Your direct sales team sold a brand the top tile in "laundry detergent" for its launch week. Then someone in the room proposes ranking every sponsored product by relevance, and the first question from the retail media side is whether that promise still holds.

It holds. Guaranteed placements and relevance ranking only compete for the same tiles when the setup forces every tile to be one or the other.

In a unified ranking layer, a fixed position is a choice you make tile by tile, while the rest of the grid is ranked on relevance. The revenue your sales team has already sold stays sold, and every tile you haven't sold gets the chance to earn more.

TL;DR

• Yes. Fixed, guaranteed placements and relevance-ranked sponsored products can run on the same page.
• The cost of legacy fixed slots was never the guarantee itself. It came from an architecture that reserved every sponsored tile in advance, whether or not a relevant product was available to fill it.
• Pentaleap lets retailers show sponsored products in fixed slots only, in fluid slots ranked alongside organic results, or in a mix of both, under rules the retailer sets.
• A guarantee trades auction upside for certainty on one tile. That's a pricing decision your sales team should make tile by tile, not one the architecture makes for the whole page.
• The requirement worth writing into your RFP: fixed and relevance-ranked placements must be able to coexist on one page, with floor prices your team sets.

"Our ecommerce team and our ad revenue team are fighting for the same real estate." Where does that fight come from?

The fight starts with how most legacy ad servers place sponsored products. The ad server takes a set of tiles in the product grid, reserves them for ads, and fills them using its own logic, with no input from what the search engine decided about the rest of the page. Changing how many tiles are reserved usually takes engineering work, so the number rarely moves.

That design turns every tile into territory. If a tile belongs to the ad server, the ecommerce team loses it to whichever product the ad server picked, relevant or not. If the tile belongs to organic, the retail media team can't sell it at all. Somebody always loses, and the person running retail media is usually the one asked to explain why.

We've argued before that fixed slots are quietly costing retailers, and that argument stands. It's worth being precise about what it's against: fixed slots as the only option the architecture gives you. A guarantee you chose to sell, on a tile you chose to fix, is a different thing. It's a commercial decision, and it should stay yours.

What actually changes when sponsored and organic are ranked together?

Unified ranking scores sponsored and organic products in one decision, using the signals your search and personalization AI already applies to organic results. A sponsored product earns its position by being a good match for the shopper and getting a boost from its bid, instead of being placed into a reserved tile by a separate system.

In Pentaleap, this runs through Fluid Ads: sponsored products are boosted from their organic position rather than injected into fixed, pre-reserved tiles. Pentaleap ranks every product, paid or organic, on a compound margin, retail margin plus ad margin, so a bid adds to a product's case for a position without cancelling out the retail side of the calculation. And a product is only sponsored, and only charged for a click, when sponsorship actually gains it visibility. A product already sitting in first place with nothing competing for that spot doesn't pay to stay there. (For a fuller explanation of the model, see why unified ranking performs better, and costs less.)

The ranking change is where the lift starts. In Pentaleap's A/B tests against legacy setups, ad revenue lifts typically fall between 80 and 140%, according to Pentaleap's internal A/B test data. In one published case study, a U.S. pharmacy chain recorded a 133.6% increase in daily ad revenue during its A/B test, while keeping its existing sponsored products vendor and before it expanded ad inventory.

Where do guaranteed placements fit in a relevance-ranked grid?

Guaranteed placements fit as fixed slots. Pentaleap's developer documentation lets a retailer set sponsored products to appear in fixed slots only, or in a mix of fixed and fluid slots, based on rules your team sets in Publisher Manager. A tile you've sold to a brand at a fixed price can stay fixed. The tiles around it can be ranked on relevance.

The commercial terms stay where they are today: in your contract with the brand. The price, the duration, the category and how a placement is shared if two brands want the same week are your sales team's decisions. Moving to unified ranking doesn't rewrite your rate card or hand those calls to a vendor. On the Pentaleap side, fixed prices can be set up through Ad Ops, usually for a set period on a specific placement.

That gives your direct sales team a product it can still sell with a straight face: a named placement and a fixed price. None of it depends on how the auction behaves that week.

There is a trade-off, and it's worth naming plainly. A tile sold at a fixed price isn't open to auction competition, so it can't earn more if three other brands would have bid higher for it that day. You're trading upside for certainty on that one tile. For a launch, a category sponsorship or a strategic brand partnership, that's often the right trade. The point is that your sales team gets to make it, tile by tile, instead of having the architecture make it for them across the whole page.

Can fixed and relevance-ranked positions sit on the same page?

Yes, and this is the part most worth checking in a vendor evaluation. Running a mix of fixed and fluid slots means a guaranteed tile and a relevance-ranked tile can sit in the same grid, each following its own logic. The fixed tile shows what you sold. The fluid tiles show whichever sponsored or organic product earns the position.

How much of the grid is open to sponsored products is a setting your team controls, not an engineering project. Floor prices, the maximum number of ads per ad unit and how much weight a bid carries are all set by your team. That matters on a mixed page, because the right balance in "laundry detergent" during a sold launch week is not the right balance in the same category a month later.

