Everything you need to know about Sponsored Display

A complete guide to help you engage and reengage shoppers, wherever they spend time with our self-service display ads.

Set up your business for success with Sponsored Display

Quickly launch retail-centric display campaigns and reach relevant audiences across the shopping journey.

Engaging potential customers is key to helping drive product consideration and purchase.

If you’re a vendor or professional seller enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, Sponsored Display can help you grow your business as you reach relevant audiences everywhere they spend time. Sponsored Display gives you the opportunity to help drive awareness and support sales on Amazon.

In this guide, we’ll show you everything you need to know about Sponsored Display to help engage and reengage shoppers across their purchase journey with a budget of any size, using retail-centric display advertising that is easy to create and manage.

Chapters

How does Sponsored Display work?

Learn how to use Sponsored Display to help grow your business on Amazon

Chapter 1

How can Sponsored Display help grow your business on Amazon?

Designed to be easy to use and impactful for your business, here are some of the benefits of a Sponsored Display campaign:

Reach relevant audiences

Use shopping signals to reach audiences everywhere they spend time, including Twitch. Insightful reporting can also help you optimize campaigns for better performance.

Maximize impact with minimal effort

Create a campaign that promotes your full product catalog with auto-generated or custom creatives in a matter of minutes.

Support your business objectives

Measure and achieve your business objectives, from product awareness to brand loyalty.

What’s the difference between Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP?

You may be wondering what the differences are between Sponsored Display ads and Amazon DSP. Although they share some similarities, they serve two different purposes and therefore would be used to fulfil different campaign objectives.

Sponsored Display is a self-service advertising product where ad creative is either automatically generated or created custom. Sponsored Display ads are purchased on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-1,000 viewable impression basis (vCPM). Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that allows advertisers to programmatically buy ads at scale. Pricing for Amazon DSP display ads vary by format and placement but are based only on a vCPM model.

Although Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP may share similar placements everywhere customers spend time, it’s very unlikely that it will affect your campaign’s CPMs. Sponsored Display is focused on advertisers wanting to implement retail-centric campaigns, whereas Amazon DSP enables advertisers to programmatically buy display, video, and audio ads.

Creating Sponsored Display campaigns

Step-by-step guidance to get you started or ready to optimize

Chapter 2: Part 1

If you’re new to Amazon Ads, go to advertising.amazon.com and select ‘Register’ then choose one of the account options to sign in.

If you already have an advertising account, sign in and select the Sponsored Display campaign type, and follow these steps for 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:

Develop awareness
Increase consideration
Drive purchase
Build loyalty

Create a campaign

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 includes details on the advertised products (ASINs) and targeting tactic. For example, if you’re looking to use Sponsored Display views remarketing to advertise a barbeque grill, you could name your campaign "Sponsored Display | Views remarketing | Barbeque grill | ASIN". This will help you easily identify it later.

2. Start and end dates

We recommend running your campaign with no end date to avoid your campaign stopping abruptly. It can take 7-14 days for product sales to be attributed to a click or view on your ad, so it’s important to let your campaign run for a few weeks to see results. You can pause or restart a campaign at any time. Remember to review campaign performance at least every two weeks. Many advertisers find it useful to set a calendar reminder to review their campaigns.

3. Budget

Choose your daily budget with the option to change it at any time. Once a campaign is out of budget for the day, your ads won’t be eligible to run until midnight when the budget resets. We suggest that small to medium-sized businesses choose a daily budget of between $40-$60 per day* and adjust it based on performance. Daily budget is the amount you’re willing to spend per day over a calendar month. Spend on any given day may exceed your daily budget but the average daily spend at the end of the month won’t exceed your daily budget.
*Suggested $40-$60 daily budget or your currency equivalent.

4. Create an ad group

Organize, manage, and monitor performance of your products within your campaign with ad groups. Sponsored Display supports one ad group per campaign. Products placed together in an ad group share the same bids and targets (products or audiences). To help identify your ad group, give it a name that is descriptive and meaningful to you based on the products you want to advertise. For example, by category, like “Barbeque grills.”

