7 actions to help improve Sponsored Brands campaign performance

Updated November 08, 2021

If you’re interested in creating a better experience for your campaign management, here are seven actions you can to take to get the most out of your Sponsored Brands campaigns and help you reach your business goals. From organization tips to testing options, there are plenty of ways to better use Sponsored Brands.

1. Focus on impressions as your primary performance metric

Think about your Sponsored Brands campaigns not just as a means of generating sales but also as a way to get shoppers to see and click on your products. This helps drive brand awareness and customer loyalty. Start by reviewing your advertising reports and sort by impressions to find top-performing keywords.

2. Use related keywords

Bid on supporting keywords, and get creative with the headline. For example, if you sell micro SD cards, bid on the keyword “digital camera” and use a headline like “Don’t forget the SD card for your new camera.”

3. Link ads to Stores

Because Stores gives you creative control to feature multimedia content and present a unique design, they can be effective tools for brand building. Ensure your brand name and logo are featured on every page within your Store; if a shopper sees your brand name repeatedly, it can start to resonate with them.

4. Test different bidding options

Try using different bidding settings based on your business goals. For example, automated bidding can help you lower your bids to get a better return on investment. With manual bidding—where you control exactly how much you want to spend on a keyword—you can increase your bids to help win more impressions. If your goal is generating more visibility with Sponsored Brands, we recommend using manual bidding.

5. Look at all match types

Broad match provides the widest traffic exposure for your ads, while phrase and exact match are more restrictive but will drive highly relevant traffic. Add keywords in all three match types to capture all types of traffic.

6. Be flexible with your budget

Think about Sponsored Brands as an add-on to your existing marketing budget. You’ll want to make sure your campaigns don’t run out of budget early in the day, causing you to miss out on potential sales. Start with a larger budget to ensure full coverage throughout the day.

7. Test different ad creatives

Clone your campaigns and change one ad creative variable at a time, such as headline text or the destination landing page. This allows you to run an effective experiment by comparing versions that differ in only one variable, then use the results to create a list of best practices.

As one Amazon seller noted, having a clear strategy behind Sponsored Brands performance can help with overall campaign performance and sales:

“First, we just threw up a bunch of stuff, but as we’ve cleaned up and optimized our campaigns, we’ve seen better ACOS, steady growth, and better returns. What we’ve found has worked well is organizing our campaigns strategically. Don’t just have one campaign—structure your campaigns by products to get more granular, and add 30-40 keywords in each. We know what’s working now so we can adjust our bids. It was important to get a good baseline at first and find out where we can get good returns. Now our strategy is to invest more. But we have that good baseline to see where we can come back to.”

– Stephen Glass, Amino Vital, Amazon Seller

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