What are Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads & How to use Them?

What is Sponsored Brands in Amazon?

Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads are ads that appear in the search results, on product pages, and checkout pages. They can target either specific keywords or Amazon product listing pages and can be created using static or video creatives. They are formerly known as “Amazon Headline Search Ads”. Sponsored Brands ads normally show up as long rectangular banners in both horizontal and vertical formats on desktop and mobile search results pages.

If you need support optimizing your ads, you can also enquire about our Amazon Sponsored Brands Ad Management Services.

Another thing to note is that these banners allow for up to 3 different product images under your brand. You can easily advertise different product variations, or complementary products all in the same ad. By clicking on these ads, shoppers are either taken directly to the product detail page (for 3 or more products), a custom landing page, or your brand storefront.

Why are Sponsored Brands Ads Important?

Sponsored brands ads are an important tool of successful Amazon Sellers because they offer a good balance between high relevance and creative differentiation. Compared to more tactical Sponsored Product ads, which only feature your default Amazon product listing, with Sponsored Brands ads you have more control over the creative. In contrast to Sponsored Display ads you have the option to target keywords – which is not possible with Sponsored Display ads. 

While most Sellers typically start out with Sponsored Products ads and many brands also spend the majority of their ad budgets on this ad format, we do encourage you to experiment with Sponsored Brands ads. 

We often see lower CPCs for Sponsored Brand Ads as compared to Sponsored Product ads (while conversion rates can be similar or even higher). 

There is one logical explanation for that: 

Only Sellers that are enrolled in Amazon brand registry can run Sponsored Brands ads – thus competition in the ad auction tends to be less intense and CPC can also be lower.

There are additional benefits of running Amazon Sponsored Brands ads:

• Enhanced Brand Visibility: Sponsored Brands ads take up “more real-estate” on the search results page. With this ad format you can prominently display your brand and products at the top of search results, increasing exposure and brand awareness while also driving sales!
• Increased Storefront Traffic: If you select your Storefront as your ad landing page, you can effectively drive more qualified traffic to your Amazon store. 
• Customizable Ad Formats: These ads allow for custom creatives including: custom headlines, logos, and multiple products
• Boosted Organic Rankings: Running ads in general can create a “halo” effect that also boosts organic sales: By driving more clicks and more conversions for specific target keywords, your organic ranking for a given keyword may also improve over time. This kicks off a virtuous cycle where ad sales boost non-ad supported sales.

What are the Eligibility Criteria for Sponsored Brands Ads?

As mentioned above, before you start on creating a Amazon Sponsored Brands Ad campaigns you must enroll in Amazon brand registry.

To enroll a brand, you need to provide:

1. Your brand name with an active or pending trademark visible on your products or packaging, along with images showing this.
2. The trademark registration number or application number from the Intellectual Property office.
3. A list of product categories (e.g., apparel, electronics) in which your brand should be listed.

For more information on this process, you can refer to the official Amazon Brand Registry Application Guide.

Amazon only accepts trademarks that have been issued by government trademark offices in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Singapore, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Sweden, Poland, Benelux, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates.

Where can Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads Appear?

Sponsored Brands ads can appear on the search results page and on and on product detail pages. Note: When sponsored brands ads appear on top of Search Results Page they are displayed above organic search results and on top of Sponsored Products ads. This helps improve brand awareness and click-through-rate.

How to Create Sponsored Brands Ad Campaigns?

To setup a Sponsored Brands campaign sign in to Amazon Ads and click “Create Campaign”. On the next page select “Sponsored Brands”.

On the next screen you can define basic ad campaign parameters such as: Campaign name, daily ad budget, campaign duration (we suggest not setting an end date, you can simply pause a campaign if you want it to stop spending) and brand (if you operate multiple brands).

On the next page you can select the ad landing page. There are three options:

• Driving Traffic to your Amazon Storefront: If you have an Amazon Storefront you can select it as your ads’ landing page.
• Sending Shopper to a Store Spotlight: This is essentially a specified subpage within your Amazon Store.
• Creating a New Landing Page: If you do not operate a Storefront you can create custom landing page that will take shoppers to a page that lists 3 or more products from your brand (see example screenshot below).

