Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads – Everything you need to know to succeed

What are Sponsored Brand Ads?

Sponsored Brand Ads (previously known as ‘Headline Search Ads’) are unique search advertising solution that allows vendors and professional sellers to boost brand awareness, increase product visibility, engage new and returning customers with their brand and drive sales for their products at Amazon. They are customizable cost-per-click (CPC) banner ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products in the showcase. The ads are typically featured at the top of Amazon’s SERP. These ads help drive the discovery of your brand among shoppers shopping for products like yours as traffic is funneled directly from the ad to your product detail page, your Amazon Storefront, or a custom landing page (depending on where they click on the ad).

How do Sponsored Brand Ads Work?

Sponsored Brand Ads is a PPC (pay-per-click) advertising method that targets keyword searches, so you’ll bid against other sellers on various keywords to gain impressions on your potential customers. Sponsored Brand Ads targeting is manual only (not auto), so you’ll be populating them with keywords or using Product Attribute Targeting to target particular ASINs.  It serves targeted ads to customer search terms that advertisers target with keywords. If you have the highest bid, then your ad will appear among the search result when a customer enters a targeted keyword into the search bar.

You, as the seller, have control over your bids for each keyword, as well as the daily budget for each of your campaigns to make sure you stay within your overall marketing budget. When Amazon shoppers click on your brand logo, they’re taken to a Store or custom landing page. When they click on a product in the ad, they’re taken to the product page. Sponsored Brands enable you to tell more of your brand story with creative headlines and images.

Where do Sponsored Brand Ads appear?

Sponsored Brands can appear on both desktop and mobile browsers, placed next to, within, or even at the very top of the search results page that has high visibility due to their placement on the webpage. Recently Amazon expanded Sponsored Brands placement options beyond search results to product details pages. Only Sponsored Brands ads that are linked to a store are eligible to appear for this new placement.

Types of Sponsored Brand Ads on Amazon

There are three types of Ad formats to pick from for Sponsored Brand Ads.

• Product Collection

Product Collection allows you to advertise three product ads together. Brands can make the products more attractive by adding custom images, headlines, and logos. This is a great option if you want to increase your brand awareness or visibility of specific products. Clicking on this campaign redirects potential customers to the brand’s product page with just the three ads. If the individual ads are clicked, then it takes you to the product detail pages.

• Store Spotlight

These are quite similar to Product Collection Ads with the exception that they feature stores instead of products (as suggested by the name Store Spotlight). You do however need to invest in creating brand stores on Amazon to use this ad format. There are no other brand’s ads featured on this storefront. So, it is like a personal brand website within the Amazon platform where shoppers only see your brand.

• Video

This is the newest format from Amazon Advertising where you can showcase your product in an auto-play video. This feature can help your product stand out among the static images on the SERP.

How to set up Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads campaign?

Creating your sponsored brand campaign is very simple. Here are the steps to follow:

• Step 1: Log in to your Seller Central account and click on “Campaign Manager” under the Advertising tab.
• Step 2: Click “Create Campaign”
• Step 3: Click on “Sponsored Brand” under “Choose your campaign type.”

• Step 4: Create the campaign. Pick a Campaign Name, start/end dates, enter your daily budget, choose the brand and the landing page.
• Step 5: Create the features ad copies. Choose the images, headline, logo, order of products, etc.
• Step 6: Select your keyword strategy. Set a default keyword bid. Choose a match type for the keywords you enter. Add negative keywords.
• Step 7: Submit your campaign for review. Preview how your ad will look on various platforms before hitting submit.

Who is eligible for sponsored brands?

• All vendors are eligible to build sponsored brands.
• Sellers who are enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry are eligible to build sponsored brands for any of their registered brands.
• Only new products are eligible. Used and refurbished products and the sexual wellness category are not eligible to build sponsored brands.
• You need to be able to ship to the country that you are advertising in.

Why advertisers should use sponsored brand ads?

Sponsored brands are a great tool that will allow you to promote your brands and new product offerings outside of product detail pages. It can help advertisers engage shoppers as they browse and discover products on Amazon if you are an emerging brand. Advertisers can use Sponsored Brand ads to provide opportunities for shoppers to find additional products in your catalog that might encourage shoppers to visit your store which can increase impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Brands can create custom headlines to call out what makes your brand stand out and share your branding message. If you are a more established brand, then advertisers can use Sponsored Brands to stay as a top priority for shoppers. They can optimize bid strategy for the placements that best meet their performance goal. Amazon also offers unique reporting with new-to-brand metrics, helping you measure the number of first-time customers or total first-time sales your brand acquired on Amazon in the past 12 months.

Benefits of Sponsored Brand Ads

Sponsored Brand is a high-impact ad product with highly visible placements in search results which helps you build your brand on Amazon and increase the discoverability of your products. The main benefits of Sponsored Brand ads are:

• Sponsored Brand Ads help to increase brand visibility and product awareness by taking up a large valuable space (top of the search) on the platform.
• You can control how much you spend by setting your daily budget and choosing how much to bid per click, controlling costs with CPC ads.
• Sponsored Brands ads allow sellers to curate a brand experience for customers while diverting them from competitors’ listings. They make it easy for customers to click through to view your brand.
• It allows you to target specific keywords so you can build awareness by showing your offering for specific shopper search queries. This makes it great for attracting top-of-the-funnel shoppers.

Sponsored Brands Ads Campaign Strategies

• One of the keys to drive maximum traffic with sponsored brand ads is by matching the keyword intent to the landing page and product ads. For example, if someone is searching for Coleman camping gear, then it makes sense to create a Coleman branded storefront showing all the options on gears as it is not specified by the search query.
• Data shows that online shoppers respond to visual signals about a product: Advertising that uses high-quality photographs, videos, or animations to convey the brand message generates up to 300% more traffic. So, you can prioritize creating higher-quality images, animations, and video ads to stay on top of your competition.
• To build brand awareness, you can design ads to include generic, unbranded short-tail keywords along with a selection of three of your best-selling products. Avoid mixing branded and non-branded campaigns. It may mask the actual performance of your branded or non-branded campaigns.
• To ensure you derive the most benefit as a result of customers clicking your ads it would be best to control how much you spend by setting your budget and choosing how much to bid per click.
• Instead of manually choosing different ASINs for each keyword, you can set up one campaign for your entire Store or landing page. Amazon will select and show the most relevant product to match the shopper’s search.
• To make sure you are not regularly running out of budget and optimize your campaigns, closely monitor your campaign spend and other performance metrics. There are several reporting options to help you optimize your campaigns faster. Utilize the advertising reports tab on the campaign manager, it offers extra detailed reporting options.
• Check on your campaigns at least one or two times per week to monitor your daily spend and adjust your bids on the top-performing keywords to meet your business goals. If your campaign does not reach its budget goal you can try increasing bids or adding more keywords.
• If a campaign reaches its daily budget and you are happy with your ACoS then increase your daily budget as you wouldn’t want your ads to go offline after reaching the budget and potentially make you lose out on sales.

In Summary

Now that you have learned about the ins and outs of Sponsored Brand Ads, the next step is to build a strategy that will increase your brand visibility and sales on Amazon. They are an excellent form of an ad to reach out to shoppers that are in the awareness and interest phases. If you want the basic KPIs and reports, then you can use the ones made available by Amazon. But if you want to get detailed reports on your own campaign performances as well as reports on the performance of your competitors, then you can use Marketplace Intelligence from GrowByData. We can monitor, track keywords, products, ASINs, competitors with no limitation on quantity and generate insights and reports that are not found in the market. This type of information can give you a leg up on the competition.