Choose your targeting tactic

You can select between two targeting tactics: product and audiences.

Product:

With product targeting, you can reach shoppers actively considering similar or complementary products and categories on Amazon, with ads that may appear in placements on product detail pages, shopping results pages, and alongside customer reviews.

Audiences:

By choosing audiences, you have the ability to reach shoppers who have visited your product detail pages, the detail pages of similar products, or any relevant category on Amazon.

Audiences help you engage and reengage new and existing customers throughout the purchase journey. Your ads may appear on product detail pages and other prominent positions where customers spend time on Twitch.*

We’ll expand further on the available targeting tactics and options in the Building your targeting section of this guide.

*Subject to marketplace availability

These more broad targeting options lend themselves to upper-funnel strategies with brand awareness and impression goals perfectly. This setting will be a great way to get in front of audiences in the discovery or consideration phase of the buyer’s journey. This kind of targeting casts a wider net than traditional remarketing, which helps increase reach to get in front of more potential buyers.
— ROI Revolution

Chapter 2: Part 2

Select products you want to advertise

We recommend adding your best performers from Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. Add at least 10 well-performing products to your campaign. This way, your campaigns have enough options to serve relevant ads for a given impression and also allow you the chance to surface multiple ads from your brand on a single detail page.

Sponsored Display ads will automatically stop serving if your products are no longer available to purchase or are no longer the featured offer. We suggest still adding products to campaigns even if they have low inventory, are currently out of stock, or are not the featured offer. Ads that are unable to convert to an order, for the reasons previously mentioned, won’t serve and you will not be charged.

We recommend choosing products that:

Fall within the same category
Are closely related
Have a similar price point
Have positive customer reviews
Feature four or more high-quality, zoomable images
Include at least three bullet points describing your key product differentiators

Select your bid optimization strategy

During this stage, you have the option to choose your pricing structure based on either a CPC or vCPM model. 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 and $5 default bid for vCPM campaigns and adjust based on performance.*

To provide you with additional flexibility and control, you have three bid optimization strategies within Sponsored Display. The optimization strategy you select helps to optimize your bids against specific campaign metrics.

Optimize for viewable impressions

This strategy may help you drive greater scale and increase reach by optimizing your bids to help increase views of your ad. These campaigns are more likely to have higher viewable impression scale and lower click-through rates compared to other bid optimizations.

By choosing “optimize for viewable impressions” your ads are served to audiences and bids are priced on a “cost-per-1,000 viewable impressions”, meaning you pay only for viewable ads.

Optimize for page visits

This strategy may help you drive product consideration by showing your ads to shoppers more likely to click on your ad. Your bids will be optimized for higher click-through rates.

Optimize for conversions

This strategy may help you drive sales and create customer loyalty by showing your ad to shoppers more likely to purchase your product. As your bids are optimized for conversions, you may see fewer clicks for your ads than when you select “optimize for page visits.”

*Recommended default daily bids or your currency equivalent

Four tips to help enhance your Sponsored Display campaign

Use “optimize for conversions” on your first campaign
Use a variety of optimization strategies in different campaigns at the same time
If you already use Amazon DSP, we recommend starting with "optimize for viewable impressions" in Sponsored Display to help increase scale
Use reporting to check how your first campaign performed, based on your goals, and tailor future optimization strategies

Bid recommendations help you develop better campaigns

To help make you more aware of what factors influence your bids, you’re provided with bid recommendations when you enter your bid amount. These help to improve your bidding decisions by:

Highlighting how your brand compares with others in the selected targeting tactic
Providing an overall relative ranking of the bid based on click and relevance predictions

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.

Launch your campaign

Sponsored Display can automatically generate your campaign creative to help drive conversions or consideration of your products. If you’d like to highlight your brand and its unique selling points, consider tailoring your ads with a custom brand logo, headline, and lifestyle image.

