Sponsored Display for businesses that don’t sell in the Amazon store (beta)*
* Available in the US only
Engage new customers with easy-to-use display ads.
Unlock the power of Amazon Ads to grow your business
Your business deserves to be discovered. And now, businesses that don’t sell in the Amazon store can use Sponsored Display to discover, reach, and engage audiences in relevant contexts.
This includes businesses in industries like:
- Travel and hospitality
- Media and entertainment
- Consumer services
- Automotive
- Home and building services
- Education
You can engage new customers across their shopping and entertainment journey with a budget of any size, using display advertising that is easy to create and manage. Here’s how to use Sponsored Display for businesses that aren’t available in the Amazon store.
How does Sponsored Display work?
Drive discovery of your business with Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display is self-service display advertising solution that helps you reach customers wherever they spend their time--across the Amazon store, plus thousands of apps and websites. Activate our exclusive audiences built from shopping and streaming signals to help your business reach new potential customers.
If you’ve considered display advertising in the past but needed more time, investment, or resources to get started, Sponsored Display is a simple, easy-to-use option with no minimum budget requirements.
Sponsored Display customization features help you tell your story and increase campaign performance. You can also add your own unique touch to your ads with custom creative elements; all you need is an image, a headline, and your logo to get started. We’ll do the heavy lifting for you and build ads optimized for a variety of placements, sizes, and devices.
Benefits of Sponsored Display
1. Reach new customers
Leverage exclusive Amazon Ads insights built from shopping and streaming signals to help you connect the right customers to your business. You can reach customers where they spend their time, including in the Amazon store, Twitch, IMDb, plus thousands of apps and websites.
2. Maximize impact with minimal effort
Create a campaign to promote your business to be more inclusive with auto-generated or custom creatives in a matter of minutes. It’s simple, even if you’ve never advertised before.
3. Support your business objectives
Measure and achieve your business objectives. You can choose to optimize your campaigns to drive reach or page visits.
4. Only spend what you can afford
There are no minimum spend requirements, so set a budget that works for your business and choose how you’re charged for your ads, whether that’s cost-per-click (CPC) or cost per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM).
5. Captivate audiences for all the right reasons
Gain valuable visibility into your business with memorable ads that take customers directly to your website when they’re clicked.
Create Sponsored Display campaigns
If you're new to Amazon Ads and don't sell in the Amazon store, register here. Under 'Sponsored ads', select 'United States' as the country. Then, choose 'Products and services not sold on Amazon' to proceed with account registration.
If you already have an advertising account, sign in and select Sponsored Display as your campaign type, then follow these steps for a quick and efficient campaign setup.
Define your campaign goal
Before you create a campaign, it’s important to know what business goal you want to accomplish through advertising. Establishing your goal up front will help you better measure and analyze your campaign performance later.
Consider if you’re trying to:
- Grow awareness: Optimize your campaign for reach
- Increase consideration: Optimize your campaign for page visits
Create a campaign
Are you ready to create a Sponsored Display campaign? Log in to your account and click the “Create campaign” button. Choose Sponsored Display and set up your campaign.
Choose your campaign settings
1. Campaign name
Give your campaign a straightforward name that will help you easily identify it later. For example, if you’re looking to use Amazon audiences targeting to advertise tickets for a music festival, you could name your campaign “Sponsored Display | Amazon audiences | Music fans | [Name of event].”
2. Start and end dates
We recommend running your campaign without an end date, unless you’re using Sponsored Display to promote a limited-time offer. This will help customers discover your business year-round. You can pause or restart a campaign at any time. Remember to review campaign performance at least once every two weeks. Many advertisers find it useful to set a calendar reminder to review their campaigns.
3. Budget
Set a daily budget that’s high enough to keep your ad showing throughout the day. Exactly how much you should invest depends on your advertising budgets and benchmarks. If you don’t yet know how much to commit to the initial campaign, set an amount that you’re comfortable with as a test. Then monitor the campaign to learn more about how much you need to spend to achieve your goals. You can always adjust your budget if needed.
4. Create an ad group
Ad groups are a way to organize and manage ads within a campaign. You can use ad groups to group your ads, such as by theme or audience strategy. Each campaign consists of one or more ad groups. The first ad group is created when you start a campaign. You can add more ad groups to the campaign after you’ve saved it.
Select your bid optimization strategy
To provide you with additional flexibility and control, you have two bid optimization strategies within Sponsored Display reach and page visits. The optimization strategy you select helps to optimize your bids against specific campaign metrics and will also determine how you’re charged for your ads.
| Bid optimization | Cost type |
|---|---|
| Reach | Cost per 1,000 viewable impressions (vCPM) |
| Page visits | Cost per click (CPC) |
Choose your bid based on the maximum amount you’re willing to pay when shoppers click or view your ad. Start with the $1 default bid for CPC campaigns or the $5 default bid for vCPM campaigns, and adjust based on performance.1
Find out more about bid optimizations and cost types in Chapter 3.
