Sponsored Products Archives

Types of Amazon Ads: A Beginner’s Guide

When it comes to advertising on Amazon, there’s plenty to unpack. We break down the three main types of Amazon ads for third-party sellers, highlighting the ways you can ensure your products get the visibility they deserve.

Much has changed about Amazon in recent years, but arguably no aspect of the platform has advanced more than advertising on Amazon. Here, we’ll walk you through the types of Amazon ads.

Over the past year, Amazon Advertising’s growth rate accelerated past its other products, AWS, third-party seller and subscription services, and its online store. Before Amazon Advertising becomes even more critical to sellers’ success, every Amazon seller should be aware of the opportunities in the Amazon Advertising Console.

No matter if you only sell one product or manage an extensive catalog, Amazon Advertising could be the key that unlocks the next evolution of your online business. But understanding what ads are, how they can scale your business to new heights, and which ad type is best for you must come first.

What are Amazon ads?

Much like the typical advertisements you see on billboards, television, or between YouTube videos, Amazon ads are a way for brand owners to gain exposure and visibility by paying for premium digital real estate.

As we know, exposure and visibility are the heartbeats of being profitable. If customers can’t find your products, they can’t buy them! But standing out among the millions of products on Amazon isn’t easy.

Amazon Advertising is pay-per-click (PPC), so sellers only actually spend if it’s increased visibility.

Of course, as the old saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink,” meaning the visibility doesn’t inherently lead to a sale. Undoubtedly, a strong product and an appealing product listing are foundational selling elements that cause turn clicks into conversions.

[RELATED: What Is Amazon PPC?]

What are the benefits of Amazon PPC?

The benefits of PPC are far-reaching but primarily break down to getting discovered, increasing sales, and controlling costs in the process.

Product and brand visibility constantly ranks among the most critical topics for sellers. Advertising provides an outlet for sellers actively seeking more exposure for their brand or products.

As previously mentioned, the pay-per-click model ensures you pay only for advertisements that are seen. Since you place the bids and set a budget, you never pay more than you’re willing to spend. Once you know your margins and get a solid understanding of your conversion rates, you can place bids accordingly to maximize your profits and scalability.

As a whole, the advent of advertising on Amazon solves many issues simultaneously. Even better, all sides benefit when adequately performed. Sellers pay Amazon for valuable digital real estate. Shoppers are shown products they’re looking to purchase, and sellers profit as those sales accumulate.

Additionally, there are tertiary benefits of advertising, some of which can be directly measured and others that are indirectly impacted. Organic rank remains the holy grail for Amazon sellers, and it’s very likely that you’ll notice your organic keyword rank improve as you gain purchases through via PPC.

For example, if you sell coffee mugs and customers purchase your product through an ad they found when searching for “cute mugs”, you may see your organic rank for “cute mugs” boosted as a result.

How do you access the Amazon Advertising Console?

Fortunately, the process for accessing and setting up Amazon Advertising is simple! First, you must register your Seller Central account for advertising.

Once you’ve successfully registered, you can find it within your Seller Central account under the Advertising tab. When hovering over the Advertising tab, a dropdown menu should appear. Next, click on the Campaign Manager option in the dropdown menu.

From there, select the “Create campaign” button, and you’re ready to start advertising!

The 3 Primary Types of Amazon ads

Choose between three unique types of Amazon ads for your ad campaign.

Amazon Sponsored Products

Mission: Improve visibility of individual products with ads that appear in search results and on product pages.

List of eligible marketplaces for Sponsored Products

In all likelihood, Sponsored Product ads are the ad type you’ve been most exposed to on Amazon.

With Sponsored Products, there are two unique ways to set up your campaigns that determine where your ads will be displayed.

Automatic-targeting ads: This targeting method leaves the heavy lifting to Amazon. Similarly to Amazon’s algorithm scanning a product listing to find keywords to index and rank for, Amazon automatically decides which keywords and/or products a product will appear under in an ad.
Manual-targeting ads: A more hands-on approach, where the seller decides which keywords or products to compete for through bidding.