Autogenerated ads will feature a product image, title, star rating, Prime badging, and price from your product’s detail page. Additionally, your ads will automatically update if the information on your detail page is changed. More on that on the Placements and creatives section of this guide.

Your campaigns can display deals and savings badges to inform shoppers when your advertised product is under promotion, including deal (deal of the day, lightning deal, best deal), discounted with coupons, or on Subscribe & Save. We recommend running campaigns on products under promotion to help amplify the reach of your discounts.

How to get additional support

If you ever need additional support within the Amazon Ads console, you’ll find that many pages provide useful tips to help you troubleshoot, complete actions, or learn more about advertising concepts without the need to leave the page you’re viewing. You can usually find this feature in the top right-hand corner of the page or window currently displayed .

Launch a Sponsored Display campaign

Building your targeting

A look at Sponsored Display targeting tactics

Chapter 3: Part 1

Understanding the targeting tactics available to you is the first step to execute a campaign that can help inspire shoppers across the purchase journey.

Product targeting

Product targeting

Target specific products or relevant product categories on Amazon to help promote product discovery. Dynamic segments, utilizing the power of machine learning, help you reach relevant audiences on popular product detail pages of other similar and complimentary products.

You can refine your product targeting using a number of retail-centric metrics such as price, brand, and Prime-shipping eligibility. Product targeting ads are served on Amazon in placements including product detail pages, alongside customer reviews and on shopping results pages. We’ll go into more detail in the Placements and creatives section of this guide.

The two product targeting tactics available for Sponsored Display product targeting are:

Product:

Help promote your product to shoppers who are actively browsing your product and similar products on Amazon. This targeting tactic can help increase consideration or cross-sell.

Categories:

Help promote your product among shoppers who are actively browsing categories that are relevant to your advertised product. This targeting tactic may help engage a wider range of potential customers looking at other products in your own or related categories.

Improved targeting recommendations

In order to aid you in creating campaigns with better targeting selections, Sponsored Display has launched updated product targeting suggestions. When you submit a list of products to advertise you will automatically receive improved targeting recommendations in the targeted products widget. These recommendations are based on their probability of driving higher click-through rates (CTR) for the advertised products selected. Adding suggested products to your campaign can help you get better scale – more impressions and clicks.

The new product suggestions are available in both the advertising console and through the Amazon Ads API.

Chapter 3: Part 2

Sponsored Display product targeting aligns with our full-funnel advertising approach by empowering advertisers to drive incremental growth, brand awareness, and product consideration.
Courtney Macfarlane, Senior Specialist, Tinuiti

Help drive interest in your product launches

Many people think of Sponsored Display when advertising established products. However, product targeting is also helpful for advertising newly launched products or products with low product detail page views. By targeting products that are complementary to yours, you can help connect interested shoppers to your products.

Product targeting can be used in conjunction with Sponsored Display audiences. Use product targeting to help generate product detail page traffic, and then Sponsored Display audiences views remarketing to reengage audiences to help secure missed sales opportunities.

Combining Sponsored Display product targeting and Sponsored Display audiences can also aid audience discovery by helping advertisers use broad targeting. This strategy can help introduce products to relevant new audiences while still helping to drive performance to grow their business.

Use category refinements to optimize your category targeting

Our solution enables you to refine any of your category targets by specific brands, price range, Prime-eligible products, and product review scores. You can use these refinement options to make changes to your targeting based on your own insights about what your customers value the most about your products.

Exclude existing audiences from seeing your ads

One way to apply the insights you have about your own brand in your advertising strategy is to exclude certain existing audiences from seeing your ads. By excluding certain audiences you can stop your ads from appearing on the detail pages of any specific products, or all products for any brands you specify.

Placements and creatives

See what Sponsored Display ads look like and where they may appear

Chapter 4

Display advertising has proven to be effective in driving product awareness, and engaging new and existing customers. With Sponsored Display, your ad creative is customizable, auto-generated, and then optimized for performance. Let us show you where your ads may appear and how they’d look.

