Answers to the 6 most important questions.

Visibility means to be or not to be for Product Brands. We are bombarded with ads, solutions, products, guides, podcasts, contests, posts and behind most of them are specific product brands. Amazon is no exception. Visibility means recognition and sales. Below we’ve compiled what every brand should know as they embark on the Sponsored Brands journey. Good Luck.

What is Amazon Advertising?

First and foremost, it is a type of PPC advertising targeting keywords, products or product categories. It is distinguished by both the format and placement of the ad. The top bar at the very top of the search results is reserved for product brands and is the most desirable place in terms of product visibility. What can be placed in this space? A horizontal banner with the brand logo and 3 selected products. When customers click on such a featured image, they are redirected to your brand’s so-called Store Front page or to a specific product.

What is available on Amazon Advertising?

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

What are the purposes of Sponsored Brands?

There are basically 4 main reasons why you should use Sponsored brands:

1. Visibility is the most important task of Sponsored Brand and often the priority goal for many Product Brand owners. Out of hundreds of product pages in your category and millions of products, it is Sponsored Brand that will allow your brand to appear in front of the eyes of customers who are searching for products in your category.

    2 Store Front Promotion. With Sponsored Brands you bring customers to your Store on Amazon where you have many more opportunities than many other sellers to tell your brand Story, showcase your full product range and increase the value of the shopping basket.

3. Sales. In our experience, the number of purchases per transaction increases by a minimum of 10% within the first month of launching Storefront. This is because you can easily show complementary products, other product categories and highlight your top products.
4. Multiple Products on One Banner. With the ability to show 3 products on a Sponsored Brand Ads banner, you can show your top products from different categories in one place. This increases visibility and sales.

Where will you see the Sponsored Brands ad?

The most important place, Prime Real Estate, is of course the bar at the top of the search results. It’s the product equivalent of Pole Position.

The Sponsored Brands banner also appears at the bottom of the screen just below the bar that allows you to go to the next page. Here it often appears together with other product brands in the same category.

The Sponsored Brand ad may also appear as a vertical banner in the left part of the screen, just after the product filters. However, this position is used less and less by the Amazon engine.

What are the requirements to create Sponsored Brands?

Firstly, you must be the owner of a product brand that will be registered with EUIPO. Based on the brand registration certificate, you need to create a brand account, the so-called Amazon Brand Registry. Once this is activated, you are entitled to launch Sponsored Products campaigns.

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

How to run Sponsored Brands campaigns step by step?

In order to launch Sponsored Brands campaigns we have to log into the Seller Central panel and then select Campaign Manager from the Advertising tab.  Next, we will see the campaign type selection window, where we select Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Now it is time to set the parameters of your campaign. One by one: Campaign name – the name of the campaign, I recommend that you do not use names like (campaign 1, campaign asdfghjkl etc.) at a later stage this can complicate things greatly when you have many campaigns named this way, it will make it difficult to move between them.

    – Portfolios – Amazon gives us the ability 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 we choose, matching the specificity of our products. The most important thing is to be consistent in this, it will help us to stay organized and move efficiently between portfolios. Additionally, Amazon displays statistics for each portfolio, so we will be able to easily assess its effectiveness

    – Start date – the date of campaign start, automatically set to today’s date. We may choose a different start date for the campaign, it may be a date even several months ahead if we have, for example, products which sell seasonally. However, I recommend that you create campaigns on an ongoing basis with the most recent data available.

    – End date – we can set the end date of the campaign in advance. I recommend not entering an end date even if our products are strictly seasonal.

    – Budget – the daily budget, this is the amount we decide to allocate to the given campaign. This is the maximum amount that can be used by Amazon to promote our products. For example, if we set our campaign budget at €20 and this amount is spent, Amazon will stop promoting our products until the next day. Our €20 is the maximum amount, but equally well, the actual daily budget spent may be below this value. Everything depends on the number of keywords that we add to their rates, the so-called bids, and the number of competitors who also benefit from paid promotion in our category. It is important to monitor the value of budgets spent during the day in order to avoid ‘Out of Budget’ as this will affect the credibility of the campaign data

    – Brand – this is the field to select the brand for which we decide to create Sponsored Brand campaigns if we have more than one.

    – Landing page for ad traffic – this is the option where we decide where our banner ad will be redirected. Here we have two options to choose from:

1. Amazon Store (including subpages) this is the recommended option to start with. The customer will be redirected to our brand’s Store Front. We can choose whether we want to direct traffic to the home page or to a specific subcategory from our Store Front.
2. New product list page – this option gives us the opportunity to promote our chosen products, not the whole brand. Customer after clicking it will be redirected not to our store front but to a special page where he/she will have a choice of products of our brand. A good moment 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 whole brand, you focus the customers’ attention only on new products. Ok, parameters set. Now it’s time to create a banner that will be displayed to potential customers.

For our ad to run, we need to fill in the required fields as below:

    – Headline – this is the place where we enter the motto of our brand, which will be displayed next to our logo, we must limit ourselves to 50 characters.

