Everything you need to know about Sponsored Display

Looking to attract more shoppers and re-engage existing customers? Sponsored Display ads help you reach more of your ideal buyers and drive performance across the entire buying journey, from awareness to purchase and repurchase.

In this guide, you’ll learn why and how to use Sponsored Display to help multiply your reach, no matter your budget.

59% of surveyed shoppers say they are
more likely to make a purchase from an ad seen on Amazon. ¹

• Reach new audiences to generate awareness for specific products.
• Increase visibility across your entire catalog.
• Drive sales of your best-performing items on Amazon.
• Accelerate sell-through of products with higher prices or longer sales cycles.
• Promote clearance and seasonal products.
• Boost your reach during popular shopping events by cross-selling complementary products in your own pages.

• Cost per click (CPC),which means you’re charged each time someone clicks on your ad.
• Cost per thousand (vCPM), which means you’re charged for every 1,000 viewable impressions of your ad.

First, sign into the Amazon Ads console.

If you’re new to Amazon Ads:
Go to advertising.amazon.com, select “Register,” then choose one of the account options to sign in.

If you have an existing advertising account:
Sign into advertising.amazon.com and select the Sponsored Display campaign type.
(You may be asked to link to Vendor Central account if you haven’t done that yet.)

Create a campaign.

From the “Campaign manager” option on your left-hand side menu, choose “Sponsored Display” as your campaign type.

Give your campaign a name.

Keep your campaign name straightforward, so you can find it easily later. This name is only visible to you.

Choose your campaign duration.

We recommend running your campaign without an end date to avoid cutting your results short. 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.

Set your budget.

There’s no minimum advertising spend requirement, and you can change your daily budget at any time. Your daily budget is the amount you’re willing to spend per day, over a calendar month. Your 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. For small to medium-sized businesses, we recommend a daily budget of $40–$60 (or your currency equivalent). We also advise adjusting your budget based on your campaign performance.

Select your bid optimization strategy.

You can choose your pricing structure based on a CPC (cost per click) or vCPM (cost per thousand impressions) 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, then adjust based on your ads performance.

Sponsored Display gives you three bid optimization options:

• Optimize for viewable impressions: This strategy optimizes your bids to help increase views of your ad. These campaigns are more likely to have higher viewable impressions and lower click-through rates, compared to other bid optimizations.
• Optimize for page visits: This strategy may help to drive product consideration by showing your ads to shoppers who are 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 new and repeat sales 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 optimize for page visits. We recommend using this option on your first campaign.

Give your ad group a name.

Ad groups are a way to organize ads within your advertising campaign. Products placed together in an ad group share the same bids and targets. We recommend using a name that’s clear and easy to find for later reference.

Choose your ad format.

Sponsored Display allows you to pick between image and video ad formats to best showcase your products, and tell a captivating story to customer. Learn more about video ads here. If you’d like to support creating your video, the Amazon Ads Partner Directory is a great place to look. Our certified service providers can produce high-quality, policy compliant and impactful videos for your ads.

Pick the products you want to advertise.

We recommend adding at least 10 well-performing products to your campaign. This way, your campaigns have enough options to serve relevant ads for a single impression, plus allow multiple ads from your brand to appear on a single detail page. On average, advertisers who promoted 10 or more products saw an increase of 13% in sales over a 30 day period compared to advertisers who didn’t ⁴

We recommend choosing products that:

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

Note that Sponsored Display ads will automatically stop serving if your products are no longer available to purchase. You may still add products to a campaign, even if they have low inventory, or are out of stock. You won’t be charged for ads that aren’t served due to product unavailability.

Select your targeting type.

Targeting helps you refine the criteria for the types of shoppers you want to reach — those who most closely mirror your ideal customer, and who are most likely to buy from you. You can select between two targeting tactics:

Contextual Targeting: Target specific products, or relevant product categories, in the Amazon store to help shoppers find your products. You can refine your contextual targeting using elements such as price, brand, and Prime-shipping eligibility.

Where do these ads appear? Contextual targeting ads are served in the Amazon store in placements including product detail pages, alongside customer reviews, and on shopping results pages.

Audience targeting: Using Sponsored Display audiences helps you reach shoppers based on their interests that are related to your products and brand, both in the Amazon store and third-party destinations. You can re-engage customers that have previously viewed or purchased your products, or similar products, in the Amazon store. This tactic can be used to help drive visibility during new product, or brand launches. You can also use Sponsored Display’s audience segments, leveraging first-party insights, to help reach shoppers in four categories; interests, life events, lifestyle, or in-market.

Amazon audiences: Use thousands of pre-built audience segments to help you reach new prospective shoppers at the awareness and consideration stage of the shopping journey. Amazon audiences are based on four main categories that are built and curated by Amazon Ads using various first-party shopping, streaming, and entertainment insights.

Views remarketing: Help re-engage audiences based on those who have viewed your products, or similar products in the Amazon store, but haven’t made a purchase. Views remarketing helps you reach audiences at various stages in their shopping journey and inspire them to make a purchase.

Purchases remarketing: Help re-engage audiences who have purchased your products, or complementary products in the Amazon store. Purchases remarketing can help you drive repeat purchases, build customer loyalty, and cross-sell to existing customers based on historical purchase behavior.

Where do these ads appear? Sponsored Display audiences ads appear both in the Amazon store, and on third-party destinations. In the Amazon store, placements appear in prominent positions such as the homepage and product detail pages. Outside of the Amazon store, placements appear on Twitch or third-party apps and websites

Combine contextual targeting and Sponsored Display audiences for the best results. Used together, both contextual targeting and Sponsored Display audiences can help you reach and engage relevant shoppers. You can use contextual targeting to help generate product detail page traffic and then use views remarketing within Sponsored Display audiences to re-engage customers to help secure missed sales.

Launch your campaign.

Sponsored Display automatically generates your ads, featuring a product image, title, star rating, Prime badging, and price from your product’s detail page. Your ads will automatically update if the information on your detail page is changed. If you’d like to highlight your brand and unique selling points, consider tailoring your ads with a custom brand logo, headline, and lifestyle image. Your ads can also display deals and savings badges to inform shoppers when your advertised product is under promotion, including deal type (e.g., deal of the day, lightning deal, best deal), discounted with coupons, or Subscribe & Save.

Launch a Sponsored Display campaign.

• Impressions
• Spend
• Clicks
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Cost per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM)
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Sales
• Advertising cost of sales (ACOS)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• New-to-brand (NTB)

• Add more than 10 ASINs (individual products) in your Sponsored Display campaigns. When you advertise more products, the products in your campaign can participate in more auctions, meaning your ads are more likely to appear on Amazon. Additionally, your ads can be relevant to a wider range of customers because a larger portion of your catalog is available when Sponsored Display dynamically selects a product to advertise.
• Ensure your campaign has enough budget to stay live throughout the day. Campaigns that frequently run out of daily budget may be missing out on potential impressions. Consider increasing those budgets to continuously drive shoppers to your ads. If you can’t increase your daily budget, consider reducing your bids.
• Experiment with your campaign targets. Remember that your targeting settings can have a big impact on results! If a category is underperforming, don’t just reduce its bid. Rather, refine its targeting and add narrower, more relevant targets to the campaign.
• Consider the sales of non-advertised products. If you see your ads are generating sales for non-advertised products, consider advertising those products. You might also consider targeting those products with complementary products.
• Leverage high-performing audience segments. If you see strong performance in a specific audience segment, try targeting similar segments, or create a parallel campaign for that segment using a different targeting tactic.