Placements

Sponsored Display ads may appear anywhere customers spend their time, depending on your targeting strategy. If your ad is using product targeting, your ads may appear on product detail pages, alongside customer reviews, shopping results pages, or under the featured offer. That gives you an opportunity to accelerate product awareness, increase consideration, and complete the sale by connecting to shoppers on Amazon.

With Sponsored Display audiences campaigns, your display creatives may appear anywhere customers spend their time on apps and third-party websites such as Twitch , as well as on Amazon in placements on the homepage, product detail pages, and shopping results pages—helping you reengage with shoppers in their purchase journey. That targeting option can help you reach audiences that previously viewed your product, similar products, and relevant categories on Amazon, but didn’t make a purchase, and encourage them to return to Amazon to learn more about your brand, the product, and maybe decide to buy.

Creatives

Sponsored Display ad creatives embody the retail-centric nature of this solution. They’re designed to help grow your business on Amazon and include the elements that customers trust when they shop, such as: product images, description, star rating, price, Prime badging, and a “shop now” button to connect shoppers to your product detail page to learn more about your product and maybe complete their purchase.

Choose between an automated or custom image in your creative for Sponsored Display , both of which are dynamically optimized. This means that if you add multiple products to your campaign, the creative with the highest chance of conversion will be served automatically. Regardless of your choice, the retail-centric elements of the creative will be autogenerated and refreshed if any changes are made to the product detail page of the featured product.

Additionally, the real-time headline assistance feature provides you with guidance as you create your custom headline, helping to ensure they’re compliant with Amazon Ads’ policy before submission.

This is what they look like

On Amazon

Anywhere customers spend time

Custom headline and logo

We enable advertisers to edit or add their own brand logo, headline, and custom product image to Sponsored Display ad creatives. This helps you combine brand storytelling with your targeting strategy. Here are some examples of how that could help make your ads more compelling:

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 products’ 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 fix any highlighted issues.

Highlight relevancy

If you’re using Sponsored Display product targeting to advertise a backpack on a laptop page, for example, you can include a headline that says: “The perfect backpack for a new laptop”. This headline can help customers better understand the relevancy of your ad.

Highlight features

You can highlight features in your ad that aren’t obvious from the picture. If your backpack is made locally, from sustainable materials, you might choose to highlight that.

Highlight your unique selling point

If you’re using product targeting to target another backpack, you can highlight your unique selling point, say if your backpack is waterproof for instance.

Make it seasonal

If you want to highlight that the backpack would be a great gift for a specific holiday or life event, you can use your headline to make your ad relevant for those dates and purposes.

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 products’ 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 fix any highlighted issues.

Monitoring and optimizing campaigns

Use insights to monitor and improve your campaigns regularly

Chapter 5: Part 1

The key to success is to monitor the performance of your Sponsored Display campaigns regularly. You can use familiar campaign metrics available for ad products, such as:

Impressions
Spend
Clicks
Cost per click (CPC)

Cost per viewable impression (vCPM)

Click-through rate (CTR)

Sales
Advertising cost of sales (ACOS)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
New-to-brand (NTB)

Sponsored Display was built to equip you with the tools you need to help reach and engage shoppers along their purchase journey. To reflect this, new-to-brand metrics give you a more effective way to measure orders and sales of your products generated from first-time customers. New customers are a fundamental step in establishing a long-term brand relationship and developing brand loyalty. Some of the new-to-brand metrics available for Sponsored Display are:

New-to-brand Orders
New-to-brand Sales
New-to-brand Units
New-to-brand Order Rate

New-to-brand and existing traditional metrics give you additional information into shoppers’ awareness and engagement, as well as whether customers are purchasing your products after clicking your ad. After launching your Sponsored Display campaign, let it run until you have sufficient traffic and sales insights to help you optimize the campaign.

