Amazon, Marketing

You Should Be Brand Bidding on Amazon

May 3, 2022

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Content Marketing Specialist at Kaspien, Inc.

Drawing on a background in sales, Ariel has spent the last 6+ years specializing in optimized content creation for e-commerce. She is currently a member of Kaspien’s Inbound Marketing team, collaborating with subject matter experts to create content on industry-leading best practices for optimized branded content.

What is Brand Bidding?

Brand bidding is the advertising strategy of allocating ad spend to defend the SERP for your products and brand. Your product is never alone on Amazon. Similar products are always vying for position as they scroll through the SERP, and can even appear on your listings.

How Does Brand Bidding Effect the SERP?

Let’s walk through an example to see the impact brand bidding can have:

Imagine you just got a new cat, and your friend tells you they absolutely love their Lesüre Cat Tree. Having never searched for such a thing before, you figure this recommendation is a great place to start. You type “Lesure Cat Trees” into the search bar on Amazon and these results appear:

Look carefully: Only two products above-the-fold are actually Lesüre products. At the top of the page, you’re shown a really interesting Sponsored Brand Headline Ad that looks like a tree. The first product listed is a Sponsored Product Ad for a modern solid wood cat tree. Below is a Sponsored Brand Video Ad with adorable fluffy kitties. (Learn more about these ad types in this blog and eBook.)

Even though you typed “Lesure” into the search, you’re still being shown ads for competitors – and it’s hard to compete against cute cat videos. If you’re a customer with no established brand loyalty, it’s hard not to notice the almost identical tree listed right next to the Lesüre product that’s cheaper and has way more – and better – reviews.

This brand has not invested in brand bidding. As a result, even when a shopper specifically searches for their products, they will have trouble locating them.

Let’s turn our eye to a brand who is employing a defensive strategy by bidding on their own keywords. Search Amazon for “K9 Power” and you’ll see this SERP:

As you can see, every single product in both organic and paid spaces are K9 Power products. The SERP for this brand is a veritable catalog of the supplements they offer. You came for K9 Power, and thanks to their brand bidding strategy, the chance of leaving with one of their products is high.

The Cost of Brand Bidding

One of the best aspects of bidding on your own keywords is that it is relatively cheap! 10% or less of ad spend should be dedicated to defensive marketing. Defensive advertising will only have a positive effect on ACOS and conversion rates skyrocket since you’re reinforcing or existing customers and providing confidence to new shoppers.

A Defensive Strategy

Defending your shelf space on Amazon goes beyond branded keyword bidding. While you need to bid on branded keywords to fend off competitors on the SERP, other strategies are needed to defend ad space the listings themselves. As we discussed in our blog and webinar, Sponsored Display ads let you retarget your own ASINs, categories, and audience, showing your products to previous shoppers as they come back for more.

Some argue that defensive advertising is a waste of money, but Sponsored Display ads have shed new light. This newly revised ad type comes with a new metric called New-to-Brand Sales, identifying how many of the sales attributed to the ad are from shoppers who have not bought anything from your brand within the last 365 days. Across the board, this metric has reinforced the importance of defensive marketing, showing that 60-80% of defensive advertising is new to the brand!

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Ariel Dearth