Inject sponsored products from a retail media platform
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Sponsored products are paid ads that appear alongside product displays on ecommerce sites. Sellers may bid for their products to increase visibility in search results or category pages. They look like regular results, but they’re marked as “Sponsored” or with a similar label.
Sponsored product placements within results can drive revenue growth and maintain the relevance of user search results. The aim is a seamless blend of sponsored and regular results that doesn’t detract from the search experience.
Depending on the source of your sponsored product data, you can approach this in one of two ways:
- If you’re promoting products from known brands and the “sponsored” flag data is also in your Algolia index, use Smart Groups.
- If you’re integrating a third-party retail media platform that returns sponsored results based on real-time bidding, follow the approach outlined in this guide.
An overview of integrating sponsored and regular (organic) results
Retail media platforms
Retail media platforms (RMPs), such as Criteo, CitrusAd, or Zitcha, are solutions for managing sponsored product campaigns. They handle ad inventories, bidding, targeting, and reporting. RMPs also provide APIs to fetch sponsored product recommendations for a search query or category.
These guides show how to retrieve sponsored product data from an RMP and inject those items within the product lists users see, for example, on search results or category listing pages.
You can place sponsored products at the top of the search results or distribute them at regular intervals (like the first, fifth, and so on) within the results.
In-grid sponsored products - top positions
In-grid sponsored products - spread-out placement
Integration strategies
Showing sponsored products involves API calls to the RMP and Algolia. These two sets of results are then merged within your app’s code (often on the backend) with the sponsored products interspersed within Algolia’s search results and appropriately labeled.
The following table details three strategies, outlining their API call order, recommendations, and trade-offs.
| Strategy | Recommendation | Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|
| Parallel requests Makes simultaneous calls to the Algolia Search and RMP API |
Recommended when RMP data is complete and for optimal speed due to parallel execution. Learn more |
Algolia’s result and facet counts are inaccurate because sponsored products aren’t included. Since there’s a risk of overlap between RMP and Algolia results, your merge logic must filter out duplicates. |
| RMP first RMP API call first, then Algolia API call |
Recommended if the RMP only provides basic product data. Learn more |
Need to query Algolia to retrieve detailed product information for sponsored products. Since there’s a risk of overlap between RMP and Algolia results, your merge logic must filter out duplicates. |
| Algolia first Algolia API call first, then RMP API call |
Only recommended if the other strategies aren’t an option and your RMP can exclude already-found products. Learn more |
Often yields less relevant RMP results. |
Before your strategy goes live, ensure you’ve considered the regulatory requirements and the influence of sponsored results on your analytics, ranking, and UI.
