How do Sponsored Product Ads work on OTTO?

Where ads appear on OTTO

OTTO shows Sponsored Product Ads in search results, in product lists and on product detail pages, on desktop, on mobile and in the app. OTTO builds the ad itself from your item's data, so you don't have to design anything.

Search results and product lists have at most 11 ad slots, at positions 1, 2, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64 and 72. A product detail page has at most 30. According to OTTO, half of all customers only scroll as far as position 30 in a product list. You can't bid a premium for a specific slot on OTTO.

How OTTO auctions its ad slots

An auction runs on every page view. In it, OTTO determines the winners and the click price each of them pays. Your bid is the most you're willing to pay for a click. The minimum bid is 0.20 €.

Besides the bid, OTTO says it also looks at how attractive your product is. Well-rated products are meant to get clicks at a lower price. Only an item where you hold the BuyBox enters the auction. If an item counts as sold out because fewer than half of its variants are available, OTTO doesn't show it.

Automatic and manual campaigns on OTTO

OTTO has two campaign types. You choose one when you create the campaign and can't change it afterwards.

In an automatic campaign, OTTO itself chooses the searches and pages your item appears on. It runs in search results, in product lists and on product detail pages. You set one bid per item. Only here can you exclude search terms. Only here do you also get OTTO's „Intelligentes Bieten“ (smart bidding), where OTTO adjusts your bid daily, up to at most the amount you set.

OTTO chooses the searches for an automatic campaign based on your listing. How well it runs therefore depends on whether your listing contains the words customers actually search for. In practice, many sellers only describe the product, written by hand or with AI, and leave out the words people search for.

In a manual campaign you book keywords. These are the words your item should appear for when someone searches them. It runs in search results only. You set one bid per keyword, and a campaign holds at most 2,500 keywords.

OTTO recommends starting with an automatic campaign and adding a manual one as soon as you know your keywords. In practice, many sellers create both for a single item or a group of similar items instead of putting their whole range into one campaign. Which one suits which situation is covered in Should I advertise on OTTO automatically or with keywords?

The three match types on OTTO

In a manual campaign you choose a match type for every keyword. It sets how closely a customer's search has to match your keyword. In the partner portal the three are called „Exact“, „Phrase“ and „Broad“.

• Exact means the keyword “gartenstuhl” usually only matches the search “gartenstuhl”.
• Phrase means “gartenstuhl holz” matches too, because the keyword appears in that order in the search.
• Broad means similar searches like “gartenstühle” can also match.

You can exclude search terms as exact or phrase. Negative keywords for a whole campaign or a whole account don't exist. Negative keywords are always attached to a single item.

Budget and billing on OTTO

The budget sets how much a campaign may spend. On OTTO it's either time-limited with a total amount or ongoing with an amount per day, week or month. You also choose whether OTTO spreads it evenly or spends it as fast as possible. The budget type can't be changed later either. OTTO doesn't accept a budget under 5 €.

You pay the click price you actually reached in the auction. It's at most your bid and often lower. A month's ad spend arrives as an invoice on the 2nd of the following month under „Finanzen“ (Finance) → „Servicegebühren“ (Service fees), with VAT, settled through OTTO Payments.

How OTTO attributes sales to a click

When a customer clicks your ad, OTTO credits it with the matching purchases of the next 14 days. A purchase without a click on an ad never counts. What counts as matching is something you choose in a campaign's detail report, on four levels.

OTTO's default is brand. The ad revenue then includes the acacia chairs a customer buys after clicking the ad for the oak table. Items of another brand of yours don't count. OTTO calculates ad revenue using the price the buyer pays, so with VAT. The ad spend in the report is without VAT. If you work out your target ACoS from your margin, use the gross price.

ACoS is ad spend as a share of ad revenue. The brand's revenue is larger than the single item's revenue. That's why the ACoS OTTO shows you by default is lower than the ACoS of the advertised item.

OTTO counts a purchase on the day of the click. A day's ad revenue can therefore keep growing for two weeks while the ad spend stays the same. So the ACoS of the last 14 days isn't final yet and can still fall.

What's different on OTTO compared with Amazon

On Amazon the counterpart is called Sponsored Products. OTTO is structured differently.

• There are no ad groups. Directly under the campaign sit the targetings, meaning the items and keywords you bid on.
• A targeting applies per item. If you advertise 10 items with 10 keywords each, that's 100 targetings. On Amazon it would be 10 targetings in one ad group, with numbers that mix all the items. On OTTO you can follow performance down to the single item, but setting it up is more work.
• There are no portfolios. On Amazon a portfolio is a group of campaigns you put together by theme or season and evaluate together. On OTTO every campaign stands alone.
• There's no premium for the top search positions.
• A targeting's performance doesn't sit next to its bid. It's spread across several reports.

How to tell whether an OTTO campaign is working

Every campaign has a goal. If you want to get known, you measure impressions, meaning how often OTTO shows your ad. If you want to sell at a profit, you measure ACoS. For that you set a target ACoS, the highest ACoS at which you still keep the margin you want. Roughly, it's the share of the gross price left to you before ad spend, minus the margin you want to keep. Which metrics OTTO shows you for this is covered in Which metrics matter for OTTO advertising? How to work out your target ACoS exactly is covered in What is a good ACoS on OTTO, and how do I calculate it?

