Launch announcement

Sponsored Brands cost control provides advertisers a new way to both optimize campaign performance and ease the campaign management process. This launch allows advertisers to set performance-based parameters that remove the guesswork when selecting an exact bid of each target. This helps advertisers of any size and with any budget achieve their goals with Amazon’s first-party data and machine learning capabilities. This release is available for the “Drive page visits“ campaign goal only.

Before this launch, advertisers needed to translate their desired goals into efficient bids across different cost types. By translating goals into bids using machine learning with an optimization strategy, Amazon can help advertisers achieve their goals through continuous optimization.

For any “Drive page visits” campaign, advertisers can apply a metric-based rule: cost per click (CPC). Optimization strategies will then utilize machine learning models to define the bids, all while adjusting base bids up and down to increase the number of clicks and aiming to adhere to the input of the cost control.

Advertisers specify a campaign goal with a daily budget, and an average cost they are willing to pay per click. There are two important levers to influence marketing goals and costs today:

1. Targets selected: Different targeting allows advertisers to reach different shoppers, and ads may be more relevant to some shopper searches than others. When selecting targets, they should be 1) relevant to the advertised brand and products and 2) broad enough to help advertisers reach as many shoppers as possible. The machine learning models that serve ads will be adjusting bids in real time for every opportunity to help the cost stay at or near the desired value.
2. Bid values: Bids signal the amount an advertiser is willing to pay for an action (a click) on each of the targets. With how the Amazon Ads auctions work, advertisers only pay the least bid amount needed in order to win, so they don’t need to worry about a strategy for setting bids.

When advertisers use optimization strategies, our machine learning models help choose the right bids that can drive a desired action at the specified (maximum) cost and budget. We want each campaign to achieve as many possible actions as long as the costs are under the specified target cost per click (CPC), without spending more than the daily budget. Bids are optimized by models that look at the past campaign performance and similar campaigns: if costs are too high, bids are reduced, and if they’re below the target, they are increased to get more total scale. Bids will be quickly adjusted based on changes in ad auction dynamics (for example, another brand is targeting similar audiences with higher willingness to pay, or traffic changes due to seasonal factors) to help advertisers stay around their desired range, all while getting as much scale as possible. We will set your bids while your campaign is running to try to keep the cost associated with your goal near or below an amount you specify. It may take some time to achieve your desired cost target, and if your specified cost per click is too low it may prevent your campaign from reaching your desired cost target.

• Vendors
• Registered sellers

• Advertising console
• Amazon Ads API