The rule of thumb is that If you are to select a custom landing page (new landing) you are optimizing for conversion, and if you are selecting Amazon store you looking at more of a branding campaign.

Sponsored Brands Ad Format Types

Under the umbrella of Sponsored Brands there are 3 different type of ad formats. We will go over them in detail below.

1. Product Collection

These are the Amazon banner ads. They show up on the top banner of the search results or on the top of a product detail page (mobile only). The ads in the top banner show up due to keyword targeting.

You can either choose two types of targeting. Keywords targeting (Fig 1) or product targeting (Fig 2) on your product collection ad format. You can also customize the following:

• Headline 🡪 a custom 50 character headline shown above your banner
• The Landing Page 🡪 you can have the landing page pointed on your Amazon storefront or a custom landing page. The custom landing page performs better. The theory is that the custom landing page still looks like the search result page; hence customer purchase flow is not interrupted.
• Automated bidding 🡪 is a very confusing option. By selecting this option, they will only automatically optimize bids for non-top of search placements. I will only select this if I don’t have an ongoing process for bid management. If you are looking for automatic bid management at scale, our software SellerMetrics can handle that 🙂
• Custom Image 🡪 will appear on mobile only. A nice, large image takes up a large portion of the real estate on the Amazon shopping app (figure – 3). Using the custom image has been known to increase CTR and CVR dramatically. I highly recommend using it.

2. Stores Spotlight

The store spotlight is quite similar to product collection, the key difference in that you can only pick your storefront pages as the landing pages whereas in product collection you have a choice between custom landing pages and storefront pages.

Our experience with store spotlight SB (sponsored brands) ads has not been good, the impression is lower and ACoS is higher relative to product collection ads. But it would not hurt to experiment with these ads for your own products/category.

In terms of where these ads show up, they will appear on the top of the search result pages on desktop, mobile web, and mobile app. The side and bottom of the search result pages and product detail page placement are not available yet for store spotlight.

3. Video Ads

Sponsored Brands Video ads are 45-sec clips. These clips are displayed in the middle of the search result page on both mobile and desktop. Right now, it is only displayed on the search result page, hence this ad format only allows keyword targeting option. Going forward I do believe that the product attribute targeting (PAT) option will be available and the video ads will be shown on the product listing page itself.

Within the accounts managed by SellerMetrics, all the data points to the superior performance of the Amazon video ads compare to any other ad type. The probable reason is the relatively lower competition. Video asset creation can be costly, but any video is better than no video. A budget solution is to take clips of your product with your smartphone and have someone on Upwork or Fiverr, edit the clip together with some callouts. The video uploaded to Amazon Advertising just needs to be in the following criteria:

Video Specs

• 16:9 aspect ratio
• 1280 x 720px, 1920 x 1080px or 3840 x 2160px
• 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 29.98, or 30 fps
• 1 Mbps or higher bit rate
• H.264 or H.265 codec
• 6-45 sec long
• 500 MB or smaller
• MP4 or MOV file
• Main or baseline profile
• Progressive scan type
• 1 video stream only

Audio Specs

• 44.1 kHz or higher sample rate
• PCM, AAC or MP3 codec
• 96 kbps or higher bit rate
• Stereo or mono format
• Not more than 1 audio stream
• 44.1 kHz or higher sample rate
• PCM, AAC or MP3 codec
• 96 kbps or higher bit rate
• Stereo or mono format
• Not more than 1 audio stream

Make sure whoever edits your video follows the above specs! The video will be rejected by Amazon if it doesn’t strictly follow the above specs.

Amazon Sponsored Brands ads: Keyword Targeting

Much like in the Sponsored Products, in Sponsored Brands you can target specific keywords with your ad placement showing up on a customer keyword search results on the search bar, and like SP, you can add broad, phrase, and exact match types. Keep in mind though in Sponsored Brands there will be no ad groups, so you will possibly need to add multiple keyword match types into the campaign. There is also a 1000 keywords limit, hence in one campaign, you can only have 1000 unique keywords and match type combinations.

Keyword targeting option is available to all Sponsored Brands ad formats.

Amazon Sponsored Brands ads: Product Targeting (PAT)

Product Targeting, also called Product Attribution Targeting (PAT), allows you to target specific ASINs and have your ad show up on a product listing page. It is shown in the middle of the product listing page, just above the product description and A+ content shown in Figure 5.