For manual-targeting campaigns, sellers can bid on the placement of their ads in two ways:

Keyword Targeting lets you be seen in search results for desired keywords and is a way to generate traffic through search. Ideally, these keywords are relevant and accurate to your product for maximum conversions. For even more strategy execution, sellers can choose between exact match, phrase match, or broad match depending on how targeted the campaigns will be.
Product Targeting allows you to be displayed on a product detail page of another product and generate traffic from complementary or competing listings. For example, if you sell peanut butter, you may want to be displayed under competing peanut butter listings, or you may visible under an item that is frequently purchased with peanut butter, like jelly.

Pro Tip

It may be best to run automatic targeting ads and let them run for 7-10 days with a budget you feel comfortable with when starting. After the campaign has ended, dig through the reports to view performance by keyword or ASIN, and utilize that data to set up manual campaigns.

Viral Launch’s Kinetic PPC tool helps with each stage of Sponsored Products. Featuring unparalleled Amazon data, easy-to-read reporting, and helpful campaign templates, Kinetic PPC is perfect for creating and managing Amazon ads like a pro!

Get Your 14-Day Free Trial to Viral Launch

Amazon Sponsored Brands

How Sponsored Brand ads appear to shoppers.

Mission: Boost brand awareness with your logo and a customized headline in ads that appear in search results.

Formerly known as Amazon Headline Search Ads, Sponsored Brands advertisements promote entire brands. Sponsored Brands ads allow for three formats to choose from; product collection, store spotlight, or video.

A typical product collection ad showcases a company logo, a slogan or tagline, and up to three products at a time for customers to view. If the customers likes what they see, they’ll click on the product that stands out and be led to the product detail page.

This allows larger brands that specialize in a product market to build brand awareness and showcase multiple products at once.

Similarly, store spotlight ad types look similar but drive traffic to a storefront or subpage within a storefront.

Sponsored Brand videos present a unique opportunity to tell your brand story and at the same time, showcase how or when your products are used. Unlike other video ads such as Facebook, the videos default to autoplay, ensuring your ads are seen.

Amazon’s recommended practices for Sponsored Brand videos:

Know your audiences — Your content should be educational, demonstrative, and product-focused.
Show your product — Research shows that videos that feature the product prominently within the first second typically perform better than those that don’t. Do not waste your chance to engage shoppers by fading in from black or starting with an empty frame. Hook them from the start!
Keep it brief and focused — Amazon recommends keeping the video length between 15–30 seconds to relay your message and hold customers’ attention. Limit your content to just a handful of key selling points to ensure your message is received.
Optimize for the format — This video unit auto-plays without sound and runs inline in the search results with no option to go full screen. Your videos should work without sound, and you’ll need to ensure that on-screen text can be easily read on a mobile device and isn’t obstructed by the user interface that is positioned within the video area
Consider the loop — Once this video ends, it will automatically loop. Consider adding an end card to allow for some breathing room, or get creative and make your loop seamless.

Amazon Sponsored Display

Mission: Grow your business by reaching relevant audiences on and off Amazon using this self-service advertising solution.

The most recent addition to the Advertising Console, Sponsored Display ads currently offer the unique opportunity to advertise on and off Amazon.

Brand registered sellers can choose from two targeting options: product targeting and audiences.

Like Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, sellers can run product targeting ads. In the same fashion as the other types of Amazon ads, sellers can pinpoint competing or complementary products. Regarding strategy, it’s best to target competing products that your listing has an advantage on. Review quantity or quality, price, or a lack of captivating creatives are prime indicators to look for when hunting potential product targeting victims.

On the other hand, Sponsored Display audiences are a method of reaching customers with high buy-intent. Through Amazon, Twitch, IMDb, and Prime Video, Amazon tracks shopper signals such as interests, lifestyle, in-market, and life stage.

