What is Rest of Search?

Rest of search is the Sponsored Products placement group covering every sponsored slot on a search results page that is not in the top of search block. That includes ads placed among or below the organic results on the first page, and ads on the later pages of results for the same query.

Why it often ends up as the baseline

Every placement modifier starts at no uplift, so a campaign that has never been touched runs all three placements at the base bid. Nothing makes rest of search special by default. What happens in practice is that sellers lift top of search, sometimes lift product pages, and leave rest of search unmodified, at which point it is the placement whose economics you can read most directly because no multiplier sits between the bid you set and the price you pay.

Shurq's own placement editor follows the same convention and treats rest of search as the fixed base while the other two are priced against it. Treat that as a convention rather than a rule of the platform, and confirm which placement is unmodified in your own campaign before calling any figure a baseline.

What the shopper is doing

The query intent is identical to top of search. The difference is position. A shopper seeing a rest of search ad has already scanned what sits above it, so the click carries a little more comparison behind it and a lot more competition in front of it. Later pages of results shift things again, since a shopper on page three is either very specific or not finding what they wanted.

The cheap clicks trap

The slots here are far more numerous and less contested than the handful at the top of the page, so rest of search will often clear at a lower cost per click and can absorb a large share of a campaign's impressions. A lower cost per click is not by itself a reason to favour a placement. What matters is revenue per click, which is conversion rate multiplied by average order value. A placement that costs half as much per click and converts a third as well is the more expensive placement, not the cheaper one.

RPC = Sales ÷ Clicks
ACOS = CPC ÷ RPC

That identity is why Shurq prices placements on relative revenue per click rather than on placement ACOS. It also explains a pattern worth watching: when a campaign's spend drifts toward rest of search while its blended ACOS worsens, the base bid is usually doing work the modifiers should be doing.

Practical use

Use rest of search for volume once top of search economics are understood, and treat any large swing in its share of impressions as a signal that something upstream changed, whether a bid, a modifier or the auction itself.