A guide for product brands on Amazon Sponsored Brands campaigns 2020.

Answers to the 6 most important questions.

Visibility means being or not being for Product Brands. We are bombarded with advertisements, solutions, products, guides, podcasts, contests, posts, and behind many of them stand specific product brands. Amazon is no exception. Visibility is recognizability and sales. Below we have gathered what every brand should know when venturing into Sponsored Brands. Good Luck.

What is Amazon Advertising?

First and foremost, it is a type of PPC advertising targeted at keywords, products, or product categories. They are distinguished by both the format and placement of the ad. The top banner, at the very top of search results, is reserved for product brands and is the most desired place when it comes to product visibility. What can you place in this space? A horizontal banner featuring the brand's logo and 3 selected products. When customers click on such a highlighted image, they are redirected to the Store Front page of your brand or to a specific product.

What is available in Amazon Advertising?

Amazon currently offers 3 different types of Amazon PPC ads: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display Ads, previously also known as Product Display Ads (display ads). All these forms are available to sellers who have brand registration with EUIPO and an Amazon Brand Registry account.

What are the goals of Sponsored Brands?

Essentially, there are 4 main reasons why it is worth using Sponsored Brands:

Visibility is the primary task of Sponsored Brands and often a priority goal for many product brand owners. Among hundreds of product pages in your category and millions of products, it is Sponsored Brands that allows your brand to appear in front of customers looking for products in your category.

Store Front Promotion. With Sponsored Brands, you draw customers to your Amazon Store where you have many more opportunities than many other sellers to tell your brand's story, showcase the full product range, and increase the shopping cart value.

Sales. Our experience shows that the number of purchased products in a single transaction increases by at least 10% already in the first month after launching the Store Front. This is because you can easily showcase complementary products, other product categories, and highlight your Top products.

Multiple Products on one banner. By displaying 3 products on the Sponsored Brand Ads banner, you can show your best products from different categories in one place. This increases visibility and sales.

Where will you see Sponsored Brands ads?

The most important place, referred to as Prime Real Estate, is obviously the bar at the top of the search results. This is equivalent to the product Pole Position.

The Sponsored Brands banner also appears at the bottom of the screen just below the pagination bar. Here it often appears alongside other product brands from the same category.

Sponsored Brand ads can also appear as a vertical banner on the left side of the screen, just after the product filters. This position is becoming increasingly less used by the Amazon engine.

What are the requirements to create Sponsored Brands?

First, you must be the owner of a product brand that is registered with EUIPO. Based on the brand registration certificate, you must create a brand account, known as Amazon Brand Registry. Once activated, you are eligible to launch Sponsored Products campaigns.

However, if the products you are selling are used or from the Erotica category, you will not be able to use Sponsored Brands.

How to launch Sponsored Brands Campaign step by step?

To launch a Sponsored Brands campaign, we must log into the Seller Central panel and then choose Campaign Manager from the Advertising tab. Next, a campaign type selection window will appear, and we select Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Now it’s time to set the parameters for your campaign. Step by step: Campaign name - I recommend not using names like (campaign 1, campaign asdfghjkl, etc.) as it can complicate matters later on when we have many campaigns named this way, making navigation difficult.

Portfolio - Amazon gives us the option to group our campaigns into so-called portfolios. We can group campaigns by brand (if we have more than one) or by product type, e.g. iPhone case, Samsung case. Or in any other way that fits the specifics of our products. The important thing is to be consistent, as it will help us maintain order and navigate portfolios efficiently. Additionally, Amazon displays statistics for each portfolio, so we can easily assess its effectiveness.

Start date - the date the campaign starts is automatically set to today’s date. We can choose another start date, which can be a date even a few months ahead if we have products that sell seasonally. However, I recommend creating campaigns on an ongoing basis, using the most current data.

End date - we can pre-determine the end date for the campaign. I recommend not entering an end date for the campaign, even if our products are strictly seasonal.

Budget - the daily budget is the amount we decide to allocate to a given campaign. This is the maximum amount that can be used by Amazon to promote our products. For example, if we set a campaign budget of 20 EUR and that entire amount is spent, Amazon will stop promoting our products until the next day. Our 20 EUR is the maximum amount, but the actual daily budget spent may be below this value. It all depends on the number of keywords we add, their bids (so-called bids), and the number of competitors also using paid promotion in our category. It is important to monitor daily budget expenditures to avoid "Out of Budget" status, as it will affect the reliability of the campaign data.

Brand - this is the brand selection field for which we decide to create a Sponsored Brand campaign if we have more than one.

Landing page for ad traffic - this is the option where we decide where our ad banner will direct traffic. We have two options:

Amazon Store (including subpages) is the recommended option to start with. The customer will be redirected to the Store Front of our brand. We can choose whether we want to direct traffic to the home page or to a specific subcategory from our Store Front.

New product list page - this option allows us to promote selected products rather than the entire brand. The customer will be taken not to our store front but to a special page where they can choose from products of our brand. A good time to use this option may be when our brand consists of a considerable number of products, and we want to focus only on specific ones, e.g. a new product line. Instead of promoting the entire brand, you focus customers' attention only on new products. Ok, parameters set. Time to create the banner that will be displayed to potential customers.

