In a move to help Seller Central based brands better reach new audiences to further grow their businesses, Amazon has released Sponsored Display on Seller Central (in open beta).
What are the key benefits of Sponsored Display?
What’s unique and powerful about Sponsored Display is that it can be used across the entire shopper decision journey.
To start, let’s talk about what’s unique to Sponsored Display that is not available with keyword, search based targeting. Sponsored Display, allows seller-based brands to easily create desktop and mobile ads that appear on websites and apps off-Amazon on a cost-per-click basis. Usually display advertising is based on cost per impressions regardless if the user seeing the ad clicked on it or not. The ability to serve ads on other websites off of Amazon’s website is a powerful way to drive inbound traffic to your products on Amazon.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some examples of how Sponsored Display can help you execute a full-funnel strategy for your brand and/or products that includes Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion tactics.
Awareness
Sponsored Display allows you to target people in-market for a number of products or categories of products that you think are relevant to the product you are trying to promote. The ability to create campaigns without relevancy guardrails (meaning impressions will serve even if the Search Algorithm doesn’t identify your product relevant to the audience you want to target) is one of the very unique features that is only available through Sponsored Display Ads.
To give you an example of the Product Targeting feature in Sponsored Display, let’s say that I’m Gatorade, and I want to target people shopping for running shoes during marathon season. (Runners need their electrolytes after all!) With Sponsored Display, you can create a campaign with your Fruit Punch flavored Gatorade products that targets people in-market for Nike, Adidas, Hoka One, and other running shoes through Product Targeting. In this example you would have to identify the shoe ASINs and manually enter them if you wanted to target specific brands).
In this example we’ve demonstrated how a product that is in the Grocery category is relevant to shoppers looking at products in the Apparel category. Sponsored Display is a powerful tool that helps seller-based brands reach new audiences that may not have been in-market for their product to drive more New-To-Brand sales as well as drive more overall sales for their products.
Consideration
By leveraging Sponsored Display, you can also reach audiences that are or may be interested in similar products to that of your products. This can be a competitor’s products or it could be an opportunity to cross-sell your products with other adjacent products.
To give you an example, if you sell Soundbars, you can target people in-market for televisions. (everybody needs more sound when watching their movies! Just sayin’) With Sponsored Display (again, there are no relevancy guardrails that prevent you from serving ads), you can leverage Category-based targeting for “Televisions” and promote your soundbar products..
Because Soundbars are closely related to televisions, there is a large likelihood that they may consider purchasing a soundbar with their television. This very relevant Consideration tactic is one that can only be executed with Sponsored Display Ads within Amazon’s Search Console and Seller Central Sponsored Display product.
Another Consideration tactic that can capture the attention of more engaged shoppers that are further down their decision journey would be to leverage Sponsored Display Ad’s Product Targeting feature. With this powerful targeting option, seller-based brands can target their competitor’s specific products to help the shopper learn more about their comparable products that may have a better price, more features and benefits, etc.
The key benefit here is that seller-based brands have a higher chance of conversion as shoppers are already interested in the product category and are already close to purchasing.
Conversion
When it comes to driving actual conversions for your products, Sponsored Display is key in inspiring shoppers who may have already identified a category of products they are interested in purchasing. The goal with conversion-based tactics is to help the shopper decide that your product is the right product for them in that category.
One very popular conversion tactic that you can execute with Sponsored Display is remarketing. Seller-based brands can re-engage shoppers who have viewed their product detail pages in the last 30 days.
Visually, what do product targeted ads look like?
Seller-based brands have the ability to show ads alongside relevant ad placements such as shopper reviews, search results pages, detail pages, and/or under the featured offer.
Presently, Sponsored Display product targeting ads feature the product image and basic detail page information like reviews, price, and if the product is Prime eligible. With additional customization features coming soon, you will have even more creative control over your ads.
Your ads will now also show deals and savings badges so that your shoppers never miss a deal.
We (Channel Bakers) were given the exciting opportunity to be an early participant in the Sponsored Display beta. Here’s a list of some new key features that came out of the beta that make Sponsored Display product targeting a great tool for Seller-based Brands:
- No limitation in the UI on which targets can be selected based on advertised ASINs
- Ability to refine category selections based on price, brand, star rating, and other filters
- Ability to feature >1 ASIN
- Ability to do negative targeting
- Ability to see detailed reporting for advertised ASIN, targeted ASINs and categories for optimization
- Ability to set bids separately on each target (flexible bidding)
To learn more about Sponsored Display product targeting and how we can help you advertise with Sponsored Display, contact our Advertising experts at Channel Bakers.
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