Amazon Advertising – What You Need to Know

With over 2.7 billion visits, about 1.6 million products sold, and more than $400 million in sales—all on an average day–Amazon is the top ecommerce market leader globally. In recent years, it has become the go-to platform for all kinds of sellers that want to leverage its accessibility and selling power to multiply their profits.

To aid sellers with their marketing efforts, Amazon launched AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) in 2012, which they rebranded to Amazon Advertising in 2018. It is a platform that envelopes several advertising solutions that companies and individuals can use to raise brand awareness or place their products somewhere where potential buyers are most likely to get engaged.

This guide will help you understand everything this feature offers. We’ll also explain how to use it properly so you can make the most out of your marketing campaigns.

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How Does Amazon Advertising Work?

Similar to the Google Ads platform, which offers ads of several types and charges only when users click on them, Amazon Advertising’s primary feature are pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

PPC ads are available to all registered Amazon sellers. Their cost depends on:

• the type of the ad
• how competitive the specific market is
• the keywords you choose to target

There’s also the Amazon demand-side platform (DSP), whose primary purpose is to market products outside of Amazon’s selling platform. It’s mainly recommended for agencies and advertisers with a larger advertising budget.

This platform offers ads that are based on the CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) advertising model and can be placed on third-party websites and apps. It can also place these ads on Amazon-owned platforms, such as IMDB.com, Kindle devices, Fire TV devices, Freedive, etc.

What Sellers Get From It

Everyone who benefits from the convenience of Amazon Advertising gets to enjoy an easy-to-use advertiser’s dashboard that’s packed with everything they need for launching and monitoring their marketing campaign. Creating ads, tweaking ad types and ad options, choosing and experimenting with keywords, and tons of other features are available to help the seller maximize their strategy.

The most valuable feature, however, is the Key Metrics section, which allows you to overview how your ads and campaigns are performing.

The Amazon Ads key metrics are an invaluable asset in understanding whether your efforts are a hit or a miss. This way, you can learn which strategies to leave behind and which to focus on, so you can make better data-driven decisions.

There, you can track:

• impressions (the number of times your ads were displayed)
• clicks (how many times your ads were clicked)
• amount of money spent
• ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales—showing how efficiently your ads bring results)
• ROAS (Return On Ad Spend–showing how much an ad brings in revenue after expenditures are calculated), etc.

What Are the Benefits of Using Amazon Advertising?

Let’s first point out that by selling and advertising your products on Amazon, you’re exposing your brand to over 300 million people who often use Amazon to shop. This is an initial indicator of how big of a platform Amazon offers all sellers to put their products out there.

The platform continuously gathers immense amounts of shopping data which is then used to understand shoppers’ behavior and habits. They then shared the best practices for product placement and advertising with sellers in a secure environment.

As we mentioned above, Amazon Ads provides an insights panel where sellers can access extensive details about their ads. This data is a powerful asset that is crucial when figuring out how to target leads in the best way possible and expand your reach.

What Types of Amazon Ads Are There?

There are three main ad types you can use to gain the most out of your Amazon Advertising experience. However, there are other ways to boost your product’s discovery and capture targeted audiences, and we’ll review all of them here.

These are the Amazon Ads that we’ll look at in this article:

• Sponsored Products;
• Sponsored Brands;
• Sponsored Display;
• Stores;
• Video Ads;
• Audio Ads;
• Custom Advertising Solutions.

Sponsored Products

The most used ad type on Amazon Ads is Sponsored Products. The feature enables both regular Amazon sellers and brand-registered sellers to quickly create an ad for an individual product from their catalog, which can be displayed in a product listing or a search result.

Sponsored Products do not require any previous experience in advertising. They are a straightforward way to create and list ads and campaigns in minutes.

One of the most important things to remember here is the targeting. There are two ways to choose how Amazon will use your ads to target specific keywords:

• Targeting manually – Simply choose your products and designate the keywords to target. You will also need to bid on your preferred keywords since this will establish your CPC (cost-per-click).
  You can also choose to target products to get more visibility in a competitive niche.
  This type of targeting is recommended for more experienced sellers or marketing teams since they need to have a clear keyword strategy.
• Targeting automatically – Excellent for beginner advertisers who are comfortable relying on Amazon to take care of the keyword strategy for them.
  This is a great way to see how Amazon designs its marketing strategy and which keywords it comes up with. Then you can overview the best-performing ones and choose to use only them in your future campaigns.

