What Top Placement is
Ozon added a new ad format inside pay-per-click: Top Placement. It is essentially one of the CPC auto-strategies that pushes your products into the first 12 tiles of search results.
What it gives you:
- Higher positions.
- More orders.
- Higher click-through rate: CTR in the top positions is almost always better.
Why? It is simple. Shoppers are lazy. It is easier to pick something from the first ten offers than to scroll down and study alternatives, especially when the product is mass-market and the choice is wide. Once you are in the top of search, you get compared on price, rating and reviews, and the chance of a click and a purchase goes up.
The catch few people think about
The auto-strategy built into Top Placement almost always leads to higher ad spend. In our tests, the ad cost share (ACOS) on Top Placement came out higher than with other strategies. Money is spent faster and not always effectively.
Meanwhile, on the next tab there is the good old Average Cost per Click tool with the Search strategy. You can promote in search the same way and take high positions, but most importantly you control the bid manually. You get a similar result in impressions and clicks without overpaying, and costs become manageable.
What we do in practice
Whether to use Top Placement is each seller's call, based on their own strategy. In our work we almost never use this tool. When we need to lift positions and get into the top of search, we choose manual bids and manage CTR and costs through Average Cost per Click.
The takeaway
Ozon keeps adding more advertising options. But in advertising, every decision should come from the numbers: your numbers and your unit economics. Yes, automation helps, but it does not always pay for itself, because manual bids often turn out to be more profitable and more precise.
So approach advertising carefully. Test. Analyze ad cost share, CTR and conversion. And think before you switch on a new tool.
