Are your ads in the right position?
Sponsored Product Ads almost by definition should get the best place in the store, which means for search result pages – the first results.
The advertisers pay to give their products more visibility but not less importantly, premium visibility, and there is no better place for getting that premium visibility than the top of the page before anything else.
Still some ecommerce sites are not parting with their top shelves easily and keep 1 or 2 positions for organic results or manual selection.
How does this top shelf really effect the monetization of the ecommerce site?
And what about the number of ads per page? Is it “the more the merrier” or maybe “less is more”?
In the last few weeks we’ve gathered data from more than 20 different ecommerce sites that offer sponsored product ads using Mabaya to answer these questions and here are the results.
Let’s start at the top.
Serving ads in the top position vs. serving the first ad only in the third position (and showing 2 other products above it) increases the page CTR by 67%!
The average CTR per ad in the pages that show the sponsored product ads in the top placement (including all the other SP ads in the page – not only the one in the top position) was 60% higher.
The effect of the first position is even clearer when comparing websites that offer 2 ads (having the first ad on the top position) vs. websites that have 4 ads in the page (but the first ad is in the third place) – A website that offers only 2 ads (which one of them is in the top position) gets 25% more clicks than a website that presents 4 ads (but only starting at the 3rd position) meaning that doubling the number of ads per page doesn’t help reach the clicks of the 1st position.
Now let’s talk about the ads quantity.
Stores that offer 8 ad slots in a page get on average 2X more clicks than those that offer 4 ads or less in a page and 1.6X more than stores that offer 5-6 ads.
This is quite obvious: More ads = More clicks on ads and higher CTR per page.
The position of the first ad has a bigger effect on the performance of the ads than the number of ads. For example, a store with 6 ads where one of them is in the top position, can get the same CTR per page as a store with 8 ads.
Do more ads effect the conversion rates?
We also checked if there’s a connections between the number of ads and their conversion rates.
The answer is no. The average conversion rate of ads on pages with many ads is similar to those of ads on pages with only 2 ads. It might vary from store to store but it is not really affected by the number of the ads per page.
In other words, as long as you serve relevant ads to your shoppers, the performance of the ads in terms of conversion rate is not negatively effected and it doesn’t matter if there are 2 or 8 ads in the page.
About Mabaya
Mabaya offers a white-label self-service Sponsored Products Ads platform for online retailers and marketplaces that enables sellers and brands to bid in order to ensure their products are listed in premium locations in the online store.
The platform is integrated in more than 50 ecommerce sites around the globe (such as Bol.com, Jumia, Manomano, Kaufland, Hepsiburada, Falabella etc.), serving more than 60,000 advertisers and sellers.
