most likely to purchase your specific products.
- Analyze historical performance data. Identify patterns in customer behavior across different times and days of the week.
- Schedule campaigns around major events. Maximize visibility when shopper traffic is highest during Amazon peak season dates like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.
- Use rule-based or AI-powered bid automation. Capitalize on peak selling periods with automated bid management and scheduled bid boosts.
- Customize timing by audience segment. Different customer groups often shop at different times of day, requiring tailored scheduling.
Smart timing ensures your advertising budget is spent when it has the greatest chance of converting to sales.
Here’s an example: Seasonal decor brand Haute Decor implemented Trellis’ automated bid management during their peak holiday season using scheduled bid boosts and dayparting to stay visible during competitive times. They achieved impressive results without constant manual adjustments: Year-over-year, they saw 21% higher sales, 2.3% lower ACoS, and 50% higher profits.
Beyond Amazon: A Full-funnel Approach to Marketing Success
The most successful Amazon sellers don't just run ads. They strategically optimize every aspect of their advertising to reach the right customers, with the right message, at the right time, for the right price.
Of course, understanding which placements drive the best results for your specific products is only half the battle. You also need technology that can consistently execute on these insights at scale. Trellis' Placement Max algorithm eliminates the guesswork by automatically optimizing your spend toward your best-performing placements, whether on Amazon or off through Amazon DSP.
Curious to see how Placement Max can help you market to shoppers across the entire purchase funnel with optimized placements on multiple platforms? We’ll show you. 👀 Book a demo today.
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