Amazon sponsored products tracker: who is advertising on your keywords

Give it a search term. Get back every slot on the results page in the order Amazon showed them, with the advertisements marked.

Position one, sponsored, someone else's ASIN. Position two, organic, yours. That is the whole product: the ranking with the ads marked inside it, which is what share of voice actually is and what you cannot get from any Amazon report about your own account.

This is the only Actor in this family that never opens a product page. Everything it returns was already on the search page, which is why it is fast and why the price per row is a tenth of what the others charge.

Read this before your first run

Search pages get refused in waves, and one setting fixes it. Measured on 30 August 2026, during a stretch of several hours when Amazon refused every search page with a two kilobyte stub:

Setting	Result
Datacenter, 12 retries	nothing, every attempt refused
Datacenter, 20 retries, six second pauses	nothing, every attempt refused
Residential on the later attempts	60 placements, 15 sponsored, 8 attempts

That is why residentialFallback is on by default here, unlike the rest of this family. It costs about seven cents per thousand slots instead of four, which against the price of a slot is nothing, and it is the difference between a run with data and a run with none.

Turn it off if you want the cheapest possible run and do not mind an empty one now and then. The run log always says which happened.

Amazon does not always serve the same search page. Measured the same day, the same search term fetched five times within an hour:

Results on the page	Advertisements found
60	15
60	15
60	14
48	3
48	1

Both versions answer normally. Neither carries an error, a captcha or any other sign that something is missing. The thin one simply has most of the advertising left out.

This Actor detects that. When a page comes back carrying far fewer results than Amazon's own result count implies, it treats it as a refusal and fetches it again from a different address, up to maxAttempts times. If it still cannot get a full page after all of those, it delivers what it has and says so in the run log, in plain words, rather than handing you a table that looks complete.

Read that line in the log before you trust a low sponsored count. A keyword with two advertisements and a keyword where Amazon gave us a thin page look identical in a spreadsheet, and only the log tells them apart.

It charges for every slot, sponsored or not. Share of voice is a fraction. Fifteen of sixty is a different number than fifteen of twenty, and you cannot work out either one from the sponsored rows alone. The organic rows are half of what you are buying.

Every field it returns

Price and offer

Field	What it holds
price	Current price from Amazon's own buy box data
currency	Three-letter code, from the page itself

Demand and rank

Field	What it holds
isBestSeller	The orange best seller badge
isAmazonChoice	The Amazon's Choice badge
rating	Average stars, read in every shop language
reviewCount	How many ratings, as a number

Identity and catalogue

Field	What it holds
asin	The product id (this is what you are charged for)
title	Full product title, shortened only past 1000 characters
marketplace	Which shop this row came from
url	The page this was read from
scrapedAt	Timestamp of the read

Placement

Field	What it holds
keyword	The search term this slot was found on
page	Which results page the slot was on
position	Where the slot sat on that page, counting from one
isSponsored	Whether Amazon marked this slot as an advertisement

What a row looks like

"keyword": "standing desk converter",
"page": 1,
"position": 1,
"isSponsored": true,
"asin": "B0864RSM5S",
"title": "VERSADESK PowerPro 36 Inch Electric Standing Desk Converter",
"price": 349,
"currency": "USD",
"rating": 4.4,
"reviewCount": 502

Position is where the slot sat on that page, counting from one. Page is which results page it came from. Together they give you the true rank across a multi-page run.

The same product can appear twice, and that is the point

An advertiser who also ranks organically holds two slots on one page. This Actor reports both, because collapsing them would destroy exactly the measurement you came for. On the page these numbers were measured from, one ASIN held position 1 as an advertisement and position 10 organically.

If you want unique products instead of slots, group by asin on your side. The Actor will not do it for you, because it cannot know which of your two questions you are asking.

How the advertisement marker works

Amazon marks a sponsored slot in several ways at once, and this Actor looks for the ones that do not depend on language: the click-tracking link, the sponsored label class, and the advertisement container class. That matters because the visible word is "Sponsored" on amazon.com, "Gesponsert" on amazon.de and something else again on the other seventeen marketplaces.

Worth saying plainly: the marker that most guides on the internet name, sp-sponsored-result, appeared on neither of the real pages this was built against. What is in here came from captured pages, not from documentation.

What to put in

Search terms, plain, one per line:

standing desk converter
sit stand desk riser
monitor arm dual

Category and search links work too, if you would rather track a browse page than a keyword:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=standing+desk+converter
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/office-products

maxListPages decides how deep to go. Page one is where the money is; pages two and three are where you find who is bidding cheaply.

Settings worth knowing about

Setting	What it does
search	The keywords or category links to track.
marketplace	Which Amazon. Nineteen available.
maxItemsPerList	How many slots to take per keyword, across all pages.
maxListPages	How many results pages to walk per keyword.
proxyConfiguration	Which proxy to use. Datacenter by default.
proxyCountry	Which country to exit from. Empty means follow the marketplace.
residentialFallback	Switch the later attempts to residential addresses. On by default for this Actor, and it is the setting that decides whether you get data at all when Amazon is refusing search pages. See below.
maxAttempts	How many times to retry a page Amazon refuses or serves thin.
minDelayMs maxDelayMs retryPauseMs	The pacing between pages. The defaults are deliberately unhurried.

