Amazon Updates Sponsored Products & Sponsored Brands
Amazon recently released two new features for Sponsored Product ads that will drastically improve the visibility into advertising performance: Search Terms Insights and History.
Search Terms Insights allows advertisers to view the search terms that shoppers are entering in the Amazon search bar and which keywords they’re matching to within a Sponsored Product campaign.
The report is available at the Ad Group level within a campaign and shows all search terms that produced at least one click. Advertisers can view this data across multiple date ranges (up to 60 days) and across all keyword match types within the Ad Group. Search Terms Insights is available in both Automatic and Manual campaigns and shows both search terms and ASINs, which can be used to create Product Targeting campaigns. This feature will partially replace the need to manually download a Search Term report and filter the data for new keywords.
History is a new beta feature that allows advertisers to view changes made at the Campaign or Ad Group level.
At the campaign level, advertisers can see changes made to the settings of a campaign, daily budget adjustments, or if a campaign ran out of budget. These data points are time- and date-stamped and span the lifetime of the campaign.
At the Ad Group level, advertisers can use History to see changes made to bids on individual keywords. The dashboard shows the keywords, the current bid, the previous bid, and the time and date it was changed. This data appears to be back dated to October 1, 2019.
Both of these features are significant improvements to Amazon’s marketing platform and address pain points that marketers have experienced for years. Amazon is clearly making an effort to improve the functionality within Seller Central as more third-party software solutions become available.
Sponsored Brands Video for Mobile Devices
Advertisers now have a new ad format to choose from for Sponsored Brand ads – Video in mobile.
This new ad placement contains an auto-play video featuring a single product, with the intent of driving traffic directly back to the listing. The ads appear on the bottom of the SERP on mobile devices. The rest of the ad functions the same way as previous versions of Sponsored Brand ads, using keyword-based placements based on Broad, Phrase, and Exact match types.
This feature is a game changer for search marketers on Amazon, as video ads were previously only available through Amazon’s DSP platform.
Amazon’s information on the service provides some basic advice for video marketing:
“Keep your video brief and relevant. It will autoplay, so make sure the first 2 seconds are highly engaging, and don’t rely on sound to communicate your message. If you use text in your video, make sure it’s legible.”
Our Results
Updated February 2020
In a 2-month test of the beta, Kaspien achieved the following results, indicating significant potential for Sponsored Brand Videos.
- We’ve achieved an average ACOS of 9.61% on over $2,500 ad spend, showing that video ads perform notably better than traditional banner ads.
- CPC has averaged $0.80, again showing that video ads perform better than traditional Sponsored Brand banner ads.
- We’ve generated 260K impressions, showing that in addition to generating more conversions than traditional Sponsored Brand banner ads, they still drive excellent brand awareness.
File Requirements
- Video duration is between 6 and 90 seconds
- File format is .MP4 or .MOV
- Display aspect ratio is 16:9
- Audio bit rate must be at least 192kbps
More information about requirements can be found here: https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-specs/en/video-in-search
Ad Management Software
Kaspien’s own software, Kaspien AdManager, has features like Search Terms Insights and Bid History available. Our team has used these features and others internally since 2017 to help improve and scale our marketing for our retail and agency partners. We are now introducing Kaspien AdManager as a SaaS offering in Q1 2020.
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