How to Analyze the Performance of Sponsored Brand PPC Campaigns

Besides the other metrics you see on Amazon PPC, such as CPC, Impressions, Orders, and ACoS, the Sponsored Brands has a pretty cool metric call NTB (new to brand). It tells you the number of first-time orders and sales for Amazon products within the brand over a one-year lookback window.

By looking at this metric, you can make sure that you are consistently driving new customers into your funnel. As mentioned earlier, this is great if you have a product that could incur reoccurring purchases. A good example of this is supplements. You can have a much higher ACoS target for these Sponsored Brands campaigns in cases like that.

Amazon Advertising Reports for Sponsored Brands

There are 6 different types of Sponsored Brands report. If you are familiar with sponsored products reports, you should be familiar with most of them. You can request reports on your seller central dashboard 🡪 Reports 🡪 Advertising Reports.

1. Keyword Report

This is the report that shows the data on keywords/Product level and its corresponding metrics. This report is on the same granular level as the bulk operations file, so if you are consistently running the bulk operations file already, then you will probably won’t need to run this report.

2. Keyword Placement Report

It is further segmented by placements similar to the keyword report. The keywords placements can be on top of search (the first banner placement for SB) or other placements (side or bottom of the search results).

This report can be quite actionable, you can analyze how a particular keyword is performing by its placement type, if the keyword is within ACoS target and make a high relative amount of orders you can think about placing a higher bid to make sure you win the “Top of Search” placement.

3. Campaign Report

This reports shows the data by campaigns and its corresponding metrics.

4. Campaign Placement Report

Like the keyword campaign placement data, this report will show campaign performance based on campaign placement. By analyzing this report’s performance, you can adjust the “Adjust bid by placement” settings under campaign settings. You can see if the placement on Top of Search or Product Page is doing well and adjust accordingly in the report.

5. Search Term Report

In my opinion, this is probably the most important report in the Amazon advertising reports. It allows you to see customer search term data, as this is what the customer searched for in the search bar.

There can be quite a bit of confusion between keywords and search terms. The difference is keywords are what advertisers/sellers choose to target on their side. Search term is what the customer is searching for in the search bar. In other words, keywords are on the supply side, and search terms are on the demand side.

The keywords and search terms can be different due to the different match types afforded by the advertiser to use. For example, an advertiser using the “phrase” match type on keywords “skinny jeans” can get an impression. This happens when the customer uses the search term “skinny jeans juniors.”

Now that we know how the difference between search terms and keywords, we can use the search term report in two ways: 1) Find poor performing and irrelevant search terms and add them to Negative Exact match. 2) Add new customer search terms that had attributed to the order as a new keyword.

6. Search Term Impression Share Report

This is the newest report. It reports on all Sponsored Brands ads formats except for Sponsored brand video. This report’s value is that it will give you the rank and impression share of a particular customer search term for your sponsored brand ad placement.

For example, the customer search term is “baby Crib”. Your rank is 1, and search term impression share is 70%. This will mean that your placement is current rank one when “baby crib” is entered, and it appears 70% of the time out of all the time customers had to search for the term “Baby crib”.

Keep in mind, just because you are ranked number one, doesn’t mean you will win the placement all the time, it could be the next bidder for your placement is a close second, at this point you can consider up bidding the targeting keyword.

How to use Sponsored Brands Ads Strategically

First of all, you need to understand that Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are two different ad products and you should not mindlessly port your Sponsored Products strategy to Sponsored Brands. Sponsored Brands if done right can expand your brand’s presence and can lower your Sponsored Products ACoS as your brand becomes more known in the niche as you scale your Sponsored Brands ads. Sponsored Brand, therefore at the very least should constitute at least 50% of your Sponsored Product campaign budget to start and adjusted up or down depending on performance.

If you are running Sponsored Brand ads for the first time, a good way to check its effectiveness is to how your Sponsored Products ads are doing after you have run your Sponsored Brands campaign for at least 30 days. If your Sponsored Brands seems to have caused an additional jump to your Sponsored Products sales, give room for your Sponsored Brands campaign for high ACoS. This concludes our Sponsored Brands tutorial we hope you find this guide useful to scale your Sponsored Brands ads.