Amazon advertising has become a significant platform for all e-commerce businesses selling both on and off Amazon. There are hundreds of thousands of sellers on Amazon selling millions of products making it tough to compete just relying on the performance of the product listings. Amazon provides sellers an opportunity to invest in their advertising with some advanced advertising tools like ‘Sponsored Display Ads’, ‘Sponsored Brand Ads’ and ‘Sponsored Product Ads’ which can be used to better compete against competitors.
In this article, we will explain what Sponsored Brand Ads are and the things you need to know about them to use these customizable ads to improve conversions.
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).
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.
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.
There are three types of Ad formats to pick from for Sponsored Brand Ads.
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.
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.
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.
Creating your sponsored brand campaign is very simple. Here are the steps to follow:
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.
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:
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.