Inject sponsored products from a retail media platform

Learn how to integrate sponsored products from retail media platforms (RMPs) into Algolia search results.

This approach is deprecated. For new implementations, use Smart Groups with external sources instead.

Smart Groups offer:

• Built-in deduplication. Algolia automatically removes duplicates between sponsored and organic results.
• Simplified implementation. Less custom merge logic required on your backend.
• Flexible placement. Control exact positions for sponsored items.
• Optional re-ranking. Apply Algolia’s relevance ranking to sponsored products.

This legacy approach still works for existing implementations but new projects should use the Smart Groups approach for easier integration and better results.

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.

For integrating third-party retail media platforms that return sponsored results based on real-time bidding, Algolia recommends using Smart Groups with external sources, which provides built-in deduplication and simplified integration.

This guide describes the legacy manual integration approach, which is still supported but requires more custom code to merge and deduplicate results.

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.

Sponsored products - top positions

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.