Advertising on bol: how to build a solid campaign structure

No single campaign structure fits every account. The right setup depends on your strategy and stage, your product type and margin, the competitive field, the size of your range and your performance.

This article gives you a clear view of advertising on bol, and shows what a structured base setup looks like that keeps you in control. That gives you a reference point to build your own strong structure on.

Advertising on bol does not start with your bid, but with the question of which products can handle extra traffic. A product that converts well can grow fast with advertising. A product that converts poorly mostly spends money faster when you add traffic.

Structure comes next. It determines which product you can steer, where it appears, through which targeting and at what cost.

In this article we explain how we build bol advertising: Sponsored Products, product selection, placements, keywords, campaign structure, budgets and ACoS. On a few points we deliberately deviate from bol's standard route, especially for accounts with enough volume.

The approach below comes from accounts we manage every day and from audits of existing bol accounts. Where something concerns how bol itself works, we base it on bol's documentation.

In short

• Start with products that already convert. Best-sellers earn the ad budget.
• Treat the long tail differently: low bids and limited budgets keep costs in hand.
• Sponsored Products is the base layer for most brands.
• Search results, category pages and product pages are different kinds of traffic.
• We run automatic discovery campaigns on Search only.
• For important products with enough volume, we work with one product per ad group.
• We use exact for control, and partial and automatic mainly for discovery.
• Look beyond ACoS at TACoS, margin and total revenue development.
• Only split when there is enough data to actually steer on it afterwards.

Which ad formats does bol offer?

For most sellers, advertising starts with Sponsored Products and Branded Shelves. On top of that, Bol Retail Media offers broader media solutions for reach and brand building.

Sponsored Products are paid product ads that can appear in search results, on category pages and on product pages. You pay per click. For many brands this is the first advertising layer, because here you sit closest to a concrete product demand. Bol itself names best-sellers, new items and a wider range as products you can use Sponsored Products for.

Branded Shelves shows several products together in a branded unit. The regular placement within search results and category pages sits at position seven, the solution is available for registered brands and can hold up to twenty products.

So the two fill different roles. Sponsored Products sits close to the individual product and direct demand, Branded Shelves gives room to brand and range.

Display and other Retail Media are used more for reach and brand building. The contribution to a sale is less direct, which also asks for a different way of judging it. We usually build out that layer only once the base underneath is solid.

A Brand Page is not an ad but a brand environment within bol where you bring your range and brand story together. It can be a logical destination for brand campaigns.

In which order do you build bol advertising?

From the bottom up. First products that can convert, then Sponsored Products, then brand and reach.

There is a simple idea behind this: existing demand is easier to measure than reach that only has to pay off later. If you spend a lot at the top while your products, content and Sponsored Products structure are still weak, you buy traffic the base cannot use.

We see this regularly in audits. A lot is spent on reach while best-sellers are barely visible on important searches. In that case we prefer to start at the bottom.

Which products should you advertise?

Not every product deserves the same ad budget. That sounds obvious, and yet we see accounts where hundreds of items get roughly the same treatment.

Best-sellers are the starting point. Bol itself also advises using best-sellers for Sponsored Products: demand is already proven and they build up enough data faster. For these products it makes sense to steer more actively on keywords, placements, bids and budget, and a fine-grained structure pays for itself fastest here.

Growth products are not best-sellers yet but have potential. You give them controlled room: enough budget to build data and sales, but not automatically as much as a product that has already proven its value.

Long tail can take part, just differently. We put those products in separate campaigns with low bids and limited daily budgets, where the budget is deliberately also a control mechanism. The product gets a chance to build sales, and at the same time you prevent dozens of small items from quietly pulling budget away from your best-sellers.

Products that convert insufficiently rarely have an advertising problem. Look at the cause first: price, content, images, reviews, delivery time, stock or competitive position. Relevance also counts in the auction. Bol documents that relevant products are rewarded with a lower CPC, so product information and offer determine not only your conversion but also your click price.

