Marketers are preparing for a cookieless world and facing the challenge of driving revenue while considering new privacy and security standards. The good news is that there are ways to build privacy-first ad solutions. The option that we often recommend to Koddi customers is sponsored listings. Sponsored listings have been the fastest-growing channel on the Koddi platform for the last four years across all industries and customer sizes.

What are Sponsored Listings?

A sponsored listing is a type of advertisement that boosts or highlights an organic listing on a website or app. If you’ve browsed through search results on a website or shopped in an online marketplace, you’ve likely come across listings that are labeled “Ad” or “Promoted.” These are sponsored listings.

Sponsored listings are sometimes referred to by other names, such as promoted listings, sponsored ads, product listing ads, sponsored placements, or sponsored products. All of these terms usually refer to the same native ad type.

Who Uses Them?

Sponsored listings can be used by almost any website or application, especially if it has one or more of the following components:

• Ecommerce – or an online retail experience with multiple brands represented; examples include Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, and Macy’s
• A Marketplace – a shopping experience with products from multiple third-party sellers; examples are Etsy, Amazon Marketplace, Walmart Marketplace, and eBay.
• Listings – a business directory, local listings, or category search results; Yellowpages.com, Apartments.com, and Booking.com are examples of sites that have listings.

Examples of Sponsored Listings

Let’s look at a few examples of sponsored listings. Each of these shows a promoted listing or set of listings toward the top of the website or app.

Amazon Sponsored Ads

Amazon’s ad program includes options for sellers to sponsor their products or brand across several areas of the Amazon search results page. In the screenshot below, we see several placements at the top of the results page for the search “camping tents.”

Priceline Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads on Priceline.com are a second-price auction that allows hoteliers to increase their hotels’ visibility with premium positioning in the ad space at the top of the hotel search results page.

Uber Eats Ads

Uber Eats Ads appear in the home feed and the search results of the Uber Eats app. Restaurants can bid in a second-price auction to win the sponsored listings spot, and users see the ad most relevant to their personal preferences.

Sponsored listings have a high return on ad spend, consistently prove incremental to the media mix, and use only zero and first-party data for targeting. Learn more about this ad type in our free ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to Sponsored Listings.