Amazon Ad Creative Best-Practices: Practical Recommendations & Examples

Rick Wong 14 July 2024
Amazon Ad Creative Best-Practice

Guidance on Creating Amazon Ads that Convert

In our always on, constantly stimulated, and noisy digital landscape, first-impressions matter and rich media content can act as a powerful hook to reel in your audience. As reported in a study by media agency GroupM Amazon advertisers that met the media agency’s criteria for Amazon Ad Creative Best-Practices enjoyed a 3x higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and a 6.5x greater Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) than brands that did not meet the criteria (Source). In this blog post, we share some creative best-practices. 

Amazon Ad Types that allow for Custom Creatives

Whereas Amazon Sponsored Products ads only feature product listings and do not require creative input, Amazon Sponsored Brand and Amazon Sponsored Display ads require custom visuals, headline copy and optionally also video. Optimizing creative assets is thus vital to achieve optimal results (Explore our Amazon PPC Services).

Sponsored Brands Ads

Amazon Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands include custom headline, visual and optionally video assets. They prominently display your brand and products on top of Amazon search results and in other placements such as product listing pages. Explore our Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads Services

Sponsored Display Ads

Amazon Sponsored Display

Sponsored Display allows for broader reach and retargeting of audiences both on and off Amazon—they may appear on Amazon’s product detail pages (i.e. on a competitor’s listing), Amazon’s search results, or on third-party websites and apps (depending on your country locale). With Amazon display ads, you can use custom ad copy, visuals or videos. Learn more about our Amazon Sponsored Display Ads Services to see how we can help you optimize your ads.

Engineering Creatives that Increase Brand Awareness and Engage Amazon Shoppers

Building a recognizable brand helps your audience easily remember and identify you from the competition while brand consistency strengthens trust and loyalty amongst your customers. Use the guidelines below to drive better brand awareness through high-quality assets that can extend your reach across different devices, placements and regions. 

Tips for Creating Visually Appealing and Cohesive Ad Creatives

In principle, keyword research for PPC campaigns works exactly the same as keyword research for Amazon SEO. Once you have identified relevant terms, you target them with ads. Include keywords in product titles to increase the chances that users click on your ads.

  • Color Palette: Use a consistent color palette that aligns with your brand’s identity. This helps in creating a unified look across all your ad creatives.
  • Imagery: Use high-quality images that reflect your brand’s style and values. Consistent imagery across ads can significantly enhance brand recall. Steer away from stock images.
  • Templates: Develop templates for your ad creatives to maintain consistency while streamlining your design process to ensure more time is spent on creativity than execution.

Understand Your Target Audience to Craft Communication Angles that work

Understanding your target audience is fundamental to creating ads that resonate and convert. It’s important to know their preferences, behaviors, and needs so you can tailor your creatives for maximum impact.

Tips for Leveraging Shopper and Data Insights to Craft Compelling Messages

  • Customer Reviews: Analyze reviews to gain insights into customer preferences and pain points. Important: do not only go through your own reviews – also go through reviews of competing product listings. For the latter you focus on negative reviews. Understanding what shoppers love about your products and dislike about competitors’ effectively provides you with the most compelling reasons why anyone would buy your products. 
  • Competitor Analysis: Study your competitors products to identify how their features differ from the features of your products. Is your product weather resistant while competing offers are not? Find important points of differentiation. 
  • Amazon Analytics: Utilize Amazon’s analytics to gather data on customer demographics and behavior. You can often reverse-engineer this by going through search term reports and then identifying queries that were driving sales.

Effective use of Logos in Amazon Ads

Studies show that shoppers engage 20% more on desktop and 13% more on mobile with ad campaigns when their brand logo met the logo requirements. A logo is a visual representation of your brand and plays a critical role in brand recognition. Including your logo in Amazon ads reinforces brand identity and ensures that customers can easily associate the ad with your brand. Logos may appear in different sizes, on different devices, and atop different backgrounds so it’s important to anticipate this when you upload your logo assets.

Logo Placement and Size Best Practices

Understanding the distinct approaches and goals of keyword research for SEO and PPC on Amazon can help you develop a comprehensive strategy that enhances both organic visibility and targeted ad performance that ultimately drives more traffic and sales.

  • Visibility: Ensure your logo is clearly visible without overshadowing other critical elements of the ad and avoid interacting with complex or cluttered graphical elements.
  • Placement: Typically, placing the logo in the top left or bottom right corner works well as these areas are where the eye naturally gravitates.
  • Size: Your logo should be large enough to be easily recognizable but not so large that it dominates the ad.

Logo Ad Creatives Do’s and Don’ts

Below are some examples for the correct (and incorrect) usage of logos in Amazon ads.

Amazon Logos Dos and Donts

Image credit: Amazon

Practical Examples of Good Logo Usage in Amazon Ads

Logo that is clear, visible and large enough without distracting the ad is more effective than a logo crowded with additional imagery, taglines or extra content.

Brand Messaging: Get to the Point Fast and Provide Compelling Reasons to Buy

To combat today’s crowded digital landscape and limited audience attention span, your brand message should have personality to create emotional resonance with your audience, be easily understood at a glance, and compelling enough to prompt further interest. Your messaging should be aligned with your brand tone and voice to create consistency and trust while succinctly conveying the value proposition of your product offering.

