Guide
What’s performance advertising? Here’s everything you need to know.
Performance advertising is a type of online advertising where advertisers pay for specific results, such as clicks and conversions. Performance marketing and advertising solutions can help promote new products and drive sales.
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What is performance advertising?
Performance marketing and advertising solutions help you promote the discoverability of new products, drive incremental sales from your brand catalog, and remarket to shoppers who have not yet converted. With an increasing variety and number of product choices available for shoppers, online marketing and performance advertising can help your brand break through and get your products discovered.
Increase sales on Amazon with performance advertising
Performance marketing and advertising can help you engage shoppers along their paths to purchase and drive overall sales of your products. We offer a variety of performance marketing and advertising solutions featuring placements and ad creatives that help you efficiently reach the most relevant shoppers, anywhere they spend their time.
Promote product discovery
Use highly relevant ads and keywords to help the right shoppers discover your products and move them down the funnel from discovery to purchase. Combine keywords and products to connect your brand to shoppers as they look for similar products or browse relevant categories, brands, or product detail pages.
Inform shoppers
Use our ad creatives to provide shoppers with key product details while they're exploring new items and actively in the purchasing mindset. Our ads integrate familiar elements of the Amazon shopping experience, such as price, star ratings, and deals and savings badging, to make it easier to make informed purchase decisions.
Engage with audiences
Increase engagement with shoppers and help them discover and purchase your products through a variety of ad placements. Ads can appear on shopping results, prominent placements on top of shopping results, and product detail pages of similar products, letting you engage shoppers at multiple touchpoints along their paths to purchase and link them directly to your product pages.
Optimize your advertising
Our machine learning models make optimizing your campaigns easier by helping you with bidding and budgeting, all while giving you the transparency and controls to grow your business.
Recommended products for performance marketing and advertising
Amazon Ads offers a suite of performance advertising solutions designed to help you achieve your performance objectives.
Sponsored Products
Use Sponsored Products to promote your individual products to high-intent shoppers close to the point of purchase. These ads appear on Amazon shopping results and product detail pages of similar products and link directly to your product’s detail page. Sponsored Products is cost per click (CPC), meaning you only pay when shoppers click your ad.
Sponsored Brands
While Sponsored Products connects shoppers directly to individual products, Sponsored Brands allows you to showcase multiple products from your brand together. These ads link shoppers to custom landing pages or Stores where they can discover the rest of your catalog. In addition to placements on shopping results and product detail pages, Sponsored Brands gives you the ability to advertise on prominent placements on top of shopping results. Similar to Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands is CPC.
Amazon DSP
Amazon DSP is best for advertisers looking to scale their display advertising with customized creative and audience capabilities. You can engage relevant audiences based on lifestyle, purchase, and media consumption signals with ads that lead back to your Amazon detail pages or your own website. Ads can appear both on Amazon subsidiaries and on leading publishers’ sites through direct inventory from Amazon Publisher Services and third-party exchanges. Pricing for programmatic advertising through Amazon DSP varies depending on format and placement.
Sponsored Display
Leveraging Amazon’s first-party shopping insights, Sponsored Display can complement your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands digital marketing campaigns by helping you reach audiences anywhere they spend their time. If shoppers initially show interest in your product or similar products but don’t purchase right away, you can reengage them with display ads anywhere they spend their time as they browse third-party websites or social media. These self-service CPC display ads are accessible to any professional seller enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry or vendor who sells products on Amazon.
Getting started
Our performance advertising solutions were built to be accessible and intuitive for any advertiser, and they're designed to scale as your business needs become more complex. Creating a sponsored ads content marketing campaign can take just a few minutes, regardless of budgets or level of experience. Advertisers who need more advanced display solutions can upgrade to using Amazon DSP. See your Amazon Ads representative, as certain minimums may apply.
Register or contact your Amazon Ads account executive to get started.
What do ads in performance advertising campaigns look like? How is creative generated?
- Sponsored Products ad creative is automatically generated and includes product image, price, star ratings, and deals and savings badging.
- Sponsored Brands features a custom headline, your brand logo, and multiple products from your catalog in an ad creative that displays product information such as star rating and deals and savings badging. New video creative options (US only) can help your ad stand out and showcase your products or your brand story.
- Sponsored Display ad creative is automatically generated and includes product image, price, star ratings, and deals and savings badging. Sponsored Display campaigns allow you to feature custom elements such as headline, brand logo, and name.
- Amazon DSP offers more options, allowing you to upload your own custom images and video creatives or use automatically generated creatives, which are created using images and details found on your product detail page.
Where do ads in performance advertising campaigns appear?
Our advertising solutions offer you a range of placements that vary by product. Sponsored ads can showcase your products and brand on shopping results and product detail pages.
You can also adjust your bid for different placements in Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products to help you focus on placements that perform best for your goals. Sponsored Display ads and ads purchased through Amazon DSP can also appear on Amazon subsidiaries, such as IMDb, as well as on third-party websites, apps, or social media.
What is machine learning?
Machine learning refers to the algorithms and systems that our solutions use to improve the performance and delivery of your ads. By evaluating real-time attribution metrics, purchasing patterns, and shopping signals, Amazon Ads’ machine learning models can dynamically adjust parameters such as budgets and bids, to optimize your campaign against performance metrics such as conversions and cost per mille (CPM).
Performance advertising resources
What is OTT? A complete guide to over-the-top
Over-the-top (OTT) video content and ads are streamed directly to viewers and offer the opportunity for advertisers to reach new audiences.
CPC (Cost per Click) explained
CPC (cost per click) is a metric used for measuring the value of your brand’s ads. It uses the number of clicks an ad receives to determine the price advertisers pay for ad placements.
A complete guide to the marketing funnel
The marketing funnel helps outline the touchpoints reached by customers during their shopping journeys. It can assist with effectively organizing and prioritizing your marketing campaigns.
What is product marketing? How to create a strategy
Product marketing refers to the process brands use to integrate their products or services with the wants or needs of a customer. Product marketing represents the intersection of the product, marketing, and sales teams to bring awareness to a product and how it can provide value to a customer.
A marketer's guide to product promotion
Product promotion is the process of explaining the value of a product to potential and existing customers to educate, generate interest, and spur purchase. It is one of the four P’s of the marketing mix, along with product, price, and place.
No creative? No problem! Whether you have existing assets or are starting from scratch, Amazon's creative production and editing services can help you produce compliant and inspiring videos across all formats to improve the performance of your ad campaigns.