Without a doubt, this consumer information is PRECIOUS for highly targeted, highly efficient ads. At the moment, audience ads are the only way to advertise through Amazon outside of Amazon’s digital walls, as they’re displayed on third-party websites and apps.

Summary

Generating exposure remains absolutely critical to longstanding seller success. For the foreseeable future, advertising appears to be the best bet to earning visibility and driving profitable sales.

As Amazon Advertising continues to grow, sellers that master advertising will be handsomely rewarded. Those who don’t will be facing an uphill battle against sellers picking up cost-efficient sales in droves through PPC. With record-setting revenue growth for Amazon and a system that rewards all who participate, Amazon Advertising is here to stay.

Now that you know the three main types of Amazon ads feel free to take the next steps! If you’re ready to start advertising, best of luck on your PPC journey. If you could stand to learn more, enroll in our FREE Amazon PPC Playbook today!

Amazon PPC Ads Discovery: How To Boost Efficiency

On January 1st Amazon released three new features in sponsored products, Dynamic Bidding, Bid Adjustments, and Placements. Among a variety of benefits, these new features led the Viral Launch R&D team to a major discovery regarding Amazon PPC ads. This discovery has resulted in the development of a new PPC bidding/optimization strategy that is driving incredible results for sellers implementing the strategy properly. It’s important to note that this is one of many strategies we use and you can employ, and it really depends on the product and the market as to which one works best.

This post will walk you through the details of this new Amazon PPC tactic we’re calling Placement Optimization strategy and how you can begin using Placement Optimization in your PPC campaigns and begin seeing results immediately!

What Are Bid Adjustments & Placements

Performance by Placement

Once in Seller Central, you can click into a campaign and view a new tab titled “Placements.” This new Placements tab provides insights into your campaign’s performance based on where the ad was displayed at the time. Amazon breaks it down into three placement groups: top of search (first page), rest of search, and product pages (defined below).

Top of Search – The top of search (first page) refers to the sponsored products ads at the top row on the first page of search results.

Rest of Search – Rest of search refers to sponsored products ads shown in the middle or at the bottom of search results, and all sponsored products ads in the second page of search results and beyond.

Product Detail Pages – Product pages refers to sponsored products placements on the product details page, and certain other placements off search results like the add-to-cart page. These ads show in the Sponsored Products Related To section on a listing’s detail page. Amazon PPC ads can show here through keyword targeting campaigns or by setting up product targeting campaigns.

Bid Adjustments by Placement

Bid Adjustments put the control in your hands to allow Amazon to spend above and beyond your set CPC for a specific placement. Amazon allows a number between 0 and 900% as a modifier to your set bid. Amazon does not allow you to set a specific bid amount for each placement, only this bid adjustment.

“For example, if you have set your CPC to $2.00 and Dynamic Bidding – Down Only selected, but set the Bid Adjustment to 50% for “Top of Search”, Amazon will bid up to $3.00 allowing for more positioning in the top sponsored ad results.

We’ll discuss below how to really take advantage of this feature to maximize your ad’s top of search placements.

Our Mind Blowing Discovery

After looking through the placements report for a number of Amazon PPC campaigns we are managing, we noticed some interesting tendencies around how frequently our keyword targeting campaigns (auto campaign, broad/phrase match campaigns, etc.) were showing on product pages. So we aggregated over $1MM in ad spend worth of campaigns to look at what was happening at a wide scale.

Here are the mind blowing stats:

On average ~84% of our newer keyword targeting campaigns are delivering on product pages!

We knew that ASIN targeting campaigns typically have a low click-through rate (CTR%), but this explained why some search terms had incredibly poor CTR%; they were delivering mostly on product pages! Meanwhile, while the clicks were more expensive, conversion rate (Conv.%) was ~60% higher for top of search traffic. It makes sense that a prospective customer is more likely to click into a product at the top of the search results for a given keyword than on a sponsored product showing on a competing product.