For our ad to be launched, we must fill in the required fields as below:

Headline - this is where we write the motto of our brand that will be displayed next to our logo; we must limit ourselves to 50 characters.

Products - in this field, we select three products that will be displayed on our banner. If our brand already has recognizability, I recommend choosing the three best-selling products. In the case of starting with a new brand, we can choose those products which we believe have the highest sales potential.

Logo - in this field, we add our company's logo, and the rules we must remember are:

Maximum file size 1mb

Minimum resolution 400x400 pixels

Supported file formats PNG, JPEG, or GIF.

We can add a picture in a larger resolution and then "crop" it to the desired dimensions.

On the right side, we have a field with a live view of our banner, which also shows how our ad will look on mobile devices, computers, and product listings. This allows us to respond continuously to the look of our banner and make changes to ensure maximum readability.

Targeting

The next option we must choose is how we want our ads to be displayed. Here we have several options:

Keyword targeting - in this option, our ads will be displayed under the keywords we choose or their variants.

Product targeting - in this option, our ads may display under specific ASINs we select, which can be competing or complementary products to ours. The second option is to choose categories under which our ads will appear. We can narrow the selection to a specific price range or a specific brand within a given category. This option allows for more advanced sales strategies.

In this article, we will focus on Keyword targeting.

Where to get Keywords for our campaign?

There are several ways to do this. The first is when creating a new campaign, Amazon suggests which keywords would be appropriate for our campaign, taking into account the products we have added and based on the words contained in titles, descriptions, bullet points, and additional keywords.

We can also use external programs that, upon entering our keyword, generate for us the most relevant keywords. However, it should be noted that such programs offer trial versions, but after the trial period, we will have to pay a monthly subscription, and free versions of programs will not give us a complete picture of the keywords related to our product.

The third way is to create an automatic campaign (where Amazon chooses the searches and listings under which our ads will appear) and base it on the Search Term report. This allows for the analysis of conversions for specific phrases and keywords in terms of their conversion and then transferring those that provided sales or generated the highest number of clicks to our Sponsored Brands campaign.

Here we must pause and explain how keywords work on Amazon, and what their division is in the campaign structures:

Exact - these are keywords with a strict match, including plural forms and minor spelling errors. They have the narrowest application, being the most precise of all, with the highest likelihood of conversion (sale). However, the average cost per click is also the highest in their case.

For example, if we use the keyword "shampoo men," our ad will appear under searches like shampo men or men shampoo; shampoo man. However, it will not appear under searches such as: shampoo men hair loss; shampoo for men; shampoo 2 in 1 men.

Broad - this type of keyword has the broadest match, reaching the widest audience. This may include synonyms, spelling, and variations of the keyword. The cheapest of all but also with the lowest likelihood of conversion due to its broad match and most frequent appearance in results. It may "fish out" the most accurate keywords for us which we can then add as exact.

For example, if we use the keyword shampoo men, our ad may appear under searches such as: shampoo men; shampoo man; hair loss shampoo men; anti hair loss treatment for men;

Phrase - this match is more specific than Broad; our ad will appear as a search result containing the set of keywords in a strictly specified order, including plural forms and minor spelling errors.

For example, for shampoo men, it may appear under shampoo men hair loss; shampoo man; hair loss shampoo men;

Negative Keyword Targeting

Another very important function that should not be overlooked, and one we easily forget about, is Negative Keyword. They can be said to function as the opposite of regular keywords. These are keywords under which we do not want to appear for some reason, or where appearing is not beneficial for us.

For example, if our product is bamboo toothbrushes and we use the keyword toothbrushes as Phrase, our ads will appear under phrases like sonic toothbrushes. In this case, we should exclude sonic toothbrushes as a negative keyword.

Another situation where it is advisable to use negative keywords is when our campaign has been running for a while, and one keyword has not generated sales over a month but has generated costs. To check keyword statistics, you need to download a report from the Advertising Reports tab. You can learn how to do this in this article [link].

Negative keywords can also be divided into the following categories depending on their match:

Negative Phrase Match - excludes the display of ads for searches that contain keywords in a strictly defined order, including plural forms and minor spelling errors.

Negative Exact Match - excludes the display of ads for searches containing the keyword exactly matched to the keyword, including plural forms and minor spelling errors.

At the very bottom of the campaign wizard, we have the option to save as draft, meaning we can save our campaign with the option to return to it later.

The second option is to submit for review, in contrast to Sponsored Product campaigns, the Sponsored Brand campaign must be reviewed and approved by an Amazon employee. The time Amazon reserves for this is 72 hours.

You are ready to launch your first brand campaign. Of course, the deeper you go, the more details, traps, and opportunities there are. Be part of the Go2Market Community and let us know how it went in the comments below this article.

Still have doubts about Sponsored Brands? Get in touch with us.

Happy Branding :)

Go2Market Crew