After you’re done bidding, select the duration of your ads/campaigns, and you’re good to go. You can expect to see your products advertised on both mobile and desktop in relevant search results or product pages. They can appear at the top, within, or alongside search results.

Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands ads are there to help you raise brand awareness. Therefore, they’re available only to brand-registered sellers.

This type of ad appears only on top of the related search results as a banner. They contain the brand’s logo and a tagline, which are both helpful to funnel interested customers into your products.

You can choose your banner to display:

• a few thumbnails showing your products (product collection)
• a showcase of your product categories (store spotlight), or
• a video (footage showcasing a single product.

The difference between Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands is that, unlike Sponsored Products ads, which point to your products, Sponsored Brands ads can lead users to your Amazon storefront or a custom Amazon brand landing page.

Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands share the same targeting options (keyword or product) and are both based on the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model.

The great thing about Sponsored Brands is that it will list no competing products on your Amazon store or landing page.

Sponsored Display

One of the newer additions to Amazon Advertising is the Sponsored Display ad type. With these ads, you can up your advertising game and attract customers even outside Amazon’s selling platform.

These are the only ads that allow sellers to re-target customers who have previously browsed their products but didn’t make a purchase.

Sponsored Display ads can appear both on Amazon and third-party sites and apps as top-of-page or sidebar banners, alongside search results or other products, etc.

Here, unlike with the other two “sponsored” ad types, you can’t target keywords to reach customers. Amazon uses rich signals that are gained from customers’ shopping behavior and interests, and it implements them with the Sponsored Display ad type.

With these ads, you can choose:

• product targeting–place ads alongside your products or similar products within your niche, or
• audience targeting–reach users who have visited your product within the last month or those whose interests align with what your brand offers

Video Ads

Similar to the previous categories, Video Ads can feature your products across the Amazon platform and outside of it.

Video Ads can appear across all devices (desktop, tablet, or mobile), on browsers and apps, and even on streaming services. Their placement format can include banners, in-feed or in-articles spots, interstitial videos, etc.

What’s great about these ads is that Amazon can show them on most of their streaming TV services, such as Twitch, Fire TV, IMDb, Freebee, Amazon Publisher Services, and live sports.

This presents a great advertising opportunity, as this type of ad cannot be paused or stopped and it’s shown before, after, or during streaming content.

Audio Ads

Another new and innovative way to reach a wide audience and boost brand awareness is through Amazon Advertising’s Audio Ads.

These ads appear whenever customers use screen-free services—for example, when they listen to news, podcasts, or music. They allow you to communicate your brand and products during streaming audio content.

Sellers (if they sell on Amazon) can use this service but only accompanied by an Amazon Ads account executive. Your dedicated account executive will manage your audio advertising campaign if you agree on a minimum budget of $25,000.

It’s worth noting that this type of ad follows the cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) advertising model.

Custom Advertising Solutions

Amazon Advertising can even help you excel with your advertising and offer solutions that are not in the usual line of online advertising practices.

Usually more suitable for bigger brands, this type of ad can be placed on packages, Fire TV spots, customized web pages, social media, and even in Amazon stores as in-store displays.

Custom Advertising Solutions campaigns take from several weeks to several months to be completed and launched. They are offered to all sellers (if they sell on Amazon).

Amazon Advertising Best Practices

There are several tactics you can employ to make sure your Amazon Advertising campaign goes above and beyond and increase profits.

For example, you need to make smart choices when choosing which products to advertise. Decide which of your products sell the most and offer competitive prices–those are what usually drive conversions.

Your storefront and product pages should be clear, appealing, and enticing. Include high-resolution images and videos and be 100% accurate with your descriptions.

Also, follow current trends and experiment with your keywords. Testing audiences and different markets can make all the difference in your ROI.

Lastly, you can hire a team of professional marketers to take care of all of your Amazon Advertising efforts. We found AMZ Pathfinder to be a brilliant solution. They are highly effective in evaluating your business and restructuring and optimizing your PPC campaigns to help you successfully reach your goals.

Wrapping up

The eCommerce industry is growing and evolving at a rapid pace, and so is the Amazon Advertising ecosystem. Adapting to each new challenge in the advertising space will always return fruitful results.

Amazon Advertising is an excellent tool to help put your brand out there and make your products a part of a new marketplace. It can also help you learn more about consumer behavior and even set new trends in how shoppers discover products and spend money online.