We usually recommend waiting at least 2 weeks before taking a look at those insights, but, when determining how long to let your campaign run before assessing its performance keep the typical selling cycle for your products in mind.

Once you have sufficient campaign metrics, review them in the campaign manager every 48 hours to learn how your campaign performs over time and to make informed decisions on improving results. Make sure you’re benchmarking your Sponsored Display performance against the goal you established during campaign creation.

For example, if you’re using Sponsored Display to help drive incremental sales, you can measure how many ad clicks convert into orders, as well as your ROAS, which is the return on your advertising spend. While useful, ROAS should be viewed in context, with a holistic approach. So if you’re using Sponsored Display to promote a new product with limited awareness, it may take additional budget to drive sales, resulting in a lower ROAS. If creating additional product awareness is your priority, you can monitor impressions, or the number of times your ad is shown. Setting strong bids can help you win more auctions and get more impressions. If you also have Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaigns, keep in mind that your Sponsored Display campaign may perform differently since some ads run off of Amazon, rather than in placements across Amazon.

After making adjustments, let your new bids run for a few days to see if your campaign starts generating clicks and sales within your target ROAS range. Remember that depending on the product and its typical selling cycle, customers may not complete their purchase immediately. If some of your products are still not performing at optimal levels, you can consider pausing these individual products and focusing on your top-performing products instead.

5 tips to help optimize your campaigns to get the most out of Sponsored Display

1. Add more than 10 ASINs in your Sponsored Display campaigns and refine your campaign structure over time

We recommend promoting more than 10 ASINs in your Sponsored Display campaigns. When you advertise more products, the products in your campaign can participate in more auctions. This means that your ads are more likely to appear on Amazon and, when they do, can be more relevant to a wider range of customers because a larger variety of your catalog is available when Sponsored Display dynamically selects a product to advertise.

Not only that, but the more products you advertise the more metrics you can gather on your ads performance. You can use downloadable reports to stay on top of which products are performing best in your ads, what audiences are more relevant to your brand, and overall what campaigns should you focus your budget on for best results.

Once you know which products perform the best with Sponsored Display based on your campaign goals, you can segment these items into a separate campaign or ad group with no end date for more streamlined campaign management and optimization. Ad groups are a helpful tool to organize and manage the products you are advertising within your Sponsored Display campaign. For any underperforming products with a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) outside of your target range, you can also add these to a separate campaign or ad group. This can help you deep-dive into their performance and optimize your bids and budgets on a more granular level

2. 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 with relevant audiences, especially for your high-performing campaigns. If you can’t increase your daily budget, consider reducing your bids or making adjustments to the underperforming campaigns after analyzing your downloadable reports to help maintain visibility throughout the entire day.

3. Test budgets between ad solutions

We recommend testing Sponsored Display alongside other solutions to assess how performance aligns with your goals and make informed optimization decisions based upon that.

You can easily test Sponsored Display alongside Sponsored Products by setting up campaigns across both solutions with the same targeting settings when using product targeting and pairing your new campaigns with a low bid and budget cap. You should then observe performance over time and adjust bids and budget depending on performance to target. Once Sponsored Display is meeting your campaign goals, consider reducing Sponsored Products bids and budgets to align with any incremental spend in Sponsored Display and continue to monitor all performance over time.

4. 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 it against the goal 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.

If you’re using Sponsored Display to help drive incremental sales, you can measure how many ad clicks convert into orders, as well as your ROAS. Note that, while useful, ROAS should be viewed in context. If you’re using Sponsored Display to promote a new product with limited awareness, for example, it may take additional budget to drive sales, resulting in a lower ROAS.
If creating additional product awareness is your priority, you can monitor impressions, or the number of times your ad is shown. Setting strong bids can help you win more impressions.
Last, if your goal is to help drive demand, you can monitor your product page views. Product page views can be an indicator of demand on Amazon. So the higher your product page views, the higher the demand may be for your product.