    – Products – in this field we choose three products which will be displayed on our banner. If our brand already has recognition I recommend that you choose three best selling products. In case we start with a new brand, we can choose those products which in our opinion have the highest sales potential.

    – Logo – in this field we add our company logo:

        ◦ maximum file weight 1mb,

        ◦ minimum resolution up to 400×400 pixels,

        ◦ Supported file formats PNG, JPEG or GIF.

We can add a photo in higher resolution and then “crop” it to the desired dimensions.

On the right side, we have a field with the current view of our banner, it also shows us how our ad will look on mobile devices, computers and product listings. This allows us to react on an ongoing basis to the appearance of our banner and make changes to ensure it is as readable as possible.

Targeting

The next option we need to choose is how we want our ads to be displayed. Here we can choose from several options:

    – Keyword targeting – in this option our ads will be displayed under the keywords or their variants selected by us.

    – Product targeting – in this option our ads may be displayed under specific ASINs selected by us, these may be competitive products or products complementary to our products. The second option is the choice of categories under which our ads will appear. We can narrow down the choice to a specific price range or a specific brand from a given category. This option allows you to create more advanced sales strategies.

However, in this article we will focus on Keyword targeting.

Where do we get the keyword for our campaign?

There are a number of ways to do this, the first of which is when you create a new Campaign, Amazon tells you which keywords are relevant to your campaign based on the products you have added to it and the words contained in the names, descriptions, bullet points and additional keywords.

We can also use external software which, after entering our keyword, generates for us the best related keywords. However, it should be remembered that such programmes offer trial versions, but afterwards you will have to pay a monthly subscription fee and the free versions will not give you a full picture of the keywords related to your product.

The third way is to create an automatic campaign (i.e. one in which Amazon chooses the searches and listings under which our ads will appear) and rely on the Search Term report. It gives us the possibility to analyse the conversion of particular phrases and keywords in terms of their conversion and then transfer those that gave us sales or generated the highest number of clicks to our Sponsored Brands campaign.

There are a number of ways to do this, the first of which is when we create a new Campaign, Amazon tells us what keywords are appropriate for our campaign, taking into account what products we have added to it and based on the words contained in the names, descriptions, bullet points and additional keywords.

We can also use external software which, after entering our keyword, generates for us the best related keywords. However, it should be remembered that such software offers trial versions, but afterwards you will have to pay a monthly subscription fee, and the free versions of the software will not give you a full picture of the keywords related to your product.

The third way is to create an automatic campaign (i.e. one in which Amazon chooses the searches and listings under which our ads will appear) and rely on the Search Term report. It gives us the opportunity to analyse the conversion of individual phrases and keywords and then transfer those that gave us sales or generated the highest number of clicks to our Sponsored Brands campaign.

This is where we need to stop and explain how keywords work on Amazon, or more accurately what their division is within campaign structures:

    – Exact – these are keywords with a close match, including plurals and slight spelling errors. They are characterised by the narrowest application, the most precise of all, with the highest probability of conversion (sales). But also, on average, the cost per click is highest in this case.

For example, if we use the keyword “shampoo men” our ad will be displayed under the search term shampo men or men shampoo; shampoo man. However, it will not be displayed under searches such as: shampoo men hair loss; shampoo for men; shampoo 2 in 1 men.

    – Broad – this is the type of keywords with the broadest match, reaching the widest audience. This can mean synonyms, spellings and variations of the keyword. The cheapest of all, but also the least likely to convert. Because of its broad match and most frequent appearance in the results. It can “fish out” the most relevant 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- a more specific match than Broad, our ad will appear as a result of a search containing a set of keywords in a precise order, including plurals 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 omitted, and which is easy to forget because we usually leave this field blank when creating campaigns is Negative Keyword. You could say that they function as the inverse of regular keywords. These are keywords under which, for some reason, we do not want to appear, or appearing under them is not beneficial to us.

For example, if our product is bamboo toothbrushes and we use the keyword toothbrushes as a Phrase then our ads will appear under the phrase sonic toothbrushes among others. In this case, sonic toothbrushes should be excluded as a negative keyword.

Another situation where a negative keyword should be used is when our campaign has already been trafficked and a keyword has not generated sales for us in a period of e.g. one month, but has generated costs. To check your keyword statistics, download a report from the Advertising Reports tab. You can learn how to do it 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 containing keywords in a strict order, including plurals and slight spelling errors.

    – Negative Exact Match – excludes ads for searches containing a keyword that matches the keyword exactly, including plurals and minor spelling errors.

At the very bottom of the campaign creator we have the option to save as draft, i.e. save our campaign with the possibility to return to it later.

The second option is submit for review, unlike a Sponsored Product campaign a Sponsored Brand campaign must be reviewed and approved by an Amazon employee. The time Amazon reserves for this is 72 hours.

You are now ready to launch your first brand campaign. Of course, the deeper into the woods you go the more details, pitfalls and opportunities there are. Be part of the Go2Market Community and let us know under this article how it went for you.

Still in doubt about Sponsored Brands? Report back to us.

Happy Branding

Go2Market Crew