Buyouts 2.0: The Complete Guide to Simulated Purchases on Marketplaces in 2025

Disclaimer #1. Buyouts will not deliver noticeable sales growth if you already have 100% "visibility" for a keyword. With a few exceptions, because 100% of shoppers already see you. In that case use them for reviews or to cut your ad spend share (DRR).

Disclaimer #2. Promotion through behavioral signals does not guarantee sales for a bad product. If the product card has weak design, the price is high and shoppers do not need the product, nothing will help. But it can take a good product 2x, 3x, 10x in a short time.

Disclaimer #3. If you do not use marketplace traffic and sell through bloggers, for example, you do not need promotion through behavioral signals. Do not waste the budget.

So let's start with the basics: the SEO keywords your product shows up for. I get it, everyone already knows this, but 99% of our clients have SEO problems. You may have them too and simply not know it.

Why I am writing about SEO keywords for the second article in a row

1. 1For most clients SEO gets changed only once a year, ignoring seasonal shifts and the evolution of user queries. As a result they lose up to half of their potential impressions on relevant keywords.
2. 2Sales from marketplace traffic depend 99% on how well you have worked your SEO.
3. 3If your product has no keywords in its SEO, it does not show up for them, ads do not run, sales do not happen. It is not that you are hard to find, for those keywords you simply do not exist on the marketplace.

Your competitor can be wrong about keywords. And they are wrong, we have checked. The competitor made a mistake, you repeated it, and you lose anywhere from 5% to 90% of traffic simply because you do not show up for the right keywords.

If you take your cues from competitors instead of starting from shopper queries, how are you going to find new keywords or prepare for seasonal demand?

Product keywords need to be checked once every week or two so you catch new queries. This matters most around season changes, holidays and events.

Update SEO as often as new keywords appear for your product

Stage 1

• Take every query users have typed.
• Check whether products similar to yours (products with the same ID) show up for those keywords.

Stage 2

• From all the queries that contain your product ID, pick the suitable keywords: by meaning and by search results.
• Remove all repeating words and words with different endings.
• Keep only unique words that did not repeat.
• Write a selling description with usage instructions or use cases that includes every unique word.

In 2 days you will be indexed for all the keywords you need.

They burn ad budget and drag down the product card's overall conversion. In Jam reports or Ozon analytics, check every keyword by conversion. High mid-funnel conversions, keep. Low ones, cut.

Step 1. Collect SEO keywords

Done.

Step 2. Pick a goal

1. 1Raising positions and visibility for target keywords. A purchase happened for the keyword, positions went up, more people saw it, more people bought. Many buyouts across a large number of keywords. First raise the ones with high conversion and low visibility.
2. 2Get a review. Cover up negativity, raise the rating or build a pool of positive reviews at launch. Buyouts across different keywords. Reviews across different keywords.
3. 3Cut the ad spend share. The higher your positions, the lower the CPM bid you can set. Many buyouts on the specific keyword where you want to lower CPM.
4. 4Prepare a product for the season. Warm the product up on keywords in advance, before demand spikes. It is like surfing: you need to paddle a bit, and then the wave picks you up. Well in advance, a small number of buyouts plus holding the needed positions across every keyword that will grow sharply in season.
5. 5Launch a new product. To get past the "sandbox" and reach search results faster. A small number of buyouts on low- and mid-frequency keywords, adapted to the situation.
6. 6After running out of stock (OOS). Restart the product card and recover lost positions. Look at the converting keywords that dropped the most and restore visibility there first.

Step 3. The logic of splitting by search frequency

At the prep stage you collected:

• low-frequency keywords (low competition, narrowly niche);
• mid-frequency ones (broader reach, niche);
• high-frequency ones (the main traffic, several sub-niches).

Promoting across all keywords at once works best, but the budget is limited, so we aim for maximum ROI.

Start with low- and mid-frequency. Then add high-frequency. Why?

• They are niche, small, targeted and high-converting. Fewer buyouts are needed to take top positions.
• Algorithms first test the product card on safe keywords with modest impression volume.
• If the product card converts well on low-frequency keywords, the marketplace starts showing it on mid-frequency ones, then on high-frequency ones, and only then gives you stable impressions at the top.

The marketplace does not want to waste impressions on top keywords. It "checks" you on small traffic and only then scales your reach.

How to shape the strategy

1. 1Split keywords by frequency.
2. 2Start buyouts on low-frequency keywords first.
3. 3After 3-5 days add mid-frequency ones.
4. 4Move on to high-frequency ones if the budget allows and you see organic growth.

Step 4. Planning the budget and the size of the project

We do 50 buyouts on a high-frequency keyword and enjoy life. Isn't that how it works?

