Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display on Amazon

Part 8 of 11 – This is the eighth part of a multi-step guide on how to succeed with Amazon ads. In this part, I will go over Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display on Amazon, explaining how and when to use them, and how to optimize them.

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Everything I’ve Covered So Far Applies to Sponsored Products Ads, but What About Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display on Amazon?

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The principle is exactly the same: you want to find the best keywords, maximize the results from them, and eliminate those that don’t deliver the required outcomes. You’ll also do this the same way, with one or more Explore campaigns and one or more Winner campaigns. The difference is that these two ad types are handled somewhat differently due to how they are set up in Amazon.

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I should point out once again that Sponsored Products ads are the foundation. I recommend waiting until your Sponsored Products ads are up and running well before diving into Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display.

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1. What Are Sponsored Brands Campaigns on Amazon?

For your Sponsored Brands campaigns, you can use the same targeting types for your winner campaigns as you would for Sponsored Products—both Product and Exact targeting. However, for your Explore campaigns, you can’t do exactly the same thing as before. Sponsored Brands do not have automatic campaigns, which significantly limits how many new keywords you can discover. You can use Broad targeting, but as you know, this relies on manually adding keywords, and you still won’t be able to discover all the types of keywords that an Auto campaign would find. My suggestion is therefore to either fully or partially use the keywords you discover with your Sponsored Products ads, and then add them to your Sponsored Brands winner campaigns and Broad campaign. After all, it’s the same products that customers are buying, so the keywords should be relevant. The difference lies in where the ads are displayed and how well they convert.

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Segmenting Sponsored Brands Campaigns on Amazon

Another significant difference with Sponsored Brands campaigns is how you segment the products into different campaigns. Each of these ads displays three products simultaneously. Since you have the opportunity to show matching products alongside each other, you should no longer have just one type of product per campaign. Instead, review your products and consider which ones should be shown together. Can you display different variations of the same product type together? Think carefully and develop a strategy based on this. The more you can segment products, the more control you gain, though it also requires more time to manage.

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Video Sponsored Brands Campaigns and More

Recently, other types of Sponsored Brands ads have emerged, such as video ads. No matter the type of ad, you can implement the same system. However, you should be aware that some of these ads require different types of content, which can impact ad performance. Therefore, for these ads, you will also need to measure the performance of different videos/images and work on creating the best possible ads. In other words, A/B testing is essential.

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2. What Are Sponsored Display Campaigns on Amazon?

Sponsored Display ads differ significantly from the other ad types. With these ads, you never add keywords. Instead, you can target Amazon Audiences, or you can use Remarketing.

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What Is Remarketing in Sponsored Display?

Remarketing involves targeting a group of customers who have already shown interest in the products you or your competitors are selling on Amazon. For example, you can target all customers who have clicked on your previous ads or who have viewed products in a specific category. Although both of these are Remarketing, I will hereafter refer to the ads targeting customers who have viewed your products as Remarketing. The ads targeting customers who have viewed products in your category, I will refer to as Category.

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What Is Amazon Audiences in Sponsored Display?

Amazon Audiences are groups of customers that Amazon, through data, has identified as being interested in specific areas, such as football or seeds. As of the time I’m writing this, Amazon Audiences is a new concept and has not yet yielded good results for the ads I’ve seen and tested. This ad type is somewhat redundant, and the audiences are already covered by the other types of ads you should be running. Therefore, I advise against using this ad type for now. But keep an eye out for possible updates from Amazon that could change this. Instead, I suggest focusing on Remarketing and Category.

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How Do You Optimize Sponsored Display Ads?

Many of the things we’ve gone over in previous chapters (match types and Winner/Explore segmentation) are not applicable to Sponsored Display ads. This is due to their structure and the lack of keywords. However, the segmentation by product categories is the same. Be sure to separate your different products into different campaigns for these ads as well. You should segment campaigns in exactly the same way as your Sponsored Products ads, meaning different campaigns for different product categories. For each product category, you’ll then want to create two campaigns—one for Remarketing and one for Categories. These correspond to the match types you used for the other ad types. If your budget is low, or if you want to start cautiously, the Remarketing campaign is the more critical of these two. Your AdGroups will look just like your Sponsored Products campaigns—one AdGroup for each product.

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To optimize these ads, you won’t need to move any keywords around since there aren’t any keywords in Sponsored Display campaigns. The optimization you can and should do is to adjust the bids for all AdGroups. But that’s it—no further action is needed if you segment products and product categories correctly.