5. Experiment with and modify your campaigns’ targets

Advertising is all about testing what works for you, so don’t be afraid to make adjustments. When checking on campaign performance, don’t forget that the targeted products and categories can have a big effect on performance alongside the advertised products.

If a category seems to be underperforming, don’t just reduce its bid–refine the targeting and add narrower, more relevant targets to the campaign.

If a campaign has been active for a while with no modifications to its targets, check that the targeting tab has new, up-to-date ASINs included. This is also something useful to check if you notice a campaign losing impressions over time – some older ASINs may see their popularity decline over time.
And finally, don’t forget to use negative targeting to exclude ASINs from brands that may have historically underperformed, or are just less relevant to an advertised product.

Campaign checklist

Your step-by-step guide to setting up Sponsored Display campaigns

Chapter 6

When setting up your campaign, remember to follow these simple steps:

Define your business goal

Choose your campaign settings

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

Choose your targeting strategy, making sure that it is aligned with your campaign goals

Choose the product you would like to advertise from a list of eligible products from your catalog

Choose your bid. Your bid should be based on the maximum amount you are willing to pay when shoppers click your ad

Decide on the products you’d like to advertise

Your ads are automatically generated

Launch your campaign

Monitor and optimize

Frequently asked questions

Answers to the most common questions about Sponsored Display

Chapter 7

How do Sponsored Display campaigns work?

Without extensive resources, you can quickly create a Sponsored Display campaign in minutes with any size budget. Simply select your products to promote, bid, and daily budget to create your Sponsored Display campaign. Sponsored Display helps reengage audiences who have previously expressed interest in your product, similar products, or categories, but haven’t made a purchase, with ads that click through to your product detail page. Sponsored Display provides automated audience creation, bidding, product promotion, and ad creatives while offering advertisers simplified controls to optimize their campaigns.

Where will my Sponsored Display ads appear?

Your ads may appear anywhere customers spend their time on placements on the Amazon homepage, product detail pages, shopping results pages, as well as on third-party websites and apps, based on the audiences or product targeting strategy you choose.

Do I need to add keywords to my Sponsored Display campaign?

No. Sponsored Display uses shopping signals to automatically reach audiences who may be interested in your promoted product. With views targeting, Sponsored Display also dynamically promotes the most relevant product that has the highest chance of conversion from the list of products you add to your campaign.

How much does Sponsored Display cost?

Sponsored Display uses a cost-per-click model, so you only pay when shoppers click on your ads. There is no minimum ad investment required. Advertisers choose their daily bid and budget. Bids automatically adjust based on likelihood of conversion, while still allowing you to change your bid or pause your campaign at any time.

What results can I expect from Sponsored Display?

Sponsored Display helps businesses both large and small who sell on Amazon to scale their reach and results using display advertising that is easy to create and manage. Sponsored Display can help you achieve a variety of goals from generating product consideration to accelerating conversion. Once you have launched your Sponsored Display campaign, you can access the same familiar campaign metrics available within sponsored ads to understand and optimize performance.

How can I improve performance of my Sponsored Display campaigns?

Measure performance against goals. After launching your campaign, let it run until you have sufficient traffic and sales insights to help you optimize. We recommend waiting at least 2 weeks before taking a look at those insights, but when determining how long to let your campaign run before assessing its performance, keep the typical selling cycle for your products in mind. Look at your insights always in relation to your campaign goals, as that will help you fine tune your campaigns to get closer to the desired results. Read more about that in the Monitoring and optimizing campaigns section of this guide.

What reporting is available with Sponsored Display?

Within Sponsored Display, you can access the same familiar campaign metrics available in other ad products, including ROAS (return on ad spend), and sales.

How can I get started today with Sponsored Display?

To create a Sponsored Display campaign, sign in to your advertising console and click “create campaign” from within the campaign manager. Select the Sponsored Display ad type to start creating your campaign.

Ready to get started?

Go to advertising.amazon.com to register, or for more information about our solutions.

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