Top of search or product pages: what the placement report says about your ad spend

A Sponsored Products campaign shows your ad in several places, and the campaign report adds them all up into one line. One ACOS, one click-through rate, one cost per click. Behind that line, the placements behave so differently that the average describes none of them.

The placement report splits the campaign by where the ad was shown. Every claim below points at a number in that report. We checked them on 276 Sponsored Products campaigns that ran in all three main placements, across six Amazon marketplaces, with daily data from June 15 to October 2, 2026.

The three placements

• Top of search (first page). The ad slots above and among the first organic results on the first search results page.
• Rest of search. Every other search result slot: lower on the first page, and the following pages.
• Product pages. Other products' detail pages, and other non-search placements such as the add-to-cart page.

You find the split in Campaign Manager, on the campaign's Placements tab, or as a placement report under Sponsored Products in the reports. In our data a fourth, small group also appeared, ads shown off Amazon. It produced a single purchase in total, so we leave it out below.

Few impressions, many clicks

Top of search is a small slice of what you are shown, and a large slice of what you are clicked. In our data it was 3.2% of all impressions and 21.3% of all clicks. Product pages were the opposite: 70.6% of the impressions, 44.0% of the clicks.

Within the same campaign, the click-through rate on top of search was higher than on product pages in all 40 campaigns where both had at least 1,000 impressions. That is not a sign that top of search is better. It is a sign that click-through rate is not a fair way to judge one placement against the other.

Better buyers, at a higher price

Top of search clicks cost more. The cost per click on top of search was higher than on product pages in 45 of the 58 campaigns where both had at least 20 clicks, and higher than on rest of search in 51 of 57.

They also convert better. The conversion rate on top of search was higher than on product pages in 19 of the 25 campaigns where both had at least 50 clicks.

The question is which effect is bigger, and here the data gives no general answer. Top of search had a lower ACOS than product pages in 12 of 23 campaigns: a coin flip. We also looked at the 17 campaigns where all three placements had at least 50 clicks and some sales. The lowest ACOS was on top of search in 5, on product pages in 5, and on rest of search in 7.

So there is no placement that is always the profitable one. There is only the one that is profitable in your campaign, and the placement report is where you see it.

What the bid adjustment does

You can raise your bid for a placement by a percentage, up to 900%. With a 50% top-of-search adjustment, a 1.00 bid becomes 1.50 when the ad competes for that slot. The bidding strategy works on top of this: with dynamic bids up and down, Amazon can raise the bid further when it expects a sale.

In our data, the adjustment visibly moved where the clicks came from. We took the campaigns whose settings did not change in the last month and had at least 30 clicks in that month. In the 24 without a top-of-search adjustment, the median share of clicks from top of search was 5.9%. In the 32 with one, it was 26.7%. These campaigns also differ in other ways, so this is not a measured effect of the adjustment alone, but the direction is clear.

That is the point to remember: the adjustment buys you top of search. Whether top of search earns more than it costs in that campaign is a separate question, and it is answered by the ACOS per placement, not by the adjustment.

Most numbers are too small

Here we looked at every campaign in the data, not only the 276 above: 337 campaigns, and 932 pairs of a campaign and one of the three main placements. Of those pairs, 638 had fewer than 20 clicks over the whole period. 363 had spend and no purchase at all. At those sizes one order changes the ACOS of a placement completely.

Before you change an adjustment, check that the placement had enough clicks to judge. Below a few dozen clicks, wait, or look at a longer period.

Twenty minutes a month

Open the placement report for your campaigns with the most spend, for the last 30 days. For each one, write down the clicks, spend and sales per placement, and calculate the ACOS per placement.

Then make three decisions. If top of search has enough clicks and a clearly lower ACOS than the other two, raise the adjustment in small steps. If it has enough clicks and a clearly higher ACOS, lower the adjustment or remove it. If it does not have enough clicks yet, leave the setting alone, and look again next month.