---
title: Product Detail Pages (PDP) and Recommender Carousels
slug: fluid-adserver-api/product-detail-pages-pdp-and-recommender-carousels
icon: 🍞
docTags: 
createdAt: 2026-02-04T16:15:47.678Z
---

On PDP pages, we typically see 3 types of ad, and overwhelmingly for Sponsored Products.

### Recommender Carousels

Many retailers have an organic recommender system to produce one or more recommended product carousels - similar or complementary items, for example.

While common on PDP pages, such carousels are widespread - for example on basket addition.

Recommender Carousels are an ideal candidate for **Fluid Ads**, because they allow retailers to make highly relevant product more visible, and monetizable.

When implementing a recommender carousel Ad Unit on a PDP page, follow these tips:

**Ad Request**

In the request, ensure to specify the page product (i.e. the ID of the product on the PDP page the user is visiting), with the `ignoreBid` and `pinned` flags set to true, This prevents the adserver from sponsoring the currently visited product. You can drop this product from rendering in the response.

We suggest sending as many recommended products as possible, in order to get the best match of sponsored products, a recommended minimum is 20.

If you only want to display sponsored recommended products, set `onlySponsored: true` in the request. If you want sponsored products within the list of organic recommended products, don't send the `onlySponsored` attribute 



:::CodeblockTabs{indent="2"}
```javascript
{
    "user": {
        "id": "Test",
        "agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
    },
    "adUnits": [
        {
            "adUnitId": "[PDP UNIT ID]",
            "products": [
                {
                    "gtin": "0195", //The ID of the product on the PDP page, with bids to be ignored
                    "ignoreBid": true,
                    "pinned":true
                },
                {
                    "gtin": "ABHCD123" //A list of recommended products
                },
                {
                    "gtin": "CHDCD156"
                },
                {
                    "gtin": "..."
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}
```
:::

**Ad Unit Settings**

The Ad Unit Settings should set only **Fluid Ads** (if you want ads dynamically in the carousel), or **Ads from Organic** custom tiles, if you want to specify ad positions. If you only wish to have sponsored products in the response, select Fluid Ads only, and use the `onlySponsored` attribute in the ad call as described above.

### Non-recommender Sponsored Carousels

Outside of using organic recommendations as a product source for Sponsored Products, you can also request Sponsored Products directly, and specify the category of the product (and any desired additonal categories) as context for ad selection.  

```javascript
{
    "user": {
        "id": "Test",
        "agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
    },
    "adUnits": [
        {
            "adUnitId": "[PDP UNIT ID]",
            "categories":{
            "current": "Clothes>Shoes", //Current Taxonomy
            "additional": [
                "Clothes>Dresses",
                "Accessories" //Additional qualified categories to be included in the auction
            ]
            },
            "products": [
                {
                    "gtin": "0195", //The ID of the product on the PDP page, with bids to be ignored
                    "ignoreBid": true,
                    "pinned":true
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}
```

**Ad Unit Settings**

In this setup, you can simply use **Addtional Inventory **Custom Tiles from slot 1 to the number of returned products you want. Fluid Ads should be set to 0.

We generally recommend requesting 3+ more products than you will actually display, in case you run a final stock/eligibility check before rendering.

### BuyBox Ads

BuyBox ads are alternative or complementary products the customer may wish to buy. You can create a BuyBox Ad Unit using either of the Carousel types above, but limit the number of ads to eg. 3, and render only the first eligible ad.