What was so mind blowing is that, this whole time advertisers have been turning on / turning off keywords based on their performance (CTR, Conversion, ACOS, etc.) assuming that keywords are / are not relevant based on the aggregated performance. In reality, those keywords we thought our products were not very relevant for, may have performed well for top search, but just happened to be a worse offer on the product pages Amazon decided to show us on.

For example, let’s say you are selling fish oil pills at a higher than average price point with only a handful of reviews. You run campaigns for the keywords “fish oil pills” and “omega 3 pills”. Prior to the insights Amazon’s new Placements feature provided, if the campaign targeting “omega 3 pills” resulted in low CTR, low conversion rate, and a high ACOS, you would assume that customers do not find your product very relevant for “omega 3” related keywords. In reality, there is a chance that Amazon was simply showing your new product with low reviews and a high price, on competitor pages where the competing products had more reviews and a lower price point. It’s very possible that your product was performing well for the “omega 3” keyword, but it was not performing well on the specific competitor listings Amazon chose to show you on.

Put differently, this should challenge everything you know about how relevant your product is for various keywords! There may be plenty of keywords you had passed off as poor performing and less relevant you may find actually perform well in search alone.

Fortunately, you have the opportunity to look at Placement reports for historical campaigns to begin answering some of the questions.

How To Use This Placement Optimization To Boost Efficiency

Within just over a week of releasing this new Placement Optimization strategy, we’ve received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback and case studies on improvements to campaign efficiency and/or overall sales improvements. We want to make sure you have the knowledge to be able to apply it yourself!

The case study below highlights how removing inefficient traffic from product pages allows the traffic to flow through our most profitable placement. By allocating 100% of the budget to top of search, we saw a significant increase in sales and a significant decrease in ACoS!

1/1/19 – 1/7/19

1/21/19 – 1/27/19

In this section we will walk through:

How to Isolate Traffic with Bid Adjustments
How to apply the strategy for maximizing efficiency/sales

How to Isolate Traffic with Bid Adjustments

The R&D team at VL has come up with a quick and simple solution to segment ad traffic across ad campaigns to optimize efficiency across delivery placements.

To set up a campaign that will only deliver for Top of Search ad placements, set a low base bid for the keywords targeted i.e. $0.30. A high percentage bid modifier can then be applied to Top of Search bid adjustment (ex. 800%). This will keep the bid amount low enough to not deliver in auctions for other placements, while also modifying the bid amount to deliver in the top ad placements only. Example: $0.30 bid with 800% modifier will deliver only at Top of Search placements at $2.40 bid.

WARNING: You should not force all campaigns to target only top of search. You need to follow the data for your own product and make sure it fits within your broader PPC strategy, which we discuss below. Test and analyze the results of each placement before making any decisions!

How to apply the strategy for maximizing efficiency/sales

Step One: Analyze existing campaigns. Consider historic performance, campaign type, match type and campaign objectives. Further, with the release of campaign bidding strategies, Amazon has made it extremely easy to spend more than you intended. It is our recommendation that you do this test initially with Dynamic Bidding – Down Only as your selected bidding strategy. Having an Up & Down bidding strategy selected could result in Amazon spending an additional 100% of your bid on top of your placement multiplier! This could lead to major overspending if left unchecked.

Other situations and scenarios to consider:

Since Placements are set for the entire campaign, if you have a lot of keywords in a single campaign, it’s difficult to know which keywords are actually delivering at top of search.
Auto campaigns are difficult to control, so a top of search tactic might change the words it’s delivering for and make the historic data you’re basing the decision off of useless for Placement decisions.
Lastly, if your campaign is performing well in all ad placements, there is a risk that changing it will disrupt that performance so you might want to instead just increase spend on that campaign.
If you are starting a new campaign, it is recommended that you gather data around each placement before setting any bid multipliers. Discover whether or not your product converts well for all placements and then adjust accordingly. To get some initial profitable sales, listen to our Product Targeting podcast where we discuss what can be one of Amazon’s most efficient traffic sources!

