What’s new with sponsored ads and Stores

JANUARY 28, 2020

By Nick Barton
Product Marketing Program Manager

We’ve been hard at work improving our sponsored ads and Stores offerings, and have introduced a number of new products and features over the last few months to help you engage customers and more easily manage your campaigns. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of product releases and feature updates to get you off and running in 2020.

Sponsored Products

Ad groups for vendors

Vendors can now use ad groups to organize and manage Sponsored Products ads within a campaign. This feature was previously available only for sellers. Use ad groups to bucket your ads by brand, product, category, price range, theme, targeting strategy (such as branded keywords or product targeting), and more. We recommend creating ad groups with products that are in the same product category. This helps optimize your bidding strategy, relevancy, and targeting. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Negative keywords for auto-targeted campaigns

Vendors can now use negative keyword targeting in auto-targeted Sponsored Products campaigns at both the campaign and ad group level. This feature was previously available only for manual campaigns. For existing campaigns using negative keywords, you’ll now find negative keywords located within the ad group level. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Sponsored Brands

Product targeting

Sponsored Brands now offers new and simple ways to engage shoppers browsing on Amazon. With product targeting, you can target individual products, or categories that you can refine by brand, price, or star reviews. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Suggested bids

Sponsored Brands replaced win rate with new suggested bids, which provide objective insights into the auction landscape based on historical winning bids. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Search term report

Search term reports are now available for Sponsored Brands. These reports give visibility into the keywords that resulted in at least one click and how they performed. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Taller mobile carousel

The Sponsored Brands mobile ad creative has more than doubled in size and now features a carousel format to display all three products, a headline, and brand logo. This replaces the earlier mobile experience that showed a static image and headline. Note, the new mobile creative is available only for campaigns that use a brand logo from your asset library.

Updates to daily budget calculation

In October 2019, we changed the way we calculate daily budgets for Sponsored Brands campaigns. With this update, budgets for new Sponsored Brands campaigns are calculated as an average over the course of the calendar month. This allows you to spend up to 10% more than your average daily budget while ensuring you don’t spend more than the monthly budget (daily budget you’ve set, multiplied by the number of days in that month).

Starting February 2020, Sponsored Brands campaigns created on or before October 8, 2019, with a daily budget will now be calculated as an average over the course of the calendar month. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Sponsored Display

Sponsored Display launches in new countries

With Sponsored Display you can increase awareness and demand for your products by reaching the right audiences for your business based on relevant shopping signals. We launched Sponsored Display in beta in the US, and have since expanded beta availability to Amazon vendors in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, Japan, and Canada. Visit our blog to learn more.

Updates to Sponsored Display views audience segments

Sponsored Display now enables you to separately manage the two default audience segments for views campaigns: those who viewed your advertised products (product views) and those who viewed similar products (similar product views). You can monitor performance and manage bids separately for each segment.

Sponsored Display views add all suggested products

Sponsored Display now gives sellers a 1-click option to advertise all suggested products for views targeting, with products recommended to give you the maximum audience reach. Recommendations are based on products with high detail page views to reach a larger audience and achieve effective scale.

Stores

Bulk and out-of-stock product management

Instead of uploading products individually, you can now upload products in bulk to product grids and featured-deals tiles, further improving your ability to curate your selection. And when you manually curate product grids, you can hide any products that are out of stock, optimizing the shopping experience for customers and making it easier and quicker to keep your Store updated. Visit our blog to learn more.

General enhancements

Updates to advertising report retention

The report center in the advertising console and Seller Central now offer the ability to report on day-level campaign metrics for Sponsored Products starting from April 1, 2018, to provide more historical information. Also, you can now schedule reports on a recurring basis instead of pulling reports manually. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Change history

Our new history feature allows you to view a detailed summary of all changes made to your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaign settings in the past 90 days. For Sponsored Brands targeting and negative targeting, a full 90-day history will not be available at launch. Visit our Support Center (vendors, sellers, authors) and blog to learn more.

Updates to keyword targeting tool

The keyword targeting tool in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaign builder now includes side-by-side view of selected keywords, keywords with multiple match types, and new bidding options: suggested bid, custom bid, and default bid.

Portfolio budget

Advertisers can now specify a monthly budget at the portfolio level that is automatically renewed at the beginning of each month. For more information, visit our Support Center.

Bulk operations for product selection

Bulk operations for product selector are now available to sellers and vendors for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. You can add products in bulk, either via file upload or copying and pasting a list of products, and also export products to reuse in another ad group or campaign.