If you still live in 2020, yes, that is how it works. But in 2025 the algorithms have changed a lot.

Promote products on the keywords where you plan to get sales. Period.

If the product card is new, the marketplace tests your product on other keywords. When it sees buyer interest and above-market conversion, it keeps you in good positions.

Core principles for calculating buyouts

1. 1The further you are from position 1, the more buyouts you need.
2. 2The higher the keyword frequency, the more purchases happen there and the more buyouts you need.
3. 3The lower the product price, the more buyouts you need to hit target revenue.

The general logic: work out a competitor's revenue on a specific keyword and match it.

Globally, on any marketplace (Amazon included), revenue is the main marker of a product's success. It is a simplified but working way to model this.

A concrete example

Given: a hydrating face serum with niacinamide and vitamin C, Cosmetics niche. Conversion is the same across all keywords except one. The constraint is to keep the current DRR. Budget 300,000 ₽ (including the cost of the goods). Product price 455 ₽. Buyout service price 325 ₽. ARK, a single automatic campaign across all keywords. Goal, raise sales.

Strategy:

• Maximum buyouts for the project, around 350 units (budget-limited).
• The keyword "serum" is out of scope: too broad, low conversion.
• The product price is low, so each keyword needs many buyouts.
• No point touching the high-frequency keyword "face serum": the budget is not enough to climb and hold without changing DRR.
• We can push the highly targeted keyword "hydrating face serum": the budget covers it.
• There are 2 target keywords with the same conversion but far off in positions, so we pull them up.
• There are 7 keywords where we can reach the top 5 without heavy spending.

The extra revenue from those keywords is reinvested into promoting "face serum", which delivers the biggest boost.

Result after 1.5 months of promotion: 2.5x sales across 2 consecutive projects.

Step 5. Planning buyouts day by day

In most cases we do a ladder: 2-4-8-16-32. Right?

If you want to kill the product card, yes, do the ladder. If you want steady growth, run buyouts so the algorithms read your product as a stable source of sales.

If sales and conversion jump up and down, there is no stability to speak of.

Buyouts should be run so that a drop in the number of buyouts is matched by an equivalent rise in organic sales. This is not a peak with a cliff, it is a plateau: smooth growth, holding, smooth decline.

Upsides of an inflated price at launch

• A median price is assigned at launch.
• Algorithms like sellers who cut prices and recommend them more often.
• People watch price changes, and if this is the first cut or a large one, more people will want to buy.
• You can join a promo and drop to the price you want, getting a position boost. Bonus: fewer buyouts needed to hit target revenue.

The downside is single, but heavy

You get significantly fewer organic sales, because fewer people will buy at an inflated price.

In 85% of cases I recommend working with the original price.

Sometimes it is not growth, it is the truth

Not every launched product brings sales. Buyouts show you that this product, with this product card, at this price, is not what the buyer wants. That is fine. Knowing that a product will not fly saves budget, time and team resources.

Case 1. We raised average organic positions on the target keyword from the 1400s to the 300s and could hold positions in the 20s in ads. But the market did not need the product, buyers chose competitors. Buyouts are a piece of ad inventory, not magic.

Case 2. The product turned out to be in demand. Average organic positions on high-frequency keywords rose from the 400s to the 40s, which let us cut CPM from about 640 ₽ to about 325 ₽ across all target queries. Despite a 10% price increase, organic sales kept growing. Result: DRR cut in half, price up 10%, sales up.

We created only half of the effect. The algorithms did the other half. We simply showed them this was a good product.

SEO

• For a product to show up, it has to be indexed. The words must be in the SEO.
• Collect keywords based on the market and user queries, not on competitors' descriptions.
• Get rid of keywords with poor mid-funnel conversion not only in ads, but in SEO too.

Buyouts

• Keep the focus on raising positions across every keyword with good conversion and less than 100% visibility.
• Buyouts, giveaways and bloggers can raise positions and increase sales if the buyout went through and the purchase was made on a specific keyword.
• Do not use filters if the task is to rank for a specific keyword.
• Build the buyout plan across all target keywords with good conversion.
• To calculate the volume, work out the competitor's revenue.
• New product: start with low- and mid-frequency keywords.
• Already selling: focus on the lagging keywords.
• The pattern that supports conversion is a plateau, not a ladder.
• Better not to change the price, so you do not lose organic sales.
• If positions do not rise after the goods are collected, the buyouts did not go through.
• IMPORTANT. Keep mid-funnel conversions at organic levels, do not break them.

Bottom line

Not every product can grow its sales, and buyouts will show that faster. Buyouts are a piece of ad inventory, like bloggers or Yandex Direct, not a magic pill.