If the ACoS is below target, you can raise the bid. If it's above, you lower it. Judge each targeting, not just the whole campaign. In an automatic campaign you lower or raise the item bids and exclude search terms with no sales. In a manual campaign you move each targeting up or down individually. OTTO advises judging an item only once it has had at least 50 € of ad spend. When to lower and when to raise is covered in When should I lower and raise bids on OTTO?

In practice, these mistakes come up often.

• A campaign is above target and gets switched off entirely. Often three or four targetings spoil the average and the rest is doing well.
• There's no target. Many sellers don't know which ACoS is still profitable for them.
• Campaigns run with no upkeep at all.
• Ads get switched off and on again because they feel expensive. According to OTTO, sales through ads can improve your position in the regular search. If you switch off, you hand your position to competitors. How OTTO sorts the regular search is covered in How does OTTO's search algorithm work?.

How to create an OTTO campaign today

You book ads in OTTO Partner Connect, the partner portal for sellers.

1. Open „Marketing“ → „Marketing Services buchen“ (Book marketing services) and click „Jetzt buchen“ (Book now).
2. Give the campaign a name and choose the brand.
3. Set the budget and schedule and choose how OTTO spreads the budget.
4. Choose whether to create an automatic or a manual campaign.
5. Choose the items through the search, a list or a CSV file. OTTO advises at least 5 items, and 15 to 20 to start with.
6. Set the bids for all items at once or per item. OTTO suggests a bid based on the bids of the last 7 days, one that wins about half of all auctions.
7. In an automatic campaign, enter the search terms you want to exclude and click „Buchung abschließen“ (Complete booking).

In a manual campaign you book the keywords per item with match type and bid, also by CSV file. You can change or pause a campaign under „Marketing“ → „Sponsored Product Ads“ in the „Dashboard“ tab, using the „Bearbeiten“ (Edit) and „Pausieren“ (Pause) icons in its row. „Bearbeiten“ opens the campaign's steps. In an automatic campaign the item bids are in step „2 Produktauswahl“ (Product selection), and in a manual campaign the keyword bids are in step „3 Keywords & Gebote festlegen“ (Set keywords & bids). In both steps you download the targetings with „CSV-Download“, and „CSV-Upload“ sits right next to it.

How to find search terms for your manual OTTO campaign

Under „Analysen“ (Analytics) → „Potenzialanalysen“ (Potential analyses) → „Suchbegriff Analyse“ (Search term analysis), OTTO shows what customers search for on otto.de. You don't need any ads for this.

• The „Top Suchbegriffe“ (Top search terms) tab shows the 100,000 most requested search terms of the last 7, 30, 90, 180 or 365 days. For each one you get the search volume as a range, such as 100,000 to 200,000, the trend and the number of products. You can filter by assortment and download the list.
• The „Suchbegriffe nach Produkt“ (Search terms by product) tab shows which search terms a product was found under in the last 30 days, with its average position. The field expects the OTTO item number, not your SKU and not the EAN.

In practice, you pick four or five competitor products similar to yours and enter their item numbers under „Suchbegriffe nach Produkt“. You add the matching search terms to your list and roughly estimate how often people search for them. The same words belong in your listing too, because that's what OTTO uses to choose the searches for the automatic campaign.

How to read OTTO's reports today

The reports are under „Marketing“ → „Sponsored Product Ads“ in the tabs „Dashboard“, „Kampagnen-Report“ (Campaign report), „Artikel-Report“ (Item report), „Verkäufe-Report“ (Sales report) and „Prognose-Report“ (Forecast report). Each campaign has a detail report, opened in the „Dashboard“ tab with the „SPA Kampagnendetailreport“ (SPA campaign detail report) icon in the campaign's row, or in the „Artikel-Report“ tab through the „Detailreport“ (Detail report) column. It has the tabs „Gesamt Report“ (Overall report), „Keyword Report“, „Artikel Report“ (Item report) and „Sales Report“. In the partner portal you can currently choose the whole „Kampagnenzeitraum“ (Campaign period) there, while the Helpdesk still gives at most 30 days for the Keyword Report. You can download the reports as CSV files and have the detail report emailed to you every week or month with „E-Mail-Report abonnieren“ (Subscribe to email report).

OTTO shows you ACoS as „KUR (ACoS)“, by default at brand level. What a single targeting costs and brings in is something you calculate yourself.

1. In the detail report, set „Conversion-Basis“ (conversion basis) from „1. Marke“ (brand) to „4. Artikel“ (item).
2. Download the Keyword Report and the Item Report of every campaign.
3. In each row, divide the spend, meaning your ad spend, by the revenue. That's the targeting's ACoS.
4. Write your target ACoS for the item next to it and mark whatever is above.
5. Leave out the last 14 days because their ad revenue can still grow.

You do this again for every campaign and every period. With many items and keywords, it quickly turns into a very large spreadsheet.

How to calculate a garden table's ACoS on two levels

Say you advertise the oak table for 100 € in your manual campaign with the keyword “gartentisch eiche”. Your bid is 0.50 €. Your garden furniture has a target ACoS of 25%. All numbers are an example and come from days more than 14 days back.

At brand level the ACoS of about 25% is exactly on target. The table itself is at 34%. At 25%, 1,000 € of ad revenue should carry at most 250 € of ad spend, so the targeting is 90 € above target. For the bid, what counts is what this item itself sells. So you lower the bid, for example by 20% to 0.40 €, and look at the targeting again after another two weeks.