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Posted on: May 14, 2021 | Written by: Radd Interactive
Are you using Amazon sponsored display ads? If you’re an eCommerce company currently selling on Amazon you should start. Below we show why, and how to easily get started.
When considering digital marketing channels, Amazon Advertising doesn’t immediately come to mind. Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Adwords, all hold precedent. But, as it stands, the world’s largest retailer offers one of the best ways to advertise online.
Just consider, on average, businesses who invest their ad spend on Amazon have found:
Those routinely best the averages on Facebook and Google’s ad platforms.
A key reason why is because 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from Amazon than other eCommerce sites. As a result, Amazon’s share of US digital ad revenue is on the rise (surpassing 10% in 2020). So if you’re not already using Amazon Advertising, we highly recommend you start.
Amazon Sponsored Display ads are one of the best places to do so, due to their versatility and reach. But before showing how to effectively implement these product display ads, we want to provide an overview of when and why you would use them instead of Amazon Advertising’s other offerings.
Amazon Advertising is the name of Amazon’s ad platform, and it is used to drive sales of products sold on Amazon via paid promotions.
Every product sold on Amazon has a product detail page (PDP). But a product page can only take your brand so far these days. Amazon’s marketplace has become too competitive for a PDP alone to drive meaningful sales. To truly succeed you need to promote those product pages, both on and off Amazon.
This is done using primarily two methods:
Within those two methods, Amazon Advertising offers a laundry list of ad types and services to promote your brand and product pages. So big is this list that it can easily get overwhelming. Deciding which you should use depends on your business objectives, target audience, and budget.
The majority of advertisers on Amazon utilize three types of PPC ads:
The third type is where we’ll focus our attention today.
Amazon Sponsored Display ads allow you to show an ad for one of your Amazon products to consumers as they surf Amazon AND other websites, targeting people who have previously viewed that product or similar products, used search terms relevant to that product, or purchased other products from you in the past.
They are most often used for retargeting.
Formerly known as Product Display ads, they combine all the ease-of-use of PPC ads with the vast, hyper-targeted reach of Amazon DSP into a single, high-performance ad type.
The notable difference between Sponsored Display ads and the other PPC ad types on Amazon — Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand — is that Sponsored Display:
Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that lets brands automatically buy ad space at scale across Amazon sites and apps, as well as third-party exchanges, using display and video ads.
The most notable difference between Sponsored Display ads and Amazon DSP is that:
Before being able to run any of Amazon’s PPC ad types — including Sponsored Display — you’ll need to register your brand with Amazon. Once that is set up, you can create a Sponsored Display ad.
To create a sponsored Display ad all you need to do is:
Based on your targeting choice and product, Amazon will automatically create your ad (including text and image). They will also decide where to place your ad, with the intent of showing it to people most likely to engage with it.
Sponsored Display ads are unique in that they can appear both on Amazon and outside of Amazon. When someone clicks one of your Sponsored Display ads, they are taken to your product detail page.
Display ads appearing on Amazon can be seen on:
Most commonly, they are found under the right sidebar’s buying options.
They will also appear on any website owned by or partnered with Amazon, usually in the form of a banner ad.
Where your Sponsored Display ads appear is largely influenced by the targeting method you choose when creating your ad. Here is a placement overview according to each type of targeting:
So you might be wondering, are Amazon ads worth it? Should you bother incorporating them into your total digital marketing strategy? The short answer is yes! Sponsored Display ads are a super effective means of retargeting — an advertising tactic to reintroduce your brand and products to people after their initial engagement.
Successful retargeting has been proven to:
So if your goal is to generate more sales than Sponsored Display ads are an absolute must.
Additional benefits include:
On top of helping increase your Amazon sales and rank, Sponsored Display ads can be a great tactic for “full-funnel” advertising. Which means this single ad type can easily be modified to engage every level of your sales funnel — including TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. However, it shines best when targeting people with a strong intent to buy, or who have already purchased one of your products. Which is why we recommend using it primarily to target the lower half of your sales funnel.
As cool as Sponsored Display ads are, they might not always be the right fit for your advertising goals on Amazon. Ultimately, the decision will come down to a few factors, like where in the sales funnel you want to target.
You should use Sponsored Display if:
You should NOT use Sponsored Display if:
A winning Amazon Advertising strategy would be to start with Sponsored Product ads (to generate awareness and target the top of your sales funnel), then follow-up with Sponsored Display ads (to re-engage and drive your audience down the bottom of your sales funnel).
If you’re content with testing to see if you can get any positive results from Sponsored Display, then there’s no need to seek outside help. Just start with a small daily budget. Your returns won’t be amazing, but you’ll mitigate the risk of losing money on unproven display campaigns.
If you’re looking to optimize your Sponsored Display ads to provide a high ROI with far less risk, then you’ll probably want to seek advice from paid media experts. Getting started with Sponsored Display is really easy, but tweaking them to provide the greatest possible Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) is anything but.
ACoS is the most important metric on Amazon Advertising. You’ll use it to gauge the success of your ads. The tricky thing is that, depending on your goals, sometimes a low ACoS is preferable and other times a high ACoS is. Knowing when to target each, and how to tweak your ads to get there, is something you’ll probably want some advice on. This way you reduce the risk of wasting your ad spend on unprofitable campaigns.
Here are some things you should ask an agency about:
Luckily, there are a lot of great agencies out there that specialize in Amazon Advertising and can help you optimize your Sponsored Display ads.
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About the author:
We’re an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) company based in San Diego. Our team of passionate experts are driven by client success. We live, breathe and sleep SEO and PPC and we strive to crush our client’s competition. Our team is never satisfied, no matter how well our clients are doing, because in the evolving online world we pride ourselves on finding new ways to keep them at the forefront of search engine technology.