Amazon’s Campaign Types
Amazon’s advertising functionality is a complex and demanding feature of the marketplace. As much as successful advertising centers on keyword optimization and audience targeting, the framework of a brand’s ad strategy will take place within three buckets of campaigns: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display.
Each of these campaign options will present your sponsored listings in different parts of the marketplace, but within each one there are a few locations where your ad might land. In the end, the actual placement will be out of your control; varying based on the bid, competition, and the whims of an algorithm. Still, understanding the logic of how each campaign type finds its audience is a useful tool in knowing how to set up your advertising portfolio.
Sponsored Products
These are the most common ad placements and the ones that look the most like an organic listing. A Sponsored Product ad will appear either in the top row, middle row, or bottom row of search results and will include all of the same information shown as organically ranking products. Except for the sponsored tag, these might as well be a high-ranking listing.
Sponsored Products ads are often the first addition to a brand’s portfolio of advertising campaigns. Because these placements are finding the most relevant customers, those who are actively searching to buy a product in that category at that moment, Sponsored Products are the closest equivalent to natural food brands buying eye-level placement in a grocery store.
These ad placements will sometimes appear on product detail pages as well. There are single rows of products both above and below a listing’s A+ Content, presented much as they would be in search results and under the headline “products related to this item”.
Sponsored Brands
These offerings are less apt to blend in with search results but offer the chance for one bid to give shoppers a fuller sense of your brand. Sponsored Brands ads most commonly appear as a banner across the top of Amazon’s search results page. With this real estate, your brand can show three ASINs in a row as well as a bit of creative, offering some personality to a marketplace that can too often remove brands from the equation of B2C selling.
Because Sponsored Brands ads are generally highlighting multiple products, shoppers won’t click through directly to a product detail page. Advertisers have two options for where these ad types link to: if you have an Amazon brand store then a Sponsored Brands campaign can link there to present your full catalog along with a bit of design. Otherwise, shoppers can be sent to a campaign-specific landing page, which will show a list of selected products, almost like a search results page curated by the brand.
Video ads on Amazon are classified as Sponsored Brands, too. These won’t be at the top of the page but rather midway down search results as an autoplay offering. Even simple video ads tend to show good returns, offering a flash of eye-catching motion into an otherwise stagnant search results page.
Sponsored Display
These campaigns are a bit more free-floating than their Sponsored colleagues, finding their way into various placements on search results and detail pages. The most widely recognized location for Sponsored Display is on the right-hand sidebar of product detail pages, just below the buy box. For this reason, Display ads might be more of a long shot in terms of conversion. A consumer seeing your advertisement below another brand’s buy box will be pretty far down that competitor’s funnel.
A unique function of Sponsored Display campaigns is their ability to use audience targeting. This targeting option means your campaign will be tapping into Amazon’s coveted consumer database to seek out shoppers of certain interests or life stages to find users well-suited to your product. Whereas keyword-based campaigns will be optimized to better target the way consumers search for products, these audience targeting campaigns will be optimized to identify which consumer subcategories convert sales. This may be an opportunity to learn something new about your brand and target audience in the process.
Sponsored Displays boast another advanced offering: the ability to target shoppers off of Amazon. Using those same targeting categories as on-platform, brands can seek out new customers or remarket to previous purchasers using a campaign that will appear on a consumer’s screen while they read the news or shop across the web. When we talk about creating a portfolio of advertisements, this is certainly an option for brands who feel they have tapped their market on the platform. Keep in mind that with this approach you will be targeting consumers who are not actively shopping, so campaign metrics and expectations may have to be realigned.
Utilize All Of The Above
There are several ways to advertise on Amazon. Consider viewing these three campaign types as a framework for presenting your brand.
The aim is to occupy as much space as possible throughout Amazon, and by utilizing all three Sponsored placements you will be most apt to catch consumers’ eyes at every stage in their purchasing process. In a marketplace built on volume—both in terms of products offered and consumers to buy them—one key to gaining traction is simply earning as many impressions as possible.