Advertising strengthens what is already there. A good product with more relevant traffic can grow fast. A weak proposition with more traffic stays a weak proposition.

Where can Sponsored Products appear?

Sponsored Products can appear on three types of pages: search results, category pages and product pages. Bol lets you analyse those placements separately and switch them on or off. We also treat them differently in substance.

Search results. Here someone types a search themselves, which gives you a lot of information about intent. You see what someone searches for, which products are shown on it and what that traffic does next. For us, Search is therefore the most important environment for keyword discovery.

Category pages. Here someone browses a range. There can be a lot of volume, but the search intent is less explicit than with someone entering a concrete term. You target at category level, and if you pick a category, the underlying subcategories come along. The algorithm partly decides which ads appear. That gives reach, but also less precision.

Product pages. Here someone is already looking at a specific item and you can show relevant alternatives. Important to know: here too you work from the categories your product falls into. In a manual campaign you can set bids yourself at different category levels. So you choose the context you take part in, not every individual product page separately. That distinction shapes how we use this placement.

Why do we use automatic discovery on Search only?

Bol advises automatic campaigns to gather data, and we agree with that. We just deploy such a campaign differently: our low-bid discovery campaigns run on search results only, with category and product pages off.

There is a clear reason for that. In an automatic campaign, bol itself decides the keywords, bids and placement based on the algorithm and your set target ACoS. So you do not set an individual CPC bid the way you do in a manual campaign.

Add category and product-page targeting to that, and you hand over even more control. With categories you set a direction, but the subcategories come along and the algorithm decides where you actually become visible. With product pages you likewise work from categories. Especially in an automatic campaign with several products, bol then makes several decisions at once: which product is shown, on which page, and how much is bid for the click. Meanwhile you mostly steer with target ACoS, budget and exclusions.

That can work fine if you mainly want revenue and want to give the algorithm room. It just fits our goal poorly. From a discovery campaign we want one thing: new search terms that we can establish are relevant and convert.

Hence the rule: auto discovery is Search only. We move new winners deliberately into a manual structure. Category and PDP get their own campaigns as soon as there is enough reason and volume for it, so we steer bids and targeting ourselves.

Incidentally, when PDP performance disappoints in an automatic campaign, bol itself also advises considering a separate manual campaign for that placement type, precisely because you then set the bid yourself.

Keyword or search term: what is the difference?

A keyword is what you want to be found on, a search term is what the customer actually types. Bol makes that distinction itself, and it matters because that is exactly where your discovery comes from.

For example, you set a broader keyword and then see in the search-term report which concrete searches produce clicks and sales. You can then steer those search terms more specifically.

Exact or partial?

Bol works with exact and partial keywords. Exact gives more control, partial gives more room for discovery.

Only, "exact" is less literal than the name suggests. On an exact keyword, bol can also include variants, misspellings and singular or plural. So you do not get a pure one-to-one relationship between keyword and search term.

Negative keywords work differently, and this often goes wrong. Variants are not automatically included there in the same way. Bol itself uses the example of "blue shoe": if you exclude that term, variants like "blue shoes", "shoe blue" and a typo are not all automatically excluded.

So check your real search terms. A one-line exclusion list often excludes less than you think.

How do we use exact, partial and automatic?

For us, all three have their own function. We use Automatic Search for discovery. We use partial when we deliberately want to search more broadly around a topic. We use exact for terms we want to steer on precisely.

That keeps the account readable: discovery looks for new chances, exact campaigns steer proven ones. Where possible we avoid steering the same search intent through several routes at once, because then you can no longer see which target, bid or campaign type caused the result.

What does a good campaign structure look like?

There is no perfect structure for every account. A brand with twenty products and little traffic needs something different from a brand with hundreds of products and millions of euros in marketplace revenue.

Our main rule: split when the difference matters enough to steer on it differently. That can be by product, placement, keyword, category, targeting type or objective.

More splitting gives more control, but also more campaigns, more management and less data per part. The level of detail has to pay for itself.

