One of the reasons Amazon has grown into such a powerful D2C marketplace is its continued effort to expand and improve the marketing tools available to brands. Earlier this year, Amazon introduced a video ad format to its Sponsored Brands advertising program called Sponsored Brands videos. For a quick reminder, Sponsored Brands are cost-per-click (CPC) ads that utilize keyword, product, and category targeting to help drive the discovery of your brand among customers shopping for products like yours. Sponsored Brands are only available for professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, book vendors, and agencies.
Sponsored Brands Video Overview
It’s no secret that video is more engaging than text or photos. According to numerous data, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to just 10% when reading the same message in text. This is what makes Sponsored Brands videos such a powerful advertising tool. It’s an effective way to attract customers not just to your products, but to your brand, which is the key to a loyal, repeat customer.
The mechanics of a Sponsored Brands video is simple. Ads are keyword targeted, cost-per-click, and link customers directly to the product detail page where they can learn more and purchase. Sponsored Brands videos include three main components:
- Your Product Details
This includes the primary product image and associated product information (title, star rating, review count, price, and Prime eligibility), which are automatically displayed from the detail page. - The Video
Your video can be up to 30 seconds (more on this below) and will play automatically when 50% of it is on-screen. - Mute Toggle Button
The mute toggle button is overlaid in the lower right-hand corner of the video and controls audio playback. By default, videos always start without audio. Customers can enable audio by tapping on this button. If there is no audio, the mute toggle will not be displayed.
Creative Guidelines and Best Practices for Sponsored Brands Videos
As with any advertising medium, it’s important to adhere to best practices to maximize the performance of your Sponsored Brands video. To help achieve the best results, Amazon recommends that your video adheres to the following guidelines:
- Know your audiences — Amazon customers are shopping for products and brands. Your content should be educational, demonstrative, and product-focused.
- Show your product — Videos that feature the product prominently within the first second typically perform better than those that don’t. Don’t waste your chance to engage shoppers by fading in from black or starting with an empty frame.
- Keep it brief and focused — Amazon recommends an optimal video length of 15–30 seconds to relay your message and hold customers’ attention. Limit your content to just a handful of key selling points to ensure your message is received.
- Optimize for the format — This video unit auto-plays without sound and runs inline in the search results with no option to go full screen. Your videos should work without sound, and you’ll need to ensure that on-screen text can be easily read on a mobile device and isn’t obstructed by the user interface that is positioned within the video area.
- Consider the loop — Once your video ends, it will automatically loop. Consider adding an end card to allow for some breathing room, or get creative and make your loop seamless.
- On-screen text — Amazon recommends adding on-screen text to videos that rely on voiceover to communicate the product message. Use Helvetica or a similar San-Serif font at a minimum size of 80 px to ensure text can be easily read on smaller screen devices we recommend using. It’s also helpful to display the text in white on top of a black bounding box set to 80% opacity.
Channel Key Client Sponsored Brands Videos Results
As a full-service Amazon marketplace channel management agency, Channel Key has launched and managed many Sponsored Brands video campaigns for clients in various industries. To give you a better understanding of what kind of results they yield, we’ve compiled the 30-day performance data from three separate campaigns and placed them side-by-side with Sponsored Products campaign data for the same client during the same timeframe.
As you can see from the chart below, Sponsored Brands videos outperformed Sponsored Products in click-through rate, conversion rate, ACoS, and ROAS. This is likely attributable to the fact that video drives more engagement than photography and text. You’ll notice, however, that all three Sponsored Products ads reached far more impressions than their video ad counterparts. While this may appear alarming, it’s expected given that Sponsored Products ads currently appear in a vastly greater number of places than video ads, so naturally they will receive more impressions.
Channel Key Takeaway
Brand owners have much greater control over their Amazon presence, including exclusive access to a host of benefits and tools that can open the door to exponential growth. Sponsored Brands Videos, while still relatively new, offer a powerful way to target customers and increase conversions. As noted in the chart above, one of our clients’ video campaigns achieved a 51.2 ROAS, resulting in $8,631 in sales on a mere $168 ad spend. While Sponsored Brands videos won’t reach nearly the amount of impressions as other ad formats, they are capable of much higher conversion rates and make a valuable addition to the overall marketing strategy for brand owners. To learn more about incorporating Sponsored Brands videos into your advertising campaigns, contact us today for a free consultation.
