Amazon Advertising is a robust platform for brands to target and convert both new and existing customers. As the largest and most powerful e-commerce marketplace, the retail giant is always improving and expanding its vast suite of marketing and advertising tools. Staying up to date with the latest changes can be challenging and time-consuming. As a proven and recognized Amazon agency, Channel Key receives early insight into new Amazon Advertising programs, analytics, and metrics. To help your brand stay ahead of the competition, we’ve compiled the most recent changes that impact Amazon sellers so you can focus your time and energy on what’s important – running your business.
Manage Brand-to-Product Relationships
The Amazon Advertising console now offers the ability to review and manage brand-to-product relationships to help measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns across all ad programs. It’s now simple to add products to your brands or remove misclassified products for better attribution to your metrics such as total purchases and a better selection experience. Any changes made to these relationships will impact all ad campaigns that are currently running as well as any future campaigns. After suggested changes are approved by Amazon, attribution will be impacted across display ads, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns for metrics such as total purchases.
New Category Benchmarks for Sponsored Brands
Amazon Advertising now provides a category benchmark report, which helps evaluate the performance of Sponsored Brands campaigns relative to their peers using the category benchmark report. Category benchmarks are available for impressions, click-through rate (CTR), return on ad spend (ROAS), and advertising cost of sales (ACOS). For each metric, the benchmark presents your performance with your closest peers’ performance values at the median, lower-performing quartile (bottom 25%), and top-performing quartile (top 25%) within specific shopping categories. This data helps identify improvement areas like insufficient spend in categories with lower relative impressions, which can better inform an overall brand’s strategy. It also makes it easier to understand how performance changes are impacted by a brand’s campaign optimizations or category trends. Note that the category benchmark report is available for a 90-day lookback window.
Upcoming Change to Sponsored Brands True Brand Logo Requirement
Beginning March 31, 2021, new Sponsored Brands campaigns will require the use of a true brand logo. True brand logos provide a better experience for shoppers and help drive more engagement with your brand and products. According to Amazon, shoppers engage 20% more on desktop and 13% more on mobile with ad campaigns that have a true brand logo. All Sponsored Brands creative types will be impacted, including product collection, custom image, and Store spotlight.
Upcoming Change to Sponsored Brands Product Optimization Support
Beginning March 25, 2021, the product optimization feature for Sponsored Brands campaigns will no longer be supported in the US (and UK) in the advertising console or the Amazon Advertising API. Existing Sponsored Brands campaigns with product optimization enabled will no longer have the products in the creative automatically optimized. Campaigns with product optimization enabled will be converted to standard Sponsored Brands product collection campaigns with the default selected products showing in the creative.
Improved Product Targeting Recommendations for Sponsored Display
Amazon recently launched improved targeting recommendations for Sponsored Display product targeting in the Amazon Advertising console. These recommendations are ranked by their probability of driving a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) for the advertised products selected. This feature expedites the campaign launching process and can help improve product consideration. Improved recommendations are also available through the Amazon Advertising API.
Create Multiple Budgets in a Single Order on DSP
Amazon now provides the ability to create multiple budgets for different flight periods within an order on the Amazon DSP. This eliminates the need to create separate orders or line items to assign different budget amounts per flight. Campaigns now pace towards order budgets unless the sum of line item budgets in the order is lower than total order budgets. In this case, Amazon paces towards the sum of line item budgets as that amount is more restrictive.
New Whole Foods Market Lookalike Category-Level Audiences
Amazon recently launched lookalike category-level audiences (e.g., meat or dairy shoppers) leveraging Whole Foods Market shopping signals, including online (pick-up and delivery) and offline (in-store). This feature enables U.S. advertisers to reach audiences who shop at Whole Foods Market – both online and at physical locations. Combining these audiences with existing audience sources allows brands to reach the most relevant customers at the right moments in their shopping journeys.
Responsive E-Commerce Creative Now Generally Available
Responsive e-commerce creative is now available to all advertisers on Amazon DSP. This provides the ability to auto-generate an e-commerce display ad creative with up to 20 featured products and automatically skips the rendering of a product that is out of stock. Additionally, responsive e-commerce creative enables brands to select and deselect up to 10 supported sizes utilized both onsite and offsite via Amazon DSP and monitor a campaign’s performance across each placement size via the Amazon DSP report center.
Bulk Association of Creatives to Line Items
Amazon has added a new creatives button to the bulk actions bar on the line item page that provides the ability to add or remove multiple creatives to multiple lines in a single action. Managing creatives in bulk helps reduce the time spent when assigning creatives by removing the need to navigate and assign to individual line items. All line item and creative types present in the Amazon DSP console are supported.
CHANNEL KEY TAKEAWAY
Amazon has become much more than an online marketplace. Today, it’s the #1 platform where customers begin their shopping journey. Because of this, its advertising business has soared. According to the Wall Street Journal, digital ad revenue for Amazon jumped a whopping 51% in the most recent quarter. More brands are realizing that Amazon Advertising is a powerful way to reach customers, which means greater competition. The key to distinguishing your brand with Amazon Advertising is to not only understand the platform’s complex suite of available marketing tools, but also remaining up to date with ongoing changes that impact sellers. Be sure to check back soon for the latest Amazon Advertising developments that can help your brand increase sales on the largest e-commerce marketplace in the world.
ABOUT CHANNEL KEY
Channel Key is a full-service channel management marketplace consulting agency that has helped generate $250M in Amazon sales for retail brands around the world. Complete 360-degree services include marketplace strategies, content development, marketing and advertising, catalog management, marketplace and fulfillment setup, ongoing consulting, and much more. To learn more about how Channel Key can help increase sales for your business, contact us today for a free consultation.
