Amazon Advertising
Achieve your selling goals and reach new customers with Amazon Ads. Amazon Advertising has tools to help you increase your brand awareness, increase sales, and control costs. Amazon Advertising allows you to grow your business on Amazon by targeting your customers at each stage of the shopping cycle - awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy, and loyalty. Amazon Advertising solutions include Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. This section will cover overview information on setting up Amazon Advertising campaigns, optimizing Amazon Ads, Amazon Advertising reporting, and Amazon Ads creative options.
Setting Up Amazon Advertising Campaigns
If you have never used Amazon Ads before, there are a few important considerations for setting up your Amazon Ads campaigns. The best place to start is to define your Amazon Advertising goals. These goals generally fall between brand awareness and sales.
Once you have established your goals, the next important step is planning out your budget. There are many ways for how to decide your Amazon Budget, but having some plan is better than having no plan at all. You are able to adjust your budget at any time, so going into advertising with a planned amount can help you decide which campaigns to allocate towards given a fixed amount of resources.
After you have set your goals and a planned budget, the next step is planning out a framework and architecture using the available Amazon Advertising Sponsored Campaign Ad Types. If you are strategic in setting up the Amazon Ads campaign structure, it is easier and more effective to review the results of your performance and optimize your campaigns to meet your goals.
Reach customers at different stages of the shopping cycle using a combination of Sponsored Campaigns like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display.
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products is an Ad campaign type that allows you to display your product listing prominently in the search results page for search terms inputted by potential customers on Amazon, from the Amazon search bar. Here is an example of brands utilizing Sponsored Products targeting the search term ‘backpack’. Their products appear at the top of search results, which is the most prominent location a customer might purchase the product.
Example of Amazon Sponsored Products Ads
Put yourself in the shoes of an Amazon customer, have you ever navigated to page 20 on a search results page to purchase the product you are looking for? I didn’t think so. You generally purchase something on the first page, and usually one of the top search results. Sponsored Products Ads allow you to ‘jump the line’ to the top of the search results, which is especially helpful if your organic ranking is buried deep in the search results.
Sponsored Products advertising displays your products when the Amazon customer is in the purchasing mindset. You can control costs and advertising budgets as Sponsored Products is a pay-per-click type of advertising, meaning you only pay for the ad when a customer clicks on the ad and is brought to the product detail page. This is a great campaign type when you have a good understanding of what customers are searching to find your product.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brands is an advertising campaign type that helps Amazon shoppers discover your brand and products. These ads are more customizable than Sponsored Products as traffic can be routed toward your Amazon Storefront page or a curated selection of product listing pages. Custom text, graphics, Brand logo, and video can be used in the creative for these Ads. Due to the customization option of this type of advertising, these campaigns must go through an Amazon moderation team prior to publication. Sponsored Brands is a great advertising option for advertisers that have a goal of building brand awareness and loyalty. The different ad formats for Sponsored Brands include Sponsored Brands Video, Store Spotlight, and Product Collection.
Sponsored Brands Video - When a customer inputs a search term and as they are scrolling down the search results, this type of video advertisement automatically plays without the need to press a play button. They can be built using Amazon Sponsored Brands Video Builder. Think of this style of advertising as an Instagram-like video as the video plays while scrolling through the feed. It is important to have a highly engaging ad, especially in the first two seconds as viewers can have a very short attention span. It is also important for the ad to make sense without the audio, as it is usually set to mute. Guidelines on creating Amazon Sponsored Brands Video ads can be found on the Amazon Ad Policy 3.11 Guidelines including duration of 6 to 45 seconds, aspect ratio of 16:9, less than 500mb and file format of MP4 or MOV among other requirements.
Store Spotlight - Sponsored Brands campaigns with the ad format Store Spotlight will display a search results headline ad showing your logo, a custom headline, a call to action suggesting the customer to ‘Shop now’ and display three products of your choice. Clicking the logo or the shop now option will bring potential customers to your Amazon store. This type of ad targeting builds brand awareness around the catalog of the brand or manufacturer. Like Sponsored Products advertising, these brand ads can be targeted towards both keywords (the search terms customers put into the search bar) and product targeting that will display categories, brands, and specific products.
Product Collection - Sponsored Brands campaigns with the ad format Product Collection drive customers to a Product List Page, which is a curated list of product listings. The format of this advertisement is the same as the Amazon Store, with the only difference being that clicking on the brand image will bring the potential customer to the curated product listing list that displays the main image, title, price, reviews, first two bullet points, and buying options/buy box. This ad type is great for seasonal or category merchandising that you want to feature.
Amazon Sponsored Brand Headline Ad
Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display is another brand awareness impression goal-oriented Advertising campaign type. This type of advertising targets customers both on and off Amazon. This is an exciting advertising option as it allows you to utilize Amazon’s reach from advertising networks across the internet to drive traffic from off Amazon to your product detail page. The ad formats for Sponsored Display are either image-based ads or video ads. These campaigns allow you to select the custom bid optimization strategy for your ads including - optimizing for reach, page visits, and conversions. Build your brand awareness by targeting these ads based on contextual targeting of categories and products you want your ad to appear for, or audience targeting which allows you to find relevant lifestyle, interests, life events, and in-market.
Sponsored TV
Amazon Ads Sponsored TV enables advertisers to in the US to run video ads on Amazon’s streaming services. This ad type is great for building brand awareness and reaching customers that may have not heard of your brand. The video ad type lets you show more about your brand story and product in use compared to just keyword targeting. TV advertising has historically been a high cost investment, but Amazon Ads Sponsored TV is a cost-effective CPM ad type accessible for all size of advertisers.
Optimizing Amazon Ads
Optimizing Amazon Ad campaigns is the act of continuous improvement in order to achieve your desired goals. This is accomplished on Amazon Ads by reviewing the performance of a campaign, ad group, product, and targeting level. Given the performance based on spend, sales, efficiency, impressions, or any other desired metric; you can take action to improve those metrics. This can be done by increasing or decreasing spend, adding keywords or targeting, and removing future targeting through negative search terms. Another way to optimize ads on Amazon is through Dynamic Bidding.
Amazon Advertising Reporting
Amazon Ads offers a suite of reporting tools in order to better understand the performance of your Amazon advertising efforts. Campaign Manager allows for an overview of key advertising data around spend, orders, sales, clicks, impressions, ACoS/RoAS efficiency, and more. Reporting can be exported using Sponsored Ads reports including reports by Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Brands drilled down by targeting, advertised products, budget, placement, purchased products, performance over time, search term impression share, and gross and invalid traffic.
Amazon Ads Creative
Amazon continues to offer additional ways to showcase your brand through custom text, images, and video content. Creative options allow you to create a custom headline as a call to action or value proposition statement in order to tell customers what makes your product special. Using a custom image in your ad, as opposed to a product listing image, lets you A/B test to see what drives the most clicks and purchases to your detail page. Sponsored Brands and Display video options let you promote your store or product detail page with a short video showing your product in action. New tools can be used such as the Amazon Sponsored Brands Video Builder to create a short video within the Amazon Ads system. Image formats for Sponsored Brands and Displays.
Goat Consulting Amazon Ads Verified Partner
As an Amazon Ads Verified Partner, we are recognized as an agency that brands and manufacturers can look to as a partner when seeking a management, marketing, and advertising agency for selling in the Amazon store.
We achieved this partner status after demonstrating both a high level of proficiency through Amazon training certifications and self-service advertising campaigns offered by Amazon Ads on behalf of their clients.
If you would like to learn more about Amazon Advertising, click the link below or contact us and we can help you strategize, set up, optimize, create, and provide reporting with your Amazon ads account.