Choose your targeting tactic
You can find the right customers for your business in three ways:
1. Views
Views help you reach customers based on what they’re browsing in the Amazon store, such as those who've viewed relevant product pages from a selected category.
2. Purchases
Purchases help you find customers who've already purchased products within a category that’s relevant to your business.
3. Amazon audiences
Amazon audiences lets you choose from four pre-built customer segments, including life events, in-market, lifestyle, and interests, to identify your audience. We recommend selecting terms you’d use to describe your core customers; for example, “car enthusiasts” or “foodies.”
You can also choose the locations for which you want to optimize ad delivery. Select a combination of postal codes, cities, designated market areas (DMAs), or states, depending on where your business is located or the areas you serve.
Learn more about targeting in Chapter 4.
Add the finishing touches, then launch
This includes giving your ad a name, choosing a landing page on your website, and adding your creative; you’ll need a brand logo, custom headline and custom image. You can learn more in the Placements and creatives section of this guide .
Next, launch your campaign.
Get to know bid optimizations and cost types
Choose your bid optimization strategy
Select from two bid optimizations to help optimize your bids against your chosen campaign objective, whether that’s reach or page visits.
Optimize for reach:
Choose “Optimize for reach” to maximize your ads’ viewable impressions, and drive awareness of your business by showing your ad to relevant audiences.
We’ll optimize your bids for higher viewable impressions. This helps drive greater awareness of your business by showing your Sponsored Display ads to the most relevant audiences to help maximize your reach and optimize against frequency to encourage post-view engagement.
By selecting the “Optimize for reach” bid optimization, you’ll be charged on a vCPM basis.
Optimize for page visits:
Choose “Optimize for page visits” to help maximize your ads’ click-through rate (CTR) and drive consideration of your products or services by showing your ads to audiences who are more likely to click.
We’ll optimize your bids for higher page visits and CTR. This helps you drive greater consideration for your products or services by showing your Sponsored Display ads to customers who are most likely to click, and ultimately visit, your website or landing page.
By selecting the “Optimize for page visits” bid optimization, you’ll be charged on a CPC basis.
Understand your ad cost type
Sponsored Display has no minimum spend requirements, so you can set a budget that works for you. You can choose how you’ll be charged for your ads depending on your business needs, and you can update it as your needs or budget evolve. There are two cost types available to help optimize your campaign performance:
- CPC, which means you’re charged each time someone clicks your ad.
- vCPM, which means you’re charged for every 1,000 viewable impressions of your ad.
Top tips to help enhance your Sponsored Display campaign
- Use a mix of optimization strategies in different campaigns at the same time to meet potential customers throughout their purchasing journey.
- Use reporting to check how your first campaign performed based on your goals, and tailor future optimization strategies.
- Remember, a competitive bid may help to improve the chance of your ad being displayed. However, the exact bid amount depends on the objective of your campaign.
- You won’t be able to adjust your bid optimization and cost type after you’ve launched a campaign. Instead, you can create a new campaign.
Build your targeting
With Amazon audiences, you can help engage new potential customers
You can use Amazon audiences to tap into our exclusive customer insights and shopping signals to help you define, reach, and connect with the right audience for your business. You have three options to choose from.
1. Views
Define and reach audiences based on what they browsed for in the Amazon Store, such as those who've viewed products that are similar or relevant to your business. For example, a hotel chain could reach customers who've previously viewed travel guides, luggage, or other travel-related items on Amazon.
2. Purchases
Reach audiences based on past purchases in the Amazon Store, such as those who've purchased products that are similar or relevant to yours. You can also reach customers who've viewed or purchased products in specific categories in the Amazon store within a specific lookback window. For example, a local yoga studio could define and reach audiences who've purchased yoga mats in the Amazon store in the past 60 days.
3. Amazon audiences
You can leverage thousands of pre-built audience segments to help reach prospective customers. These audience segments are built using Amazon’s proprietary shopping, streaming and entertainment signals, including those from Amazon.com, Twitch, and IMDb.
There are four main audience categories to choose from: in-market, lifestyle, interests, and life events. You’ll be able to select audiences in a similar way to how you would describe your business’s core customers; for example, “yoga enthusiasts” or “foodies.”
In-market: What are Amazon customers shopping and browsing for right now?
Lifestyle: What does the content they consume and retail behavior tell us about them?
