7 tips for advertising on Amazon with Sponsored Brands

MAY 15, 2017

When L’Oréal wanted to reach new audiences in Mexico, it engaged Amazon Advertising to help drive brand awareness and consideration. As part of this shift it adopted a full-funnel marketing strategy using Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, and display and video via Amazon DSP. As a result, sales on Amazon increased 400% year over year and the brand attracted 140,000 new-to-brand customers.

Amazon Advertising’s Sponsored Brands can be a powerful tool to help more people discover, shop, and engage with your business. Beyond just growing your audience, Sponsored Brands give you the opportunity to tell a compelling story about your brand.

Sponsored Brands are customizable ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products. These ads appear in prominent places within shopping results and on product detail pages using keyword targeting. Advertisers can customize their headline and link their ad to a custom landing page or a Store.

Advertisers who launched Sponsored Brands after Sponsored Products saw a 12.2% average increase in the return on advertising spend. To help get the best results from Sponsored Brands, it’s important to take the necessary steps from setting goals to learning from reporting tools to understand the Average cost of sales (ACOS) and Detail page views (DPV).

Here are seven tips to help you get the most out of your own Sponsored Brands when advertising on Amazon:

1. Set your goals

It’s important to go into this with a plan. Before creating a campaign, it’s key to know what business goal you want to accomplish through advertising. Do you want to raise brand awareness? Get new customers? Increase sales?

2. Target the right keywords

Selecting a strategic variety of keywords increases the opportunity for your ads to be shown.

Include at least 25 keywords in your campaigns, and make sure you have a mix of match types—broad, phrase, and exact—depending on your goals. Broad match gives you the widest traffic exposure, while phrase and exact match help you refine traffic to your ads. Add negative keywords or products/brands to help prevent your ads from appearing in shopping results pages that don’t meet your performance goals.

3. Research traffic volume

When you enter keywords for your Sponsored Brands campaign, you’ll see a list of suggested keywords pop up. Next to each one is an indicator of how much traffic it gets (high, medium, or low) based on expected impression volume and the relevance of the ASINs in your campaign.

Sponsored ads use an auction-based pricing model, so you must bid competitively if you want to win the high-traffic keywords. If your bid is too low, then someone else’s ad will appear instead. Increase your bid to help win more impressions.

4. Select keywords that fit your budget

If your budget is limiting your bids, you might not be able to win impressions on very popular, high-traffic keywords. Low-traffic keywords won’t have as much competition for bids, making it easier to win the auction.

Remember, you don’t necessarily need the highest amount of traffic to make a sale—just the right shoppers whose searches are a good match for your products.

5. Always be on

Run your campaigns continuously. Don’t just wait for holidays or seasonal shopping events like Valentine’s Day or Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Showcase your brand year-round to increase visibility and continually develop your audience. When a customer decides it’s time to buy, you want them to remember your name.

When Pringles decided it wanted to drive greater awareness of its products with German customers, it switched over to an always-on approach. As a result, Pringles Sponsored Brands video campaigns generated a 200% higher click-through rate (CTR) than Pringles Sponsored Brands campaign historical average.

6. Take advantage of the reporting tools

The advertising console automatically tracks your campaign metrics, including how many clicks your ads get, how much you’ve spent, and how much you’ve generated in sales.

A few metrics to watch in particular:

  • Average cost of sales (ACOS): The total cost of advertising divided by the number of sales generated
  • Detail page views (DPV): How many shoppers clicked through your custom landing page to your individual product’s detail page

These metrics can give you valuable insights. For example, if your ad’s click-through rate is high but DPV is low, it means shoppers aren’t going past the landing page.

And that’s where tip #7 comes in.

7. Test, test, and test!

One of the benefits of Sponsored Brands is that you can customize the ad creative. Take advantage of this and invest time in testing the different components:

  • The custom ad headline and image
  • The order, number, and mix of ASINs in the ad
  • The experience on your custom landing pages

Remember to follow a few best practices when testing:

  • Set up multiple campaigns to run simultaneously
  • Change one variable at a time
  • Run the test for at least 2 weeks
  • Identify winning criteria based on your business goal and the test set-up

Given its prominent placement above search, investing time in testing your Sponsored Brands creative can have a high impact on your advertising success.

Are you ready to dig in to get the most from your Sponsored Brands? Begin the journey today.