Sponsored Display custom bid optimizations

On average, the shopper journey on-Amazon is 6-7 days,1 and display advertising helps brands engage shoppers to become aware of their products, consider their products, or even convert to purchase. Sponsored Display offers granular yet flexible bidding controls through custom bid optimizations, which can help you engage and reengage audiences as you grow your business with Amazon.

What do I need to know about custom bid optimizations?

When creating a campaign, you can optimize bidding for your specific needs by selecting one of the following optimizations: “Optimize for Page Visits,” “Optimize for conversions,” or “Optimize for viewable impressions.” This allows you to signal your campaign needs, deliver against those needs, and further optimize campaigns against metrics such as clicks and impressions.

These controls help you use our self-service display ads to introduce products, engage new customers, and drive loyalty with scale, which can boost existing Amazon Advertising efforts. We’ve observed advertisers who combined display advertising with Sponsored Products saw 4% higher month-over-month ad-attributed sales growth than if they only used Sponsored Products.2

Custom bid optimizations are available to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, agencies, and technology providers in CA, DE, FR, ES, IT, JP, UAE, UK, and US.

Why use custom bid optimizations?

  • Control and flexibility: Sponsored Display allows you to use first-party signals and retail-centric controls to engage and reengage audiences throughout all layers of the purchase funnel. With custom bid optimizations, you have more control over your campaigns and aren't restricted by predefined, “one size fits all” bid optimizations. You can easily select bid optimizations to help drive conversion, consideration, or awareness.
  • Complement your targeting and creative strategy: If you are looking to bring “out of aisle” shoppers—those shopping detail pages outside of your category—“into your aisle” and onto your detail pages, you can complement your targeting and creative strategy with a bidding strategy. Use Sponsored Display product targeting to help reach shoppers viewing complementary categories, a custom creative headline to describe why your product is relevant to that category, and “Optimize page visits” bidding to help serve ads to addressable audiences that are most likely to click on your ad and visit your detail page.

When should you use custom bid optimizations?

  • Create product awareness: Audience discovery through Sponsored Display product targeting and Sponsored Display audiences enables advertisers to use broad targeting to introduce their products to new yet relevant audiences while still driving performance to help grow their business. “Optimize for viewable impressions” complements these efforts, helping advertisers extend reach, measure their awareness campaigns with Click + View attribution, and pay on a vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions) basis. Regardless of targeting strategy, ads with this bid optimization may only serve on Amazon, and Sponsored Display reporting helps these advertisers optimize campaigns and learn more about addressable audiences.
  • Drive traffic: You can use Sponsored Display to engage “out of aisle” as well as reach customers “in the aisle” to expand the reach and scale of existing products to drive traffic. “Optimize for page visits” bidding helps you drive consideration to reach new customers and then quantify your efforts using new-to-brand and click metrics.
  • Drive loyalty: You can use both Sponsored Display targeting strategies to engage existing audiences viewing your brand’s products by targeting your own detail pages with product targeting or by remarketing to past audiences with custom-built audiences. “Optimize for conversions” bidding helps support co-sell and upsell strategies to help drive sales and create customer loyalty.

Key features

  • vCPM Billing: vCPM billing helps advertisers understand the cost of their awareness efforts when using the “Optimize for viewable impressions” bidding option. While all other bid optimizations use CPC (cost-per-click) billing, this option is priced on a vCPM (Cost per thousand viewable impressions”) basis. This means we charge an advertiser for an estimate of when their ad has been viewed by shoppers.
  • Viewable Attribution: To help advertisers understand the value of their awareness efforts when using “Optimize for viewable impressions,” we report on estimated viewable impressions. In addition, this optimization utilizes click + estimated view attribution instead of just click-based attribution for metrics such as ROAS. This helps equip advertisers with data on how viewing or clicking ads influences audiences.

Sign in to apply custom bid optimizations to your Sponsored Display campaigns.

1-2 Amazon internal data, 2019