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Introduction
Did you know your Sponsored Products PAT campaigns can show up in Top of Search placements? That means your ads might be appearing on the search results page.
While advertisers usually associate keyword targeting with search results and PAT with Product Detail Pages (PDPs), many PAT campaigns actually spend over 80% on Top of Searc.
Without insight into the search terms driving these placements. This unseen traffic is called "Dark Search."
Placements 101
Amazon created quite a stir recently when they announced that Sponsored Products (SP) ads would soon be eligible for off-Amazon placements. While the Sponsored Products ad type remains synonymous with search in many advertisers' minds, the search results page (SERP) is only one of the possible placements for your SP campaigns. Let’s do a quick recap of where your Sponsored Products ads can show up. There are four broad categories of placements:
Top of Search (ToS)
Rest of Search (RoS)
Product Detail Page (PDP)
Off-Amazon (coming soon…)
Targeting 101
Let's review the two main targeting options available in Sponsored Products campaigns:
Keyword Targeting: Select keywords to help your products appear when shoppers search.
Product Targeting: Target your ads to specific products, categories, brands, or other product features.
Although the official descriptions imply that keyword targeting is mainly for search placements (Top of Search and Rest of Search) and product targeting is mainly for Product Detail Page placements, both methods can be used across all placement types.
You are likely already familiar with keyword targeting. For example:
Product targets can either be individual ASINs or PAT expressions that target clusters of ASINs meeting certain criteria (e.g. specific categories). Here’s an example:
How Do Products Targets Match to Search Terms?
If ASIN-targeting campaigns can win impressions on the SERP, the key question is: when does this happen?
The answer depends on the organic search results shown on that page.
The screenshot below shows the SERP for "back to school supplies".
If your PAT campaign targets a top organically ranked product (marked 1), your ad may appear in a ToS or RoS placement on this page (e.g., placement marked 2).
❓ How high must a product rank organically to qualify ❓
There’s no fixed rule—it varies by search term. However, in our experience, targeting the #1 organically ranked product for a search term makes your ad eligible for placement on that term’s SERP.
Classifying Traffic from Competitor and Branded PAT Campaigns
There are some profound implications here on how you measure and think about the classification of your traffic. Just because it comes from a competitor or branded campaign, it doesn't mean it is competitor or branded traffic. Let's look at a few examples.
Branded PAT Campaigns
Branded PAT Campaigns
If your own products rank high in the organic results for category search terms, then your branded PAT campaigns (targeting your own brand’s ASINs) may end up showing on the SERP for those search terms. If you don’t usually get a lot of branded searches then this can result in your branded PAT campaigns seeing a lot more spend and sales than your branded keyword campaigns. You may also inadvertently misclassify spend as branded—based on the campaign type—when in fact the majority of the spend and sales are coming from your ad being shown on the SERP for category search terms.
What makes all of this worse, as we’ll explain below, is that there is no way of measuring which category search terms your product-targeting campaigns are being shown on—this information is obscured in the search term reports for Sponsored Products.
Competitor PAT Campaigns
Competitor PAT Campaigns
Targeting competitor keywords is an aggressive strategy.
You are paying to put your product in front of shoppers who are already in the consideration phase for your competitor’s brand. The payoff can be big if you’re able to convert them, but the price can be high. Expect higher CPCs and lower conversion rates on these keywords. Trying to win organic rank on a competitor keyword is not a tactic that we often see employed.
If you are targeting competitor ASINs however, you may see completely different ad performance dynamics. If your competitor ranks highly on high volume category search terms, then these targets could see your ad being shown on the SERP for those category search terms. For this reason, we often see much better conversion rates and lower ACOS on competitor PAT vs competitor keywords. Why? Because the majority of the traffic is coming from category search terms.
Measuring Top of Search Placements for PAT Campaigns
To analyze how much of your product targeting campaign's spend goes toward search placements, check the campaign-level placement reports
In Perpetua, navigate to the “Campaigns” tab within the goal deep dive view, then expand the campaign to see a breakdown of metrics by placement.
In the Branded PAT campaign shown below, ToS placements account for the majority of spend and sales.
What is Dark Search and How Does it Appear in Search Term Reports?
In the search term reports for product-targeting campaigns, the “search term” column always contains an ASIN. So even if the click occurred on a ToS placement, there is no way of telling what text the shopper entered into the search box.
When you run PAT campaigns, your ads will be showing up on search terms and you have no visibility into what those search terms are.
For this reason, we casually refer to clicks on search placements within product targeting campaigns as “Dark Search” traffic.
Manage Bid by Placements in Perpetua
In the Advanced settings of your Sponsored Prodcts Goals, you have access to placement multipliers, which are available both within the Amazon ad console and within Perpetua (see below):
However, these multipliers can only be used to boost bids by placement, not suppress bids. This means that If you were looking to focus your product-targeting campaigns on PDP placements, you would need to set low bids at the target level and then apply a high bid multiplier to just the Product Pages placement.
Article last updated February 2025. If you find this information to be out of date, please contact hello@perpetua.io.