The ABCs of Amazon Advertising

With more than half of all product searches starting on Amazon, your brand needs an effective Amazon advertising strategy. But that’s easier said than done. To help clear things up for you, we’re breaking Amazon advertising down into three main categories:

1. Sponsored Brands Ads

2. Amazon Stores

3. Sponsored Products Ads

A Is for Awareness With Sponsored Brands Ads

Sponsored Brands Ads target shoppers who are searching for products similar to yours through Amazon’s organic search. Sponsored Brands Ads are a great way to:

Maximize brand and product awareness
Help customers find products
Drive traffic to your Amazon Store pages

And as long as you’re either a vendor selling directly to Amazon as a retailer or you’re a seller currently enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, you’re eligible to use Sponsored Brands Ads.

Why should you use Sponsored Brands? If you have the right keyword and bidding strategy in place, your brand could show up when customers search for your competitors. If you’re able to include a high-res logo, it may even appear as if your brand owns the entire search results page on Amazon!

In addition to a customizable headline and logo, each Sponsored Brands ad unit requires three unique ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers). Clicking on any of the three product ASINs will send shoppers to a relevant Amazon product details page. This allows you to be very tactical with your advertising. You can advertise multiple best-sellers in a single unit to cover a wider range of your product catalog, focus on a particular line of products, or focus on products that complement each other.

While all of this is great, the real beauty of Amazon Sponsored Brands is that you aren’t only sending traffic to a product page. You can also send shoppers to your Amazon Store when they click your logo or headline, which is an excellent opportunity to provide additional information and educational content to customers.

This helps you improve brand awareness and ultimately sell more products.

B Is for Building and Beautifying Your Amazon Store

Amazon Stores are free, self-service, multi-page web stores that qualified brands can use to showcase their products. Any page in your Amazon Store can become a landing page for Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Hosted directly on Amazon, Amazon Stores are custom destinations that provide an immersive shopping experience where shoppers can browse your curated selection of products – whether they’re on their desktop, mobile device, or tablet. They’re a great way to showcase and enhance your brand identity.

Think of an Amazon Store similarly to how you’d think of your website, but strictly for Amazon consumers. Your Amazon Store gives you the creative control to provide additional images and videos to drive customer interest. By adding a custom hero image, custom navigation, your logo, descriptive brand content, and other assets, you can create a truly immersive brand experience.

Amazon Stores allow you to go up to three hierarchies deep. For example, imagine that you have a home page linking to a product group, category, or brand page. This sub-page could then link to a list of all the products within the group, category, or brand. From there, clicking into a specific product would bring the shopper to the relevant Amazon product details page.

The ability of Amazon Stores to create such an enhanced, brand-centric shopping experience makes them an immensely valuable addition to your Amazon advertising arsenal. And since any Amazon Store page can be not only a Sponsored Brands ad landing page but also a landing page for traffic coming from Facebook, Google, email marketing, and more, you have a great opportunity to be creative with where you lead consumers!

C Is for Capturing Conversions With Sponsored Product Ads

Another ad format offered by Amazon are Sponsored Products Ads. Sponsored Products Ads, prominently displayed above the fold on an Amazon search results page, are essentially Amazon’s equivalent to Google Shopping.

If you’re currently running Amazon Sponsored Product campaigns, you should already have a solid list of keywords to get started. This is important because just last September, Amazon changed search results pages to start with three Sponsored Product Ads instead of two. Since these ads appear at the very top of the page, they are an incredible opportunity to get your brand’s products in front of consumers that are primed to buy.

When a consumer searches organically for a product on Amazon, they can see Sponsored Products listings in three different areas:

1. Top of the search results page

2. Middle of the organic search results (mobile)

3. Bottom of the listings (mobile and desktop)

Once they click on a specific product from the search results page, they can also find Sponsored Products ads within the Product Details page. If they scroll down below the actual product listing, there is a bar of ads. This is the other major placement for Amazon Sponsored Products.

Between Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand Ads, there are usually only two organic results above the fold, and none on mobile! Your 2020 Amazon advertising strategy needs to incorporate highly optimized Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products ads to ensure your products are in front of the customer as soon as they complete a search.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither are successful Amazon campaigns.

With all of these formats, advertising on Amazon can seem overwhelming. To help you overcome those complexities and better optimize your brand’s efforts, ROI Revolution Founder & CEO Timothy Seward wrote Ultimate Guide to Amazon Advertising. This is the book for brands looking to better understand the Amazon platform, ad formats, optimizations, and how to set up a strong advertising mix that will help you attract more customers and improve profitable revenue generation. You can get your copy here!

We’ll also be tackling Amazon in our 2020 Brand Appétit Mastermind Tour – our nationwide executive talk series where you’ll learn unifying strategies to accelerate brand growth and scale new customer acquisition on Amazon, Google, and Facebook. With these three platforms comprising 70% of all U.S. digital advertising, brands have new breakthrough opportunities to accelerate growth and new customer acquisition. To see when we’re coming to a city near you, visit our events page!

Additionally, for more content on Amazon advertising, check out some of our resources below: