The Ultimate Guide to Sponsored Brands 2020

Sponsored Brands 

Visibility means everything in advertising nowadays, which can increase brand awareness, bring more sales. Amazon Sponsored Brands serves good in that sense. If you are looking for new ways to improve your PPC ads, Sponsored Brands are a weight off your mind.

As we know Amazon offers 3 different types of Amazon PPC advertisements: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display Ads (formerly known as Product Display Ads). They are available to Vendors, Sellers registered in the Amazon Brand Registry and agencies with clients who sell products on Amazon. 

What are Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads?

Amazon Sponsored Brands (formerly known as Amazon Headline Search Ads) are keyword- and product-targeted PPC ads. What makes Sponsored Brands is that the placement of the ads as well as the format. The advertising place at the top of the search results page is called the Prime Real Estate of the Amazon search results page. 

Aside from positioning on the page, advertisers select three products of the same brand, a featured image or video and create a customized ad copy. By clicking on the featured image, customers are forwarded to the landing page or Amazon store or URL. When the customer clicks on the products, they are directed to the product detail page. 

What is Sponsored Brands?

4 Reasons Why You Should Run Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads

When taking into account almost 3 million active users in 15 Amazon marketplaces, Amazon Sponsored Brands are promising for advertisers who want to stand out from the others with their virtual shops and to build brand awareness.

Amazon Sponsored Brands enables you to:

Advertised products appear at the prominent positions on the page such as, at the header, in other words, the Prime Real Estate of the page or at the bottom separated from the products. 

Unlike Sponsored Products, you can promote at least 3 products at the same time.

3. Direct Traffic to Your Own Shop

With Sponsored Brands Ads, you can easily drive traffic to your own products and have customers roam around your products. 

Since your ads are at the top position and displayed in prominent positions, it means more visibility, more sales! 

Where are Amazon Sponsored Brands placed?

There are 3 different placements of Sponsored Brands: 

1. on the top of the search results
2. on the left side below the filter panel 

Placement Top and Left Side Bar

Placement Bottom of Search Results

However, the top position on the search results page is the creme de la creme of the placement and becomes prominent compared to other types of placement. 

Who can run Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads? 

Vendors can use Amazon Sponsored Brands, and professional sellers who are registered in the Amazon Brand Registry and are able to ship to the country that they are advertising.

What are the requirements to create a Sponsored Brands campaign?

To start with a Sponsored Brands campaign, you have a minimum of 3 products registered in your Amazon Advertising Central. You can create a maximum of 100 ads in a campaign, and use 1000 keywords per campaign.

Adult categories, second-hand, and refurbished products are not supported by Sponsored Brands. 

You can check which categories are supported by Sponsored Brands below: 

Amazon Sponsored Brands Categories

How can you create an Amazon Sponsored Brands Campaign? 

If you are already using Sponsored Products, this step is as easy as ABCs for you. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that each campaign should include at least three products of the same brand. 

Log into your Amazon Seller Central and go to Advertising. Under that select Campaign Manager and click Create Campaign. As we are creating Sponsored Brands, click on the Sponsored Brands. 

Don’t worry your campaign name is only visible to you, that’s why you can name your campaign whatever resonates best with you. 

Sponsored Brands: Create Campaign Settings

2. Start and End Date: Do you really need one?

With the special promotions such as Christmas offers and Valentine’s Day sales, we would suggest you set a start and end date. If your ads are running only for Prime Day, setting the 16th of July as an end date would be wise.

If you wish to run your Sponsored Brands campaign longer, you can set it as “no end date”. Therefore, your ads will be running constantly. 

When determining our budget, we want to make sure that our ads do not only run throughout the day but also that they are displayed on the top of the search results. 

We have to put a lot of thought into deciding between a daily budget and a lifetime budget. Unlike Sponsored Products, it is not possible to change the budget method anytime after we set up the Sponsored Brands Ads. To change your budget method, we would suggest that you copy your existing campaign and change the budget method and send it for review again.

If you are running your ads for special times like the Holiday Season, Prime Day, etc., you can select the lifetime budget.

As we know the time duration of the advertisement, we can estimate the lifetime budget by multiplying the amount we want to spend daily with the number of days we want the campaign to run. 

Please note: With the lifetime budget, the minimum amount you assign is 100€. 

Amazon lifetime budget

As we promote our products without any end date, in that case, the only option is to select the daily budget. Amazon advises defining an average 15€ budget to run the ads throughout the day. 

Amazon daily budget for Sponsored Brands

You need to select the brand you are promoting if you have more than one brand in your product portfolio.  

Create Campaign Brand

Sellers have two options when it comes to the landing page: their Amazon Store or a new product listing page. 