How it works, in plain terms

It fetches the search results page, reads every result slot on it in order, and records what was there. No product pages are opened, so a keyword costs one page fetch and returns sixty rows instead of sixty fetches returning sixty rows.

Each slot is checked for the advertisement markers. Title, price, star rating and review count are read from the search page itself, which is where Amazon already prints them.

If Amazon refuses the page, or serves a thin one, it tries again from a different exit address. Both cases are counted separately in the run log so you can see which happened.

Reading the run log

Every run ends with three lines from a real run of this Actor:

Done: 60 charged, 0 refused by Amazon, 0 other. 113 KB per charged result, 10 attempts in total.
Exit addresses: 10 used, 1 proven good, 0 burned.
Attempts by outcome: {"refused by Amazon":7,"served fewer results than Amazon claims to have":2,"ok":1}

Two extra lines are worth watching for. One says a page came back thin, meaning Amazon served fewer results than it claims to have, and you are seeing fewer advertisements than were really there. The other says a page never arrived at all after every retry, in which case that keyword is simply missing from the run and you were not charged for it.

What you can build with it

Share of voice per keyword. Count your ASINs among the sponsored slots, divide by the total sponsored slots. Run daily and you have the trend line that agencies charge a monthly fee for.

Competitor ad watch. Track the keywords you bid on and see who else shows up, at which positions, and on which days. A competitor who suddenly appears at position one on twelve of your keywords has just raised their budget.

Keyword discovery through the back door. Track a competitor's ASIN across a hundred keywords and you learn which terms they are willing to pay for, which is a better signal about commercial intent than any keyword volume tool.

Organic versus paid ranking. The same ASIN in both a sponsored and an organic slot tells you whether their ranking is bought or earned.

Ad load by category. Fifteen sponsored slots out of sixty is a crowded keyword. Two out of sixty is a cheap one. Run a list of candidate keywords before you plan a campaign.

Working it into your stack

Set a schedule and let it run at a fixed hour each morning, so day-to-day comparisons are like for like. Ad placements move throughout the day, and a run at nine and a run at five are not the same measurement.

Pull the dataset from the API:

https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/<datasetId>/items?clean=true&format=csv

Every field is flat, so it drops straight into a pivot table. Group by keyword and isSponsored and you have share of voice without writing any code.

Marketplaces

Nineteen, from amazon.com to amazon.co.jp. The advertisement markers this Actor uses are the language-independent ones, so a German or Japanese results page is read the same way as an American one.

Ad load itself varies a lot by marketplace and by category, and that is real rather than a limitation: a keyword with no advertisers has no sponsored slots to find.

Pricing

A tenth of a cent per slot, plus three cents to start a run.

One keyword at five pages is about three hundred slots, so thirty cents. Twenty keywords at one page each is about twelve hundred slots, so a dollar twenty. Tracking ten keywords daily at one page costs about eighteen cents a day.

The price per row is low because the work per row is low: one page fetch of about half a megabyte carries sixty rows, where the product scrapers in this family read half a megabyte per row. You are charged per slot delivered. Slots that could not be read are not delivered and not charged for, and a page that never arrived costs you nothing beyond the start fee.

The rest of this family

This Actor is one of thirteen on the same engine.

• Amazon Search Results Scraper when you want the full sixty-four fields for every product on a search page rather than the slots themselves.
• Amazon Listing Monitor to watch what changes on the ASINs you find here.
• Amazon Bestsellers Scraper for category rankings rather than keyword ones.
• Amazon Product Scraper for everything about a single product.

They share the retry engine and the pricing model, so what you learn on one carries to the others.

Questions people ask

Why do I get fewer advertisements than I see in my own browser. Almost always because Amazon served a thin page. Check the run log for the line about thin pages, and make sure residentialFallback is on. A signed-in browser on a residential connection is the most ad-heavy view of Amazon there is, and it is not a fair comparison.

Does it tell me what the advertiser paid. No. Amazon does not publish bids or costs anywhere on the page. What you get is presence and position, which is what share of voice is built from.

Can I track my own campaigns with it. For placement and position, yes. For spend, impressions and clicks, use Amazon's own advertising reports for your account; this reads what a shopper sees.

Does it open product pages. No. That is deliberate and it is why this costs a tenth of what the product scrapers cost.

What it does not collect

No review text, no reviewer names, no customer questions, no seller names. Review text and reviewer names are personal data, and scraping personal data is almost always a problem under European privacy law regardless of intent. The star rating and the review count are aggregate numbers and those you do get.

You can see which ASIN holds a sponsored slot. You cannot see which person or company is behind it, because Amazon does not print that on the search page and this Actor does not go looking.

Legal note

This Actor reads pages that Amazon serves publicly, at a deliberately unhurried pace. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Amazon.com, Inc. What you may do with the data it returns depends on where you are and what you use it for, and that is your call to make.