Interest: What have they bought in the past?
Life events: What important events are going on in their lives?
Sponsored Display built-in functionality helps you maintain control of campaigns
As your Sponsored Display ads may appear may appear in the Amazon store plus thousands of apps and websites, our Brand Safety functionality helps control where your ads are seen and protect your brand. We have a list of content categories where ads aren’t allowed to be shown, including online gambling, tobacco, and alcohol categories, which are continuously being updated.
Help manage, organize, and optimize your campaigns with portfolios
Portfolios can help make managing and organizing your Sponsored Display campaigns much easier. They allow you to arrange your campaigns into collections that mirror your business structure in just a few clicks.
Organizing your campaigns into portfolios has two main benefits
1. Improved budget control
Once the spend within your portfolio is exhausted, all its campaigns will automatically pause until you choose to reactivate them by increasing your portfolio budget. This helps you control spend and minimize manual monitoring.
2. Holistic campaign reporting
Once you’ve created a portfolio, you’ll unlock consolidated portfolio reporting in your advertising console. You’ll be able to get a complete picture of your overall Sponsored Display campaign performance, giving you more time to analyze, identify, and optimize campaigns based on factors like high-level trends.
Placements and creatives
With Sponsored Display, your ad creative is customizable, auto-generated, and optimized for performance. Here’s where your ads may appear and how they’d look.
Placements: Where your ads may appear
You can help capture the attention of potential customers by meeting them where they are, on websites they know and trust. Your Sponsored Display ads can appear in the Amazon store and beyond—on Amazon owned-and-operated sites such as Amazon.com, Twitch, IMDb, and thousands of third-party publisher websites and apps—giving you more opportunities to drive visibility into your business.
| In the Amazon Store | Other destinations |
|---|---|
| Product detail and shopping results pages | Twitch, IMDb, and third-party websites and apps |
Customizable creatives for your ads
Help your ads and your business stand out with compelling creative. Engage potential customers with customizable display ads that showcase your business. It’s important to ensure you’re reaching audiences with effective, compelling ad creative.
You can add your own custom lifestyle images as your ad creative, or discover Shutterstock’s library of more than 390 million high-quality images for free—available directly in the Amazon Ads console. Finding the perfect image for your ad is easy with the advanced search capabilities that surface the most relevant content for your campaigns to help you drive performance and delight audiences.
Examples of Sponsored Display ads
Amazon example
Twitch example
IMDb example
Third-party website example
Custom headline and logo
You can edit or add your own business logo, headline, and custom image to Sponsored Display ad creatives. This helps you combine business storytelling with your audience strategy.
It’s easy to tell if there are any problems after you’ve submitted your custom ads for moderation. Rejected ads will cause your ad group or campaign status to change to “Not approved” or “Suspended.” You can check the reason for rejection on the “Creative” tab in your campaign and resubmit for moderation after you’ve fixed any highlighted issues.
Monitoring and optimizing campaigns
Evaluate your ad campaign performance in real-time
You can access key campaign metrics specific to your Sponsored Display ads whenever you need. Once your campaign is running, your campaign reporting will help you measure how audiences engaged with your Sponsored Display ads and if the ads are helping meet your business goals.
The key metrics available to you are:
- Viewable impressions
- Clicks
- CTR
- vCPM
- CPC
These metrics can help you determine if your Sponsored Display ads are helping to drive awareness or consideration of your business, and if audiences are engaging with your ads.
| Awareness | Consideration |
|---|---|
| Viewable impressions, vCPM | Clicks, CTR, CPC |
Sponsored Display downloadable reports
Another way to learn how your campaigns are performing is to use downloadable reports. These can offer more detailed information about specific areas that can help you gain insights into the performance of your campaigns. Here’s how you can use these reports to your benefit.
Audience reports
For all campaigns that received at least one impression, you’ll be able to review performance metrics for the audiences, which can be reviewed at an account level. You can use these reports to see how audiences perform over time, informing adjustments to bids and targeting strategies.
If you see strong performance on a specific audience segment, consider increasing bids and advertising more products or services within that segment to help scale. You could also create a parallel campaign for that audience segment using a different tactic.
Campaign reports
This report provides you with your Sponsored Display performance aggregated by campaign. You can schedule reports so you never miss out. If you see strong performance on a campaign, consider increasing bids and broadening your targeting.
3 tips to help get the most out of Sponsored Display
1. Monitor your budget
Ensure your campaign has enough budget to reach across all your relevant audiences and stay live throughout the day. Monitor campaigns that frequently run out of daily budget—they might be missing out on potential impressions. Consider increasing budgets that frequently run out to help continuously drive traffic to your ads from relevant audiences, especially for your high-performing campaigns. If you can’t increase your daily budget, consider reducing your bids or adjusting the underperforming campaigns, after analyzing your downloadable reports to help maintain visibility throughout the entire day.