If you are already a store owner, you can select “Amazon Store (including pages)”. In that way, the customers are directed to your Amazon store, browse around the products you sell. 

But keep in mind! If you select your Amazon Store, the products you want to advertise should be available in your store. 

Or you can select the “new product list page”. From the list shown below you add a minimum of three products of the same brand or you can add the products manually by entering the ASINs.

NEW: Now you can also upload a CSV file, which makes it easier to select the products if you are promoting more products. Don’t forget that the maximum number of ads you can run is 100. 

Amazon Store or new product listing page

In addition to the Amazon Store and a new product list page, vendors have the possibility to define a “custom URL” as a landing page. By adding the URL of at least 3 products, the customers land directly on the product detail page. 

In the “Creative” section, we work on the featured image and the ad copy. 

• For the featured image, select a 400x400 pixel image and it should be under 1 MB. You can either select an image from your catalog or upload a custom image. 
• Your ad copy should be max. 50 characters, in line with your brand and appealing to your customers.
• You can arrange the order of the products as you wish. 

Create Campaign

7. Keyword Targeting vs. Product Targeting

If your aim is to target the search terms that customers type into the search bar to reach your products, select keyword targeting. However, if you want to target users who go through products and categories similar to yours, then you can use product targeting. We would suggest you make use of keyword targeting. Fortunately, you have the search term report in your hands and it is going to be your guide when it comes to harvesting the best-performing keywords and running optimized Sponsored Brands Ads. 

Targeting

8. The Most Exciting Part: Bidding! 

This is one of the features that differentiate Sponsored Brands from Sponsored Products: Automated Bidding vs. Custom Bid Adjustment.

Automated Bidding: You can leave yourselves at the hand of Amazon in terms of bidding. Amazon automatically adjusts the bids depending on the placement of your ads. 

Amazon automatically optimizes bids

Custom Bid Adjustment: With Custom Bid Adjustment, you specify the percentage of “decrease” or “increase” of your bids for the placement below the top of the search. For example: Let’s say you bid 10 €. If you select “decrease by” and decide on 20%, your bid will be 8 €. 

Keyword Targeting

Amazon shows us the “related” keywords based on the products in the portfolio. We can add the keywords, adjust the bid of each keyword and decide on the match type. 

For each keyword, we are able to customize the bid by selecting “Custom bid”. Depending on the match type, we allocate the bid.

Bid Allocation

We can also select “suggested bid” that determines the bids based on the performance history of the keywords. 

Suggested Bid Allocation

Another option is that we can enter the keywords manually. Here again, we can either select “Custom bid” or “Suggested bid” and select the match type. 

Enter List Custom Bid

List Suggested Bid

If you already have a CSV file that includes your keywords, bids, and the match type; and you do not want to go to the trouble of adding them manually, you can also upload a CSV file directly.

You can prevent your Sponsored Brands Ads from being displayed with irrelevant search queries by adding negative keywords. 

Negative Keyword

After going through the settings of your ad one more time, send it for review. It is important to check up on everything because you will not be able to change the landing page, products, and creative afterwards. Within three business days your review process is completed and your first Sponsored Brands are ready to run! 

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5 Tips for Successful Keyword Targeting with Sponsored Brands Ads 

The success of the keyword targeting determines also the performance of the sponsored brand ads.

As we are promoting our best sellers in Sponsored Brands, it’s important to detect the top-performing keywords. You can identify the best converting keywords and add them to your Sponsored Brands campaigns. 

The Search Term Report is a great help in identifying non-converting keywords. As the aim of Sponsored Brand is to take up the Prime Real Estate and reach the customers with the desire to purchase, we do not wish our budget to be exploited with thankless keywords. We would definitely advise you to add non-converting keywords as negative. 

With a mixture of different match types (exact, phrase and broad match), you should at least add 25 keywords. Therefore, it will expand the horizon of your ads, and you can reach more customers. 

For Sponsored Brands, broad match type works differently than Sponsored Products. When the search term includes synonyms of the keyword or one word of it, the Sponsored Brands ads can be pulled up for this broad match type. For example; if you are searching for “Gaming Headset”, there is a high possibility that you can end up “Smart Watch” Sponsored Brands ads. 

To avoid being shown up in unrelated search terms, add “+”  before the word that must be included in the search term. For example; if you use “+Sneaker Women” with a broad match, your ads will be shown only to search queries that include “Sneaker”. 

If you are selling phone cases for Samsung mobile phones, we would advise you to include “Samsung” and also the model as a phrase match type. 

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Comparison Between Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands

If you would like know how our tool supports Amazon Sponsored Brands, you can check out our blog post: "ADFERENCE now supports Sponsored Brands".