Why we structure differently from bol's advice at sufficient volume

Bol advises grouping related products logically. That keeps an account clear and prevents you from building dozens of small campaigns too early. For smaller accounts that is a sensible starting point.

For important products with enough volume, we go further and work with one product per ad group.

Why? Suppose five products share the same targeting. Those products do not automatically have the same conversion, click-through rate, selling price, margin, stock position or organic position. You can view the results per product, but bids, keywords and placements are shared within the ad group. As a result you cannot steer a focus product separately without moving the others along.

With one important product per ad group, you see much faster what is really happening. You adjust bids, keywords and placements without dragging other products along. That gives control.

But not for every SKU. One product per ad group is not a goal in itself. A long-tail product that sells four times a month has little use for an elaborate campaign construction, because there is simply too little data for it. So we mainly use this level of detail for best-sellers and growth products with enough volume. We keep the long tail simpler and cheaper.

What is the point of an automatic campaign?

Discovery. In an automatic campaign, bol chooses the keywords itself, and after about two weeks or 80 to 100 clicks per product or keyword, according to bol there is usually enough information to analyse.

We use that data to find new search terms. The route is simple: discover, assess, add manually, steer precisely.

That is why it matters to us that the campaign actually gathers Search data. A discovery campaign that mainly spends budget on categories and product pages can produce fine sales, but teaches us less about which searches to claim next. Revenue and discovery are two different goals.

How long do you wait before optimising?

Not three days. Bol advises about two weeks or 80 to 100 clicks per product or keyword before you draw conclusions, and that is a good ground rule.

Also look at the volume behind your figures. Twenty clicks without a sale means something different for a product with an expected conversion of 25% than for an item that normally converts at 3%. Data has to have had enough chance to say something.

How do you use budget?

Budget determines not only how much you spend, but also how long you stay visible. If the daily budget runs out, the campaign stops for that day. Bol itself points out this can be a missed opportunity, since 40% of purchases happen after 5pm.

For best-sellers you therefore want to avoid a well-performing campaign running out of budget unnecessarily. For the long tail we use that same limitation deliberately: lower bid, lower budget. The product stays in the game, but cannot drain the account.

Bol currently works with a fixed daily budget and has announced an average daily budget over a full calendar month. That would reduce the tension between busy and quiet days. Until then, the daily budget stays a setting you have to manage actively.

What has to be in place before you advertise?

An ad buys a visitor. The product page then has to do the work.

Buy box. For Sponsored Products you have to hold the buy box. Bol names this explicitly as a condition to be able to advertise an item.

Stock. More traffic to an almost sold-out product mostly speeds up a problem. Advertising and stock planning belong together.

Product information. Title, images and specifications influence conversion and relevance. Bol also uses product information in automatic campaigns to determine keywords, so a weak listing costs you money in two places.

Price position and delivery time. An ad does not make a poor offer attractive. Because relevance counts in the auction, price position and delivery terms can also carry through into your CPC.

Reviews. More visibility does not make a product with a weak review position more competitive.

What do ACoS, ROAS and TACoS mean?

ACoS is ad cost divided by attributed ad revenue. A thousand euros of cost on five thousand euros of ad revenue is an ACoS of 20%.

ROAS turns the same ratio around: five thousand euros of revenue divided by a thousand euros of advertising is 5x. Same information, different presentation.

TACoS compares ad cost with your total revenue. A thousand euros of advertising on ten thousand euros of total revenue is 10%. This shows how heavily advertising weighs on the total marketplace business. A stable ACoS with a falling TACoS fits, for example, a situation where organic revenue grows relatively faster.

Watch which source you use for TACoS. The bol dashboard and the attribution report calculate with different denominators: bol with the total account revenue, the attribution report with a more limited set. In accounts we audit, we regularly see that difference run up to about a factor of one and a half. So two percentages can both be correct and still mean something different. Agree beforehand which source leads, which revenue counts and over which period you calculate.

What is a good ACoS?

There is no universal percentage for that. The relevant limit is how much margin is available before advertising.

Suppose that after purchasing, bol costs, fulfilment and other variable costs you keep 20%. Then you have roughly 20% of room before the order becomes loss-making at that level.

Even that is not an automatic target. Sometimes you deliberately accept a higher ACoS: for a launch, for market share, for a growth product, for seasonal build-up or for extra visibility on a strategic keyword. Then it is an investment. The problem arises when a higher ACoS is not a choice but simply happens.

Advertising and organic visibility belong together

Do not look only at the advertising result. If a product already ranks strongly organically on a keyword, the value of an extra paid position is different from when you are barely visible organically. Bol now shows organic product positions at category and keyword level itself.

So the question is: what extra visibility and revenue are we actually buying here?

That is why branded traffic deserves separate attention. A brand searcher already typing your name is different from someone searching generically for a product category. Throw it all on one pile, and cheap branded traffic makes the average ACoS look better than your acquisition really is.

Common mistakes

• Advertising products that barely convert
• Treating best-sellers and long tail the same
• Running automatic discovery on CAT and PDP too, without a clear reason
• Merging different placements and then only looking at the average
• Structuring too fine-grained too early, or giving strong products too little control
• Adding negative keywords without checking the variants
• Running discovery without moving winners into manual campaigns
• Optimising too quickly
• Letting good campaigns run out of budget before the evening
• Looking only at ACoS, or judging branded and generic traffic without distinction

Frequently asked questions

What does advertising on bol cost? Sponsored Products works on a cost-per-click basis: you pay when someone clicks. You set a budget and steer, depending on your campaign type, with bids or a target ACoS. The actual cost depends among other things on competition and relevance, because bol rewards relevant products with a lower CPC.

Is it best to advertise with best-sellers? For us, best-sellers are usually the starting point. They have already proven they convert and produce enough data faster for targeted optimisation. Bol itself also names best-sellers as suitable products for Sponsored Products.

Can you advertise the long tail? Yes. We like to set the long tail apart with lower bids and limited budgets, so the range gets reach without using the same budget as proven best-sellers.

Why does Brightways use automatic on Search only? Because we use automatic for keyword discovery. On Search we can analyse concrete search terms and move strong terms into manual campaigns. With category and product-page targeting, an automatic campaign gives more decisions to the algorithm, and for those placements we prefer manual campaigns at sufficient volume.

Does every product need its own ad group? No. For best-sellers and products with enough volume, one product per ad group gives a lot of control. For the long tail, the same structure mostly produces extra management and fragmented data.

When do you optimise a campaign? Bol advises about two weeks or 80 to 100 clicks per product or keyword. Use that as a lower bound and not as an automatic decision rule: also look at conversion and volume.

What is a good ACoS? That depends on your margin and your objective. First calculate how much margin is available before advertising, and then decide how much of that you deliberately want to invest.

Why do my ads stop halfway through the day? Your daily budget has probably been reached and the campaign pauses until the next day. That is a shame, because 40% of purchases on bol happen after 5pm.

Is advertising on bol the same as on Amazon? The basics are similar: both platforms work with product ads, targeting, bids and automatic discovery. The setup and options differ enough that you should not copy an Amazon structure one-to-one to bol.

In closing

Good bol advertising starts with product selection. Best-sellers earn budget and control, growth products get room to prove themselves, the long tail can take part on different terms, and products that do not convert have to get better first.

Structure comes next. We use automatic Search to find chances and bring proven search terms into a manual structure. For products with enough volume we split further, but only when that actually produces extra control.

Not because more campaigns are better. But because you can only steer precisely on differences you have made visible.

You cannot fine-tune what you cannot measure separately.

This is how we approach advertising on bol, and in our client cases you can see what it produces. Want to spar about your own setup? Book a call.

Sources

• Discover Sponsored Products · Bol Partner Platform
• Start your campaign (Sponsored Products) · Bol Partner Platform
• Keyword targeting · Bol Partner Platform
• Bids and budgets · Bol Partner Platform
• Analyse results · Bol Partner Platform
• Discover Branded Shelves · Bol Partner Platform