Sourav Singh and Marc Tian, Senior Product Managers at Amazon Ads, led a session at Amazon unBoxed 2021 on learning implementation and optimization techniques for your Sponsored Display campaigns. They covered how you can dial up the impact of your campaigns with targeting techniques and new custom creative solutions.
Sponsored Display is Amazon’s retail-centric display solution that helps support your goal of growing your business. Sponsored Display ads help you discover, reach, and engage relevant audiences with relevant ads in the key moments that matter throughout the shopping and entertainment journey.
The marketing funnel:
- Awareness – out-of-aisle audiences
- Consideration – in-aisle audiences
- Purchase – interested in your brand
- Loyalty – existing customers
Amazon’s research shows that shoppers take 6 to 7 days to make a purchase on Amazon, and these shoppers typically browse through 14 product detail pages during that time. If you’re a brand, that means that at any point in time there may be relevant audiences across different parts of this funnel, and you have an opportunity to create a strategy to reach audiences at each stage.
To help brands better reach audiences throughout the shopping and entertainment journey, they were excited to announce that they were expanding Sponsored Display on Twitch. This is especially exciting because 7 million unique creators stream on Twitch each month, and 2.5 million people are watching live at any given moment.
According to Amazon, advertisers with a balanced investment across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display saw 15% higher sales YoY at a better ROAS compared to those only using Sponsored Brands.
How should you be thinking about this from your advertising strategy? After all, a campaign depending on if it’s meant for awareness, consideration, conversion, or loyalty requires a host of different controls in metrics to help you meet your needs.
People love pets. Imagine a pet food manufacturer looking to launch a new premium dog food. For this launch stage of the product life cycle, this advertiser’s goal is to reach relevant audiences and educate potential customers on a new product. Or say they have a best-selling cat food on Amazon, they might want to help increase consideration in sales by including a creative to show their best-seller status with a badge.
Another example is that we know during tentpole events such as Black Friday that people like to stock up on their favorite items. If the manufacturer knows from other offline sales channels that bulk size products perform really well during tentpole events, they may want to take advantage of this insight by leveraging advertising to focus on their larger pack sizes during these high traffic periods.
An effective Sponsored Display campaign is built and managed using a combination of controls:
- ASIN – support up to 10k ASINs in a campaign
- Targeting – use product targeting and Sponsored Display audiences
- Bidding – augment your targeting strategy with bidding optimization and values
- Creative – tell your brand story with custom or auto-generated options
The first step to building a successful campaign is to tailor it to the product you’re advertising. As you select your products, we always recommend advertising products that are advertising ready:
- Clear imagery
- Descriptive titles
- Numerous good reviews
Pacvue Case Study
In the last 18 months, Pacvue has leaned into Sponsored Display and shared a few insights on how they have used Product Targeting and Audiences. So far, this year 83% more clients have launched at least one Sponsored Display campaign compared to last year. And the share of overall Amazon Ads budget has increased by 117% YoY.
But how did Pacvue achieve success and growth? “They leaned into a number of Amazon’s advanced strategies and innovated on existing controls. First, Pacvue leveraged Amazon’s recommendations in combination with their own AI-powered engine. Then, Pacvue leveraged both Product Targeting and Sponsored Display audience tactics,” said Singh.
According to Adam Hutchinson, Director of Marketing at Pacvue, “advertisers using Pacvue have increased spend on product targeting by 56% this year and spend on audiences has grown 168% this year.”
Pacvue focused on new-to-brand metrics to showcase incremental conversions. On average, Pacvue’s clients increased their Sponsored Display spend by 61% from Q1 to Q2 this year. During the same period, their new-to-brand sales grew 9%.
Pacvue also innovated using API reporting to closely monitor campaign performance and continued to test and learn using campaign creatives by leveraging custom product image options as well as using headlines and logos so brands can better tell their unique story.
You can watch the full breakout session at Amazon unBoxed 2021 here.
