Sponsored Products bid strategies — down-only, up-and-down, fixed.
Three Sponsored Products bid strategies, three different relationships between your bid and what Amazon actually places. When each is correct, when each is dangerous, and the placement-modifier interaction.
Sponsored Products has three bid strategies. They look like a UI choice; they are actually three different agreements with Amazon's bidder about how aggressively it can move your bid in real time.
Dynamic bids — down only
Amazon will lower your bid in real time when a conversion is judged less likely. It will never raise the bid. This is the closest thing to your bid is your ceiling and is the right default for: profitability-led campaigns, ASINs with thin margins, harvesting campaigns where you want a low realised CPC, and almost every launch.
Dynamic bids — up and down
Amazon will raise your bid by up to 100% when a conversion is judged more likely (up to 100% in top-of-search positions, up to 50% on product pages), and lower it when less likely. The 100% modifier compounds with your placement modifiers — a top-of-search modifier of +50% combined with up-and-down on a "likely" auction can result in your effective bid being multiplied by 3.0 or more.
Use up-and-down only when revenue or rank is the goal and you have margin to absorb the higher realised CPC. It is the right choice for proven manual exact-match campaigns on terms you know convert, and it is wrong for everything else, including most launches.
Fixed bids
Amazon places exactly the bid you specified — no real-time adjustment. Placement modifiers still apply. Fixed bids are the right choice when you want to learn the unmodified auction behaviour of a new keyword set, or when you specifically want predictable spend behaviour for reporting reasons. For most production campaigns fixed bids will leave conversions on the table.
The placement-modifier interaction
Placement modifiers (top-of-search, rest-of-search, product pages) multiply your bid for that specific surface and compound with the dynamic-bid modifier. Examples:
- Down-only + top-of-search +50%: bid floor is your bid × 1.5 at the top, with downward room from there.
- Up-and-down + top-of-search +50%: maximum effective bid is your bid × 1.5 × 2.0 = ×3.0.
- Fixed + top-of-search +50%: realised bid is exactly your bid × 1.5 at the top.
Defaults for the three-campaign skeleton
Auto harvesting campaign: down-only. Manual exact-match profitable campaign: down-only at launch, up-and-down once the keyword has proven CVR. Brand-defence campaign: down-only with a high bid — the auction will protect the CPC for you.
Watch Episode 10: Sponsored Products bid strategies (German)
The German walkthrough — Sponsored Products bid strategies compared.
Choose the bid strategy your goal actually requires.
AMALYZE traces every realised CPC back to the strategy and modifiers that produced it, so the next strategy switch is informed by evidence.