Guide
Getting started with video creative for Sponsored Display with Amazon Ads
Advertising with Sponsored Display can help you grow your brand by serving ads anywhere customers spend their time in your own visual language.
Your ad creative is an important part of a successful marketing campaign and can help shoppers get excited about your brand and product experience. To help you create engaging opportunities to connect with customers, we’ve created this guide on getting started with video creative for Sponsored Display.
What video creative for Sponsored Display can do for your brand
Show your products in action
Help audiences understand your product and brand with more engaging content through tutorials, unboxings, and more.
Help achieve your campaign goals
Sponsored Display’s unique bidding options, like cost per mille (CPM) or cost per click (CPC), can be used with your video ads to help maximize your reach, consideration, or conversion goals. Pair video creative with either contextual targeting or Sponsored Display audiences to help engage relevant audiences.
Help drive engagement with your products
Your video ads can link directly to your product detail pages, helping audiences learn more about your product and consider purchasing.
Helpful resources for creating video ads
We can help you create high-quality video creatives, whether you want to create your own video, get help from trusted services providers, or reuse your existing video assets. Learn more about our existing tools below.
Create your own ad creative
Easily build videos through a selection of ready-to-use customizable templates.
Get help from trusted service providers
Obtain high-quality, policy compliant and impactful videos from certified Amazon service providers within Amazon Ads Partner Directory.
Reuse your assets across ad solutions and Stores
Store, organize, and reuse your content across Amazon Ads and Amazon shopping pages through a centralized interface.
69% of customers said they’d prefer to learn about a new product or service via video over other mediums like text-based articles or infographics, according to a study by Wyzowl.
Source: Wyzowl, Video Marketing Statistics 2021
Tips for impactful video creative
1. Use creative that complements your objective
Are you trying to grow your brand and gain awareness, or are you focusing on product consideration and conversion? The first step is defining your objective and deciding how your creative can complement it. Remember to consider your audience’s needs and what type of messages would be most helpful to them. Your ads’ context and relevance will change depending on where you engage with your audience.
2. Engage customers by showing what sets you apart
Try building an emotional connection with visuals that tell a story about your product and brand. You can demonstrate how your product can be used, focus on key features that set it apart, and help customers imagine how the product will fit into their lives.
3. Be authentic to your brand’s tone
Branding can help you showcase the uniqueness of your products and distinguish your identity through brand names, logos, designs, and stories. Consistent branding can allow you to stand out from other sellers and help you connect with customers to build deeper engagement with your products. Need brand-building tips? In this webinar, we cover developing your story, sharing your mission, and consistently applying your style guide.
4. Include a headline and logo
Headlines and logos are optional in campaign setup, but we highly recommend adding them. Firstly, they help tell an engaging story about your product and brand. Secondly, they help immediately establish who you are in customers’ minds.
5. Use captions to reach shoppers without sound
Many customers look for products on their mobile devices and watch ads without sound. Sponsored Display video ads autoplay on mute and provide the customer the option to click unmute. We recommend adding captions to ensure customers don’t miss any important details.
6. Speak to shoppers in their local language
Video and audio must be in the primary language of the site where the ads are displayed. Subtitles, text translations, and other important text such as product information must be in the local language, particularly if the video’s audio is in a different language.
7. Be mindful of moderation errors
All video creative must go through Amazon Ads moderation. It’s important to make sure you’re complying with our guidelines so your ad will be accepted the first time around. The most common rejection reasons include:
- Low-image resolution, below 72 ppi
- Blurry, unclear, pixelated, or unrecognizable visuals
- Black or blank frames at the start or end of videos
- Illegible text (the text must be big enough for the average customer to read)
- Abruptly edited ending at the maximum video duration
- Jumpy, jarring, overly fast-paced cuts and edits
- Distracting, shrill, unexpected or violent and irritating sounds
- Sudden changes in volume
- Unsubstantiated claims
- Titles with grammatical errors
Video and audio specifications
| Video dimensions | 1920 x 1080 px or higher |
| Aspect ratio | 16:9 |
| Minimum duration | 6s |
| Maximum duration | 45s |
| Maximum file size | 500MB |
| Minimum video bitrate | 1mbps |
| Video frame rate (fps) | 23.976 (recommended), 24, 25, or 29.97 |
| Minimum audio bitrate | 92kbps |
| Audio sample rate | 44.1kHz or 48kHz |
| Supported formats | Video: H.264, MPEG-2, or MPEG-4 Audio: PCM or AAC |
| Audio channel | Stereo or mono |
Measuring the success of your video ads
Once you launch a video ad, you’ll want to understand how many customers viewed your ad and engaged with the video.
