Enhance your Prime Day and festive strategy with Sponsored Display

2 October 2020

By Raja Ghanta
Sr. Product Manager

Prime Day and the festive season are busy times of the year for shoppers, and in 2020 they all occur in Q4. In 2019, a record number of Prime members shopped during Prime Day in the US, and Prime members purchased more than 175 million items worldwide throughout the event.1 Over the 2019 holiday season billions of items were ordered worldwide, and it was a record-breaking festive season for independent third-party sellers – mostly small- and medium-sized businesses – with worldwide unit sales seeing double-digit year-over-year growth.2

Sponsored Display can help you get you ready for these high-traffic, high-sales periods with strategies that can reach new customers, supplement your existing Amazon Ads efforts, and ensure your products stay top of mind with customers.

What is Sponsored Display?

Sponsored Display is a self-service display marketing solution that helps you grow your brand on Amazon by engaging shoppers across the purchase journey – with ad placements that run wherever they spend time. There’s no minimum spend, you can create a campaign in just a few clicks, and your campaigns are “retail aware,” meaning campaigns will pause if, for example, your products sell out quickly due to a promotion or deal.

This year, we’ve also improved bidding for our remarketing strategies to help your bids stay optimised during high-impact periods like Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Two Sponsored Display targeting strategies to include in your Q4 campaigns

The following strategies can help you reach new customers, generate brand awareness and reengage audiences during the busy Q4 time period.

  • Product targeting: Build consideration among audiences considering similar or complementary products and categories to yours.
  • Views (US only): Drive conversion and consideration with remarketing placements that appear wherever they spend time and direct back to a product detail page. This strategy allows you to reach high-intent audiences who have viewed your detail page, or similar detail pages.

Let’s say, for example, that you sell baseball equipment. You might use product targeting to drive consideration among audiences browsing detail pages of other sports equipment, or complementary products like athletic apparel with ads that may appear in high-visibility above-the-fold placements. You might also use views remarketing to reengage audiences who previously viewed your product’s detail pages, with placements that appear wherever they spend time.

Four ways you can use Sponsored Display to help grow your business in Q4

Add your promoted ASINs to campaigns

Q4 is a key time for businesses to offer customers deals and discounts, and Sponsored Display can help you get those promotions in front of your audience. And don’t worry – with Sponsored Display, your campaigns will pause if your product is not the Featured Offer or if it goes out of stock, ensuring you don’t waste ad spend. Whenever you do run a promotion, Sponsored Display’s automated deals and savings badges can drive up to a 42% higher CTR for your ads.3 Furthermore, this year we’ll also support Prime Day deals badging so that you can fully maximise your Prime Day efforts.

Combine Sponsored Display with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands

For better results, leverage Sponsored Display with your other sponsored ads campaigns, such as Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands. We reviewed more than 150 advertising campaigns over a four-month period that used a multi-goal strategy, which encompassed awareness, consideration and conversion using Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, coupled with Sponsored Display tactics. We learned that advertisers who 1) added more than one targeting strategy to reach shoppers at different stages of the customer journey, and 2) combined their Sponsored Display campaigns with Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, experienced +3.2% incremental sales and 3.8X return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to advertisers who only added a single Sponsored Display targeting strategy to their campaigns.4

Help build consideration with product targeting

Sponsored Display ads may appear in highly visible above-the-fold placements on product detail pages. Target other products in your category to help reach new customers, or consider targeting your own product detail pages to introduce shoppers to other products you sell. Let’s take our sports equipment example: to engage new customers and ensure that your baseball bats are top of mind, you can target similar product pages within the baseball equipment category, or you can target your own product pages to promote your complementary products (e.g. baseballs or gloves).

Reengage audiences throughout Q4 with views targeting (US only)

Keep your campaigns active after events to take advantage of additional opportunities. Since Prime Day occurs at the beginning of Q4, use views remarketing to get in front of early holiday shoppers throughout October and November, and once again after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to reach shoppers as they purchase last-minute gifts for the festive season.

If you’re already using Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display is a simple way to help extend your marketing efforts this shopping season. Leverage this solution to help amplify your deals and help reach new customers, supplement your existing Amazon Ads strategies, and ensure your products stay top of mind with customers.

Learn more about Sponsored Display or get started with a campaign just in time for the festive season.

1Amazon press release, July 2019
2Amazon press release, December 2019
3Amazon internal, 2019
4Internal Amazon data, US, 2019