This blog was updated on March 8, 2024.
As the world’s most powerful and popular online marketplace, Amazon is continually improving its already robust suite of tools designed to help brands better target and convert customers. Recently, Amazon announced several updates to Sponsored Brands, including the following:
- Sponsored Ads Consolidated Invoice Statement Download Is Now Global
- Sponsored Display Expands to Amazon Business Globally
- Language Translations Are Now Available for Sponsored Display Custom Creatives
More information about these updates is available here.
What Are Sponsored Display Ads?
Sponsored Display is a self-service display advertising solution that helps you grow your brand on Amazon by engaging shoppers across the purchase journey – both on and off Amazon. Launched in 2019, Sponsored Display is one of the newest types of Amazon PPC (pay per click) advertising tools and is available for vendors and sellers registered in Amazon Brand Registry. While still relatively new compared to well-established Amazon Advertising tools like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display ads are growing in popularity as more brands discover their effectiveness.
Depending on your targeting selection (explained later), Sponsored Display ads can appear on the Amazon homepage, on product detail pages, or shopping results on desktop, mobile, and app, and on third-party websites and apps. Sponsored Display ads can provide the following key benefits:
- Activate Amazon’s Exclusive Inventory
Meet customers as they stream, shop, browse, or game by being present across a wide array of channels like product detail pages, owned and operated sites like Twitch and IMDb, and third-party destinations. - Access Self-Service Display Advertising:
Activate audiences built from shopping and streaming signals and leverage multi-format, dynamically-optimized creatives to convey the right message. - Drive New Demand for Your Business:
Drive conversions, page visits, or reach if you sell in the Amazon store. If you don’t sell in the Amazon store, drive visits to your website, or boost visibility of your business.
How do Sponsored Display Ads Work?
Unlike Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display ads allow brands to reach customers at scale both on and off the Amazon platform – including highly visible placements on the Amazon home page. This tool utilizes a targeting strategy powered by first-party shopping signals that helps brands reach relevant customers throughout their shopping journey. According to Amazon, only 4% of shoppers complete their purchase during their initial product search. Sponsored Display advertising can help you reach the remaining 96%.
Sponsored Display ads can be found in many locations across the Amazon store plus thousands of apps and websites. For example, placements can be found on the Amazon homepage and product detail pages, owned and operated sites like Twitch and IMDb, and third-party destinations. Placements are automatically selected based on your targeting tactic and optimized to help drive your desired outcome.
Sponsored Display offers both product-based and audience-based targeting options. If you’re looking to drive consideration, product targeting can help you promote or cross-sell your product among audiences who are actively browsing your product or similar products and categories. Target specific products or categories with ads that may appear on product detail pages on Amazon. Product targeting allows you to target products within your advertised product’s category as well as complementary categories. You can refine targeting by price, star rating, brand name, and Prime eligibility.
If you are interested in engaging new customers or re-engaging those who have viewed your product, audiences can help you reach relevant shoppers both on and off Amazon. Custom-built audiences, such as views remarketing, allow you to reach high-intent shoppers or engage new customers using customizable controls, such as star rating refinements. Amazon audiences, including interests, lifestyle, in-market, and life stage audiences, allow you to reach audiences with pre-built segments based on a variety of first-party shopping and streaming signals from Amazon, Twitch, IMDb, and Prime Video.
Sponsored Display Ads Audience Targeting
Sponsored Display offers custom-built audience targeting, which uses Amazon shopping signals to remarket with intuitive, flexible targeting controls (e.g., views remarketing).
Over the years, Amazon has expanded targeting options for creating audiences within Sponsored Display campaigns. Brands can select audiences in a similar way to how you would describe your brand’s core customer. For example, if your brand manufactures outdoor clothing, you can create an audience based on descriptions like “Outdoor Enthusiasts” or “Hiking Enthusiasts”. You can then connect the language used in your overall brand marketing strategy to your Sponsored Display campaigns. You can also mix and match Amazon audience segments with custom-built-views remarketing audiences within your ad group.
With these improvements, Amazon audiences makes it even easier to reach new prospective audiences through awareness and consideration campaigns. These audiences fit into the following four segments (each informed by billions of first-party shopping and streaming signals):
- Lifestyle: Positioned for awareness campaigns, these audiences reflect a variety of shopping and viewing signals, including shopping on Amazon, browsing on IMDb, streaming on Prime Video, or streaming on Twitch. These behaviors reflect shared preferences and map to lifestyle segments such as “Foodies”, “Sports Enthusiasts”, “Tech Enthusiasts”, and more.
- Interests: Interest-based audiences allow advertisers to help raise awareness with prospective buyers based on what they frequently browse and buy. Examples of these audiences include “Interested in Canadian History” and “Interested in Interior Design”.
- Life Events: Life Events audiences give brands the opportunity to drive awareness and consideration for relevant products based around life moments, such as “Traveling Soon” for shoppers going on vacation.
Channel Key Takeaway:
Sponsored Display ads are a great complement for brands who are already using display advertising. For example, if you are using a DSP to reach new audiences with programmatic display, you can extend your reach to specific Amazon product detail pages by using Sponsored Display product targeting. According to Amazon, 64% of shoppers use multiple channels to make a single purchase. Sponsored Display ads can help increase your presence in multiple channels to keep your brand and products top of mind for shoppers looking to buy.
From a broader perspective, the latest enhancements to Sponsored Display ads provide greater control over how brands reach customers. With Amazon growing at an unprecedented rate – for both shoppers and sellers – brands need to utilize every tool available to stand out from their competitors. It can be difficult to stay up-to-date with Amazon’s ever-changing advertising ecosystem. As a proven agency that works closely with Amazon every day to help brands across all industries develop best-in-class Amazon sales channels, Channel Key is devoted to bringing you the most recent developments in Amazon Advertising to help your brand stay competitive. Be sure to check back soon for the latest Amazon announcements.