View metrics are available for Sponsored Display campaigns optimized for reach (vCPM) that also have video creatives and provide key metrics for measuring and optimizing video campaign performance. The new metrics include: video first quartile, video midpoint, video third quartile, video complete, and video unmute. View metrics are available in the advertising console, report center, or through the Amazon Ads API.
You can use video completion metrics to measure how many customers completed a video ad and to better understand what type of content resonates best with customers. Over time, these insights can help you iterate on video quality and optimize for video viewing to help increase customer engagement.
| Performance metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Video first quartile | The number of impressions where the video was viewed to 25% |
| Video midpoint | The number of impressions where the video was viewed to 50% |
| Video third quartile | The number of impressions where the video was viewed to 75% |
| Video complete | The number of impressions where the video was viewed to 100% |
| Viewable impressions | The number of impressions that met the Media Rating Council viewability standard, which is 50% viewable with 2-second playback completed |
| Unmutes | The number of impressions where the shopper unmuted the video |
Learn more about Sponsored Display
Browse our educational resources.
Course
Display has a new ad format, and you’ll want to try it. Join an Amazon Ads Sponsored Display expert to hear how you can upgrade your campaigns with video creative for Sponsored Display.
Guide
A complete guide to help you engage and re-engage shoppers anywhere they spend their time, with our self-service display ads.
FAQs
Videos will show across the Amazon homepage and detail page, anywhere customers spend their time, on video-dedicated placements on Amazon Publisher Services websites and apps; other third-party websites and apps; and IMDb, an Amazon-owned and -operated film content site. Amazon Publisher Services has direct relationships with publishers that offer premium content at scale and provides access to over 60% of Comscore’s top 250 web domains.
The video ads will autoplay on a loop. Videos will be muted by default, with a control button to unmute if viewers want. On Amazon Publisher Services and third-party exchange, the videos may also include additional features, such as video expand button, generic call to action (e.g., “Learn more”), and skipping (if in-stream), which will depend on the publisher setting.
The viewers will be directed to the Amazon product detail page of the advertised product, as with existing Sponsored Display ads.
Sponsored Display is the first solution for self-service advertisers to serve video ads across the Amazon homepage and detail pages at scale. To best support endemic advertisers who sell in the Amazon store, Sponsored Display video will 1) show accompanying product elements (e.g., product title, star rating) and optional static assets (e.g., headline, logo) to best convey the context and 2) be retail-aware, so that advertisers don’t spend for an impression or click that couldn’t result in a sale. In addition, you can apply the standard Sponsored Display billing methods (vCPM or CPC), which are also unique to Sponsored Display.
Sponsored Display serves as a complementary video solution to pair with Sponsored Brands video. Sponsored Brands connects advertisers with shoppers who browsed the store via keywords or are looking at relevant products. Sponsored Display helps increase reach to shoppers at scale—even without those signals—across the Amazon homepage and detail pages to connect with shoppers along their shopping journey. Advertisers may use different video assets depending on their bid optimization selected for Sponsored Display (e.g., a brand film to optimize for reach, a testimonial to optimize for page visits, or a tutorial to optimize for conversion). Advertisers can still enjoy the standard Sponsored Display capabilities, such as its billing methods (vCPM or CPC) and retail awareness (i.e., not serving ads that couldn’t result in a sale).
Video creative is an ad format at the ad-group level. All ads (products) within the ad group will be delivered as a video creative.
Yes. For example, you could create one video ad group and one image ad group within the same campaign.
Ready to help captivate shoppers and tell your brand story? Click “Get started” below to begin building your Sponsored Display campaign with video creative.