Multiple placements on one page need one more rule. If you run a sponsored carousel above the main grid, ad units requested together can carry de-duplication rules, so a product shown in the carousel can be kept out of the grid below it. The standard ad response also returns sponsored and organic products as one combined list, so the same product doesn't appear as both.

Nobody wants to explain to a brand that its launch-week tile went to a better-matched lint roller. With fixed and fluid positions running side by side, nobody has to.

When should you keep a position fixed, and when should you let it go?

Keep a position fixed when you can name who the guarantee is for. A sold placement, a contractual commitment to a brand, a launch or a tile your merchandising team has a standing reason to protect all have an owner and a reason. Those tiles earn their fixed status.

Let a position go relevance-ranked when it's fixed only because the old system needed it to be. Ask who a tile reserved for "whichever sponsored product the ad server picks" was promised to, and nobody in the room raises a hand. It shows an ad whether or not a relevant one exists, and those are the tiles where the gap between siloed ad serving and unified ranking shows up in click-through and conversion.

The result to aim for is a small number of deliberately fixed tiles and a grid that's otherwise ranked on relevance: guarantees where you've sold them, relevance everywhere else.

Who controls the rate card when programmatic demand joins the auction?

Your team does. Floor prices are set per ad unit by your team in Pentaleap's Publisher Manager, and a product won't appear as sponsored if its bid doesn't clear them.

That matters when you start adding demand. Your strategic brands can stay with your direct sales team. Onsite programmatic demand only covers endemic products, the ones you already sell, with your team still deciding eligibility and placement. Michael Krans, VP Retail Media at Macy's, Inc., described the partnership with Pentaleap as one that "ensures relevant ads and protects the user experience while expanding access to new demand sources." If you're weighing that shift, we've covered how to add onsite programmatic demand without losing control, including which brands to keep in direct sales.

Three questions to ask any vendor about guaranteed placements

If guaranteed placements are part of your revenue today, these three questions will tell you quickly whether a vendor's architecture protects them or quietly removes them.

1. "Can a fixed placement and a relevance-ranked placement live on the same page, with separate rules for each?" If the answer is that every sponsored tile on a page has to follow the same logic, you'll end up choosing between your sold guarantees and your relevance gains.
2. "When a fixed placement is live, what happens to the rest of the grid around it?" The right answer is that the rest of the page keeps being ranked on relevance. A sold tile should take one position, not switch the whole page back to reserved tiles.
3. "Who sets floor prices, and can any demand source bid below them?" Floors should be set by your team and apply to every demand source, with no bid below them getting through.

For a broader version of this checklist, see the five questions to ask a vendor that says it ranks sponsored and organic together.

What decision does this leave you with?

The decision isn't whether to sell guarantees. It's which tiles deserve them. List the fixed positions on your highest-traffic pages, mark the ones with a named buyer or a merchandising reason behind them, and treat the rest as candidates for relevance ranking.

Then test it before committing to anything. Pentaleap tests alongside your existing stack, with your current setup still running, and you move forward only if the numbers convince you. Your sold placements keep running exactly as sold. The test shows what relevance does to every tile you haven't sold yet. (Here's how one U.S. pharmacy chain A/B tested a ranking change against its existing ad server.)

Key Takeaways

• Guaranteed placements and relevance ranking can run on the same page. The conflict comes from architectures that reserve every sponsored tile in advance, not from guarantees themselves.
• Pentaleap lets retailers show sponsored products in fixed slots, fluid slots or a mix, under rules the retailer sets in Publisher Manager.
• A fixed placement trades auction upside for certainty on one tile. That's a pricing decision for your sales team to make tile by tile.
• Keep a position fixed when you can name who the guarantee is for, and let the rest of the grid be ranked on relevance.
• In Pentaleap's A/B tests against legacy setups, ad revenue lifts typically fall between 80 and 140%, according to Pentaleap's internal A/B test data.
• Floor prices are set per ad unit by the retailer, and a product isn't shown as sponsored if its bid doesn't clear them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can we still sell guaranteed placements if sponsored products are ranked by relevance? Yes. Pentaleap supports fixed slots alongside fluid, relevance-ranked slots. A placement you've sold can stay fixed while the rest of the page is ranked on relevance.

Can we run fixed-slot sponsored placements only? Yes. Sponsored products can be set to appear in fixed slots only, or in a mix of fixed and fluid slots, under rules the retailer sets in Publisher Manager.

Does moving to unified ranking change the deals our sales team has already signed? No. Price, duration and placement terms stay in your contract with the brand. Unified ranking changes how the tiles you haven't sold are filled, not the ones you have.

Does the retailer keep control over floor prices? Yes. Floor prices are set per ad unit by the retailer, and a product isn't shown as sponsored if its bid doesn't clear the floor.

Will more sponsored products mean more clutter on the page? Only if you set it up that way. Your team sets the maximum number of ads per ad unit, and Pentaleap's own guidance is to keep fluid, relevance-ranked ads in the most visible positions and place broader additional inventory lower on the page.

Will the same product show up twice if we run a sponsored carousel and a main grid on one page? It doesn't have to. When ad units are requested together, de-duplication rules can keep products shown in the carousel out of the main grid.

Does Pentaleap replace our ad server? No, unless you want it to. Pentaleap works alongside your existing ad server, which can stay on as a demand source, or it can replace it over time. That decision is yours.

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