2. Manage your bids
Use campaign metrics to make informed bidding optimizations and benchmark against campaign goals. Actively managing your bids is an important step in helping your campaigns perform at optimal levels. Make sure you use Sponsored Display downloadable reports to evaluate your performance, and benchmark them against the goals you established during campaign creation. Your bid should strike a balance between how much you’re willing to pay for a click and how much traffic you’d like to drive to your ads.
3. Test and learn
Advertising is all about testing what works for your business, so don’t be afraid to experiment with your campaign targets and adjust. When checking on campaign performance, don’t forget that the targeted products and categories can have a big effect on performance alongside the advertised services. If a category seems to be underperforming, don’t just reduce its bid; try refining the targeting and add narrower, more relevant targets to the campaign.
Campaign checklist
When setting up your campaign, remember to follow these simple steps:
- Define your business goal
- Register to advertise, then sign in to your account and create a new campaign by selecting Sponsored Display as your campaign type
- Give your campaign a straightforward name, then add your start and end dates
- Set a daily budget that is high enough to keep your ads showing throughout the day
- Select your bid optimization strategy, depending on the metric you want to focus on: reach or page visits
- Choose your targeting strategy, making sure that it aligns with your campaign goals
- Select your bid, which should be based on the maximum amount you are willing to pay when customers click your ad
- Add your website or landing page where customers will go to when they click on your ad
- Upload your creative assets—you’ll need a brand logo, custom headline, and custom image
- Get your ads automatically generated for different placements, creative sizes, and devices
- Launch your campaign
- Monitor and optimize
FAQs
How do Sponsored Display campaigns work?
Without extensive resources, you can quickly create a Sponsored Display campaign with any size budget—even if you don’t sell your products and services in the Amazon store. All you’ll need to do is provide a few basic inputs across bidding, targeting, ad creatives, and destination to help us understand your business goals, and your ads will automatically be optimized for different placements, creative sizes, and devices. For added flexibility, you can adapt and optimize your ads as your business needs evolve, including updating your bidding, targeting, creatives, and budgets.
Where will my Sponsored Display ads appear?
Your ads may appear in highly visible positions both in the Amazon store and beyond—such as on product detail and shopping results pages across the Amazon store, and third-party websites and apps--based on the audiences your choose.
How much does it cost to use Sponsored Display?
There is no minimum ad investment required or any upfront fees. You can choose a daily budget that works for your business, and a bidding strategy based on your desired outcome; this will help determine your ad cost type. Sponsored Display has two cost types to help optimize your campaign performance: CPC, meaning you’re charged each time someone clicks your ad; and vCPM, meaning you’re charged for every 1,000 viewable impressions of your ad.
What results can I expect from Sponsored Display?
Sponsored Display can help your small business grow your reach using display advertising that is easy to create and manage. Sponsored Display can help you achieve a variety of goals from generating awareness and consideration of your products and services to driving traffic to your website. Once you have launched your Sponsored Display campaign, you can access campaign metrics available to understand and optimise your performance.
What reporting is available with Sponsored Display?
Once your campaign is running, you can view campaign reports to help measure how audiences engaged with your Sponsored Display ads and if the ads are helping to meet your business goals. The key metrics available to you are viewable impressions, clicks, CTR, vCPM and CPC.
What is the difference between Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP?
Sponsored Display is a self-service advertising product that allows businesses that sell products and services that aren’t available in the Amazon store to use display advertising to grow their business. Sponsored Display ads have no minimum spend and are purchased on a CPC or vCPM basis.
Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that allows advertisers to programmatically buy ads at scale. Display ads purchased through Amazon DSP are sold on a CPM basis.
Am I eligible for Sponsored Display ?
Sponsored Display is now available to US businesses that don't sell in the Amazon store. This includes, but is not limited to, businesses that sell products and/or services in industries such as restaurants, consumer services, automotive, and education. We do not accept ads from certain industries, such as financial services, gambling, real estate, and employment sites. You can confirm your eligibility for this beta opportunity by reviewing Amazon Ads guidelines and acceptance policies and related restrictions. Eligible customers must comply at all times with these guidelines and restrictions.
Ready to get started?
First things first, if you're new to Amazon Ads and don't sell in the Amazon store, register here. Under 'Sponsored ads', select 'United States' as the country. Then, choose 'Products and services not sold on Amazon' to proceed with account registration.
If you're already registered, sign-in to the ad console to get started.
Thank you for reading.