Step Two: If a campaign is spending above your target ACOS in one placement (ex. top of search or product pages) while spending below your target ACOS in another placement, then this is an indicator that you should begin isolating traffic away from the inefficient placement. In some instances, top of search is the unprofitable placement, while in other instances, product pages are the unprofitable placement.

If all placements are performing below ACOS, that’s great. You may have an opportunity to scale up your budget and increase your sales!

Step Three: If you have crunched the numbers and decided to focus traffic toward top of search, look at the bid you’ve been delivering at top of search for. Set a bid and bid adjustment to focus on that traffic. For example, the top of search (first page) clicks below have been delivering at an average CPC of $0.95. If you want to isolate traffic, you can do the math. You could set your bid to $1.00 for top of search by setting a bid of $0.13 ($1/800%). By not having a premium on product page placements, your campaign should divert traffic from inefficient product pages and push more impressions and clicks through top of search where you’re more likely to get sales!

If you’ve spent a lot of time and/or money doing Amazon’s PPC, you know there are a few levels between what you try to do and what Amazon delivers; and Placements is no exception. After you change the placements, you need to monitor results very closely to make sure it’s performing at the efficiency and effectiveness you want.

Practices to Avoid While Testing

We recommend everyone go test these new bidding strategies and placement adjustments based on the goals and objectives of their campaigns. When testing these new strategies, there are a few things that you should be sure to avoid…

Applying a large bid multiplier to top of search on campaigns that perform well for product page placements. If your campaign is running within desired ACoS and driving a significant amount of sales, it is not advised to interrupt the efficient flow of ad traffic.
Testing new bidding strategies such as Dynamic Bidding – Up & Down on a new campaign. Without a significant amount of ad history and data, Amazon will struggle in determining whether or not your ad is likely to convert. Test the impact of this new feature on an existing campaign to fully understand the impact it may have on your Amazon advertising methods.
Creating two campaigns with the same keyword set, bids, etc… and testing them against one another using different bidding strategies. Since both campaigns have the same keyword set, they would be competing against one another for the same auctions. Testing in this manner will likely lead to results that do not accurately represent how the campaign is likely to perform in an unbiased testing environment.
Recreating an existing campaign with a new bidding Up & Down bidding strategy. By copying the original campaign and creating a new one, you are essentially setting up a brand new ad that Amazon has never seen before. This campaign would have no ad history making it difficult for Amazon to predict the likelihood of a conversion in any given auction.

Conclusion

Adjusting bids by Placement can be a really powerful strategy to change how your campaign delivers. Now that you know what to look for, and how to make the change, you’re ready to go out and dig into your own campaigns. You need to follow the data for your campaigns and make sure that you are making the right decision for your product and campaign. Check your campaign metrics regularly and Follow The Data!

Amazon Advertising Tools to Boost Visibility & Sales

As an Amazon seller, your main goal is to get your product in front of as many buyers as possible. But with competition high, where do you even start? Thankfully, there are several Amazon advertising tools designed to help sellers promote their products.

From sponsored ads and video ads to storefronts and more, sellers have plenty of options for how to advertise their Amazon products and brands. In this guide, we’ll cover what each of these advertising options are and how you can use them for your business. But first, let’s discuss a big change Amazon recently made to its advertising platform.

What’s in a Name? Amazon Advertising Rebrand

Come with me on a journey through time and space to August 2018. It was a different, more confusing time in the Amazon ecosystem. Back then, Amazon sellers looking to advertise their products had to wade through three different marketing channels and decide which one was best for their business. Amazon offered AMG (Amazon Media Group), AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) and AAP (Amazon Advertising Platform) as their three marketing pillars.

However, the disjointed nature of having multiple advertising platforms was seen as unnecessarily confusing to a lot of sellers. Many people found it hard to decipher where you needed to go to run the types of ads you wanted with so many different acronyms and platforms.

In September 2018, Amazon began phasing out the three-headed monster of AMG, AMS and AAP, opting rather to combine them all into one advertising platform. Now anything that has to do with advertising on Amazon falls under the umbrella of Amazon Advertising.

