FAQs about the ad response
As standard, the Sponsored Products ad response returns both organic and sponsored products in a combined list, with sponsored products interspersed among the organic products.
This is a featureto our Fluid adserving engine, which chooses the ideal positions of sponsored products (based on rules your team sets in our Publisher Manager UI) and returns a combined list to you for rendering.
The benefits:
- You get a combined list of ads and organic - no duplication of ads and organic unless you specifically request it
- You don't have to inject any ads after the page render - no layout shift
- Superior ad and organic performance - ads are shown in the most deserving place based on your settings and rules
- It's also possible to set ads to only show up in fixed slots, or a mix of fixed and fluid slots, as desired
Yes - while the standard response returns ads + organic combined, you can also just request a list of sponsored products using the OnlySponsored: true attribute in the ad request.
This is useful for eg. Carousels, where products should always be sponsored. Or, if you want to control placement and inject ads, you can also use this approach.
We allow for and recommend calling all ad units on the same page in one request. A common use case is:
- Sponsored Carousel at the top of the page
- In-grid sponsored products
- One or more Display or Sponsored Brand placements
All of which would have their own Ad Unit ID.
Not only does batching these to a single this request minimise calls and network traffic, it also allows you to set de-duplication rules between ad units, for examples:
- Products in a carousel should not come from the first X products of the main grid, or
- Products shown in the carousel should be removed from the main grid altogether
This allows granular control over what ads are shown where, within the same page.
There are several cases where a product won't show up as sponsored, even if it has a bid:
- It is locally or globally out of stock according to our product feed
- Due to ad unit floor prices or maximum ad rules set by your team
- When the product gets no benefit from sponsorship. There are a limited number of cases where this happens:
- It started in position 1 organically, and no product was competing with it for position 1
- It could not be moved up from its organic position, but was not being challenged for its own position by a competing product
Pentaleap's system is designed to give fair value to the advertiser and to the publisher, and so we only allow sponsorship of a product (and therefore for it to pay a CPC) when it gains some visibility benefit from that sponsorship.