Announcing general availability of Sponsored Display

August 31, 2020

By Starry Peng, Senior Product Manager
and Rich McMahon, Senior Program Manager

We’ve launched new Sponsored Display product targeting capabilities for vendors and sellers registered in Amazon Brand Registry in United States, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and United Arab Emirates (UAE). With this release, now available in both the advertising console, and Amazon Ads API, you can promote product discovery with ads that reach shoppers who are browsing similar or complementary products and categories on Amazon. Sponsored Display ad placements appear alongside customer reviews, shopping results pages, and on the far right side of product detail pages. You can choose to show ads for promoted products on the detail pages of specific products or on the detail pages of relevant products within a category, with placements appearing above the fold.

Product targeting ads also display deals and savings badges to help shoppers easily spot special offers. For an ad to be eligible to serve, the advertised product must be the Featured Offer.

Product details with cost and ratings

What does this mean for you? Here are three ways that Sponsored Display product targeting features can help you grow your business:

Reach like-minded audiences

Let’s say you sell camping equipment, like tents. You might use product targeting to help drive consideration among shoppers who are viewing complementary product pages for related supplies, such as hiking backpacks or electric lanterns.

Promote product discovery

You may also choose product targeting to build awareness among shoppers who are browsing a similar product’s detail page, or even put the emphasis on reaching shoppers in the broader camping or outdoors categories. For more control over which detail pages your ads appear on, you can use product attribute refinements including star rating, price point, and Prime shipping eligibility.

Promote relevant add-ons

Sponsored Display product targeting can assist you in quickly and easily surfacing other relevant items in your catalog to shoppers. If you also sell camping chairs, adding product targeting placements on your tent’s product detail page can make it easier for shoppers to add these complementary items to their cart in just a few clicks.

We’ve also added features to help you manage your campaigns with more flexibility and efficiency. These enhancements include:

Advertise multiple products in one campaign

You can promote as many ASINs as you wish (up to 10,000) in the same campaign. Let’s say you sell desk lamps, and many of these desk lamps all have the same selling price. You can add all of these items into the same campaign and manage them with the same bids, reducing account complexity and operational overhead.

Optimize your campaigns with detailed reporting and the ability to set separate bids for each target

You can view the performance of each advertised product as well as each of your product targets separately. Suppose you notice that there are some new products available on Amazon, and you would like to target their detail pages with your promoted products. After you add these products to your targeted product list, you can see how many clicks or orders your ads for each targeted product are delivering.

You can also further optimize your campaign by choosing separate bids for each of your targeted products and categories. This allows you to modify each bid depending on how your targeted items are performing against your advertising goals. For example, you can focus on maximizing the traffic for products or categories that are performing well by increasing your bid on those specific targets, while your other bids and targets remain unaffected.

Out-of-stock and Featured Offer awareness

Sponsored Display product targeting ads will automatically stop serving for a product if it is no longer available to purchase on Amazon—for example, when it is out of stock. This means that you can add products to your campaigns even when they have low inventory or are currently out of stock, confident that you will not generate clicks on any ads that can’t immediately lead to an order.

Sponsored Display product targeting is also aware of which supplier is the current Featured Offer for each product. This means that your ads will not serve if, for seller accounts, you are not the featured seller on a product’s detail page, and for vendor accounts, if Amazon is not the Featured Offer.

If you are a vendor and wish to advertise any products you supply to customers directly, or any products where you are the supplier but the orders are ultimately fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), you must create Sponsored Display campaigns in your seller account instead.

Add to Card and Buy now CTA button

With this launch, vendors will no longer be able to create legacy product or category targeted campaigns through Sponsored Display; however, these ads will continue to serve with no loss of functionality. To take advantage of the new functionality, you can create a copy of these legacy campaigns. Simply use the “Copy” button next to your old campaign’s name in the advertising console to create a new campaign with any old settings automatically applied. Once you are comfortable with performance of the new campaign, you can archive your old campaign.

Sponsored Display product targeting now available in the Amazon Ads API

Sponsored Display product targeting is now available worldwide in the Amazon Ads API. The Amazon Ads API provides a way to automate, scale, and optimize advertising. Campaign and performance data for Sponsored Display product targeting is available through the API, enabling programmatic access for campaign management and reporting. The API enables users to develop flexible solutions that meet their needs and goals, and to integrate more deeply with Amazon Ads. The API offers most of the functionality of the advertising console while enabling programmatic management, allowing advertisers to manage ads or ad groups based on pre-defined conditions.

Learn more about how product targeting within Sponsored Display can help you promote product discovery and optimize your campaigns. For more resources, please visit our vendor support center or seller help files, as well as our API release notes to learn more.