Head over to Amazon Advertising if you’re looking for any of these services or features:

To make sure you understand all the options at your fingertips, let’s dive into each tool.

Amazon Advertising Tools

Display Ads

Like sponsored ads, Display Ads also use a pay-per-click model. However, there are some differences. While sponsored ads are keyword targeted, Display Ads allow you to target your ad based on shopper interest or a specific product. Display Ads can appear in a number of places for both desktop and mobile users, including:

Detail pages
Below search results
Customer review pages
Top of the offer listing page

This image shows a Display Ad appearing directly under the checkout options on the right side of the page.

In addition to the areas listed above, these ads may also appear in Amazon merchandising emails.

Want some more information about Display Ads?

Check out the Amazon Ads YouTube account for more information on display ads and everything Amazon Ads.

Video Ads

Video Ads are a great way for advertisers to really tell their brand story and engage customers in a unique way. These ads show up in brand-safe environments via trusted channels like Amazon, IMDb or on exclusive Amazon devices like Fire TV or Fire tablet, as well as across many third-party sites and apps. As you can see below, videos are showing up on the bottom of a webpage as well as on a smartphone.

One major point to remember about video ads is they require a budget of $35,000 or more in the United States. These are typically going to be utilized by sellers or brands that have bigger advertising budgets.

Stores

Stores allow sellers to create their own website within Amazon with its own branded URL. This is a great way to showcase your brand story and product portfolio in a curated customer destination while providing a place to drive advertisements to. They don’t require any coding skills to set up and, as you can see below, provide a multi-page shopping experience.

Amazon DSP

Known formerly as Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform. This allows sellers to programmatically reach audiences on Amazon sites as well as through publishing partners and third-party exchanges. Unlike other advertising options where the main goal is to have a direct impact on sales, the main goal of DSP campaigns are to build brand and product awareness. This is more for companies that understand the nature of brand advertising and are already running display ads on other platforms.

Metrics and Reporting/Measurement

The metrics and reporting of Amazon Advertising allow sellers to see how their campaigns are performing. Here are some of the most important terms to understand:

Impression: An impression is generated every time your ad is displayed.
Click: A click is generated when a user clicks or taps your ad.
Click-through rate: Click-through rate is the number of clicks your ad generates divided by the number of times your ad is displayed (impressions).
Detail page view: A detail page view, or DPV, occurs when a customer visits one of your brand’s product detail pages after clicking your ad.
Total sales: Sum of sales attributed to your campaign. A sale is attributed to your campaign each time a customer clicks your ad and purchases your products within 14 days. It takes 3 days after your first click for this data to begin showing in your report.
ACOS: The average advertising cost of sales (ACOS) is the amount you’ve spent on a campaign divided by the total sales attributed to your ad.

In this section of Amazon Advertising, sellers are able to run many different reports to check how their campaigns are performing.

Amazon Advertising Tools: Find What Works for You

While standing out on Amazon can be difficult, these days sellers have plenty of Amazon advertising tools to help get their products seen. However, running Sponsored or Display Ads or utilizing any of the other marketing strategies won’t automatically ensure success.

A lot of the Amazon game (advertising included), comes down to good old fashioned research along with trial and error.

If you’re going to jump into running Sponsored Ad campaigns for your product, you need to be fully aware of what you’re willing to spend on your advertising campaign as a whole so you can properly set bids and your budget. It also might behoove you to start with a wider net of keywords, let the campaign run, and then pick out a few of the keywords that perform the best.

The point here is, you need to figure out what Amazon advertising tools and strategy options work for you and your goals. If something isn’t working, take note and adjust accordingly before moving forward.

Here, at Viral Launch, we want to provide you with all the information you need to become a successful Amazon seller. For more on Amazon selling strategies, we encourage you to subscribe to our blog, check out our Youtube channel, and listen to our Follow the Data podcast.

Tag: Sponsored Products