Tips for Effective Brand Messages

  • Customer-Centric Messaging: Focus on the benefits that your product offers rather than just its features—what are you solving for your customers and what will they gain in return?
  • Emotionally Driven Content: Craft messages that evoke emotions, whether it’s humor, excitement, joy, or a sense of urgency—it’s that spark that makes your advertising memorable and impactful. 
  • Consistency Across Platforms: Ensure consistency in your brand messages across different platforms to build a cohesive brand narrative—consistency bolsters trust.

Examples of Effective Brand Messaging in Amazon Ads

Lifestyle Images: Showing your Product in Use Helps Shoppers Visualize their Needs

Lifestyle images show your product being used in real-life scenarios, helping customers visualize how it fits into their daily lives. These images enhance relatability and evoke positive emotional connections with your audience, such as happiness or comfort, making the product more appealing.

Best Practices for Selecting and Incorporating Lifestyle Images

  • Authenticity: Use authentic images that reflect real-life usage of your product.
  • Diversity: Include diverse representations to appeal to a broader audience.
  • Quality: Ensure high resolution and professional quality to enhance credibility.

Examples of Effective Lifestyle Images in Amazon Ads

Video Ads: Capture Attention more Effectively

Video content is king in digital advertising. It offers a dynamic way to showcase your product and engage customers.

Key Elements of Effective Video Ads

  • Storytelling: Craft a compelling story around your product to captivate viewers.
  • Length: Keep videos concise. Your videos should be no longer than 30 seconds and key messages and your brand logo should be communicated within the first 5 seconds (after that viewer numbers will drop off significantly).
  • Visuals: Use high-quality assets to create an enriching experience.
  • Call-to-Action: Include a clear and compelling call-to-action to prompt immediate response from the video.

Best Practices for Successful Video Ads

  • Key Takeaway First: Put the most important takeaway in the first few seconds (plus your logo)
  • Legible Text: Use text that’s clear and legible over the background
  • Use Captions: Most shoppers will see your video with sound off. That’s why it’s important to add stylized captions. 
  • Allow Sufficient Reading time: Keep text on screen long enough for it to be read
  • Mobile Optimization: Optimize for mobile screen sizes as most customers shop on mobile

Proven Communications Angles to create Impactful Video Ads 

  • Humor: Humor in advertising is one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience
  • Customer Testimonials: Use of customer testimonials in advertising is a strong social proof to build audience trust.
  • Features AND Benefits: Clarity of product features is helpful, but also explaining how these features BENEFIT a user is key.

Seasonal and Event-Based Advertising

Leveraging Seasonal Trends and Events to Boost Ad Engagement

Leverage seasonal trends, shopping periods and of course Prime Day in your ads. These provide unique opportunities to capture more awareness and interest. Tailoring ad creatives around significant moments can boost engagement and sales, especially if customers are anticipated to shop around this event (i.e. Christmas). 

Tips for Resonating with Shoppers During Holidays and Special Events

  • Timely Themes: Align your ad themes with current holidays and events.
  • Special Offers: Highlight limited-time offers and discounts.
  • Festive Imagery: Use seasonal imagery to create a festive atmosphere.
  • Urgent Messaging: Create a sense of urgency

Amazon Ads Guidelines and Acceptance Policies

Understanding Amazon’s ad guidelines and policies is crucial to ensure ads are approved and perform well in the marketplace. These guidelines cover various aspects, including common pitfalls to avoid to ensure your ad gets approved, image quality, and ad formatting. 

It’s important to stay up-to-date on Amazon’s guidelines and policies by regularly reviewing the official Amazon pages and subscribing to their official communication channels to help you stay informed on frequent changes.

Things to Avoid to Ensure Ad Approval

  • Misleading Information: Ensure all claims are accurate and verifiable.
  • Poor Quality Images: Use high-resolution images that meet Amazon’s standards.
  • Irrelevant Content: Keep your ad content relevant to the product being advertised.
  • Avoid Prohibited Content: Abstain from prohibited content listed on Amazon’s guidelines.

Resources for Further Information on Amazon Ad Policies

Takeaways – Be Strategic when Crafting Creatives and Test, Test, Test

While staying informed and adhering to Amazon’s guidelines ensures success in your Amazon ad campaigns, creating effective Amazon ads goes beyond technical precision—it’s about infusing creativity and energy into your campaigns that resonate at a deeper level with your audience. Emotion is a powerful force to shift behavior changes and influence decision-making that will ultimately help you win over customers. If you are not sure how to edit your campaigns check out our step-by-step guide on how to edit Amazon advertising campaigns.

Oftentimes it will take you a while to figure out the best communication angle, or to tweak creatives until they deliver maximum impact. Testing and learning is thus an important part of the process. As an Amazon advertising agency we have significant experience deploying creatives that are proven to work. Contact us today to get a free consultation and to learn how we could help you turbocharge your creative iterations to reach maximum ad efficiency faster. 

Related readings: How to conduct Amazon PPC keyword research and our guide on Amazon retargeting ads.

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